Dunia Sutra

Chapter 15 :Dear Friends

2010-06-25T22:25:00.001-07:00

Dear friends,

If we have come this far, stop worrying about yourself. I am trying to do the same. Let us think of some more important things to worry about, like those who are suffering and are truly suffering, not those who have the luxury of debating the relativity of suffering that we all face. We do not face it equally. Coming to grips with this fact has led many people to lose faith. Some of those people are those that have witnessed injustice. Others are those that have felt injustice. Still others are those who have debated injustice. Few among those that have lost faith however, have been able to change the world for the better. Many of us have intellectualized agency itself, in order to diminish the importance of our own actions with regard to that effect. But the fact is, we all take actions that have consequences, and from time to time the consequences are significant, even on a personal level, and sometimes on a broader level than that. Whatever we decide to do in life affects other people. We have power. The fact that we diminish the idea of our personal power is evidence of our fear of it, hence it is powerful. The fact that one can diminish one's own personal agency is evidence of the significance of agency. On the other hand, one can exaggerate the importance of agency to the point of delusion. One cannot be perfect in the evaluation of this question.

If one respects logic, one cannot lose faith completely. If one is to avoid risks, one must live with the idea of risk. Thus one is not entirely safe, not matter how faithful one thinks one is. Faith is having faith anyway. In the same way that courage is not the absence of fear, but action in the face of it. How do we reconcile this with surrender? These are questions that I cannot answer.

If one respects logic one admits that there are questions that one cannot answer. One admits that there is a high probability that since there are always new questions to answer, there is no limit to the knowledge possible. Therefore one cannot know everything. One is human. One cannot also not lose faith. Where there is mystery, there is a logic for faith. Faith and reason always have a point of reconciliation that can be found, when a motivation for reconciliation presents itself.

We have many motives for reconciliation now. Those that speak with both logic and humility about mystery can be trusted. But even logic tells us that we can be fooled by our own logic.

Is it ok to be confused or is it a place to run from or to succeed at ending. It depends whether you have faith. If you have faith and you are confused, you can calm down and sort it out. If you don't have faith in the confusion, you can end it. Either way, you get to decide, you're a grownup. No one said it would be easy.

I am thankful for the suffering that I have in my life, and I am thankful for those who gave their lives both in time and effort, and in early death, so that my suffering is not worse. So that I can experience happiness and freedom. It calls me to work again. Dammit.

I am at a crossroads and I've been at a few of these before, and I am at the mercy of our lord. We all are who have the time to read this. So, take a fresh breath. Go out tomorrow and do something genuinely good, for yourself, for someone else. Stop worrying about yourself. You'll feel better.

Bye for now.

Arif

Chapter 13: Good Morning

2010-06-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

So I wake up this morning without any money, nicotine withdrawal, have to work the evening shift - but I am happy. I was unreasonable happy last month, so I am happy to be a bit more ordinarily happy with some nuisances to deal with.

I stopped last at an awkward moment in this somewhat autobiographical journey. Who reads this, I don't know. Why people want to live in the dark, I don't know. But as such, I create some mystery here as a way to self-censor. It creates more mystery here in this writing than it should, but it is meant that way I suppose. I still may only express myself distantly.

If we follow the passage, the sort of tragic drama I was in to last chapter, 'the dark night' - etc. has passed. ok. good. I'm sure if we follow this timeline, there will be another night, no one can say if it will be as difficult.

So, lightly we continue.

I live in the city now. The other day while waiting for a call for dinner at this family of artist siblings, I met a beautiful young woman at the Cafe who listened to me talk about the economic crisis, afterward she gave me a hug. Simple pleasures. I seem to be playing music all the time, sometimes alone, sometimes with a group of talented bohemians. None of us work much, we have little money and we waste a little time with stupid things, but we play a lot, so for that reason, we get better. I put my cowboy hat on the other night, played Angels from Montgomery and Lucky Old Sun. Met a tomboyish and bratty African woman, the youngest of 9 of course, and really enjoyed her brazen style. I love being single.

Lightly we continue, but we can think about light. I decided that maybe I am a complicated monotheist. The African woman told me she is not a monotheist, maybe she is a polytheist or a pantheist. I get the point of monotheism, but I suppose I am not completely hung up on it either.

There is time. Time is God, it is greater than us. It moves everything forward and therefore it creates. It is eternal, always there, a Friend. But Light is God too. Light is everything that is created. Time moves light and creates, in creating, beings arise. As beings arise there is consciousness. In consciousness, there is now a relating, a relating between conscious beings and this light and time.

Sometimes I feel that my whole being is light, actually, and intellectually, I know that it is anyway, but I can feel it filling me. Light as energy to matter, my body not just a clumsy sack of bones, brimming, shimmering light. And then I get a pretty good sleep.

A woman friend decided to instruct me that I am not enlightened. I needn't explain why, there is a bit of history to this misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding because I don't know what 'not enlightened' means anymore than I know what 'enlightened' means. I think it's something that comes up on the way as a lightpost to people seeking to shed some extra baggage, or 'onion layers' of themselves as they like to say, or trying to be happy and they don't know why they aren't, people with restless souls who want something spiritual they feel is lacking. So people with some wisdom speak of enlightenment as if to say, 'hey, this is a good place of dignity, peace, and love that we are being in, and you should come over here.' What is it? It's called 'enlightenment'. But speaking of it is always a kind of blasphemy anyway. People get fixated on the words, because they think it is a label you can get or ascribe, or some sort of spiritual achievement, a rank in the spiritual pecking order, something larger than life.

This is all bullshit, actually. We are all basically 'lighter' than we think spiritually, physically, emotionally, mystically, and states of being are described in reference to that. This has caused much confusion, particularly for young people who are 'spiritual' and 'seeking'.

Lightly... we will continue next time.

Chapter 12: There is no God but...

2010-03-22T21:52:00.000-07:00

The first part of the Shahada, the Islamic creed, reads 'there is no god but God'. Contained within the Shahada is the creed of atheism, there is no God. Atheism is the first pillar of enlightenment, the second pillar is faith. This is grossly misunderstood by nearly everyone, especially believers and atheists.

Faith has no purpose where there isn't truth, truth implies a possibility of the real as opposed to the illusory. The purpose of skepticism is to eradicate illusions with the same ascendance of a reality.

One of these illusions is god. However, the truth and what is real as opposed to what is illusory is also known as God. The difference in god and God is the level of humility and honesty of the person who mouths the word. Humility arises in knowing one's imperfections and limits when it comes to understanding truth and reality, in understanding God. Honesty arises in the courage to stay with truth and reality and to speak of it.

When it comes to religious belief, there are many erroneous notions about what god is. It is that way now, and it was that way at the time the Shahada was revealed or discovered. What is different now, is that there are less erroneous notions about the physical world and indeed about our social and mental worlds. There is less need for gods, and just as much desire for God. The desire for God remains because we die. We don't know and can't know what happens to us after we die. If we think about that honestly, it means we can't exactly pin down who and what it is we are as we live; are we mind, body, soul, spirit, consciousness, individuated, connected, alone in the universe and what for? Therefore, with all that science can tell us, we are still and always will be, on an existential cliff with no one to catch us.

So, this relationship between individual and God remains important. But it does not help us on the path to enlightenment if we are just concerned with 'what happens to me' and 'who am I' and 'I need to find myself'. That only leads to comforting words we want to hear, a kind of spiritual pampering.

Truth requires negation. Truth requires discovery. It is one of those yin-yang things. The Tao Te Ching says 'know the yang, but stick to the yin'. So above all, truth requires a belief that it is possible and responsible to exercise discernment, discretion and humility with regard to finding out what is not true (negation) and what is true (discovery). It is not expected either that one can judge an axiom or a fact if it is presented without rationale or evidence, that one can discover or negate as simply as that. This is why one is foolish to look at 'God exists' as an article of faith that is opposed to 'God does not exist'. One simply can't start with either statement.

Instead, tradition has always dealt with such questions with subtlety, or rather we would regard it as subtle because we are in such a fog. The Shahada is part of that tradition. Some people might actually believe that the Shahada gives Muslims the real God over other religions, making Islam the true religion above others. This is the kind of nonsense that belongs in the negation side of the Shahada, it is a god.

In the end it's quite direct and obvious what is going on. The first part offers the possibility of negation in the search for truth, reality, god or gods, faith etc. It offers the possibility of being mistaken, and thus becoming humbled, emptying oneself of illusion. Then it offers the possibility of discovery, if all of these illusions are not god, then what? ....there is no god but.... Maybe the Shahada should have left it to a dot,dot,dot, a wide open space, but emptiness and the Dharmakaya was already a wind blowing from the Far East. Again, it's yin and yang. Nothing and something. From zero to universe in a singularity. Monotheism gives us the fullness of the universe, that which is arising in emptiness as real. As God.

This may seem highly esoteric, arrogant and opinionated. But it is an important discussion.

The problem with theism is that is doesn't practise enough negation. That gives power to religious authorities and ordinary people alike to abuse the power of our ignorance and the power of the possibility of discovery to harm, create suffering and even genocide. Theists need to practise atheism in order to navigate manipulations both coming from others and coming from within themselves. Manipulations that seduce one towards power, be it for control over what is feared, or to acquire what is desired. These seductions displace truth, the connection with reality, for illusions that are more useful than truth in the pursuit of power.

The problem with atheism is that it stops with negation. If we have discovered the means to discover everything, then there is nothing really and truly to discover, it is just a matter of waiting for other people to collect the truth. The problem with atheism is that in all its rationality it cannot bootstrap itself onto reality. It appears to have not been responsible for any of the bad things that have happened in humanity. That also turns out to be a cop-out, for in negation one copes with the question of existential responsibility in the same way the religious cope through duty to God.

Atheism is ultimately a reactionary system, retreating on the difficulties of navigating the tension between discovery and mystery when they go beyond what the atheist fairly arbitrarily decides is a line. The theist also has an unfortunate line, and that stops the theist from asking the questions needed to arrive at truth. The atheist's line prevents them from going further in discovering who they are in relation to the universe, it is undiscovereable. The theists line prevents them from unearthing religious or other comforting delusions they have about themselves in relation to the universe. The tragedy is that in time, their chances pass, and only because people continuously seek comfort and power in gods.

Ultimately that is what the Shahada represents, the tension between discovery and mystery, the struggle to negate illusion, and open space to discover reality. It saddens me that in this day and age when we have discovered so much, many Muslims will negate discovery on the basis of something they were taught by religious authorities. That is not the idea, it is exactly what Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)was fighting against at the time. The tension between mystery and discovery helps us remove the illusions that result in oppression, it allows us to discover dignity in being human.

The best thing that can happen to a theist is for them to embrace atheism without losing faith in God. The best thing that can happen to an atheist is to surrender atheism without embracing illusions. Contradiction in words is a reflection of its opposite in reality.

When we have no last leg to stand on, we can walk together in the reality of a cool spring day. There is no god, but God.

Chapter 12: Where Am I?

2009-11-10T20:38:00.000-08:00

Near Lake Huron now. I am breaking down, really. My spare tire got me here, it's really what I'm running on in life at this point. Here's where you find the ruins of my education, my sense, my understanding of the world. Here's where we can talk in the middle of the night about my failure to be the husband I was supposed to be. Here's where I let people down. Here I have a great friend, but no one can help me but the one I left. No one has that kind of position. So, I keep wondering why it is that I'm here and not there. That ambivalence is still there, I've crossed the point of no return and returned, I have no idea where I am or where that point is now. If I don't come home at the end of the week though, she will know, she will probably do what she has done before and try and save us.

We were married six years ago under a tree by the mother of a friend of my wife, a pastor, for $12. We met serving the most vulnerable. I was a seasoned heartbreaker, she had never had her heart broken.

I am heartsick, sad and exhausted. Worn down you know, and finding solace in country music. I really want to describe how hard is to break up a relationship, that's a lyric I can only write when its done. I am wishing I could speak the lyrics of Easy by the Commodores (Lionel Richie), that they were true and not just a yearning in me. 'I know it sounds crazy but I just can't stand the pain, girl I'm leaving you tomorrow, you know I done all I can, I beg, stole and I borrowed'.

We are different though, me and her. I am one to look down the road at what it is, pain, death, loss and to go there and walk with others. She is one to make a better road for others. These are two shades of our good nature, our beneficience, and we understand that life is nothing without the ability to give of ourselves. I can only say that nonetheless two good people can be bad for each other, or bad for one, and if bad for one, ultimately it cannot be good for either. She doesn't see it that way. I am her Al Green, perfect lover, idealist husband - 'let's stay together' decent guy. Al Green celebrates marriage in his music, but Al Green has been twice divorced in real life. She doesn't want to see the real me, ultimately something more than a role model, a comfort zone, a strong pillar in the marriage, in the community and so on.

So this way, though, it seems it might be lonely. Enough time with friends can show you the limits of what anyone can do for you. Those limits are widest in marriage, that's a lot to give up. New mysterious women seem so unpredictable, and one doesn't figure out how walk with one foot out the door, one stumbles, one falls. This is a time where I'm totally alone.

'Why would anyone put chains on me, I've paid my dues to make it. Everybody wants me to be what they want me to be, I'm not happy when I try to fake it.' - from Easy by the Commoders.

good night.

Chapter 11: Middle of the Night

2009-10-30T12:30:00.001-07:00

Rather than revise earlier parts of the book, better press ahead. There's a long night ahead, a long road ahead, a roadblock to get around. It's not the middle of the night, either. But as chapters, go, in this book, it's too early to call it morning. No awakenings yet. What I'm running from with the philosophy and other distractions, though amusing to read - is my life, my wife, my head, my medicines, my heart, my death, my love. Into your arms, your thighs, your kiss. I got to go, my life is calling. BRB.

Ok, I'm back, it is the middle of the night now. Can't sleep, won't sleep, don't want to, it's the same with me.

I had been thinking in bed. Brilliant stuff, enjoying it rather than fighting it. Reflexivity, a point of view of subjectivity in the context of the objective. The view of the world with self as part. This blog that is written about itself. As I mentioned I would move on and edit later, I can't tell which version you will read. Maybe it will be revised a hundred times, maybe never. That's the interesting thing about a blog/book. It could never finish. It is always finished. There is no better way for a writers pure enjoyment to write.

But you're different. You dive in, you don't need to let go, and don't bruise easily. You're fearless and free. And you want to hang around me a bit. I thought I was wild. Most people are just trying to hard. You live because that's the way you are. I won't disappoint you. You are not the kind of person who dwells. You're the girl I was talking to outside the bar where we were smoking cigarettes. Get out my dreams, get into my car. I've been known in other places to be a free man. I don't think you care, maybe you can see right through me. Maybe I'm making it all up. You gave me some joy anyway, who knows what day by day will bring.

In other places, where I had no immediate history, I had a far more expansive past. Part of the English, Canadian, Indian and Ugandan nations, a murid of the 49th Shia Ismaili Imam, musician, academic, mystic and capable of developing bonds with people at the places of the heart and of the human tradition where cultures arise. Travelling added these miles of identity. Going and returning strengthens home. But there is times when leaving is the only thing to do.

"Stay if you want, don't be ashamed, leaving is easy, losin's the same." - Kris Kristofferson

Chapter 10: Evening

2008-01-12T14:36:00.000-08:00

Take the 15 for 25 minutes South and you arrive at Smith's Falls. Wind back 200 years and all you have there is a few mills in a rough wilderness, a piece of land owned by the son of a British spy, and a doctor. A little farther back that land was bought from the Mississauga nation for some trivial items. The Mississauga had fought the Americans with the Loyalists, but they had no idea what title would mean for their allies, and for themselves, and for the Algonquin, Iroquois and other Six Nations who had agreed to nothing.

I quit smoking this year. I used to enjoy that pensive moment. Smoking has always been best done outdoors, smokers who argue against the ban in restaurants are lazy and ignorant. I won't comment on the Legion, the mental health ward or the veteran's retirement home. Just these healthy and able-bodied smokers who feel their civil liberties are diminished by smoking in the fresh air, rather than in an enclosed space. Healthy people smoking in the fresh air, while an ironic sentence politically, is the best alternative.

So, I enjoyed smoking outdoors, letting my mind smoothe out. I enjoyed the conviviality of the smoking crowd, if we were risking our lives, we were doing so together. There's a sense of community in that somehow. And sense of community is what's missing a great deal from places of work, places of study, in 'society' in general. And that leads to unhappiness. Smoking is a fairly shallow medium for community, and at a high social cost. But part of the reason for the addiction is our lack of sense of community. I'll miss that community, as temporary as it is lasting as it does, only the length of a cigarette.

I feel great to have quit, I have wanted to be free from it for a while, even as I continued to appreciate the habit. I hated paying for them the most. I hated buying cigarettes, and shelling out $8 for a pack every couple of days. I hated asking for Peter Jackson regular king size and rarely mixing it up, what's the point really. I was never one to develop a discerning taste. That would acknowledge the addiction too deeply. No, PJ's are usually the cheapest. I hated flicking them, littering, on some level though it didn't prevent me from doing it. I would never litter anything else. I'm not entirely sure why it's acceptable to litter butts, but it is. You can judge people for it, but it's not the same, for some reason, as littering other things. So, you'd really be being judgmental, because littering butts is acceptable to smokers. You'd be insensitive to the culture of smoking to judge people on the same standard as littering other garbage. I don't make the unwritten rules. I would often make the effort to use the butt-stops, or even scrape out my cigarette and throw it in a garbage can. But if there's no garbage and no butt-stop, no one's going to carry the thing around with them. The only place where it's really unacceptable is in a park, municipal, provincial or national - you can get away with it in municipal parks, though, especially in the winter.

No, I'm glad to be done with it. What I need to is publish literature, I need to form a country-rock band as well. I've got no balance in my life with the creative and artistic things that give me the most fulfillment and the drive I put into work. That work is also fulfilling, it's creative and meaningful. The problem is that the academic world, the university where I work, has a culture which I find utterly bereft of spirit today. It is dominated by egos. It's a pissing test to see who is the most credible. It's a lot of wordplay. And to think that once, universities were the lifeblood of civilization, the incubator of ideas and knowledge, the patrons of creativity, brilliance, problem-solving and energy. But they've gone and established themselves under high modernism, then decided that criticism was the highest form of this. Yet the criticism's net effect is to reveal that academia is really a castle made of sand. And castles made of sand wash into the sea, eventually. So said Jimi Hendrix. Bruce Springsteen said, about his chums and him, that they 'learned more from a three-minute record than they ever learned in school'.

High modernism. The problem is that physics has gone way ahead of everything else, and humanities have fallen behind. The humanities have gotten lost in post-modernism, post-structuralism and other such sophistry. And the prefix 'post' is a curious thing. These thinkers are supposed to come after modernism. In doing so from their critical nose-in-the-air perspective, they render their predecessor's knowledge meaningless and relative. Physics, on the other hand, though it's breakthroughs create new paradigms, these paradigms exist in dimensionality with previous understandings, such as mechanics. What is challenged is the completeness of the prior paradigm. But the understanding of quantum physics, the dimensionality that this brings, as well as relativity with the expansion of possibilities of perspectives on space-time, are built in continuity from mechanics. Mechanical equations do not lose all meaning, they are still legitimate in the field of reality that is not quantum, yet the discoveries of the quantum levels open up new possibilities for the understanding of global reality, ecompassing quantum and non-local fields as well as local and mechanical fields. In humanities, criticism has attempted to be post-positivist, instead of being meta-positivist as physics has done. Or, some have sought to resist new perspectives and become more dogmatically positivist, yielding the politically charged perspective of scientism.

The Algonquin once were the guides to explorers like Jacques Cartier, ably transporting the Europeans through difficult Canadian wilderness and teaching them. White people have a difficult time understanding their history. My mother was always one for sayings, especially those critical of the establishment, or those that were pithy commentaries on society. She loved the saying 'history is written by the winners'. When history is written by the winners, and these winners are the Europeans who dominated most of the world under their empires, when it comes to understanding history, their descendants become losers. When it comes to a loss of knowledge, as a result of the domination in history, and the domination in writing history, the descendants are doubly at a loss. The documentation is replete with missing information, and each time a people that experienced itself as superior would encounter another people, it would fail to learn anything from them. What it knows best is how to dominate, but this is not the same thing as having knowledge that serves one's people well. The domination can be seen as a benefit, but that benefit is superficial and time-bound. What the people have not realized fully, is that the world of problems faced by humanity in the age of late modernity exists as a consequence of selective awareness of the dominant societies. Dominant societies' tend to be selectively aware of reality for several reasons. There is guilt associated with being the oppressor, or even knowing on some level that benefits arise from an association with oppression by one's leaders and benefactors, rather than from honour. This shame tends to de-select parts of reality from the general consciousness. Then there is the encounter with the other under the assumption of superiority of one's knowledge, and even a sense of competitiveness that seeks to demonstrate that superiority. This then leads to the rejection of the ways of knowing of the other. The knowledge of the other can be lost completely, if the society of the other is destroyed. Or the knowledge is left separate and marginalized as quaint. As such, instead of learning the farming techniques of the Iroquois, our arrogance in the advancement of our agricultural technology leads to unsustainable farming techniques. The lack of deep understanding of democracy as known collectively to Western civilization historically, as it has been known to the original Nations of the Americas has corrupted democracy. The lack of a deep understanding of ecology as known most extensively by the indigenous people's of the world leaves our planet in peril. The rationalism that atomizes people, and reduces them to responders of stimuli, as processors, as self-interested but not enlightened, this psychology fails to learn from the psychology of wisdom.

Until the dominant socieites recognize their loss, and are humbled by the limits of their civilization, they'll continue in this distorted modernism.

Smiths Falls has 2000 empty beds. The province is trying to move the remaining 300 severely disabled residents into the community. The residents cannot speak for themselves, but they are being moved against the will of their guardians. The shortage of health-care beds goes on. The pain of the families facing the institution's closure goes on year after year. The province cannot see the grounded reality. The economy of the town is being devastated. They can't see that they could fill the bed shortage, prevent the calamity of moving these residents and save the regional economy, and save themselves money. Somehow, this doesn't figure into a rational government, who can only say that they have a target, and they plan to achieve it. Someone decided twenty years ago that institutions were all bad, and though twenty years has changed and institutions have changed, and we've not provided community supports, and we've realized that even with the best of community supports, these can't replace residential care, the priority is completeness and consistency, going to the logical ends of de-institutionalization. Internal logic that doesn't respond to grounded reality, and evidence. Stupidity, not rationalism. Rationalization. De-selecting the evidence that contradicts the program.

In McEwen's Field long ago, where Rideau Regional stands today, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally over 10,000 strong. In the old institution, there were a few horrors. The institutional model was far from perfect, and far from the level of accountability to residents it should have had. These kinds of things can happen in a group home too. They can happen in a long-term care facility. There is a greater stigma attached there as a ghost. People are afraid of the severe disability, they are afraid of the darkness of things difficult to imagine, of lives very different from our own, of abnormality. Apparently too, there may be a First Nations burial ground in the vicinity. The First Nations could teach us how to cleanse the spiritual energy of a building. They know how to cleanse the spiritual energy of a person, something called a smudging ceremony.

In my faith, we have something similar. In its similarity, it is also close to communion in Christianity. We take water blessed by our Hazar Imam in a cup and pray over it, we ask for blessing from the server of the nyaz, we drink that water. We take a little food, in a similar way, sukrit. We do chanto, and ask for forgiveness, and our brothers or sisters repeat verses wishing this forgiveness to us. We do this after communal prayers. There is agurbhatti (incense) burning during this short ceremonial practise. After this there is socializing with our community. We go home cleansed. I don't get there enough, it pains me. I need that shower. I'm in the wilderness for long periods of time. I'm working for God in some way, but away from the community, away from prayers in a hall. It is as if I must travel by rougher roads, in rougher areas, to do so often under the cover of darkness, in the dirt, in spiritual back roads, as a missionary of sorts, without a religion. Long periods pass before I find renewal. It is ok. It is a path for me to take - rich with drunkenness, turmoil, struggle, conflict, to make sure I cannot pretend to be above anyone, or more pure. Fall into the sky, fall into the mud - it is the same. All is within the heart and compassion of God.

Man-made progress, natural wilderness. Science and mysticism. Wisdom. Time moves forward in modernity, and stands constant in eternity. We can't please everyone.

I need this country-rock band. Doesn't have to be country-rock. I want it to be direct and heartfelt, strong and human. I want it to be driving, but not boring. I want it to be drinking, but not totally drunk. I want it to smoke cigarettes with some pretty girls outside the bar, without me having to smoke, just as a metaphor for that companionship and sexual tension. Music for friends, and to listen to while washing the car in the summer. Music to break up to. Music to play on a third date, and make love to. Music about losing a job, being broke and politics. Something like Born in the USA, but for 2008 in Canada. A rejection of the idea of a post-911 world. A re-discovery of Canadian wildness. Something to break wide open the rural-urban divide. Something to play on Y101 and on the Bear (is it still called that?). I need some poet-musicians, people who get desire for music as a craft and an art. For its raw beauty. Good arrangements, room for improvisation - strong lyrics, straightforward but not totally predictable. Melody that makes you yearn. Lyrics that leave you vaguely aware of something richer and deeper than can be expressed in words. Music that cuts the bullshit out and goes straight to the heart, and the sexuality that begets life. Lonely or in communion.

umm.....

Wait for it. one day it might suprise you.

Chpater 9: Day

2008-01-12T11:50:00.001-08:00

The book has to change.

It's been hiding in anonymity and abstraction.

It needs a face, a place. The anomie of today is globalization, and globalization is an abstraction from territory. Territory is still the ultimate reality. Not territory as divided lands, territory as ground.

Enough of that.

You can find me on the banks of the Mississipi River, the Canadian version. Lanark County. Roll West of Ottawa down the Highway 7. Arrive at our brand new collection of box stores, the first town on the way out of the Nation's Capital.

The river is high. It's a strange season. 60 cm of snow melting in the middle of January, against our suprise that 60 cm of snow could fall in December. Grass and high, crusty snow banks. There's a strong breeze.

My banister coming up my porch on the right is shaky, be careful. I'm not a DIY guy, I'm not organized, I have little money, I don't care enough about appearances. My house is messy. My wife is kind. You may end up telling her your life story. We can walk 100 yards south, and we should take my dog Elvis, by the way, he doesn't get enough walks and I feel badly about that. But if we go 100 yards south and about 5o yards West, there's the park and across a junior soccer field there's the Mississipi banking on this park and a small bird sanctuary.

We're going for coffee now at a grungy small-town diner, with my wife's folks. Gotta go now. Back later.

Chapter 8: Darkness

2007-12-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

This is not my usual self, nor is darkness my orientation, but is a side of me, a dark side. I will not explain myself with the pretension of telling you that ‘I am not my self today.’ This is every bit me as the ananda, ananda that is my orientation by choice, and perhaps by constitution and good fortune. I have disappointed my dearest, because of the darkness, and that is hard to bear and yet is part of the contours of the dim light.. Part of the shortcomings of me, part of the illness of bipolar.

A good friend once told me that my condition was a blessing and a curse. One irony is that the exalted highs seem the blessing during their time, yet are the most destructive. The lows are extremely unpleasant, but may be more valuable. The worst times follow the highs, the best times, in reality and not just in the illusions that ecstasy bring, follow the lows.

But more to the point, it is two negativities about the darkness that have value in their own right. Just that statement points to the value. We live in a world where negativity is seen as only negative. We are as if to remain positive even whilst our societies erode, where reason and conscience gives way to cynical relativity, or the excusing of extreme stupidity, brutality and ignorance because all the accusers are coloured in their own right. We are to remain positive while beauty is corroded, value lost, tradition warped, and while human failure results in real tangible grotesque suffering. We kid ourselves to get by, so time to time we need the darkness for balance.

The two negativities are the inward and the outward. When things go badly, some feel one should not blame others and seek the source of the trouble within themselves. But some apply this to everything. There are others that take this advice, and punish themselves while letting society off the hook, seeking some absolute self-reliance. There are others who are accused of only accusing society. In my mood, it does not matter. I know the brutal self-examination will come, if it does not I won’t grow and won’t be able to let go of the darkness. At the same time, I’ve been that one whose ego wanted a self-perfection where I took responsibility for all my ills. None of these positions are true. In truth, you, my audience are partly to blame for my ills. In truth, you cannot be expected of better unless you can be confronted with your social responsibility. And yet, you cannot ever be expected to, as a vast group, achieve quickly the social change you must create. As an individual, you cannot be expected to be saintly, not to err, not to consciously or unconsciously affect others negatively. I would be the ultimate hypocrite if I demanded it of you, since I am the same. There is enough blame to go round. In our society we resist this pain of who we are, what we’ve become, the responsibility of where we’re going. There are those who cannot avoid it, where cultures are confronted with social problems that approach a crises. We are comfortable enough to argue that we’re fortunate, so why should we be negative, and forget that we are not liberated, because our liberation is bound together. Don’t try to get away.

The other negativity is what I do, where I’m weak, where I repeat mistakes and where I can’t explain why I can’t meet the expectations of others, why I should ask for a break. I ask because it’s survival, and often I know that others have had to meet the same expectations, I know it may be unfair to ask and receive. Yet others cannot know why I can’t lift a finger, and so they do not have the same need to ask, and none of it is visible – this disability.

There is a difference between wallowing, and painting an inner landscape. I write out of need to work it through. I can hear so many judgements all the time, which is why I need to be explain, so then one of the judgements is self-involvement, and the more I explain the more I hear the judgement. But I reject the judgement, and invite you to see the beauty of the dark painting. Of course it’s self-serving, why shouldn’t it be. If you get nothing from this, you are not served, why should you read it.

I yearn for communication, which is why I want to paint this for you. For some reason I don’t want specifics but I can tell you that there is idealism in here trying to get out. I suffer from a plague of ideas. I start with recognizing a concern, maybe social justice, unemployment, something that can be prevented, down to one person whom few can understand why they don’t belong in jail. I read and listen, react, talk with others and I think and then I begin to have visions. Not visions in the sense that they come true without any intervention, but one’s that come true because of the intervention. I see the intervention as stemming from the context, the understanding extends to a system of relationships, a sense of political, social and cultural ideologies drawing on the philosophies that I’ve encountered, and the thing about these ideas is they quite typically lead me to try and grasp mundane human psychology, where the intervention relies on an opening towards a human psychology of potential based not on any new ideas, but just living up to our stated and overt intentions as decent and responsible citizens, rather than the realism of the mundane. These two psychological states seem to co-exist in parallel, in one real world of real people, with basic survival needs, with rights. On the one hand we see that we want to eradicate poverty, and yet we seem to accept that doing it is impossible. Again we swing to feeling that we must do it, and we must set goals, and then the mundane mountain of obstacles sends us back. We create a mountain to pass, we say we must pass it, but we spin our wheels in our own mud. So, once in a while I see a situation where I see the solution. I quickly anticipate the obstacles and try to find the first steps. I need others. Others let me down and I they have some blame in that. I know there’s nothing I can do about them. So I return to what I can do. And the whole problem is that I can’t get the power of communication to work, I don’t have the resources. There’s two problems, in that I can’t get the medium and that people are not listening very well to ideas these days. People in fact reject ideas, ideas are too difficult, and there isn’t time. They create an impossible situation where problems are created where ideas are needed that are beyond the mundane, but the people ask us please to cast our ideas in the limitations of the mundane. Because we don’t build anymore, not as societies. We only try not to fall apart.

That is to say we are in a dark age. And I have said that when I wasn’t myself in the darkness. Truth is that I am blessed with a great many emotional riches that normally tide me over with a buoyancy. It is just that my usual self is somewhat floating above where we are. I need this darkness to get to the bottom of things.

Don’t forget that when the Mongols overran the Muslim empires of North Africa, Persia, the Middle East and Muslim Spain, my religion was broken. It was broken from its heights, its Golden Age. The Crusades followed and the dominance of Europe. The military advantage was joined with the liberation of knowledge from dogmatism. That liberation of knowledge was said to be inspired by the Greeks, a Renaissance of rationalism and humanism. What was forgotten was that it was actually transmitted. It was transmitted because the Arabs and Persians were inspired by nearly the same tenets as the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and these could not have happened without them. The tenets were nearly the same. In the Western secular tradition, the separation of church and state freed science from apologetics. The Muslims had a similar notion, because the Muslim scientist took free inquiry in the same direction. The Muslims did not see this as separation, except that authority over free inquiry could not come from a clerical institution. This free inquiry was challenged by orthodoxy, but they did not have the upper hand, and the enlightened caliphates were patrons of the sciences, of astronomy, the arts and culture, of free health care, of social services, etc. Separation was necessary in the Renaissance because of Galileo’s challenge to the notion of the earth as the centre of the universe, and so to challenge orthodoxy and break the pattern of apologetics. Separation was necessary because of the darkness that arose from the dogmatism and orthodoxy of the church, and it’s political integration with the Westphalian states. Yet Galileo’s discoveries, as is yet hard to prove, were likely based on work done by astronomers in the Muslim world who had performed the same calculations revealed in Galileo’s astronomy, and performed in an environment with few pre-determined problems about whether the earth was the centre or not. These concerns were not concerns that the Muslim astronomers felt acutely in accomplishing their work. Thus their humanism required less of a sense of separation of spheres, in fact it did not need a distinction of humanism vs. God-centredness. Thus, when this knowledge spread to the West, from a place that did not require separation, it required separation for the West to be able to accept it. This process has a few implications. One is that some feel that the separation of secular and spiritual spheres, though politically necessary in Western society for freedom and science, has uninteneded consequences of de-spriritualization. This de-spiritualization can have ugly faces, because when rationalism exists without a supra-rational, a super-ceding ethical level, one which is derived from natural justice, which is less empirical and more felt, existential, holistic and deep, that rationalism can operate in a form completely detached from the human. That rationalism can result in quite severe consequences, because internal logics serve themselves. We can see therefore, no check on Nazism within its own system, but in lesser extremes we see decision-making that can entirely rationalize itself as poverty reduction, where anyone outside it can see that it is tearing the world further apart. But what happened to the Muslim world is worse. After the destruction wrought by the Mongols, that world was subjected to the Crusades, and then to colonialism, then to being proxy pawns in the Cold War. More guns were given to children than books, well that’s a metaphor perhaps. So now, Muslim orthodoxy has gone to some wild extremes in reaction to the West, and now we have regressive reactionary Islamism which looks nothing like Islam of the 12^th century, and uses Islam as a banner for a kind of barbarism Europe experienced in the Middle Ages under the Church. From this we get a mob of Muslims in Sudan asking for the death penalty for a teacher who merely named a teddy bear Mohamed after a child in her class, following a vote of her students to do so. We get insanity.

And so it’s time for Muslims to throw off the yolk of their religious masters, reject their orthodoxy and yet not dive into a mush of commercial secularism, but find our own Renaissance. That would give me hope.

Be good to others, and compassionate, and kind, and understanding and forgiving – this is what God wants.

See you soon.

Chapter 7:Bitter Irony

2007-11-13T21:17:00.000-08:00

My apologies in the delay of this post/chapter of the blog/book.

These last weeks have offered only a crowd of foreseeable but unforeseen demands, accompanied by unforeseen disruptions, with an agenda to interrupt loudly and rudely the tasks requisite of solitary reflection. The complicated needs of others have seen fit to weigh accidently and in tandem on shoulders with few resources, limited experience and expended energy. The possibilities of letting others down seem to stalk my efforts at every turn. The heaviness of these lamentable entanglements, these pile-ups, seem always to visit with ferocious synergy during the dark November months. They are relieved at first snow, with the reminder of the promise of Christmas vacation, a reprieve from the muddled purposes and anonymous vulnerability of the busy world, a retreat to the family, the familiar and to rest and solitude. Today, hell is other people, and we can't just get along.

The bitter irony of late is thus. Our universities profess to teach critical thinking, questioning of the world and what we think, independent thought, the pursuit of truth through the tearing down of illusion. Yet, when the professor is criticized by the student, the student pays in censure and even academic penalty. The lesson is, focus your critique elsewhere, occupy your station, do not question authority, do what you're told and repeat after me. Those who attack hypocrites, can also be hypocritical - thus becoming a reflection of their critique.

Thus we fight, we lose a battle, we conflict, and we own no truths other than our dignity, and this is both the reason for and the method of our constant struggle.

Peace.

Chapeter 6 Whither Freedom

2007-10-24T23:09:00.000-07:00

One question is not solvable. It is not polite. It leads to necessary deconstruction of one's idea of fairness as it applies directly to oneself. That is, where we were born and into what situation. In the confrontation of privileged one to degraded one, the tourist and the vagabond we never leave with a satisfactory sense of our humanity. Shall we blame God for the unequal chances we are born into? Chances are part of the universe, but we humans are enjoined with the responsibity for the range of chances available to our own. How can we blame God, when humans - you and I - are complicit in creating the vastness and degree of inequity in the chances of who is born today, the choices available. The more fortunate are not so just by their bad luck as the charitable believe, but by the moral failures of humanity's previous generations. Their current choices are shaped by ours. Like an alcoholic, we may be poised to break the generational cycle. What do you think? What's your stand in this one life?

Yet for a young child, the chance at birth given, is conditions they find themselves born to, and completely at the mercy of. A young girl in a country our history made poor, is someone we most frequently fail to protect. Who is most immediately responsible? Being responsible is not the same as having the means to protect and nourish. A mother's burden is as immense as the joy of a child, it is never easy, none can do it alone. Who surrounds a mother? What is that community up against? Is it similar to when the greedy raze a forest and ruin the soil. What lives fights for life, it is not the lush vegetation of a nourished ground. The elements have been degraded. You can water, and a plant will survive, but it is not vibrant life as it was meant to be. Water land that has been razed, as charity while enjoying the high end furniture, the cheap electronics, the stuff of pleasure. No, this land must be renewed. The foundation of societies impoverished by our arrangements must be restored. The people shall build it themselves, so long as ones like you and me respect it, hold and pass the tools, share the knowledge and stand out of the way.

What is given to chance in life is the reason life is unfair. What is given to people in life, is the chance to be fair to each other. In order to be fair to one another, we cannot assume that life is fair, we must be able to understand the way in which life is unfair. Then, our humanity rests in acting fairly on that understanding. It does not rest in the tourist becoming a vagabond on purpose, or the tourist out to change vagabonds into tourist.

At the end of the day, when we are fair, those we encounter have dignity. It may be a dignity that have not known, but they will recongize it. It is part of human nature. Freedom is thought of as many things, all of which are transient and can be taken away. Without dignity, the mind is lost and the heart broken. What freedoms have meaning where dignity is lost.

I am speaking of myself too. And dignity is something that can become vacant within me, head down, without worth, in embarassment or humiliation. None of us are the steel and poise, competence and shine we show the world. Some of us are not able to keep that up day by day, we shake, we hide, we get through the day. All of us search for a way to be free.

In this book, we will move on from the history of the universe. We will introduce you, my audience, as a character. I can guess that you've had a hard time to decide something, you've been irritated, perhaps you are now at this writing. You shower daily, and perhaps you read on the toilet. Your life is fairly ordinary, even though events in it, at times, maybe now, shake and challenge you. You're a reader, there's no way I have you down. You're mysterious to me, yet I'm talking directly to you. As a character in my book, I've kidnapped you. Perhaps I'll reveal you in ways that are profound, even difficult. If you are to 'read the book of your own life', as Rumi said, I shall try to write it. But to read it in a way that you regain consciousness, your own consiousness, you cannot follow yourself as a character for which you have hopes for. You're in the book, it's not about you. That in itself can be a new cliche for the masses. 'You're in the book of your life, but it's not about you.' It's about life.

A world so rich, deep, powerful, sometimes painfully beautiful because delights and enlightenments, the moment one falls in love or discovers and experiences the depth of beauty are fleeting. We resist that direct connection because it may be gone now, there is no 'evidence' for it but the memory, and the disenchantment of drudgery is where the vast majority of time is spent so that we can survive through money and other entitlements. Duty calls.

The great global depression is all about our sense that this Majesty is either an illusion, a disappointment, a romanticism. Or, more heartwrenching is that it is real, but it is being lost, it is leaving us, we are too drowned in its sorrows to say that the Beautiful is the Real, the sorrows are its confusion and the tragedy is how very long we go on with brutalities and pain, and ignorance, and how many times we turn away from some spark of that Majesty. Being lost to artificial life. So many buildings, none of them beautiful, all of them functional and modern, and necessary, and our thanks to the developers who drive our bountious economy. Blocking the full moon.

So you the reader, are my first character in this book, and I will call my friend. Under tonight's full moon, you walk home. Sweet raindrops gently fall from the bright yellow maple, a leaf brushes the lapel of your fall coat. The temperature neither makes you feel too hot or cold. The reflection of the town hall buildings has a perfect clarity like a mirror in the river below. The wind is calm and the rain has stopped save a light the breeze carrying droplets from wet branches.

There is no war. There is no flood. There is no bread shortage or lack of fuel. You and I are blessed, I am grateful for your safety and comfort. World's survived another day. World's seen many things it regrets. It does not regret this just being. It's forces will drive us to labour again tomorrow, and perhaps our work will surprise the world in lessening its burden and regrets. You know what it takes. A random act of kindness perhaps, an act of courage, a friendly and open gesture, lifting your head from your desk and suggesting a lunch together with colleagues, a mere breaking up the illusion that people's worth is what they can put on paper, on time. The world will not regret you and I, our friendship. It is the because we can recall the majesty, and realize it never left us. The war, the strikes, the solidarity, the faith in God, the marches so black and white could be authentic friends at work, at school, full recognition of status as equals, not living in a society based on a false permise. Many accepted death, the did not chose it, but they knew surviving such battles would not be possible for all who fought them. They fought. Each one of us are meek and our existence, our life, is not as we sometimes feel in these times of peace and modern medicine, gauranteed by anyone, nor are we a cog that if destroyed the entire machine would fall apart. These things do not distinguish us, we are not entitled just because we live. The right to life is not about our bodily functions, it is the right to be alive when we live. We cannot feel anything but grateful for this that we have now, for each other my friend. The moon, the maple, your people.

We are going to write a story, maybe other characters will join soon. There will be conflict and desperation in the road ahead. I do not think there is anything to fear. It's only a book. You are not afraid, because this is a book about life, which you are a character, but it is not about you as some kind of worried and self-examining neurotic. It's time to stop worrying about what people like to worry about, what will happen to their reputation, money, ability to provide, their responsibilities towards others.

I feel the same way. Is this the way we become warriors? We resign. We live with our agency, intention, free will and risks to ourselves. What if we encounter disaster? We sink with our characters, when we read, we drown with them and hold our breath, the book is not in danger. The book's only danger is if it is only writing, separate from its authenticity. What is important if our lives our lost, if we die. The book, and you and I will not be the same, if we are to be at all.

What can reconcile human tragedy. We don't know. This is an effort to do so, and that is the book. It may be long. We can do it.

Chapter 5: Expanse

2007-10-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

When do we have space? When do we have time? These seem scarce. In this society, one is made to feel irresponsible and unproductive for seeking time for its sake. I was, and still am someone who has chosen a path that restricts this time, and someone who used to be, but to a lesser degree now, worried about it.

One night after weeks of tensions and worries, tasks and demands, projects to finish and new ideas to pursue, people to agrravate and be aggravated by, my mind intent on getting to the bottom of something and turning over in such a way as to knot the stomach. I had a dream. In this dream, a very clear voice, clearer than I've ever heard, said 'Just Be.'

This is not as hard as I thought it would be. Not hard to do, easy to lose and forget.Just Be. I'm not going to lie and say it was very challenging hard work to implement this advice. In fact if you approach this advice as a project, you are already breaking the advice. Just Be.

Writing is enormously fun for me, do that which is enormously fun for you. But this is not a self-help course. There are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. That's Rumi, who nonetheless I have found to be more self-helping than any self-proclaimed help. Anyway, like I said, this is time to relax. Do your really think this is the time to worry about the cruel world? The world is not so cruel when you have a moment to breathe. You must honour that gift.

When the clock ticks from one moment to the next, does that moment become the past, extinguished forever? Does the world and universe of that moment no longer exist except in memory or historical record?

Or did the last moment simple become this one? Is the past still here? Does everything that exists contain the sigularity at the beginning? Is energy ever destroyed? Does any moment ever pass, can time be broken? Everything is as it was. And it always was changing. That's how we remember it, as happening.

In a conversation, one can stop time and we call that intimacy. In a meditation the same. It is seeing it from inside, rather than viewing the world as an observer. From the inside, time is a field. Moments do not pass, moment is. This is not to ask one to see only what is happening now as important. This is to see what is happening now part of the past unbroken. It is not to forget the past, it is to see today as its becoming - all of it. We are shaped by history. In the very precise timeline, we can say that what we see is the past. The time it takes for light to travel through space. When we look to the stars, we see a past of long, long ago. Or should we say that what we are seeing as a star, is not a pin, but light that has travelled. Seeing things for what they are means travelling backward through time, things in the current moment are composed of the past. Nothing is extinguished except in minds.

Minds can be inside or outside the universe. When inside, they experience time as a field. When outside, the experience time as a line. Coming inside and outside is experienced as a circle, cycles of waking and sleeping, objective positive tasks, reflections and daydreams, time pressure and free space. Agency, that is action that affects the timeline, is experienced as a spiral, a returning way. What happens after death is similar to time experienced as a field. This is the expanse, the eternity, unchanging sense of home and belonging in the universe. This is as the world is busy with agency and pattens, a freedom. If there is somewhere to go or be, that is where you go. The universe moves, you move, yet peace returns to you and it is the overwhelming embrace. It is not that you drop your job, or even change outward habits. There is simply a freedom and peace that follows you wherever you go. It is that ever-presence. You go away, but it does not. When the religions call the faithul to remembrance, the faithful call themselves to openness, trust, faith, expanse, unwavering presence inside the Friend. The world can bring pain, that pain rests in this presence. It is truly not time in the end, but home.

We have arrived at the start of this story.

Chapter 4: Returning Way

2007-10-12T20:29:00.000-07:00

Time is both a line and circle, it returns and it has a direction - like a spiral.

The sun set again. There is a new govenrment in the province. A speech to gather all the peoples together under the king. Three other factions that sought the throne together were greater than that of the king. Each by itself was weaker than the king's faction so they were defeated and stripped of all power except that of honourable criticism in the court. The citizens themselves turned down a proposal that would have all the factions fairly represented. Another day's labour.

Now we are travelling near the end of 2007. Globalization has set in officially. The world is one but is not as one, but set upon a heirarchy. This heirarchy is based mostly on wealth, and the wealth based mostly on historical accident. The heirarchy is like a long curve. The low part rises very slowly as it moves along a population axis, encompassing most at the lower end of the wealth heirarchy. The curve shifts rapidly at 80% of the axis, then dramatically, exponentially at 1%. Wars of national defence and security are fought between nations encompassing the 80% wealth gap and those at the lowest end. The armies of the rich are endowed with the highest technology of warfare and the nations have enjoyed peace and security within for half a century, save the 911 attacks. Yet the wars have raged since the beginning of the millenium and have no expiry date.

Chapter 3: Cycles

2007-10-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here we are again.

The sun rose again. History repeated herself. We are talking again.

This is an utterly magnificent fall day. The fall always brings nostalgia. I never felt more uprooted than when I was away from the Ottawa Valley during the fall season, never felt more at home when I returned.

Time returns and revolves. Another government to be elected. Same issues. Speculators become rich while farmers lose their land. The government spends more on weapons than cures. The upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn. Robbery and chaos, just as it was written before Christ in the Tao Te Ching. Yet because it is out of balance now, time pulls us towards balance again.

Back again tomorrow. Be well.

aej

Chapter 2: Timeline

2007-10-06T21:24:00.001-07:00

Time is fourfold.

There is a line

There is a circle

There is a spiral

There is a field.

Time is one thing after another. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Every moment in line behind the next. Every passing moment ordered precisely, once gone never to be retrieved, once ordered, frozen. The present inching forward by minutes, speeding forwad by nanosecond.

Just a minute...

Chapter 1:The Big Bang

2007-10-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

First of all, this book is not about the Big Bang, astronomy, any particular science or academic subjects. You will find subject matter that has been studied academically, and scientists and scholars play a large role in this book.

Beginning with the Big Bang seems an awfully good place to start, though remote from today, which is also a good place to start. Perhaps this is the ultimate way to overcome writer's block. Start with the Big Bang, or Revelations if you believe that to be literal, or start with today - or both.

First off, I will not debate Creationism and reject it as literal truth. I told you this would be from my perspective.

I will start with today and the Big Bang, I will argue for the moment, and this will be a thread throughout the book that the Big Bang and today are an inseparable present.

We start with a singularity, an ultimate unity - an ultimate binary translation from nothing to one thing. We shall say that this one becomes all things. We shall say the linear measurement of time as one thing after another is layered by a phenomenon of time as always being here never separated. We shall say that the centre of the universe is everywhere. We shall argue that mathematically time is continuous, divisions of time being aspects of the mind.

Today, each particle of every existing thing emanates from singularity. Each has uniqueness, yet each has category.

Plato said that Forms were eternal and unchaning and these represented the true reality, illusion was in that which was impermanent. Heraclitus said that you can't step into the same stream twice, that what was permanent was change.

I shall say that the universe is as wine pouring into a glass. The glass represents those Forms, those immutable structural laws of the universe. The pouring wine is Heraclitus' flow, and this wine is always being poured, it is being poured now for you. It takes an overall shape, but is always in flux, where each particle lands up has randomness, and in the case of people, as an aspect of free will.

This book is not entirely philosophical. There is time to throw the glass into the fire, to make love by the flames and to sleep.

Good night. Sweet Dreams.

aej

This is a book in progress, with a beginning but no end

2007-10-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

For a long time I've wanted to write a book.

For every conversation has it's limits in time, and each is interrupted, ultimately. And there is a yearning to continue to deepen, include other conversations that you missed, ultimately to satisfy a need to communicate.

Selfishly, I need to take your thoughts, desires, fascinations, anger, ideas and laments and to make them my own, and reflect them back to you in larger integrities, and ambitiously within a whole. I need to include my ear for the voices of the world, but also those solitary ruminations, my own creative syntheses, where all these conversations have been drawn out in my mind. The selfish part is to be the appropriator of a mountain of human experiences, with honesty that I delve to be fair to perspectives, but without offering as sacrficice my perspective as a subject, without offering a promise of objectivity. As such, there is at heart an attempt at truth as far as I am able of that which is recorded fact, yet the deeper truths are in the meanings. Subjectivity is often derided and things which are deemed subjective all to weigh the same, next to nothing. Yet subjectivity that arises out of a yearning to understand reality, a tortuous and uncompromising yielding to truth, an an identification of subject as a container of truths only found through this bouyancy of striving and yielding, and finally arriving at way-stations, disappearing, being broken apart, returning, recollecting, creating, listening and telling and yet imagining and contemplating, using and experiencing, working and resting, taking apart and building and giving up and giving back and relenting to humour, returning to humility and silence - therein lies truth. This is not fiction or non-fiction precisely, yours is the task to take it for what it is, judge for yourself, use what you need, find pleasure, find your tension between mystery and discovery, ground and sky.

This book does not have an end. It has a beginning. This is a Dunia Sutra, a thread of the world. It begins as the world does. Today, with the Big Bang, everything in between, it starts tomorrow.

As I write in the blog a date will appear with the post. Do not assume historical accuracy of the time of writing. It will be edited, parts will be shifted, dates arranged in terms of the composition. Accuracy will be there when needed. I need artistic license to tell this story. The dates will remain part of the composition, and part of the story.

I am writing it as a blog, partly so you can find an unfolding drama, mystery and ideas you need as we go, you can comment and offer me suggestions. I do not care about publishers, all this work is copyright as my own. The other reason is my impatience. I would find it onerous to work away at this book on my own word processor waiting for the improbable day of finishing before revealing it. This way the task is divided up, day by day, and each day I publish.

thank you for reading, don't steal my work, and see you tomorrow.

be good.