Kitty-Boy

He's 14 years old. He's a sweetheart. He's my cat, and I'm his human.

colors from somewhere else

I think I've read that color has to do, scientifically, with light. Something about a prism and the word "spectrum." I really can't be bothered with that kind of thinking. It makes me tense and rebellious. I prefer rummaging around in the fractal cracks and seams of things, where spirit moves and the poetic happens.

I want to talk about Jack Cardiff's use of Technicolor in the 1947 Powell and Pressburger film Black Narcissus. 

I bought the DVD several years ago, owing to Cardiff's color. It's the most beautiful film I've ever seen. The plot and characters are beside the point.

I want to talk about Cardiff's color in this film, but I'm not sure what to say. Even if I knew what to say, I doubt I would know how to say it. Whatever it is I want to talk about is something different than what this article has to say:

Jack Cardiff: Painter's eye view

Cardiff said his filter palette was influenced by master painters. That's one way of looking at it -- his. I want to look at it my way.

I've read about the effects of peyote. I've read that colors from somewhere else are transposed onto or interfused with objects. A chemical transcendence in which vibrancy itself is made manifest as tones of metaphysical color. It's an entry into a dimension unsuspected by everyday consciousness. 

As with peyote so with Cardiff's colorology -- we're getting as close as we're likely to get to thingness-in-itself. An impossible depth of presence somehow also possible.

Jack Cardiff's cinematography in Black Narcissus happens as a convergence of hallucination, substance, and aesthetics. 

amazon.com

1914 - 2009

Who would win in a swordfight...

...the probabilistic Blaise Pascal or the cognitively dissonant Miguel de Unamumo?

Pascal wagered on belief -- just in case there's a God on the other side of reality. Unamuno suggested paradoxical faith -- live as if there's a God, even though there isn't.

I think the Spaniard would win, because Spaniards are hot-blooded and tilty. I mean, would you really choose a lisping Musketeer with a feathered hat over Inigo Montoya?

No contest.

a little something about Scriabin

1872 - 1915

Many folks look askance at the fellow, and some are perplexed by his music. Many consider his compositions to be emotionally plethoric, structurally diffuse, thematically unhinged. Reading his biography by Faubion Bowers (Dover Publications), one is tempted to apply those descriptors to his personality as well. Musically and personally, he was assuredly a weird appearance on planet Earth. 

His childhood was spent among women only, who fussed over him and spoiled him thoroughly. All children, up to a certain age of socialization (an integrating of others' existences), are intensely grounded in ego, in complete self-being. I don't think Scriabin ever managed to fully extricate himself from himself -- he remained a child of sorts all his life. Thus, the world was always an aspect or analog of himself. His ego-infatuation eventually turned into megalomania -- a case in point is his Mysterium.

Many baby-boomers have something in common with Scriabin. Parents tended, in general, to lavish attention and material gestures on us. Hence, the emergence of some neurotic hippies. Many of us became crystallized into shapes of self-being. Socialization was iffy, erratic, ostensible, problematic. Estrangement from others causes an aversion to their consensus, goes-without-saying reality. 

For those who couldn't pull off a convergence with the public world and its "sane" forms of being, despair became an option. Or else we drifted into precincts of otherness as such (the world of infinite imagination).

It's about opening up frontiers of fantasy. Even if the impulse is colored, tainted by a certain decadence of self-absorption. However it gets made, the making of aesthetic objects is an alternative to traditional forms of being, to what convention deposits into the space of collective living. 

I dare say that many of us peculiar baby-boomers who are instinctively oriented to the arts, who have a creative impulse should look upon Scriabin as an example of metaphysical possibility (a kind of exotic, ghostly mentor for painting and poetry). 

I respond not only agreeably but also spiritually to Scriabin's music -- how it tilts toward and expresses another way of being than the conventional.  Scriabin opened up unheard-of aesthetic geography. Those "superfluous" worlds he created in sound have, I think, something in common with that dreaming abyss beneath time and substance. Listening to Scriabin's music has the effect of making the word "reality" (nature and norms) a quite dubious thing.

About that Blue Flower (or -- those funky, funky Germans!)

Against the mythos, ethos, and pathos of Judaism and Christianity, I contrast those funky, funky Germans and Austrians.

Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Schubert, Carl Maria von Weber, Schumann, Hölderlin, Heine, Kleist, Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the Brothers Grimm, Nietzsche, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Freud, Walser, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Benjamin, Hesse, Mann, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Werner Herzog, W.G. Sebald.

I'll lump in some others, such as: the German-Swiss Paul Klee, the Bohemian Kafka (who wrote and maybe thought in German), and the Polish Bruno Schulz (who translated Kafka and thereby was, I'm sure, infected with Germanic Weltanschauug and Weltschmerz). I will hazard to suggest that the German sense-of-things  trickled into the soul of Coleridge (via Lessing and Kant, as well as the scenic landscapes around Ratzeburg and Göttingen) and insinuated a darker, deeper tonality into English Romanticism. The British writer George MacDonald was influenced by the German imagination. Perhaps the spiritual-aesthetic shadow of Germanic being spread even to Edvard Munch, over in Norway -- I've felt it in his palette.

(It's incumbent on me, at this point, to mention the phenomenon of Nazism. But I don't want to go into it. Those thuggish butchers and their delusional followers have been seen by some scholars as the natural extension of German culture in general. But I'm not persuaded that Wagner and Nietzsche caused such barbarism.)

And then there's this unusual fellow:

Novalis 

"The more poetic, the more real."

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg
1772-1801

Even though some of our Germans dallied with Christianity to a certain degree, they could not be contained within the claustrophobia of a theistic category. With Judaism and then Christianity, we have a construct of Creator-Messiah-The End. In other words, a drawn-out, foregone conclusion about reality and Being.

The Judeo-Christian milieu, from Moses to Aquinas, is autistic and obsessive-compulsive. It wants to box in reality, impose order and narrative, mark strident time, leave no loose ends.

That just ain't gonna fly with the German soul, which prefers the ambiguous and the labyrinthine. It requires a pathological-hysterical opening onto the infinite, ever-weird Mysterium. Being for them, in general, is not about Jehovah or Jesus; it's about the Unsayable lurking within the beauty of nightmare and the melancholy of ecstasy.

Does it have something to do with Paganism & Nature? There might be a little Harz Mountains and Black Forest mixed into it. But it's something farther-fetched, subtler, and more unusual than the Volk.

German Romanticism -- early, late, modern, and postmodern -- is a different and shadowed response to "Let there be light." It's a preference for or instinctive allegiance to imagination, dream, and textures of the abyss behind substance and process.

Novalis's Blue Flower........

What is it? What's this all about?

The Blue Flower is the symbolic essence of sought-after Mathilde, in the novel Heinrich Von Ofterdingen. And Mathilde represents the sought-after meaning of beauty, poetry and being.

In this never-completed book, Henry travels the worlds of pondering, fairy tales, and actual geography. This is the story of an awakening into mystical spirit and mythical vision -- into the "supreme realism."

amazon.com

The Blue Flower blooms within Schubert's Trio No. 2 in E-flat major. It becomes an implicit apparition blossoming above Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The "gods" of Hölderlin and Heidegger are garlanded with its petals. Kant's and Schopenhauer's noumenal is scented with its unknowable blueness. Freud's Eros and Uncanny are forms of its pistil and stamen. The "ecstatic truth" of Herzog is hallucinated from its pollen. A tinted dew remains upon the melancholy of Sebald's wanderings.

The Blue Flower is a perennial. It continues to flourish outside the walls of ruins and within the depths of haunted poems.

an unexpected poignancy

Yesterday, I posted this:

Professor Agata Bielik-Robson

My coming to that webpage, which announces and links to her seminar paper, was one of those tangential internet things. Something led to something led to something.  

I read her seminar paper

Mysteries of The Promise. Negative Theology in Benjamin and Scholem

and was unprepared for the effect it would have on me.

For most of the essay, I was simply trying to follow the argument, stopping many times to reread paragraphs in order to absorb the subtleties.  For most of the essay, the intellectual part of my head was engaged. I was transfixed by Professor Bielik-Robson's critical unfolding and analysis of the debate between Scholem and Benjamin -- their different approaches to God, nothingness, revelation, trace, bare life, and Kafka.

It would be an injustice to her paper were I to offer a summary or paraphrase of its contents. This stuff is too deep for a generalized compression. And what happened to me while reading it happened as a result of reading the whole thing. So, what I have to say about its effect on me is all I will say, and should be taken as a kind of whispered gesture of invitation to others.

On pages 16 and 17 (of 19), I read the following, which began to alter my orientation from the intellectual to the emotional:

It is not power which is concealed and radically transcendent – but only life, the ‘mysterious hidden life of God.’ God, therefore, reveals himself as indeed meaningless – but not as a Nothing-of-Meaning or the capriciously inexplicable power issuing ‘commands that command nothing,’ but as an autotelic Pleroma of eternal Sabbath, delighting in its own absolute uniqueness.

Also on page 17 is an excerpt from Zohar: The Book of Splendour. That text worked upon me in a peculiar manner. I felt an existential weight being gently displaced by something else. A kind of metaphysical buoyancy occurred. A floating quality that also sent invisible strings into the organic, the lived, the psychological. 

The suggestion of "Sabbath" struck me with a poignant force. 

Yet a dreamlike effect, as though the word was haunted by a heretofore unrecognized je ne sais quoi. For a few moments (who knows, maybe a lasting thing), I felt myself opening to a new and uncertain sense of the quietly festive. One struggles for words.

It was as if I had been graciously and strangely adopted into an old Jewish family.

on spiritual myopia

Apparently, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are not death-haunted and those who are. Art has a chance of taking place among the latter group. The former are too oddly situated within a sober existence to be genuine makers or deep appreciators of art.

Art is a form of attempted transcendence. Any attempt at art -- music, painting, dance, sculpture, poem, novel -- that doesn't have death somewhere in the foreground or background will yield pedestrian results. That's an assertion. So be it. And here's another one: the genuine work of art is one in which consciousness knows that transcendence is only a fleeting possibility -- a something available only during moments of creation. Knowing that permanent transcendence is unavailable will texture or imbue the creative work with a sense of the tragic.


What got me to thinking about this stuff is an article I read this morning:

"Evolution and Existentialism"

I come across this attitude often, and it remains a baffling thing to behold. In this case, the fellow is trying to amalgamate evolutionary biology and rational existentialism. Oddly, he is not the least bit concerned with the macabre fact of death or with expression toward transcendence. This fellow is way too well adjusted. Art didn't even appear in his article about life.

But maybe his way is just one of the ways of being in the world. One in which art doesn't much register as a possibility of living and coping. Each to his or her own, right? The problem is that this fellow is preaching a preferred way of being. For all of us sentient human creatures. He says that the blending of scientific and philosophical rationalism will put us on a better path of life. And to that I say "Balderdash."

There's an unsettling blitheness to the article writer's construal of being and time: life overall is meaningless so our job is to lose ourselves inside little meanings. That won't cut it. A greater response to overall meaninglessness is called for. Art is the deeper form of life. The tragic sense is the called-for tonality.

Reality is not explainable, nor is consciousness. Another grand assertion, which is fun for me to make. So we are ensconced in a permanent mind-bending mystery. The fact that biological entities evolve or that old French guys in cafes prescribe free choice does nothing to quell the big problem: human consciousness and mortal existence are incompatible. We are located in a compelling paradox. That's where and why the artistically tragic takes center stage.

Mahler's symphonies make the article writer's attitude seem myopic and rather air-headed.

That's all I have to say right now. I need some more tragically existential coffee.

Carl Jung -- peculiar and interesting

I thought this article was quite good -- well-written, critically astute, and philosophically alive:

article about Jung


Though...the writer's concluding talk about God is a bit facile, a mite too edifying, and a good deal problematic.

I must acknowledge Lev Shestov

Portrait by Leonid Pasternak 

Lev Shestov, Russian (1866 - 1938)

Wikipedia said this:

The author seems to contradict himself on every page, and even seeks out paradoxes. This is because he believes that life itself is, in the last analysis, deeply paradoxical, and not comprehensible through logical or rational inquiry. Shestov maintains that no theory can solve the mysteries of life. 

Camus said this:

Shestov ... throughout a wonderfully monotonous work, constantly straining toward the same truths, tirelessly demonstrates that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism always stumbles eventually on the irrational of human thought. None of the ironic facts or ridiculous contradictions that depreciate reason escapes him. One thing only interests him, and that is the exception, whether in the domain of the heart or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences of the condemned man, the exacerbated adventures of the Nietzschean mind, Hamlet's imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an Ibsen, he tracks down, illuminates, and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable. He refuses reason its reasons and begins to advance with some decision only in the middle of that colorless desert where all certainties have become stones. 

Though Jewish, Shestov turned to Christianity as the answer to his philosophical concerns about radical freedom and the truth of subjectivity. Christianity as the true north against the hubris and dead systems of pure reason (Idealism). But it doesn't necessarily follow that the non-rational must reach apotheosis in a personal God or in the promise of the Cross.

While I agree that the human spirit is mostly unfathomable and that lived experience has a different, deeper resonance than philosophical and scientific edifice-building, it could be the case that our unmeasurable chambers of meaning have no absolute echo in a Fatherly Heaven. Maybe, but maybe not.

Again in sympathy with Shestov -- I think there is a density to human consciousness and its relation to phenomenal reality that supersedes the dim-but-noble lights of abstraction and theory. But if Shestov is sensitive to paradox, then how could he have so blithely tumbled toward and into God? How could he not also discern an even greater paradox in God's own theory of God?

About Shestov's notion of radical and infinite freedom -- freedom to be or to do what? To be simply unburdened with abstract formalism and the mentations of scientism? Surely he means more than that. Something mind-blowing and spiritual and religious. But what? To just sit around and have Godly and paradisaical feelings? To be a wild-spinning mystic? To prepare oneself for something beyond the grave? I just don't know what he's getting at.

Of course, it's not for me to criticize or even guess about the contents of Shestov's religious imagination. Whatever he envisioned and deeply felt about a Living God beyond reason is something that took place in the unique dimensions of his perception and response to reality.

Sometimes I wake up from dreams and know for sure that I've just come from worlds far more lustrous and strange than my thinking could ever encompass or understand.


And here's an essay by Czeslaw Milosz on Shestov:

"Shestov, or the Purity of Despair"


An article:

"A Philosopher of Small Things"

SARAH THE PRIESTESS

The First Matriarch of Genesis 

amazon.com

from the publisher's page -- Swallow Press

The only source in which Sarah is mentioned is the Book of Genesis, which contains very few highly selective and rather enigmatic stories dealing with her. On the surface, these stories tell us very little about Sarah, and what they do tell is complicated and confused by the probability that it represents residue surviving from two different written sources based on two independent oral traditions. Nevertheless, the role which Sarah plays, in the Genesis narratives, apears to be a highly energetic one, a role so active, in fact, that it repeatedly overshadows that of her husband.

In a patriarchal environment such as the Canaan of Genesis, the situation is discordant and problematic. Dr. Teubal suggests that the difficulty is eliminated, however, if we understand that Sarah and the other matriarchs mentioned in the narratives acted within the established, traditional Mesopotamian role of priestess, of a class of women who retained a highly privileged position vis-a-vis their husbands.

Dr. Teubal shows that the “Sarah tradition” represents a nonpatriarchal system struggling for survival in isolation, in the patriarchal environment of what was for Sarah a foreign society. She further indicates that the insistence of Sarah and Rebekah that their sons and heirs marry wives from the old homeland had to do not so much with preference for endogamy and cousin marriage as with their intention of ensuring the continuation of their old kahina-tradition against the overwhelming odds represented by patriarchal Canaan.



Okay. Now this sounds neat to me. The idea of a pagan Canaanite culture in which priestesses had important roles in society is something I like to think about. And that culture beginning to fuse with ancient Hebraic culture (and trying to retain priestess stuff)  is really something to ponder upon.

In fact, if I had it in me, I would try to write a poem about this.

René Daumal on carbon tetrachloride

Daumal (1908 - 1944) experimented with doses of this poisonous substance and then reflected on stuff:

• You don't have to try this particular and rather exceptional experiment in order that your intuition of the absurd can attain the value of a metaphysical experience. But...the existence of persons and consciousness distinct from yourself, your own existence as an individual and finite creature, all that should, if you really wake up, appear to you intolerably absurd.

• Remember the day that you tore open the curtain and were taken alive, stuck in the uproar of uproars, in the wheel of wheels. And remember the days that followed, when you walked around like a cadaver bewitched, with the certitude of having been eaten by infinity, canceled and voided by the single existing Absurd.

For Daumal, the absurd consisted in the hysterical multiplicity of phenomena and the moribund of normality. Whereas the Absurd was conceived as the mind-blowing Absolute -- intrinsically not explainable, even to "itself." Yet a condition of being he tried to approach via chemicals, dreams, and poetry.

"I was ready to get in my car and go 100 miles in any direction...."

cool essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review

a nice Kandinsky essay

This is an interesting and well-written evaluation by Yakov Rabinovich:

Kandinsky: Master of the Mystic Arts


I think the tie-in to Doctor Strange -- my favorite old comic book character -- is cool.

I had also written a Kandinsky essay, in which I took the artist to task for his use of the word "spiritual." I'm not sure if my argument was a coherent or appropriate one. I felt that such a word has to do with something beyond aspects of human psychology or issues of symbolic proximity or intuitions of plane-space hierarchy or concerns with theosophy or even allusions to a God. Mr. Rabinovich apparently has no qualms or caveats about the painter's use of the word "spiritual." That is a reasonable perspective and is most likely the majority opinion. 

“Who made God, Daddy? Who made God, Mommy?”

I will not strain your credulity by trying to write something sophisticated. On the flip-side of that token, I hope you will set aside any knee-jerk religious conviction or fuzzy-skulled mysticism while reading this.

The child's question is everything. We gather around us a lifetime of buffering nonsense to keep her question from touching us in the deep places. It is too disconcerting to really address it and think into it. Or we've become so mature, that such a query is met with condescension.

Well, Meister Eckhardt drove his mind all the way into it. And came up with an “answer” that some would find the raving of an imbecile. God requires a foundational Godhead...then the Godhead requires something beyond even it...something finally ineffable.

The question is everything. It is a serious matter. The child is waiting.

…..............................

I used to be, and still sometimes am, over-stimulated when reading or hearing about the death of a child or young person. Someone cut off, cheated out of years and experience. There's a scene in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which Hans Castorp overhears the tragic wailing and rebellion of a tubercular girl on the eve of death. That really stuck to me.

I used to think that old people dying was not such a tragedy. They've lived a long life. They had their share of experience. Now, I'm not so sure. I'm beginning to think that a life spent wrapped up with religion or some mysticism...or as an above-it-all atheist...or in some other “mature” kind of buffer zone...well, I suspect that the Reaper's close breath just might be more horrible on their faces than on the cheated child.

Here's why: the child or young person is closer to the vacuum of non-being; the elder is much farther removed. If there is a God – something that explains Being – then the child has more lately flown from that mysterious Weaver; the awesome, sublime dew of life's morning still beads on her fair soul. The old are too far flung in time, thus tragically forgetful...grown too solid to be bothered with such ephemeral questions as “Who made God?”

On the deathbeds of ancients, I suspect the trauma is tenfold that of the young. Now...Now...Now...the question looms as agony instead of curiosity. But what does it matter you might ask, if there is no answer? Well, I further suspect that a life, short or long, spent in conscious awareness of, in constant tension about the question of who made God would be a life that is less anguished over pending extinction. Less shocked and surprised to discover that there actually is a Mystery.

excessively ancient sunken city

A few years back, I got caught up in the story of an archaeological find off the NW coast of India, in the Gulf of Cambay. I mean...my imagination swelled up to dangerous proportions. That strange "air" took weeks to slowly dissipate. I would spend hours in delicious reverie, thinking about the significance of this discovery: a large city, tentatively carbon-dated to be 9500 years old; thus, pre-dating the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia.

The implication is that all culture and all spirituality came from India. And this dove-tailed beautifully with what I had been reading at the time: the dialog between Devi and Shiva in the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Something in the tone of revelation and in the "personality" of Shiva struck a chord in me. It seemed to be the Fact of the Matter about deep reality. And those verses are said to pre-date the Veda itself, thus the Harappan -- Indus Valley -- civilization of the north.

I had also been reading The Upanishads, which my Indian friend Chittaranjan Naik had sent me as a gift. Here also was a rumor, an evocation, a fragrance of something very old and very deep...something from the core of Being.

Strange threads of connection began to twine in my musing head. I could picture a river valley civilization with glorious cities, which had begun to rise not too many tens of thousands of years after the dawn of human self-consciousness. And these tree-shaded environs...with lotus blossoms on crystal pools...had as their foundational god none other than Krishna.

Myths about an ancient northern river -- Saraswari -- have been confirmed as fact by recent satellite imagery and some excavations. This river and its tributaries were said to be dotted with several large cities. One of these sites, on the Arabian Sea coast, is the present city of Dwarka, with its Dwarkanath Temple in honor of Krishna. Five other cities were built on the general site but were washed out to sea over thousands of years.

Here's a video I just found about a sunken city off the coast of Dwarka, but as far as I can tell, it's distinct from the Gulf of Cambay discovery:




Now, I've heard nothing recently about the astounding discovery of that sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay. Was it a hoax? I certainly hope not. If I remember correctly from reading a number of articles at the time, the India Oceanography Society was going to do more extensive underwater exploration and excavation. I also remember that the area in question was very murky, roiled with strong currents and brackish water, making camera reconnaissance almost impossible. The video above shows divers in not-too murky water, thus confirming these are two different areas and separate incidents.


Here's the original article:

BBC article on sunken city


And here's a link to a breathtaking Krishna statue. There appeared to be some licensing mumbo-jumbo, so I didn't feel comfortable putting the image here outright. Sure wish I could have, though.

gorgeous statue of Krishna!

Taoist excerpt

A pot of mellow wine

Is the acme of my wants.

On dragon back I fly

To the Islands of the Blessed.

Within that faery realm

When the night begins to wane,

One may see immortals sport

With the rings around the moon!



Lü Yen
(trans. John Blofeld)

Taoism: The Road to Immortality

losing my religion

I was reared a Southern Baptist, up until 18 years of age. At 20, I was introduced to the Gurdjieff literature.

Head, meet wrecking ball.

For the next five years, I read those books over and over. One can't become absorbed in something to that extent without stark changes taking place. The world is turned inside-out. Years later, you might fumble around, trying to turn it outside-back-in, but the fabric has been permanently wrinkled, so to speak.

Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, Tertium Organum, A New Model of the Universe, The Fourth Way.

Rene Daumal: Mount Analogue, A Night of Serious Drinking.

A. R. Orage: On Love.

G. I. Gurdjieff: Meetings with Remarkable Men, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: All and Everything.

And by a natural extension, some books by Idries Shah, including: The Sufis.

Well...that's a bunch of unusual stuff. It can soak way down into your mind, and before long, the world begins to look topsy-turvy. I don't think I ever fully recovered from that period of reading and reflecting. Many others back then used those books as mere stepping stones to actual action...to finding some Gurdjieff group, wherein they could systematically work on their conscious evolution. Me? I'm too much of a dreamer. I just wanted to sink down into those strange books and swallow their dark nectar. I think I turned that literature into an exotic dream, whereas it was designed to wake someone up.

Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales is the strangest book ever written. Reading it once through, and your brains will liquefy, oozing out your ears. Reading it twice will cause part of you to become permanently stuck inside another dimension. For goodness sakes!...whatever you do, never read that book.

But all that reading and thinking prompted me to no firm action. Can I be blamed very much? For not wanting to be fully conscious and awake? And a nagging thought followed me around even back then: so what? Ultimately, what does it gain someone to be a Fully Realized Being? If we're all eventually destined for the Big Sleep?

No, I'd rather spend my days just walking funny: a semi-wakeful foot followed by the one tinging and numb with sleep. Just limping through life, half awake, half sighing. Off-balance...yeah!...that's the ticket.

My life shall be lived equivocally...so stop looking at me that way, Mr. Gurdjieff!

Zen

Below are my favorite responses from Shiva to Devi in the section "Centering" from the book Zen Flesh Zen Bones. That section is considered to be over 4000 years old and a source from which Zen drew much of its inspiration.


DEVI SAYS:

O Shiva, what is your reality?
What is this wonder-filled universe?
What constitutes seed?
Who centers the universal wheel?
What is this life beyond from pervading forms?
How may we enter it fully, above space and time,
names and descriptions?
Let my doubts be cleared.


SHIVA REPLIES:

9. Or imagine the five-colored circles of the peacock tail to be your five senses in illimitable space. Now let their beauty melt within. Similarly, at any point in space or on a wall -- until the point dissolves. Then your wish for another comes true.

13. Touching eyeballs as a feather, lightness between them opens into heart and there permeates the cosmos.

36. Sweet-hearted one, meditate on knowing and not knowing, existing and not-existing. Then leave both aside that you may be.

50. At the point of sleep when sleep has not yet come and external wakefulness vanishes, at this point being is revealed.

51. In summer when you see the entire sky endlessly clear, enter such clarity.

62. In rain during a black night, enter that blackness as the form of forms.

64. Just as you have the impulse to do something, stop.

68. Pierce some part of your nectar-filled form with a pin, and gently enter the piercing.

82. Feel the consciousness of each person as your own consciousness. So, leaving aside concern for self, become each being.

91. Wherever your mind is wandering, internally or externally, at this very place, this.

102. Suppose you contemplate something beyond perception, beyond grasping, beyond not being, you.


_______________________

Zen Flesh Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings
Compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Sensazki
Tuttle Publishing, 1998, Boston, MA