WAITING IT OUT

Sunday:

The Corona Virus is the big surprise of the New Year. I’m not shocked that many ignore it as something that isn’t supposed to happen in our modern world, and I’m not shocked that it has tweaked the conspiracy theorists. Humans usually try to confine the uncontrollable unknown in a mental corral they feel familiar with and thus falsely believe they have some control over. However, there is now a lot of time to fill in the small space of this little adobe home while I look out the window toward the great sky beyond our neighbor’s house.

Something must knock the habitually adjusted everyday mind off its rails to make space for the brilliance of the higher mind. Any shock will do, but the quality of the results depend on the developmental level of the mind in question. Here we enter unexplored depths and paradoxes. While some minds soar upwards, others fall through the decaying floor of an outdated structure into a dank underworld. Wars generate much creativity. This is a sad reality; many of our highest and deepest mind stretches are infused with mental adrenaline induced by fear and competition.

An emotional/physical crisis, if profound enough can thrust one beyond the gates of known reality and call in the angels but beware they can be both the light and dark kind. A new world becomes visible from a stratospheric perspective by those who don’t go mad. It is not necessarily emotional stability that saves one from madness. There are other minds for other dimensions that lie dormant until they are called forth by the failure of ordinary operations. We don’t know why some are endowed with the strength to travel mentally and spiritually into unknown dimensions and others are not. Some, for whatever reason are equipped with a lamp that can light a path through dense forests and dark nights while others become lost in fear and confusion.

Sending Prayers Over the Moon

I’ve been speculating: are we unsuspecting diffused holograms of God, to be activated when some event thrusts us into mindless emptiness—knocked into a space we could not have imagined? Fear alone is not enough and usually evokes the dark angels who have a ready-made sales pitch for the false god of the moment. Perhaps emptiness is precisely necessary for enlightenment. Anything else is dense electrical interference that brings a confusingly mixed signal. Do we activate awareness of our essence by shattered explanations? So many creation stories involve vivified mud. The image of the Golem comes to mind. But the Golem issues from shadow powers soiled by the lesser mind, the one with dark motives in place of enlightenment. I have always seen black magic as the use of higher powers for lower ends.

Monday:

Red and Blue do not exist for the color blind, but that does not mean that they are not real. Culture unites and gives a collective approach to perception, yet it also blinds us to the things it inevitably leaves out. It is not easy to see something you never thought of or don’t believe exists. However, as soon as you see it, due to some event that has interfered with your habits of perception, its almost impossible to imagine that not everyone else sees it. This goes equally for thinking outside the social box, political box or even the scientific box. From time to time, some event, even if it is experienced by only one person is so powerful that it breaks through the collective skin and after that the skin seems thinner to another and another until more burst through or until it becomes more flexible.

There are religious people for whom the church is a comforting container decorated in only the colors they are habituated to perceive. There are others who see colors in the full range and for whom the church walls have become opaque blinders. They are regarded as heretics by those of restricted perception. In truth we all have limits to our perception, even as the limits have expanded at various times. perception of let us say, blue, red and yellow yet still falls short of comprehending that there are lines leading to infinite perception along the color spectrum.

It becomes more complicated as the human herd instinct becomes entangled with one's perception thus the need to belong in a club. True holiness is always a distant goal, yet humans are want to seek it as an image projected on some tribal hero of legend. However, even the tribal legends must eventually be seen with extended color perception to retain their power.

Tuesday:

There is always great life and death tension between the confinement and safety of belonging and the compulsion to evolve and grow. These Dynamic opposites are a part of nature that is in continuous interface. They are not enemies but natural elements of evolving creation. Religions and political parties carry on as if only one is good and the others evil, but neither will ever die or be permanently overcome by the other. The icons of God morph but never die and the whole in holy is forever becoming. Identification with the past even if masquerading in a favorite fantasy of an imagined future will always be challenged by the real Lords of creation. Those who try to protect God may find that they are in denial and will be buried in the waves of creation.

However, in some ways the past is as real as the present in the face of eternity. Thus, important pieces of knowledge lost in the past are often just the ticket to the future. Perhaps its best not to think in terms of time and just use whatever works best. In the meantime, which is the constant time, PQ has Tina Turner and Rod Stewart on Netflix and I'm compelled to dance with them. Staying busy has been no problem for me. I’ve been painting new work, tweaking old paintings and doing ballet bar exercises. Oh yes, I’m also writing. I have to go now, PQ has Dwight Yoakam on, Mr. tight jeans. I have a great collection of classical records, especially piano concertos, I may try to introduce PQ to classical music. This indulgence in music of the past is pulling us forward and that is the mystery of time. Now Paul Simon is coming on.

DEMOCRACY OR CAPITALISM: WHICH ONE ARE WE?

Listening to Michael Moore talk on YouTube this morning about Trump’s leadership style I realized that America is operating on an unconscious two-party system that has much greater power than the acknowledged two parties. While he essentially said that Trump is a caricature of the narcissistic CEO in his manner of running the country, I realized that our entire country is based on an unconscious internal dissonance. Of course, the opposites in life are the source of movement and change but they are destructive rather than creative if there is no attempt to resolve them by moving to a higher resolution.

Our government has been idealistically if frequently not functionally based on democratic values. As a nation, we are also in an adolescent state of development and think in unresolved opposites of black and white. Our pioneering spirit is also very extroverted and not inclined to self-reflection. A high IQ is valued over a sensitive and intuitive heart. Perhaps, on a side this is the reason there is so much heart disease even among those who eat right and exercise regularly. Our culture is not kind to the body which is often seen as another part of nature that must be conquered and exploited. But the body is not just a complex machine. In fact, the comparison of body and machine is an unwittingly reversal of the reality that machines are fashioned after various body functions to enhance their innate functions with greater speed and power. There are, of course those who would replace us all with machines and others who are terrified that we will be replaced with machines. Neither thinks in terms of a soul and its emotional responses in association with well being. The mind is more than a mechanical calculator and even science is beginning to recognize that the body in both heart and muscle has an intelligence of its own separate from brain cognition.

The democracy we assume seems to be a thin layer of paint covering a voracious oligarchy. The hungry wolf has been scratching at the door of the Capital for a long time. Trump is raising much consternation because he invited the wolf in without rationalizing or attempting to hide it. In this sense, he is a different kind of politician because he exaggerates this act as leader and makes no attempt to hide it.

Does unfettered capitalism truthfully result in a better way of life. It is supposed to encourage creativity and increased quality, but while encouraging competition it also encourages greed and exploitation. How are we to enable the good aspects of competition while controlling self-serving greed. We must approach capitalism with a sense of relatedness, or it becomes exploitation.

In the 19th century the Darwinian concept of natural selection of the fittest as a justification for exploitation of the poor by the wealthy became embedded in the capitalistic system. Socialism was judged as a reversal of the natural order and the sure way to breed a weak society. I suppose the subject must be how to encourage creativity and healthy competition without going to a self-destructive extreme. Somehow, head (literally capital) and heart must be balanced.

The current scare about the Corona virus outbreak brings the imbalance of self service and communal membership into direct confrontation by threatening to shut down businesses and jobs, the circulatory system of our world economy and therefore society. The virus isn’t political. As an act of nature, it is pushing the reality of global membership in our face. The individual is also a member of a society and society is made up of individuals. One cannot exist very long in denial of that reality.

The ultimate fear seems to be the end of the world as we know it, and this is the fear, as they say in Washington, “on both sides of the aisle”. However, creation is a continuous process and the entrance and exit signs exist on the same wall. The difference depends on whether you’re coming in or going out. The end of one world is always approaching as another is coming in. As individuals we always have the choice of celebrating or mourning. I usually mourn and then celebrate, but everyone has their own sequence. Nature doesn’t care because its always in process. If you have a superior ability you can benefit the world but if you attempt to hold your place forever you will become a disease.

I’ll use the concept of God as an intelligence principle in the cosmos that includes all functions of the creative/destructive/re-creative process. In the astrological model there is creative fire, nurturing water, solidifying earth and distributing air and they are all in constant interaction, but we humans usually don’t notice when “the times they are a changin”. Carl Jung said, “...fundamental problems cannot be solved, only outgrown”. Belonging and competition are always in conflict. Creation is a process of finding a resolution on a higher level. The breakdown in a system reveals its weaknesses. The world in balance is always a tight rope walk. Eventually there will be a fall and the people of the world will go on by getting up and trying again or recognizing that someone else must walk the rope.

On a seemingly unrelated and possibly trivial note, I have been watching YouTube videos of the current generation of professional dancers. As a child, my first desire was to be a dancer. I was not allowed to dance because of my parent’s religious restrictions and thus began lessons hopelessly late  in my twenties. However, in my usual style, I went in for total immersion for several years. I got to see the Bolshoi Ballet with Maya Plisetskaya, Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and The Royal Ballet with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev. Now comparing that generation with the current generation (also on YouTube), the virtuoso techniques of that past generation have been absorbed and transcended by the current generation. Someday, the current generation will have taken certain steps and postures to an absurd level, (some have almost arrived there now) and there will be a reaction back to classicism. And so our planet spins and the poles continually wobble.