this decade

Egyptontology

Limiting discussion to humans and their world(s), there are five human realities, each of them potentially knowable by man, who is able to participate in them by means of the five bodies he/she possesses. These are the "gross" and "subtle" bodies encountered in all major spiritual traditions and systems of magic and occultism. The understanding of them is distorted, however, and some systems, for example, subcategorize, while others lump together, thus arriving at three, seven, nine, or some other number of bodies and their respective realities. The five human dimensions or worlds are a "midpoint" between the realities of chaotic "matter" and evolutionary "spirit."

The "gross material or physical body, " or just "physical body" (AUFU), is the body of anatomy and physiology, and it is what most people think they mean by "my body." This body, however, has a brain but no mind and is therefore not the body of most experience, as will be explained more fully later.

The second, more subtle body is the Double (KA), and it is the body usually experienced by the mind of that body; it is a body image, coincides more or less with the AUFU, and its sensations also are images or, more precisely, symbolic representations of an imaginal reality, which it in many ways distorts. This distortion is recognized by psychology, so that some authors speak, for example, of a "symbolic coding" of the "actual" reality done by the brain or the brain-mind. Quite apart from metaphysics, one can accept that the experience of one's own and other bodies is not immediate, but mediated by the mind, and "occurs in" the mind (or brain, if one chooses to regard mind as "epiphenomenon of brain").

As the KA's world is more subtle than the AUFU's, similarly the third body and world of the Shadow (HAIDIT) is more subtle than that of the KA. This is a reality ordinarily experienced as altogether "mental" and mostly "unconscious", the world, for example, of most dreams and most images experienced in trance and drug states. It can be a world of either the personal or the collective or transpersonal unconscious, a world that is the source of many works of art and which figures also in other sorts of "creativity." Many fail to consider that in, say, the dream world they have a body which is not the body of everyday experience and that the dream world also is a different reality, the dream body and dream worlds being unfettered by many of the "laws" which bind the world of the ordinary waking consciousness. As is true of the KA and the other subtle bodies, the HAIDIT is part of and interactive with that constellation of five bodies which is the human being. Therefore its experiences can affect the others, particularly those inferior to it in subtlety, but the more subtle bodies also. Such interactions are most strikingly apparent in cases where the unconscious is clearly in a causal relationship to the sickness or healing of the physical body or the mind. Once again, this world of experience is well-known to psychology. What is not grasped sufficiently, however, is that the world of the HAIDIT, or Shadow, is equally as real as the "objective" world, that the body of the HAIDIT is also equally real, and that the failure to recognize these facts is damaging and severely limiting.

The Magical Body and its world, or KHU, are only rarely consciously experienced but shape importantly that "work of art" or "myth" which the HAIDIT in its own consciousness lives, and which it imposes on the KA, which in turn lives out the same myth, but almost always unconsciously. These subtler realities then very largely determine the fate of the AUFU, including, accidents apart, when and how it will deteriorate and die. In ancient times when such matters were better understood the KHU was not thought of as "magical", but as magico-spiritual, the line between magic and religion being artificial and imposed on human thinking by religions which already had lost much of their awareness and potency. The KHU was the "second order" reality and work of the magician-priest -- only later, just of the magician. To live and act consciously in the KHU it is necessary to undergo a prolonged and very rigorous training. There are brief, spontaneous experiences of it, most often triggered by unusual stress and a resultant alteration of consciousness. Also, in some more primitive societies, shamans, witch doctors and similar figures still attain to fragmentary knowledge of the KHU and thus can generate some "paranormal" effects, but these fall far short of what is possible. Nevertheless the importance of the KHU, which can serve either Cosmos or Chaos, is very great. Functioning unconsciously insofar as the less subtle bodies are concerned, it affects them and their worlds quite apart from determining the myth that is lived out. Each person is to some extent an "unconscious magician", affecting his world, including other persons, by telepathic, psychokinetic and other means. In some cases this "unconscious magic" can be extremely potent.

The "highest" and most subtle body and world is the SAHU, or Spiritual Body which again, more appropriately, should be magicospiritual, but of the "first order." This is the world of authentic "religious experience" as it is attained to by rigorous practitioners of "spiritual disciplines" -- "holy men", "saints", "spiritual masters," whatever they may be called in a particular system. In the ancient traditions, the high magician-priest was expected to be able to experience and work with the realities of both KHU and SAHU. Presently, however, spiritual disciplines largely eschew the magical reality, aiming only at passive consciousness of the "spiritual" one -- more rarely, spiritual Work and interactions with Neters. This limitation is crippling for spiritual development. And the true goal must be "complete" consciousness -- that is, the knowledge and use of all five of the bodies and their respective dimensions. Similarly, the magician is crippled if his consciousness and Work do not extend beyond the KHU.

The SAHU is the only human reality which is "congenial" to the Cosmic "Gods", although such Beings may "descend" all the way into the realm of the AUFU which, however, is excremental to them. The "Gods" of Chaos ordinarily "ascend" only to the realm of the KHU, when a "black magic" is practiced. However, some of the most potent sometimes invade the SAHU, so that even the holiest of men or women is not secure from them. Also, the most powerful of black magicians can work with Metaeidolons representing the UrGods of Chaos at this level, thus effecting the most potent

                                                       robert masters

the ghosts of me

falling into hallow

on vacation

seeing wood

become light

mind over matter

Saturn/Christ did an

important thing

for man

by putting a god in one

and gave a chance

for us all to be god(s)

until machinery

and sloganism

was bought by

the uncritical

and we changed

back to a problem

its all matter

jim and arthur

1871 and 1971

returning to france

and death

ending the same

but i will

be absent

a fiction

of long dead

dogs

names

forgotten

Claude R. Kirk Jr., who was Florida’s governor from 1967 to 1971, seemed annoyed to be asked about the Morrison case by telephone this week.

"Are you kidding? It's all bull----," Kirk said. "It shouldn't be brought up, period. It's part of why the man wound up a junkie and dead.

“There’s a lot more important things to think about than that,” Mr. Kirk said. “The right things were done, and Morrison died in the condition he elected to die.”

“The state didn’t do anything to him,” Mr. Kirk added. “It tried him and found him guilty. Why would you pardon him, then?”

“Jim’s a total loser, in terms of rehabilitation and what he’s done,” he said. “He’s shown no remorse, no sorrow.”

Whether or not the pardon is granted, he added, “He’s still going to be Jim Morrison.”

miami killed jim and it will kill you too

you were five

its killing you now

shallow

rude

pretentious

wilderness

alduous

We have always chosen to adapt our

economy and technology to human beings—not our human beings to

somebody else's economy and technology.

They've been taught from infancy to be fully aware

of the world, and to enjoy their awareness.

Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding

enjoyment,

so that the most ordinary things,

the most trivial events, are seen as

jewels and miracles.

"Dancing in all the worlds at once,
In all the worlds.
And first of all in the world of matter.

Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing.
It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy.

Within it Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away.
It's his lila, his cosmic play. Playing for the sake of playing,

like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his

playground is infinite space and between finger and finger every interval is a thousand million light-years.

Look at him there on the altar. The image is

man-made, a little contraption of copper only four feet high. But Shiva-Nataraja fills the universe, is the universe.
Shut your eyes and see him towering into the night,
follow the boundless stretch of those arms and the

wild hair
infinitely flying.

"Nataraja at play among the stars and in the atoms. But also at play within every living thing,

every sentient creature, every  child and man and woman.
Play for play's sake.

But now the playground is conscious, the dance floor is capable of suffering.

To us, this play without purpose seems a kind of insult.
What we would really like is a God who

never destroys what he has created. Or if there must be pain and death, let them be meted out by a God of righteousness, who will punish the wicked

and reward the good with everlasting happiness.
But in fact the good get hurt, the innocent suffer.
Then let there be a God who sympathizes and

brings comfort.

But Nataraja only dances. His play is a play impartially of

death and of life, of all evils as well as of all goods.
In the uppermost of his right hands he holds the drum that summons being out of not-being.
Rub-adub-dub—the creation tattoo, the cosmic reveille.
But now look at the uppermost of his left hands. It brandishes the fire by which all that has been

created is forthwith destroyed.

He dances this way-—what happiness!

Dances that way—and oh, the pain,

the hideous fear, the desolation! Then hop, skip and jump. Hop into perfect health.
Skip into cancer and senility.
Jump out of the fullness of life into nothingness,
out of nothingness again into life.

For Nataraja it's all play,

and the play is an end in itself, everlastingly purposeless.
He dances because he dances, and the dancing is his maha-sukha, his infinite and eternal bliss.
Eternal bliss,

For us there's no bliss, only the oscillation between happiness and terror and a sense of outrage at

the thought that our pains are as integral a part of Nataraja's dance as our

pleasures, our dying as our living. Let's quietly think about that for a little

while."

Suffering and sickness,  old age, decrepitude, death.
I show you sorrow.

"Open your eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In his upper right hand, as you've already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the

destroying fire.

Life and death, order and disintegration, impartially.

But now look at Shiva's other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does that gesture signify? It signifies,

'Don't be afraid; it's All Right.'

But how can anyone in his senses fail to be

afraid? How can anyone pretend that evil and suffering are all right, when

it's so obvious that they're all wrong?

Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He's using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing? Look closely and you'll see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little

subhuman creature—the demon, Muyalaka.

A dwarf, but immensely powerful in his malignity,

Muyalaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the

manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood.
Stamp on him, break his back!
And that's precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot.
But notice that it isn't at this trampling

right foot that he points his finger; it's at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances,
he's in the act of raising from the ground.
And why does he point at it? Why?

That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity—it's

the symbol of release, of liberation.

Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once—in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of

ordinary, all-too-human, experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of

Mind, of the Clear Light. . . .

Look at them there in their little cave of light.

And now shut your eyes and see them again—shining, alive, glorified.

How beautiful! And in their tenderness what depths of meaning!

What wisdom beyond all spoken wisdoms in that sensual experience of spiritual fusion and

atonement!

Eternity in love with time. The One joined in marriage to the many,

the relative made absolute by its union with the One.

                                  island

'The popular cry of our time is "Let us return to Life and Nature; they will recreate Art for us, and send the red blood coursing through her veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong." But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meaning efforts. Nature is always behind the age. And as for Life, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.'

I am rather inclined to believe in 'the impulse from a vernal wood,' though of course the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to mean simply the advance to a great personality.

 The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.'

 Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style.
                                                                               wilde intentions

oscar

Scientifically speaking, the basis of life--the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it--is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.

Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out of the debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comedie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.

I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp. She told me that Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman.

I inquired what became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after the appearance of Vanity Fair, she ran away with the nephew of the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling places.

'All Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.'

A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right.

For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.

 At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them.

They did not exist till Art had invented them.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing.
And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over- emphasised.

Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very often commits the same error. She produces her false Renes and her sham Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on another a more than questionable Rousseau. Still, Nature irritates one more when she does things of that kind. It seems so stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary.

A false Vautrin might be delightful. A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable. However, I don't want to be too hard on Nature.

I wish the Channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied, Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also. That she imitates Art, I don't think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilised man.

Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists.

 If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention.

There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only too well.
He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

'No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the Saturday Review, will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.

To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters.
They will call upon Shakespeare--they always do--and will quote that hackneyed passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.'

Paradox though it may seem--and paradoxes are always dangerous things--it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.
We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw,
the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved,
 there the sweet maidenhood of 'The Golden Stair,' the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the 'Laus Amoris,'
the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream.'

And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with models.

The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride's chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain.
They knew that Life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul- peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles.

Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right.
We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty.

For this, Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word,

Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil.

                                          ____intentions

art basel * 10

jebel al faya

neolithic bonediggers

telling the future

about our past

and the trillions

who knew

by acceptance

openness

far more than

the present

has tested

in its atom

rooms

our science

of tools and use

does nothing

for the stairs and floors

forgotten

four hundred years ago

our fathers waited

to teach and invite

us to this family for

150,000  years to

our  hominid parents

from the last 2,000,000

just in time

The light was the usual mustard and the bathroom was the kind of soap green that was ugly that day long ago when it was painted. He walked in, careful to pull his pant hems off the wet floor. He took about eight feet of tissue paper ripped into two sections and laid each section artfully so it divided the bowl into upper and lower sections. He had taken a multivitamin earlier in the day so the liquid  came out a bright yellow florescent. He directed the fluid to the upper crescent and  stared as the syrup elegantly permeated the draped folds into the pure clear lower section.  All of this had its own melody which lazily played with  the slow beat on the floor outside and the animal grunt solos he heard in the room he stood naked in.

staring into your best friends eyes

staring into yours

as they twinkle dim away

you always lose best friends.  that is why they are the best.

ART basel *10

ART basel *10

ART basel *10

 

ART basel *10

ART basel *10

dropped into the heat

from the cold

and became a binary field

without body

only a sensitive

boundary of warmth

my mind

reorganized

identity

instantly

and awoke

alert

like before

i look

forward to

the change

with abandon

i peeled back the layers

about twelve

of needs and limits

and saw me underneath

one

and I was lonely

to  feel a part

of the whole

you realize you

like everything

are matter of information

through design

so you walk

inside you

listening to others
talking to yourself

of which you are a part

in music

made by us

reality(s) are an accretion from emptiness