Relating to Aurobindo: An Essay once called Killing the Beast

It comes up from time to time when I think of Sri Aurobindo. Like I wrote in the first essay on this blog, I cannot relate well to the man at all except for the fact that he was mightily overtaken by the Spirit while in prison and on trial for his life. It is a common syndrom, the jail house conversion. I recall he sat through his trial in something of an ecstatic, non-dual trance. I cannot say I knew personally anyone who could make the same claim. Michael, who’s story I tell below, sat through his in a trance but it was not of the sort where the consciousness is overwhelmed in the ineffable apprehension of cosmic wholeness. Michael’s was induced to overcome some of the side effects of his conversion and to set him up…but to all of that soon enough.

Killing The Beast, I believe, was the name of the thread that Jana started some months ago on one of the many forums that help civilians in Integral Province stay in touch. If I correctly recall I posted something and then was still drafting another, the one found below, when the direction of the thread changed; it went tangent or was jacked by chatters and dribbled out toward entropic stasis and the AADD diffusion that often characterizes the provisional forums. So I let this piece hibernate in some virtual closet. About two years ago I hauled it back out, shot it up with a little adrenaline, tidied the style and added a bit or two, found it suitable again for public consumption and hung it on the board at Integral Visioning. Now I’m nailing it to this page:

So we wonder at The Beast. I’ve been an artist too long so I tend to forget, I no longer remember to wonder each morning at The Beast. But today might be the time to be conscious again in this manner to see what we are trying to kill here and what we would be well advised to keep of The Beast. For 18 years, doing work as a p.i., I tried to keep people from going to jail, or to get them out of jail, or to keep them off the gurney that rolls down the concourse to the Needle. The Beast roams at large in that concourse and breathes in, breathes out through that slight steel tube. My client Michael was on his way there once.

Michael talked to the wall for a month, maybe more, after he turned himself in. He was a sweet young man, quiet and dutiful, with a wife and a baby a week away. He had a job and a car. The Beast rode in that car because he put the two young women in the trunk and took them out east of Albuquerque and killed one with his knife and the tire iron, but the other, with 17 stab wounds and two skull fractures got away. Michael’s wife helped him turn himself in and he didn’t talk to anyone except The Virgin who apparently finds a residence in the wall of many an institution. The Beast slept in the bunk while Michael no doubt spilled his life to Our Lady of the Psych Ward Wall and he probably talked of cars, his car, his mother’s car when he was young and Mom let her brother sodomize her son in the back seat on their way into town. Cars; it will be a long time until Michael rides in one for he will probably live out his life somewhere near the concourse where The Beast lives and breathes. The Beast breathed enormous doses of stelazine and thorazine into Michael while he was standing trial so that he wouldn’t get distracted into a chat with Our Lady of the Court House Floor because that would make him look insane and someone incompetent of committing a capital crime. And though he wasn’t competent and wasn’t guilty in the capital definition, the State liked The Beast’s breath because it made Michael look sane enough and sociopathic enough (Google “stelazine stare”) for a jury to want to kill him. And it worked. But we got him free of Death Row and his mother was touched with the work we did to save her baby, Michael, the good little boy she beat up on a few too many times.

There was another guy who was talking in those days to Our Lady of the Cell Block Wall. They called him Weepie. Weepie and a man with the last name Chavez killed Joe A. in the Cell Block 3 (Maximum Security) exercise yard where The Beast was working out while the two stabbed Joe A. 47 times before the guards got him free of his handcuffs. Weepie needed that kill for some inside credibility and I think that when Ricky issued the contract on Joe A. he picked Weepie as a favor. Ricky looked out after his people that way. Weepie needed someone like Ricky to front for him because Weepie was the skinniest guy in the joint, he had that wretched name because he still had his tear-drop tat from his juvie days, and worst of all he looked just like Olive Oyle. Chavez had wanted to kill Joe A. on his own and he didn’t want to be in trial with Weepie because Weepie was just Weepie and that was a bad drug on the Chavez image especially now that Weepie had religion and was enjoying long and fruitful exchanges with Our Lady of the Protective Custodial Wall. The Beast was all round that morning while Chavez was telling me this. I was working for the widow of Joe A. in her civil rights and wrongful death suit against the State of New Mexico. Chavez, whose business with the A. Family had been successfully concluded, hoped she could loot the State for all she could carry away. And, indeed, she made out alright because it wasn’t hard to prove that the Warden knew and the Captain of the Shift knew and the Lieutenant for Cell Block 3 knew, and the Assistant Warden for Security knew and even the New Mexico State Secretary of Corrections knew that Joe A. was going to be killed if he went into the exercise yard that morning and they did nothing at all, nothing, to stop it. The Beast had been busy all around.

Ricky was already on Death Row the morning they killed Joe A.; sent there for having killed that other Cell Block 3 prisoner from Las Cruces and the new guard with one week’s tenure, both at the same time, both of them in the middle of Cell Block 3 where no two prisoners were to be out of their segregated cells at the same time. (Ricky was a wizard.) At his sentencing to The Needle, Ricky looked the new guard’s mother in the eye and apologized for killing her son, but the kid had, in effect, committed suicide when he tried to stop Ricky from doing what he needed to do which was to kill the guy from Las Cruces.

Ricky laughed when he told me this, but then he said he meant it and he genuinely felt sorry for her, sitting there in court looking like just another sorry assed Anglo woman with the thinnest kind of blood and the weakest sort of will.

Quite often when I went into that prison to chase the facts around I would have them bring Ricky in from Death Row so the two of us could kick back in the legal interview room, Ricky would drink the Coca Cola I brought him while I told him why I was there and then he could pass the word on his way back to his cell that it was alright to talk with me. It was like a courtesy call.

Ricky and I were hanging there one morning when into the adjacent room the guards ushered a fat, middle aged, red faced White guy who was doing life for a couple of psychopathic motivated murders. He had spent almost his entire sentence in protective custody because he was “mental,” a freak, and as such wasn’t tolerated well in such close confines. But some months before, due to overcrowding, the administration had farmed him out to a county jail in an end- of-the-world kind of hamlet called Estancia. He behaved himself so well there the Sheriff made him the office dispatcher on the night shift. Three nights before we saw him there in the next room, the fat man had walked away from the dispatcher’s desk and caught a ride to Albuquerque . The night after that he hired a cab to take him to a restaurant and on their arrival had killed the cabby and had been hauled down by some bystanders and witnesses when he tried to run. He was back in custody within 10 minutes and back in prison almost as soon. When the guards brought him in to see his lawyer, Ricky’s blood went up. He forgot I was in the room, forgot perhaps how to talk. His focus froze on the Fat Man and we sat there for almost five minutes without words. I said nothing, just listened to Ricky breathe because the Fat psychopath was a loose cannon, loose on Ricky’s watch and he wanted the Fat Man dead because Ricky had more power in that prison than the warden and a responsibility to keep it orderly. Ricky was not a psychopath, he was a warrior from a cultural substrate with alternative values, and perspectives, and economies that generally ran totally counter to the norm. His sentence to The Needle was commuted to Life the same time Michael’s was, along with five others. We cleaned up that day; it was on a Thanksgiving.

The County Sheriff who used the Fat Man as a dispatcher lost his job the next election, it was no big surprise. A few months later he and I were sitting around a vacant jury room in the court house in a town called Los Lunes. It was a criminal trial. I was working for the defense and he was a witness for the prosecution. He asked if I had heard what had happened that morning in Santa Fe. No, I had not because I’d been away from home for a couple of days. So he told me the story of a man named Andy who had been charged with first degree murder. Andy’s lawyer, a few weeks prior, had pled him to the lesser charge of second degree, and the previous day the judge sentenced him to seven years in prison with the obligation to pay the former wife of the man he killed $100,000 restitution to make up for the child support she would no longer receive. Early that morning Andy went to the former wife’s mobile home and shot her dead. He then went to the court house to take the judge hostage while he made his break for god knows where. But the judge was late in coming to work and that screwed Andy’s plan. He tried to run and a deputy sheriff, a Santa Clara Pueblo Indian named Naranjo, brother of a friend of mine, shot him down. Naranjo put a pistol full of bullets into Andy in the lobby of the Santa Fe County Court House where The Beast was all around. I thought, as I listened to this story, of how I had less than six months before sat at Andy’s kitchen table and talked with his wife and son and him about how the man he killed, the uncle of his son’s wife, had been threatening his son, threatening Andy too. One day the word was out that the uncle-in-law and another family member were going to make good on the threat that night. The son went out looking for the pair. Andy, out of his mind with worry, went out to find the three of them. He confronted the uncle in the drive way of the mobile home where his former wife lived. Andy thought the man was reaching for a weapon that was said to be always close at hand. Andy pulled a pistol, shot twice, hit once and drove away. The Uncle walked across the driveway, sat down on the steps to the former wife’s front door and bled to death with The Beast lounging there beside him.

Andy was a shy, pleasant, worried, round little middle class lath and plaster contractor who had an acute brain disorder triggered by fermented barley. They found out about that one too late and the judge would not let it be admitted into evidence at the sentencing where The Beast was watching from the back row.

The next night I left Los Lunas and headed south to a mountain town with a cowboy dealer who had hired me to help his lawyer make 24 ounces of cocaine, thirteen pounds of marijuana, two and a half gallons of crystal meth, a couple blocks of hash, and 1,200 tabs of LSD legally disappear because to all involved the FBI had obviously lied on the sworn affidavit for the search warrant, an act that should make those pharmaceuticals inadmissible as evidence. After I had spent several days finding witnesses to the fed’s big lie, the cowboy came around and told me that the next day he had a meeting with Another Busted Dealer and they were going to be talking snitches and rats. But the two men didn’t know each other, or each others friends, or each others enemies, or anyone’s real name and neither knew where the other one stood on the issues of a high-rolling cattleman dealer who always got busted but never was charged, or the guy who got his product wholesale along the border in guns-for-drug deals and who had been busted a few weeks before and might have been the one who had rolled over on them. When the feds searched the house of the gun runner they found an original Yoko Ono piece hanging above the couch. It had once been stolen in a burglary at the Dakota Hotel and god knows The Beast hung there. The gun runner told the cowboy and me that he had always thought the piece was a copy. We’d had our meeting with this man on foot along a dirt road that ran through the hills, his call. And we had every reason to believe that he had a second who wasn’t all that far away with a rifle because things can turn funny-shaped suddenly when strangers are talking snitches and rats. That was why the cowboy asked me to be in place to take up his slack if the meeting went sour with the Other Busted Dealer.

I was the first one at the 7-11 parking lot, site of the rendezvous. The cowboy had rented for my driving pleasure and general transport a Lincoln Town Car and this was where I was topping off the tank. The Other Busted Dealer and his side-kick showed up next. I knew them for their Jeep CJ and their ski clothes, the two guys I was going to start shooting at, if and when… They went inside and I went in behind them. One bought a candy bar and the other one jerky. I paid for the gas and bought a newspaper to cover my pistol that lay between me and The Beast in the passenger seat. The Cowboy showed up last in his pickup and the Other Busted Dealer, quick like, climbed in beside him and off they drove. I slipped the Lincoln out onto the highway behind them just ahead of the sidekick in the Jeep. The trick was to stay three cars back and still make all the same lights. They drove into the hills on a winding road and pulled into the back lot of a time-share complex. I drove past, around a hairpin switchback and pulled to a stop on the wrong side of the road right above the pickup and watched the animated conversation through its rear window.

I had time then to take what seemed like a leisurely inventory of my life to that date and I found that I could not have been more pleased with where I had been, where I sat now and who I was. Robert Service once wrote: “The world’s a jolly good joke to him, and now is the time to laugh, ” so I did. And I found a familiar heat rising up my spine, radiating into the viscera, infusing my heart with delicious longing, doubling my lung capacity, forcing into my throat; if I had then anything to say it probably would have been spoken in a language that no one else had ever heard either. When it reached my ears all the white noise within miles became harmonized notes in the perfect overture to this highly localized little celebration. And then I saw all into eternity turn crisp and glowing, and despite the vividness of shape and color, eradicate all boundaries and all frontiers, and fuse with me into an indivisible totality; shipped straight back to the non-dual again…in a clumsy Lincoln Town Car with only a newspaper, a pistol, and The Beast.

Everything seemed straight between the Cowboy and the Other Busted Dealer who got out of the pickup and strolled across the lot to a time share. I drove down past the driveway just before the Cowboy pulled onto the road to show him I was still around and still on the clock. I don’t suppose given all the events that The Beast was too disappointed…there was after all a little commonality with the Sri.

No Reason to Believe

She obviously was not Fox Mulder, but she did have two posters that read, “I Want to Believe.” The two were scrolled, tubed in cling wrap and tucked side-by-side into her large linen shopping tote. I could not see if they pictured hovering alien spacecraft but I doubt if they did. The background to the declaration of her desire was done in soft, sylvan, ethereal colors. There was nothing glaring, nothing to flaunt membership in a fringy sub-culture or devotion to a passe TV potboiler. There was another line in a language I did not recognize printed in soft gold ink above the English “I Want to Believe.” I figured is was a repetition of the phrase and assumed there were others in a list. Somewhere within the scroll would be the statement in Spanish “Yo Quiero Creer.” That would be the one that best expressed this woman’s wish that, if I had to guess, had nothing to do with chasing UFOs and aliens from far afar. She hardly looked the type—middle-aged, well-off, traveling with her husband in first-class. She joined us in the holding paddock that fronts Gate D40, Miami International, we were bound for Caracas Simon Bolivar. With carry-on items as she possessed, she might have just shown up from the Integral Mall.

I Want to Believe and I Want to Believe. One expression of need for her wall, the other for a friend’s or perhaps the wall of a daughter, or maybe both were gifts. Where the posters would eventually hang was incidental…the point was the woman identified with the desire and I wondered why. Is Belief the place Jeremiah called Gilead? Does its possession promise to heal or soothe? Is it the source of peace or the mint that coins the mantras that out-wear the mind? Or is it the admonition from the slightly mean spirited elder to remind us that in the end there has to be an end to the fun—believe for the sake of your doomed soul, or at least for the comfort of those who worry about it…take your place in the community of believers who are responsible for those who might not. Join the team, believe. “I want to Believe”…does it mean “I haven’t gotten there yet”? Are such posters unconscious (conscious?) pleas for some help in believing? Surely there are coaches in the Mall here who can help; spiritual coaches and therapists and philosophers who can advise one on how to devise a structural template, a conceptual kaleidescope of sorts, through which they can view the world and rest easier knowing they’ve bought tools from stores of their superiors.

Across the frontier from Integral Province, I understand that Daniel Dennet would have said the phrase should read, “I want to attribute agency.” I think that’s a little narrow, there are more needs out there than just that one, and it says more about the structure of his faith and his own necessity to tell the more fascinating story than it does about a sylvan colored, multi-lingual poster, listing phrases for…

The need to believe…

Marianthi posted this comment on one of the blog posts below.

“Steven,
Quoting here one of your ´contexts:

‘I have found in a few rather rare instances people whose autonomy of mind is as well developed as their level of self-awareness. They seem not to have any need for belief. They seem whole in both heart and mind.’

Would you tell me more about this WHOLENESS of heart and mind? Is that the instance when one is not divided against oneself but knows, feels, un hesitantly- but something else as well? Is it total conviction or fullness of instinct or all of the above?”

She has been urging me, with more insistence of late, toward an answer. She deserves the best…

No, it isn’t the instance when one is “not divided against oneself” or not divided against The Other for that matter if we want to take Wholeness into the illusive dominion of Nondualism. Unless one is seriously schizophrenic some internal division is advisable to provide the effective dynamism of consciousness that distinguishes the human psyche from that of a slug. By this I am not suggesting that the behavior of nondual practice should be equated with the behavior of a slug unless in a given situation such an equation is unavoidable. I suspect that possessing a nondual consciousness is not necessarily apart from a psyche possessed of a little internal division—how would one know if they were possessed of nondual awareness unless aware of another kind. I suspect that much because I suspect that nondual consciousness is a psyche-op and if one has the ability, for example, to visualize all sides of a Henry Moore sculpture or one of their own in the making without closing their eyes, one should be able to phase in and out of the nondual op at will whenever it suits the purpose at hand. Nondual is just one aspect of true, multi-faceted Wholeness and one that could illegitimately rub-out all other, often more mutually supportive facets, if it is promoted as a superior therapeutic or spiritualizing operation. Unfortunately nondualism is too often coupled with spirituality, which like the sciences, is reductionistic and ultimately anti-wholeness; thus it contains no reason to believe.

“Is it total conviction…?”

No. Conviction is belief. Somewhere I read a piece by Allan Watts in which he wrote that the original and still reigning significance of “belief” is more like a “fervent preference or hope” and less a profession of faith. I once spent almost an hour trying to follow-up on Watts’s entomology and got as far as learning that he might have been right given enough room for substantial equivocation. However if one pursues the history of “conviction” they will find a word that is actually stronger and more direct in its meaning…so a paraphrase: “They seem not to have any need for conviction.” (I considered at this point making a bad pun with the word “acquittal” but thought slightly better of it.)

“…or the fullness of instinct…”

I like that phrase and the fact that it is present in the question tells me that Marianthi knows a lot more about this Wholeness apprehension than she might be letting on and it makes me wonder if I am not a student in her class. Instincts are not high on the praise list for most folks from a culture with a background in the desert religions. Alternative journalists often make good use of the word if they are not the kind to take themselves too seriously. Human Behavioral Ecologists like it too and they seem to be such delightful subversives that I will gladly give them a plug whether or not they know of what they speak. More respectable civilians, those with spiritual inclinations or at least transcendental leanings prefer however a marginally near miss in the word “intuitive.” Butter would not melt in their mouths…but it appears that I digress.

Fullness of Instinct.

Instinct is informed by experience. This seems fairly obvious on watching the hunting strategy of an old cat…it appears to have what it needs to achieve its ends wu wei; seasoned but unconscious calculations of odds against exertion and factors of distance, terrain and cover, when to stalk, when to pounce, when to just sit back bemused and wash the face. Old cats have no need for beliefs for they have all it takes to live well without it. There is an age when they pass being needy. Marianthi and I have talked of the informing of instinct to make it full.

So how does one know there is no need to believe. “How do you know when,” she asked me last week and hinted she already knew.

It is without doubt when one catches themselves preening a little like an old cat, looking that way at the world, catching the taste of a sense that no matter how long the delicious free falls through the abyss that come the bottom, if it comes, one will land on their feet. Will it hurt? Who knows. But its safe until then.

Integral Dissipation

The tourist brochures that are endlessly pumped on-line from Integral Province are clear that most of the natural charm of this map-generated territory is the willingness of the Provincials here to lend their spirits to the cosmic course of healing and evolution, they give the known universe an integrated voice in the repetition of Emil Coue’s mantra, “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and etc.” They take their texts for this teaching from a literary genre that can be called The Levels of Human Development Theory: works of Gebser, Maslow and his student Graves and Graves’s students Beck and Cowan, and Lawrence Kolhburg, Carol Gilligan, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and on and on. Theirs is an all inclusive look at human psychophisiological to cultural processes that in its shortest form says “first you walk and then you run.” The theorists generally like to think that since running (for the short form example) is based on and grows out of walking that it is therefore “higher” and maybe even better. They’ve taken a lot of post-modern flack for their penchant to always order the ranks by gradation and quite often with more than just a slight hint of “to know an Alpha one must be an Alpha” sensibility showing; but it’s all part of the charm of this earnest little province where vanity has never been deemed a sin because: “Who knows? Maybe it has been earned.”

I don’t have any problem with the grades and gradations and the continual academic renaming and fine-turning of the obvious, for indeed—first you walk and then you run. To find another way of reaffirming that affirmation is always good work if you can get it—The Bright but Lazy Professor’s Fast Track to publications: cobble up a questionnaire for the undergrads, have the TA do the grades just like at mid-terms, and skew the definitions toward the politics of the journal to which one aspires. Nothing new or out of the ordinary there. Everything hinges on the definitions and if cleverly coined they can boost that one questionnaire and its subsequent reiterations into five or six articles, or a book, or a sub-school of the thought, or even a perpetual seat at the head table for every conference banquet from now to emeritus.

If I have a problem with the ever developing genre of Development, I find it rooted first of all in another charming and typically Provincial level of its own; a late adolescent, post-first-samadhi, arrière-goût among the Provincials that manifests in a deadly serious regard for Levels Literature, which in turn makes the lit itself not only humorless, fusty and over-precious but partial to the point of trifling, especially as other synthesizing litterateurs in the province are attempting to bootstrap Developmental Studies and Theory past the Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Fallacy, through higher orders of Spiritual Darwinism into a self-prophesying new Kosmic order. It ironic because the entire effort seems to leave out half of the final equation and so I must wonder why as much effort hasn’t been put into Degeneration Studies and Theory, Death Studies and Theory, Decomposition Studies and Theory, or Dissipation Studies and Theory; thus:

Integral Dissipation Theory

About 30 years ago two men boarded a plane in Washington, D. C. Each was unknown to the other at departure, but they had two things in common beside their destination: 1) Knowledge of which row of seats in that generation of 727s had the most leg room, and 2) A close acquaintance with a well respected physicist named Dr. Charles Hyder, the now late crusading environmentalist and conservationist who at that time was in the middle of a 217-day public fast in an alley off Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. He was calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide before he broke the fast or died. The first of the two men’s commonalities put them in the last row of seats on the plane’s left side and the second sparked the conversation that is the basis of this essay.

I was one of the two, a young radical investigative journalist working out of Albuquerque, NM, USA, and D.C. The other was Dr. Stirling Colgate, an internationally known nuclear physicist, astrophysicist and later one of the several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute. It was not long into the flight before we learned that Hyder was a mutual acquaintance, and on that point Colgate began a disquisition. He told me that he and Hyder had discussed Hyder’s environmental/conservational missions at great length—particularly his efforts to close down the coal burning power plants and gigantic strip mines in the Four Corners region. Colgate had given up on the man who would not be convinced that his scientifically based crusades to preserve the planet were not only bad science, but flew in the face of over-all evolutionary process and one of the few natural laws on which every scientist in the world could hang their hat: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I never had much interest in science—it was school work and I generally found it boring and void of good stories, but Colgate gave The Thermodynamics Story a compelling spin. What he laid out was essentially Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 “What is Life?” lecture series and book which coupled the Second Law with evolution by proposing that open, self-organizing, ordered systems (including living ones) created gradient equilibrium, not by falling into disorder themselves (as would be the case in a closed system like a steam engine) but by generating disorder (entropy) through feeding off the negative entropy (free energy) available in their environments. (In this study Schrödinger also proposed the existence of a living complex cell with a genetic code for replication, a proposal that inspired the research that led to the discovery of DNA.)

Based on that background, Colgate stated his argument against Hyder’s position: Every since it came into existence the Earth, everything on it, and its every process from the core to the outer edge of the atmosphere has been undergoing a metabolic dissolution in the re-cycling flow of energy from the sun’s heat to the chill of deep space, a dissolution absolutely enhanced with the inception and advance of ever increasingly complex forms of life. He said that from the replication of the first living cell to the highest levels of humanity’s technology and culture one thing about evolution has remained constant: with each higher level of evolved complexity there has been a concomitant increase in the earth’s overall efficiency in generating entropy. In fact it is the only consistantly directional activity that can be observed not only in the local solar system, but the entire known universe. Or, in other words, everything in the Kosmos is working to burn itself out; it is The Law—from the smallest known, shortest lived particle to the largest ongoing process. (Colgate was in a position to know because his proposal to the U.S. State Department (circa 1960) to monitor the ban on nuclear tests in space through the use of gamma ray detecting spy satellites led to his pioneering research into the mechanisms of supernovas and hypernova phenomena.)

Point: The supreme function of nature is nihilistic and all its life, all of Earth’s living systems, all of our humanity, every breath we take, is an integral part of that function.

The essence of Colgate’s argument to Hyder was that any well organized effort to save the planet would be accompanied by an equally efficient degradation of energy feeding the organization. Hyder’s public fast proved a micro-case in point. During the 217 days, he degraded away over half of the 300 plus pounds he weighed going into the fast. Additionally he caught the attention of thousands of people around the globe (the fewest of whom were in the USA) who sent him hundreds of pounds of mail which came into existence and organization through the degradation of energy from the fuel for chain saws, bull dozers, logging trucks, pulp mills; diesel, gasoline and jet fueled transports, electrical lighting systems, printing presses, broadcast facilities, not to mention the nutritional energy spent by the manpower that went into making all those things work. It was an equation that equals the nihilistic irony of the Universe. If one wanted to ascribe consciousness to the Kosmos one could imagine that it had structurally guided Hyder into his fast not to end nuclear proliferation (which a conscious Kosmos would resist since nuclear is its energy of choice and which Hyder’s fast failed to do) but to speed the rate of its own degeneration—which it did.

I should point out that open system thermodynamics are much more complex than what I am sketching here. In any given system, such as eco-systems found and studied in national parks from border to border, free energy circulates and recirculates throughout, like cash in a micro-economy, generating complexity and new organization. But nothing is free. Each time through the organizing energy generates the equalizing disorder in the system’s supporting environment until that environment is dissipated into weakness and general death.

It seems that this scenario tends to create certain levels of depression and denial throughout the citizenry. Inspired from Schrödinger’s seminal lectures, far more people have taken up careers in genetics than in biochemical thermodynamics. Research funding has followed the same trend. There is only one generally available book semi-geared to the layman on the thermodynamic side of the coin: Into the Cool by Schneider and Segan and one fairly comprehensive web site maintained by Rod Swenson. Evidently people don’t like to be reminded of death and decomposition on such a macroscopic scale, so I will try not to dwell on it further, besides, the end result—total entropic stasis and the literal Death of Time—is not so much the subject of this essay as the getting there, the process.

This is a “process theory” though certainly nothing like that of Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of field, in that he was a god-fearing fellow who took these things earnestly and seriously and I’m not and I don’t. So for my requisite philosophic grounding as to process theory I’ll backtrack past Whitehead to Nietzsche’s revelation of the obvious that all perceptions pivot on perspective. All writers have to follow this advice if they want credibility here in the death watch for Modernity. Bennitta Roy was careful to do so in a recent Process Theory article that appeared in the on-line Integral Journal published by ARINA, one of the many management consulting groups that are headquartered in Integral Mall. The article put forth a process theory of integral for consideration by academia and if it had any solid human relevance beyond that, or at least a good story it might have been worth recounting at length, but I found it had neither, so I won’t. However, the article does start off on more or less the right foot:

“I hope to tease you, the reader, into a pure process orientation. This requires adopting a certain attitude—allowing one’s mental framework to release its grip on thinking in terms of things, and following me into a world of process or flow in a field of dynamic forces. It requires you to suspend structurally based perceptions to allow for new ways of orienting perceptions.”

What Roy failed to point out or follow up on, was since perceptions are perspective dependent, a process perception is almost impossible from the habitual perspective of a well educated, post-1945, American point of view in as much as most of the pilgrims treking through that category (those who would be reading articles such as hers) are not used to observing large-scale energetic and creative movements, day in, day out, or being in highly energized environments. By these I don’t mean simply frenetic places like PR firms that are pimping presidential candidates this Spring, but the ones that really count for the benefit of entropy—like the turbine galleries in Grand Coulee Dam or the raving chaos of a 20–man, steel fabrication shop anywhere in the third world, or huge railroad salvage yards where cutting torches are seven-feet long, crushers never slow down and neither do the magnetized front-end loaders that are three stories tall and careen through the waste to the peril of everything shorter. These aspects of existence have to a large degree been mediated for the sake of comfort out of the lives of Integral Journal readers. Theirs is not a world of high voltage flow or industrial strength fire, or bedlamized heat—entropy on demand—but of static structures that aim to render low energy, mediated calm. Roy’s readers had no point of reference from which to suspend habitual perceptions simply on the abstracted suggestion that it might promote understanding; so, because media brought the reader to this point, I will turn to it as a source for a few pointers toward generating those “orienting” perceptions.

A few months ago there was a TV commercial for Subaru Automobiles choreographed to the tune of the old folk-rock song “Dust in the Wind.” One sequence showed a semi-truck load of competitor cars literally decomposing and evaporating into the trailing draft; the air pressure gradient field created by the motion and heat of the carrier. That is the perceptual analogy and the perspective is from a Hubble-like telescope adrift in the Andromeda Galaxy and zeroed in on the Milky Way. Got it? Cue the time-lapse photography and there go Earth, the Sun and the rest of its little system and then the galactic mass itself dissolving into the mega-gradients of temperature, gravity, velocity and who knows what other forces. And there are no celestial Subaru plants out there minting new alternatives, just smaller and smaller models as the free entropy cycles through in ever weaker waves. Things will never be the same…again.

An optional media perspective is from the audience point of view on a sci-fi cliche confection wherein the curse of immortality is lifted from the support cast starlet who transmutes (transcends?) through the miracle of energy hungry Special FX from maid to middle age to crone to corpse to skeleton to calcium lace to dust to dust in the gradient draft. And like the well-deserved release of that world-weary, fictional form we, everything within us, everything around us is on the move, flowing outward, changing, disappearing. Everything is in the flux, even the illusion of structure. Everything is caught within a gradient, all the mythical turtles that go down, go up or go across flow in the currents. All the holons that the Holonic Nothing Butters say the Kosmos is nothing but are to open system gradients what Fun with Dick and Jane is to Of Time and the River; an analogy chosen not only for its disparate levels of complexity, but the words in the title.

Time, from the perspectives where the sense of process rules, is the flowing mirage created by joining the perception of movement to a supporting, secondary, open system process called memory. If one can imagine doing away with memory but keeping consciousness then coherence is totally lost, but then expand the span of memory from there at 0 to 0.5 seconds and coherence can be regained. (This is a meditation. Try it. It’s a kick) The sense of a moment is total and the perception of process is phenomenally acute. All is born, becomes integral to the perspective, the perception, the perceiver and passes into oblivion in 0.5 seconds. It is the integral moment: it is the omni-dimensional and all but dimensionless point where fuel integrates into fire, all the currently available and integrated potential degrades to waste, the universal razor thin rubber hits the universal, razor thin road, and the perceiver is riding on and integral to the absolute front edge of their life; nothing else is playing.

Who can ask anything greater of integral? All other models soon have to start incorporating into their concepts of The Whole deengergized, dissipated and disintegrated scraps, dregs and feces; litter, weight and inertia from the time that is no longer viable. Such a model might be entertaining to the mind but it isn’t actual or evolutionarily effective. It is a model built of dead ashes from a cold fire. It is only media, maybe even “Integral” media that can be trade marked and sold by the byte-size to expand the entropic moment into a marketable illusion of control.

Living at large in the entropic moment is not for those who need much control over, or security from, the occasionally furious wash of ravaging integration around them. But if the perceiver knows that inner security and control are the only kind there are, who knows that the concepts of external coherence and structural integration are probably best seen as projections from within, then such a moment is the perspective of choice; one is reconciled to the ride, comfortable in the heat, set for any event, and could give a rat’s ass if anything different is taught in the schools or sold on the net.

The Atheists are Coming (Gasp…!)

The two, hour-long videos of Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins and Harris talking on atheism are making their way through the Integral Province. I made a short comment on them at Open Source Integral and was asked to expand on the thoughts. One of the main reasons for pursuing the matter further was it gave me the chance to quote this essay by the late Richard Rorty called Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude in which he deftly stated some cultural perceptions that parallel my own. He wrote:

Philosophy occupies an important place in culture only when things seem to be falling apart-when long-held and widely-cherished beliefs are threatened. At such periods, intellectuals reinterpret the past in terms of an imagined future. They offer suggestions about what can be preserved and what must be discarded. The ones whose suggestion have been most influential win a place on the list of “great philosophers”. For example, when prayer and priestcraft began to be viewed with suspicion, Plato and Aristotle found ways for us to hold on to the idea that human beings, unlike the beasts that perish, have a special relation to the ruling powers of the universe. When Copernicus and Galileo erased the world-picture that had comforted Aquinas and Dante, Spinoza and Kant taught Europe how to replace love of God with love of Truth, and how to replace obedience to the divine will with moral purity. When the democratic revolutions and industrialization forced us to rethink the nature of the social bond, Marx and Mill stepped forward with some useful suggestions.

In the course of the twentieth century there were no crises that called forth new philosophical ideas. There was no intellectual struggle comparable in scale to the one that Lecky famously described as the warfare between science and theology. Nor were there any social convulsions that rendered either Mill’s or Marx’s suggestions irrelevant. As high culture became more thoroughly secularized, the educated classes of Europe and the Americas became complacently materialist in their understanding of how things work. In the battle between Plato and Democritus-the one Plato described as waged between the gods and the giants, they have come down, once and for all, on the side of the giants. They also become complacently utilitarian and experimentalist in their evaluations of proposed social and political initiatives. They came to share the same utopian vision: a global commonwealth in which human rights are respected, equality of opportunity assured, and the chances of human happiness are thereby increased. Political argument nowadays is about how this goal might best be reached.

This consensus among the intellectuals has moved philosophy to the margins of culture. Such controversies as those between Russell and Bergson, Heidegger and Cassirer, Carnap and Quine, Ayer and Austin, Habermas and Gadamer, and Fodor and Davidson, have had no resonance outside the borders of philosophy departments. Philosophers’ explanations of how the mind is related to the brain, or of how there can be a place for value in a world of fact, or of how free will and mechanism might be reconciled, do not intrigue most contemporary intellectuals. These problems, preserved in amber as the textbook “problems of philosophy”, still capture the imagination of some bright students. But no one would claim that discussion of them is central to intellectual life. Solving those very problems was all-important for contemporaries of Spinoza, but when today’s philosophy professors insist that that they are “perennial”, or that they remain “fundamental”, nobody listens. Most intellectuals of our day brush aside claims that our social practices require philosophical foundations with the same impatience as when similar claims are made for religion.

Rorty was a little more diplomatic here than I would have been. If asked, “How do you feel about religion?” “What is your stand on the forced hegemony of science?” My reply would be: “Ask me if I care.” “Well then, in what do you believe?” “I don’t.”

Context: I have found in a few rather rare instances people whose autonomy of mind is as well developed as their level of self-awareness. They seem not to have any need for belief. They seem whole in both heart and mind. Next to their qualities, belief appears to bespeak a failure of self-reliance, a failure of will. But that is just the accumulation of experience from my preferred perspective. From another I can see where the faculty to believe is the highest human sensibility.The two are an ambiguity that I have neither the time nor interest to resolve for myself. I embrace the former of the two because its a lot more fun and save for the fun of it, why stick around?

But looking at the 4 H’men video, I see a great deal of true belief and maybe some superstition. Dawkins, for example seems to possess a militant belief in Science. (And Dennett to a lesser extent.) To me that is like believing in a wrench, but I have known people who do actually have faith in Science like it was The Savior, that it has some numinous aura and requires all of our subordinatiion. I would write further on this phenomena but such people need our understanding; their lives must be bleak enough as is without the addition of my ridicule.

And Sam Harris is an interesting case. From something akin to Rorty’s perspective he appears as the troglodyte militarist trying to revive the flames of a long-dead war. On some site he is described as believing that “religion creates divisiveness…” Now that’s a revelation. Who would have ever thought? But is he against all divisiveness, even that which certainly can be caused by the placement of an attractive, ovulating young woman in the presence of a group of lusty young men? Is Harris also in favor of eliminating attractiveness or lust or ovulation?

Reflecting on that last riff, I seem to have detected a puritanical streak running through the 4 H’men conversation. It isn’t quite as pronounced as the drearily earnest puritanical streak that is present here in the Integral Province, but that is probably because of Hitchen’s cynical and dissolute kind of influence in the video discussion. True belief, whether among the 3 Scientistic H’men (Hitchens is a journalist) or among the civilians of Integral, appears often to create this puritanical aura. But I have written enough of that elsewhere. Speaking of Hitchens, he seems to be the most vocal of the four in pointing to world terrorism and saying “look at the damage that superstitious belief can create” as if thinking that the elimination of belief can eliminate violent conflicts, or hatred or fear. I think there is some illogic at work in such a contention.

My final thought—at least for the time being—on this expansion of comments is that all of the 4 H’men are considered part of the “Brights,” though they are not entirely in favor of that name. The name Brights was proposed to describe those who are members of the “naturalistic” (as opposed to the supernatural-istic) persuasion in a public relations campaign to habilitate the Non-Belief Option to the point where non-believers (whatever their subcatagory) can successfully run for public office. How sweet. I wonder if the really Brights would even want to.

Vultures Copulating on The Roof: An Essay on Wholeness

I’m jotting notes at random for this essay on Wholeness and two vultures are copulating on the second roof down the ridge. iTunes is playing John Prine’s song “Illegal Smile.” I’m jotting a note about a YouTube vid on sustainable One Taste Buddhist orgasms (Jana posted it on Integral Visioning’s forum but I’ve watched only about 30 seconds of it—hand-me-down media makes my skin crawl) and two vultures are copulating on the roof down the ridge. I’m wondering if I have not lived longer than what I can afford to remember…there’s this memory here of me and John Prine standing side-by-side at the men’s room urinal at the old Exit Inn in Nashville. Prine lifts his bottle of Heineken in toast to the effluent before us and says, “It’s all pure Heineken.” Did he mean the effluent or did he mean the Whole of It All…everything Integral? Heineken was the bar special that night when John D. Loudermilk and his opener Steve Goodman and Prine who Goodman called up from the audiance and Doug Kershaw, who John called up from the audience, sang a lot of their songs and all of us ended up at Kershaw’s house, all of us, my wife, John’s wife, Kershaw’s wife and Prine’s brother too, where Kershaw, who hadn’t slept in three weeks, riffed bouncy Cajun waltzes on a French concertina.

This essay is about being Whole which is why I’ve stayed in the Integral Province so long, because I wanted to know if this place was about being Whole or at least acting as if one was. I wonder about things like that. I am wondering about this place still.

Note—Definitions: Whole means Real as in Real Being, Integrated Being. Whole for the time one has— like a fine, instinctually self-organizing process, a naturally open self-organizing process like a hurricane. Hurricanes thrill and Wholeness can thrill too. Wholeness is not particularly The Non-Dual. I did not come here in a self-organized package to always pretend I did not. I find pretending becomes a bore. (Yes, Ramana Maharshi did non-dual. Did he pretend? No. Did he do Whole? I think not.)

Two vultures on the roof. “1000 Airplanes on the Roof,” the piece by Glass, the concert at Popejoy in Albuquerque and afterwards someone in our party mentions that their Entheogen of the Week was like condensing a three day Vipassana retreat into five hours. What he took I cannot recall for I have no taste for Vipassana. But I have a fascination with Wholeness.

Note (the jot just below the jot on the YouTube Buddhist Orgasm Sutra)—”Wholeness is not a product of meditation…it is a quality that comes with being born.”

Below the kitchen window, below the vertical back yard, a narrow, battered road runs a few kilometers in from its fork off Carretera Panamericana, past Sr. Luna’s body shop and snakes into a barrio called La Matica from whence comes the rarely ceasing Afro-Cuban drumming of Caribbean Christmas songs. Early risers trudge to work, night-timers are trudging home. A man in Hawaiian print Bermudas and a wife-beater slips into the rancho across from the body shop. I make mental note to:

Note—Wholeness. Born from the stuff of world, the Whole Being freely wanders waist deep within it, fulfills all the world stuff, all the stuff required; no resource ignored, no faculty unindulged. There’s this memory…Max’s Cafe, I’m with two other writers and a photographer and the three of them are talking about the photographer’s curious times with Ali in Zaire, but I’m flirting with the only waitress around who still has all the teeth one should be able to see. She’s flirting back from behind the counter. She used to run with the Texas song writer who’s at a table between me and her and she and I are feeling deliciously brassy but he’s feeling badly left out and dangerously Texan; looking huesos at me as they say in the north. He’d written, maybe not too long before, a line that sang thus: “Too far and too high and too deep ain’t too much to be. Too much ain’t enough…”

Thought at the kitchen window…Too much, anything less is a partial life, not the Whole, not the Real…no self-respecting …. will ever choose partial, or decline to be a fool for love, or ever stop contesting against the wind, or and or…and on and on like that.

Vultures on the roof and Nicole on the YouTube, One Taste, Cum to Buddha Teaching lets us know that she has had mind-bending realizations in Buddhist retreats…she says nothing of Vipassana…but realizations, alas, that are unsustainable. She says “…as soon as I went into the supermarket they were gone…” So we’re at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the boats are beached, the sun wanes and Ann Shulgin, cuddled up to Sasha, is talking about how “you” (meaning her and those who have no doubt been there too) are standing in a prolonged state of samadhi at the supermarket check-out where everything remains ecstatically WHOLE and sustainably CLEAR to you (and her), but the only thing clear whatsoever to the surrounding throng is the fact that “you” (being her) are not one of them.

Note—“Wholeness is not synonymous with samadhi. The absence of samadhi does not mean the absence of Wholeness. The presence of samadhi does not mean the presence of Wholeness.”

God knows that Ann knows that samadhi can be chemical, can be self-hypnotic suggestion, can be conditioning, can be brain-wash, can be pathology and always has more to do with the endocrines than the spirit. Samadhi is contextual and contingent. Wholeness is not burdened by such qualifiers.

Note—Wholeness is not a state of consciousness. Consciousness is not large enough to hold this state of being…not even in samadhi, not even in Buddhist retreats…retreats are for spiritual matters and Wholeness has but a single thing to do with spirit…being its often uncredited source. To spiritualize the Whole of one’s being is to imprison one’s body in a cage that it smaller than it is.

Note—”Unless you realize you are unimaginably All-that-You-Are the whole of the Other-Out-There is a projected illusion. No matter how many needy orphans scramble to find the phantom mother, the outside search for the integral womb is futile. The outside finds are always frauds. When you are One with the All-From-Within the Other- Out-There may be whole or may be not…irrelevant either way.

M has been reading Bhagavan Das and thinking back. The two of us are easing toward sleep, her head, my shoulder conjoined. She wonders why he or anyone else wants things to have meaning when meanings just enforce limits.

From M—Wholeness: no limits, no meaning. Make a note of it.

Standing on the roof of the National Cemetery Administration, downtown Valhalla. I’m looking at an inevitable death in the sky above and I’m just inside those gates myself. I indulged a risk in Nambe, NM earlier and now I am seemingly elsewhere. I’m invited into a majestic glass, steel and rock tower off an Elysium-esque boulevard by a fat little hard-bitten man in a shabby suit and tired Hamburg. He wants me to meet the Head Grave Digger, the Lord of Death himself. On the building’s PA system we hear a radio interview with the Lord. He sounds unctuous; telling how he feels such an obligation to every fallen soldier within the administration’s care that he personally visits each grave in a 20–year cycle to make certain the dead are well respected, faultlessly attended. It was not a live broadcast because here he comes down the hall, alive as I may or may not be, to greet us. He is not unctuous. He’s dangerous, combining the total essence of every executioner and hit man and assassin who ever drew a weapon. But he is friendly, authentic and honorable beyond the need to be, trustworthy beyond the need to be and more than likely to kill us all without a second thought. He wants to show me something, escorts me down the hall, bows me into an elevator. The second I step into the car the left hand wall of it curls slightly and rolls into the space like a stainless steel Tsunami. I’ve been suckered into almost certain death, but I spring to the rear and it barely clips the back of my jacket. I turn to see how the Lord and the Shabby Man fared with the wave. But they are still standing in the door. They nod approval—I pass the test, I’m still on my feet. We ride to the roof and they show me to an observation deck and I see Her. She rises above this building by two stories at least; the Supreme Valkyrie—Liberty, a statue. She holds her torch straight out in front, not a stationary beacon but a dynamic guide-light. She is constantly cared for by the warriors of the Lord, those who ride in his wild hunts and who will die with him in Gotterdammerung.

Comes the PA again: News flash, warning, look to the sky for inevitable death. Ground control radar has picked up a military jet fighter and a little private single-prop on a collision heading and they’re past the point for evasive acts, both men will die. Don’t get hit by falling debris. I look up just in time to see the fighter pilot—within inches of the other—roll the fighter into a spinning dive toward safety, a trick that flouted the laws of physics. No one dies this day. Apparently I have seen all that has been intended for me: She and that ferocious act of will. The Lord and the Shabby Man walk me to the elevator, we exchange sly smiles at the door as the steel wave rolls, we ride to the ground floor. Before the Shabby man shows me out of the tower the Lord of Death tells me now I can come and go there as I have need to. For one inclined to shamanic sensibilities, who could ask for more?

I regain consciousness sometime late that night. I have not been anywhere except a little deeper into The Whole, closer to my source to life and death. The Lord, the Shabby Man, pilots and warriors and ground control, Liberty, the tower, the city—all are currents within this flow, this Whole. Where does it go? How is it mapped?

Note—”Wholeness—We don’t need no stinking maps!”

Whatever Gets You Through

A Soap in One Prologue and 11 Lines

Prologue

To live sanely is to limit the awareness. It is to draw back from the incoherent cusp of each on-setting moment to organize snippets of conditioning into sheltering illusions and idealized blinkers. Enough of these patches can be cobbled together into a process that one can call their own perspective; a discreet, serialized narrative that is manipulated to function within others and around others—currents knotted on currents—and function smoothly as long as one can pretend it is non-fiction. To live sanely is to suspend disbelief in the Inner Disney, the master of make believe and author of The Cautionary Tales. Sanity depends on how closely one attends the Inner Disney’s Cautionary Tales.

Act I

One — “I’m afraid…”

Another — “Tell me.”

One — “…of the chaos out there…”

Another — “The chaos within?”

One — “We can only hope for Integral™”

Another — “Oh, but Darling, how can you sacrifice your authenticity, your heat, for such a…a…clunky…I don’t know…oh god…it’s a cloister!”

One — “I need to gain control again…” (sobs)

Another — “But there are others…other sheltering illusions.”

One — “What? Existential Phenomenology? It’s too sad. It’s too scary…too real…so close to the edge. We have to fall back! I’m frightened.”

Another — “I’m afraid…”

One — “Tell me.”

The Scene

Outside: Reality remains the same as it has always been—but that’s an incidental matter.
Inside the Tale: Their content is nothing, their style is all.

They are trembling through the night.

Fade

Integral Province: Sensualist move on…

If you are at large in the Integral Province, a tourist perhaps or a Seeker or stumbling through the sprawling Integral Mall of consulting care givers and Espiritu-Social Democrat change agents, looking maybe for half a rack of fleshy smoked ribs and a pint or two of IPA…sensualist move on. To the sorry dwarfing of The Provincial culture and its imperial ambitions, this is just not one of those places. Instead it’s a kind of ashramic sanctuary for postulant abstractions and words without stories. And for all the lip service paid here to Context—the sine qua non of intelligent interpretation—all the homeless, artless words under foot seem to shun every context except Mind.

Context—Drums
The big box mercado is packed…Hallowthanksmas is serious business here. All the the front-end kids called in today so there are only three checkout colas, each an hour long. The muzac is salsa. Two carts ahead of us a man on the younger edge of middle age, thinning brown hair, worn black Tee from the U.S., black jeans, is paused by a table display of boxed glass dinner ware. The lid of one carton has been pried half open. The man starts his percussion solo on this one. He works the bass with the heel of his right hand in the middle of the intact side; snaps his left index finger along the edge of the torn opening on the half-beat, the other nine fingers and both palms work the entire surface. He’s finding four or five registers across the box top plus the various shots he sporadically takes off the corners and the sides. The man casually gazes around the blah cubed cavern and drums and waits to move along. His accompaniment is superior to the muzac and lasts perhaps 10 minutes. Though the sound could have told me different, I doubt he’s professional. He doesn’t have to be—this is the southern Caribbean.

Just now the sunrise is turning scarlet behind the quebradas that are full of fog below the house, and the moon, four nights from new, conjuncts Venus at the top of my window. I click on a couple of album covers on the “music” page of Matthew Dallman’s site to see how his music stacks up against his essays that are all about Integral. The music isn’t as dense. If music can be said to have syntax, like prose English has syntax, Dallman’s compositions leave his written words far behind. It strikes me as well considered; studious and deliberate structures that move along like restrained and softly fitful conversations and monologues in the tenor to mezzo ranges. There is rarely a bass line. A drum machine on one cut intrudes along side a solo piano, patterns a few repetitive sounds and exits abruptly. Dallman lives in Chicago.

Evidence of what is absent here in The Integral Province can be found in two small instances of heedlessness in the principle Integral Canon. These are small issues, little gaucheries like standing in the salon with a trail of toilet paper stuck to one’s shoe, amusing almost but tending a little more toward a larger revelation. The first is the following unfortunate choice of a metaphor:
—The presence of God (a.k.a. Spirit) in The All of Everything is like the wetness of the ocean.—This is the essence of Ken Wilber’s testimony in Jim Chamberlain’s essay, “Whither Ken Wilber” recent on the Integral World site. Ever since I rode into Integral Province (to see how the civilian population handled the Wholeness Perspective–the object of my fascination) I have wondered why the language here rarely corresponds with something one can touch with their hands, that one can sense. But in that brief disquisition on God, Wetness, and the Ocean I finally got what I had wanted, so I am satisfied to a point. I suspect it is as good as one will get around The Province where there is little considered analysis of the manifest and sense-able. I spend a sizable portion of my time in the sense-able consideration of the manifest and manifesting so while Chamberlain and probably most others in The Province rolled without a second thought across the analogy, immediately my instincts said, “wrong.” The ocean isn’t wet. But if I touch it with my hand, my hand gets wet because my hand is not the ocean. I could guess that the obverse of this is that the surface of the ocean that engages with my hand becomes something of myself that the ocean isn’t, but I won’t; the transitory quality of the ocean in this instance is of no consequence because the ocean is not the measure of anything, nor is wetness, nor is God, while man, as the man said, is the measure of it all.

From the sensual perspective on the ocean analogy the nature of Wilber’s God/Spirit descends to something of a dualistic presence instead of retaining the non-dual “universalist grandure” (Richard Rorty’s phrase) that Wilber wanted to imply with the image. But that is not the point here. Wilber can harbor his God anywhere he wants, fashion It any way he wants; It is after all his creation. Likewise I see no problem with him retaining the detachment from the apparently solid Here and Now that subverts his efforts to write something about it that is as considered and effective as what a sensualist would write of the same thing. This lack of consideration, however, makes for a comic lop-sided and ineffective imperialist movement, if an expanding sphere of influence is what the civilians of the Integral Province really want; a lack that will keep maintaining this territory as a faltering little isolationist district like…I don’t know. Paraguay?

When I am writing of the sensualist I am not including in any way Dionysius a la Nietzsche’s Apollo/Dionysius dichotomies that make sense only when restricted to the two-dimensional, monastic environment of printed pages on cultural theory. This is, instead, about flesh and blood epicurians (though not necessarily Epicurians for their patriarch strikes me as having been excessively prudish), and hedonists, and any aesthete who would accept the styling of sensualist. I will not exclude de Sade, John Wilmot, Arthur Rimbaud, Neal Cassady or Fyodor and Dmitri, Karamazov father and son, or any other sense privileging experience junky. Some in my position might be more exclusive for fear their credibility will be compromised by the sketchy reputation of the company they keep. But I will choose a fascinating field of associates over social approbation with certain knowledge that vulgarity is not always synonymous with sensuality and quite often is it’s opposite— a display of one who’s sense of sense has been truncated by culture, religion or a tragic failure of consciousness into pre-adolescent prurience, of which several examples can be found in The Provincial Canon.

There are two sensual essentials to be emphasized here. The first is contained in the phrase “experience junky,” which is often listed as an attribute of a sensualist with no further examination of what it entails: which is primarily that dubious ability to make perfectly reasonable life choices that often lead—as a secondary or tertiary consequence—to the perpetuation of a dangerously exposed, unblinkered, unbuffered and marginal life. It is an existence that the youthful romantics in the coffee bars and devitalized men in their wellness groups laud as “living in the moment;” a cliche thought to be high praise until one realizes that it is heard only from those situated well back from the edge; a hint that the spontaneous life is mostly popular as a spectator sport. Still some sensualists survive, even flourish, actually able to exploit the resources of wisdom found at the fringe. But that is far from guaranteed to all.

Context—The Ice Barn
Mark has second thoughts about signing on for this welding gig. He checks the size of the steel,the heat of the fire and goes on the hunt for heavier gloves. Pamala is lining up her cameras, one for slides, one for b&w, one for color prints. She’s a film snob, disdains digital and would rather buy cameras than eat and is often too broke to do either. Pamala’s putting together a photo essay on people at their work. I’m forging joinery scarfs on the ends of two of the heaviest pieces of steel I’ve worked in years, mainstays in a free-standing retro-contemporary sculpture that I just happened to design with the right codified height and thickness to serve also as a handrail. The lumbering old swamp cooler on the far end of the space really isn’t doing the job because its August and the forge is in South Tucson. This is a separate town inside a city; a planned community of sorts in the old days, planned for the marketing of numerous vices and a place where people of color could own their own homes and stay out of the spaces of the white folk. One rarely hears English on the streets. The building was once an ice barn. We work in the back two thirds and up front is a failing liquor store, the owner of which pumps very heavy iron every day, keeps a seven-foot komodo dragon and populates his office with half-a-dozen near-life-size Gene Simmons action figures. If he pays the utilities he can’t stock his shelves. If he stocks his shelves they cut the power and his beer gets hot. The guy with whom I share this space is a thirty-something, alcoholic sculptor who’s into the owner for about six months of back rent and it is a horse race as to which of the two will bottom-out first. When things get really pinched up front the owner comes back and tries to throw the sculptor out but somehow he manages to stay and the lights keep shining save for only six or seven days a year. The sculptor often doesn’t show until after four and just as often spends the full night here to stay out of his wife’s way. She studies for a PhD while he slaughters brain cells with a guy named A*** who looks like he still has rickets and sweeps up now and again for the privilege of sleeping in the bathroom when the weather’s bad and his room mate runs him off. A***’s cousin, P***, a crack whore, drops by weekly and bums loose change for smokes. From time to time a tall calaca in a threadbare trench uses the sculptor’s space as a show room to sell stolen bicycles. He and I are the only ones around who are levering any kind of income from the place. I stay because no other site would tolerate my coal-fired forge, the rent’s not bad and the unbuffered life’s mostly a delight in this procession of irrepressible variables and novel contingencies.

The second essential element that rises on our way to the next evidentiary exhibit is the need to weigh matters of art and artistry so as to establish a common reference since the sensual like to create art and the not-so-sensual like to think about it. De Sade and Wilmot were artists, though neither could match Rimbaud. Cassady could turn an artful phrase but he rarely did and the Old Man Karamazov type in the spoof Art School Confidential spoke of “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” I would have scripted “aphrodisiacal moment,” if the actor had been able to pronounce it naturally; “narcotic” denotes the sleeping of senses not their stimulation and works better in a phrase like: “the narcotic moment of media absorption.” Nonetheless, the line as it was spoken got the point across about art that is created as a production and extension and realization of the sensual flow of creativity above and beyond whatever thoughts and feelings might bob along in its wake. It is my feeling that the preeminent embodiment of art is the work one creates out of one’s own living, the informed instinctual aesthetic that makes a Whole of the piece and steadies it in the face of all the chaotic Other. In short: the life that is not a truly class act from the core to it’s furtherest effect isn’t worth living. Of smaller importance is the categorical collection that includes but is not restricted to: two dimensional art, three dimensional, gastronomic, sexual, auditory (in this one I include written art and not just poetry–read Dostoevsky aloud, Crime and Punishment is the best, and you will hear some of the finest auditory art of all time), the art of movement and the theatrical arts. In regard to this last category I submit the following:

After ignoring Wilber’s output for 13 or 14 years, I encountered his writing again in 2005 in “An Integral Theory of Consciousness wherein I came across this line: “If you want to know the meaning of Hamlet, learn to read English, get the play, read it, and see for yourself.” thereupon I almost shouted, “What? If you want to know the meaning of Hamlet, learn dramatics, mount the play. Second best: buy a ticket, attend the production!” Hamlet is a stage play, an elementary fact that makes its meaning close to infinitely larger than the page-bound, though still sublime, words on sorrow, obsession, cupidity, self-doubt, revenge, and the sub-texts of almost every speech in the work. The meaning is all of that plus the size of the venue, the shape of the stage, the tones of the sets, the cut of the costumes, the forms of the players and their placements as the lights come up, their movements around one another, the sounds of their voices, the cadence of their deliveries, the kinesthesis of the audience, the aroma of the occupant in the next seat, and the taste of the Jack Daniels in a plastic cup at intermission. All of that is fundamental to the meaning of Hamlet and those not conscious of these elements and their direct sensual effects on the entire experience and their need to be considered can only be living fractional lives.

Wilber’s failure here was a tragic failure of consciousness, a lack of consideration for the basic element of consciousness. He didn’t have enough respect for or experience with something that could be an actual presence to give his own words a second remedial thought. The failure here is like that of a film editor whose lack of integrity allows her to leave in the final cut the shadow of a camera boom or the misplacement of a prop between takes; small, thoughtless production errors that belittle credibility. Wilber ignored the writer’s first rule: Write only about what you know. His naive sentence on Hamlet makes it apparent he knows little or nothing about the profound sensuality of Shakespeare, or the theater, or more generally anything of the sensual and its art. But few people in this Province do. The kids who loiter around the Integral Institute’s sites might counter this charge by submitting to the court the official I-I veneration of Alex Gray and Stuart Davis naive to the irony that on that same evidence I can rest my case.

Context—The Weld
Mark is working on an MFA, turns out pretty decent steel sculpture and welds really well. But he’s never seen a forge weld and wonders why I just don’t do these with a machine. I tell him I’m too much of a prima donna. An aspirant once said to me,”I always thought you guys who can weld up steel with your hammers were gods.” and I’ve never looked back. I don’t tell Mark that I’m not as fond as he is of machines, or tools and gadgetry that are bad stand-ins for talent, but I do rejoice in fire, its always sinuous look, its odor, the menace and fever from it, and the cool, visceral wash of adrenaline I feel in its presence.

The scarfed ends of the two steel bars, side by side in the coke-bed, are a radiant, searing bright lemon color. Their surfaces look glassy and slick; they’re starting to sweat, I cut back on the force of the blower, watch for sparks, tiny brilliant chips of iron oxide slag that shower off like fireworks when the metal’s ready to weld. The three of us, Pamala, Mark and I are all sweating the same as the steel. The feel of this scene is so charmed I want to laugh. Mark knows what to do; we’ve practiced. He’s handling a 60 lb. length of 2” round stock; my end is a little thicker, noticeably shorter and a third as heavy.

A burst of sparks—I yell “Go!” and we plunge into a state of intensely focused and reckless speed. He drags his steel, fast, fast, from the fire, lays the incandescent end inside the chalk marks I’ve outlined on the anvil, braces himself and I press my piece, scarf to scarf, atop the other, hold it almost loosely there and strike with sharp quick hammer blows. I’m trying to shock start the molecular exchange across the dimensionless space between the two. It will happen all at once inside the first few seconds or not at all. Four swift blows, five, and I feel my piece suddenly tighten against the other, feel the steel below the hammer double in thickness, The hammer’s ring drops an octave in the space of that single blow. The weld is stuck…integration…cohesion. What was dual in one split second transcends to unity. That’s when I start to work, laying into the joint like I was possessed, yelling at Mark to turn it over…pull it back…push it, push it…turn…again! Pamala’s camera is clicking over like a tiny diesel engine on a fast idle. Sweat is running in my eyes, washing ash across my glasses. Mark’s face is turned away from the spray of slag from every blow. When the lemon color deepens toward orange we lay the piece back in the fire. The doubled-thick bulge in the length of it looks like an egg in a snake. Mark wanders around hunting for face protection. Pamala selects another camera, debates herself on filters. I crank the blower, chuckle and catch my breath. To work the bulge into a clean, unblemished, ever so slightly tapered, invisible joint takes five more heats, a 10 lb. sledge and a brake on the beat.

Back in Integral Mall, if one takes time to examine the growing offerings one finds an atmosphere in which those who administer sales of care giving and change agency like to give lip service to art but don’t know how or where to wedge it into their theories on the structural order of things. Most try to make artists part of the up-market service industries like personal chefs or transpersonal therapists. And they prefer to think that artists, like all the other really important people, like they themselves, are forever diligent in their labors on behalf of The Culture, or Evolution or the Future of Spirituality. But intuition says thats might not always be the case, so on the whole all subjects re: art just makes care givers and change agents nervous and condescending and fearful that every artist who happens along is going to know that they don’t know what to do with something from someone whose blood, they suspect, might be brighter and closer to the surface than theirs. Thus the illustrations on their sites, if there are any, tend toward sentimental pantheism, always an easy way out. From several decades of acquaintances with those at the forefront of the Self/Spiritual/Cultural Evolution trades, entrepreneurial soul mates to the proprietors here at Integral Mall, I have found too many evince an initially benign puzzlement “Why can’t all art be dedicated to serving the object of my reverence? If it did then all art could be good art…some would be well…like…better than the rest but not more important,of course.” And it continues through a not so benign proposal: “If there was only some means to re-educate away the egotism and nihilism and sardonic, intractable autonomy of those other artists…yes, re-education…a law perhaps” (Or maybe some camps.)

Yes! Re-education! It is the universal management tool for the modern anabolic sovereignty and in light of the imperial ambitions of The Integral Province it is worth a brief digression from the sensory into the sensory-null predisposition of its home territory. Here the Wilber faction promotes re-education via rationality, synthesizing research, quasi-historical/anthropological hypotheses, and Vision Logic, a not particularly formal cognitive operation from the genus that Juergon Habermas calls “other than reason.” The target populations are the practitioners in the flatland reductionist disciplines who wantonly exclude spirituality, contemplative practices and a Wilber-favored Neoplatonic taxonomy of the cosmos from the scientific study of humanity’s psychophysiological development and cultural evolution. Matthew Dallman, whose essays I generally appreciate, lacks the Wilberian sized fan base but wants to re-educate the masses back into an unconditioned veneration of the Canon of Western Humanities so as to liberate it from the Pomo running dogs of Euro-American Critical Theory and their stooges from Cultural Studies. This is a cabal that Wilber regularly excoriates but in Dallman’s mind Wilber is one of the worst offenders—tense times. I wish I could write that blood has been spilled, but there isn’t a lot of blood to be found in Integral Province, I’ve rarely seen its signifier. Ironically, there is at Integral Mall a huge collective heart that is steeply inclined toward re-educating the Philistines into the values of a highly therapeutic, sustainable, Espiritu-Social Democratic, Gaia-wide federation, but after nearly 40 years of this message being retailed out through the same old functions and liturgies and incantations for personal and planetary salvation dessicated cliches are peeling off its walls like ancient paper. No there isn’t any blood. I have seen evidence of cerebrospinal fluid though none that has been pumped below the first cervical vertebra. That’s as moist and as low as it goes around here.

Context—Hammers Like These
Working hammers of this weight—ten pounds—in this heat is a gourmet meditation on the priceless treasure of the body—that which we are until that moment we aren’t. The eyes and shoulders take care of the weld, wu wei, it doesn’t need another thought. This body is the only asset and care in the whole world now. One strikes right as if growing up, tranquil, from the earth with a dark, slacked core of original energy settled just above the groin as the center and source of awareness. It’s a little like a slow dirty, Latin dance and a dance to be regally, seductively dirty must look and feel as if it is the easiest thing two people have ever done standing up; a dance so certain of itself that the steps are barely there; just brief, cathartic afterthoughts that really aren’t thought of as much as they are small reflexive tokens to the music that, for its own part in the piece, is not so much the impulse for the dance but a restraint on its passion. So too, heavy hammers move almost on their own, verging on beyond control. Gripping hammers that weigh like this will soon cripple the hands and the feeling of ease; being crippled spoils the fun to be had at the border with chaos. These hammers are held like a small bird—with just sufficient tension to keep them from flying away. They bounce, levitate on their own—boost the lift, stretch up with it, sense the apex, pause there. Throw the hammers down, try not to miss. Hammers of this weight in learned hands are always thrown at the work; softly guided there. They are never swung. The blow, steel against steel, generates power again into the core and that sense could be the entire reason to be right here. Care for the body—that is all there is—keep it straight, tranquil, upright and healthy so it can always feel this sublime and real, this close to the ground and a shout for delight and this fantasy of living forever that is spun up from the source.

But for all of that, sledge hammers still get heavy.

After the first weld is finished we stick an only slightly thinner piece on the other end. Its the same drill; heat and adrenaline, thirst, water and trace mineral tablets, flecks of slag sizzling cool on wet forearms, racked breathing, laughter, shouting, floods of sweat, sulphurous steam when I damp the fire’s edge, the sun bleached Snickers Pamala brings back from the liquor store and the savored ground of vitality that substantiates it all.

Sensibilities like these are not found much in The Province or its canon and they might not do so well in these environs because (though his topic was slightly more dire) the scene is the same as when Cassady wrote: “This means little to those who have not lifted the veil.”

The Conspiracy

In the early 80’s a diffident, northern New Mexico (USA) hippie named Skye married into a nice piece of change and finally was able to finish his opus, a 90 minute video on the genius, and victimization of Nicola Tesla (NT). Yes, there was mention of conspiracy. The vid played the local circuit for a few years. It never got off the ground regionally let alone nationally, but that was before the www. If only Skye could have waited 20 years he probably would have been a feature on late night, AM, gimmick talk radio like Mark DeMucha with his Tesla Conspiracy movie. Paul Simon wrote the lyrics “every generation throws a hero up the pop charts…” and he could have just as well written that every generation drops a dreary rehash of the Teslsa tribulations down the bottomless media maw.

I’m sure that everything the public needed to know about NT could have been found on Skye’s video, the You Tube interview with DeMucha revealed nothing essentially new, but added a few details that redeemed two or three minutes of my time there from being a total waste. One of these gems was the brief discussion on how NT might have caused the 1908 Tunguska Explosion, the eradication of 2,150 square km. of timber in Siberia, by aiming his pulse generator or whatever it was at the north pole and missing by a a few thousand km. DeMucha bases this possibility on the fact that there is no meteor crater at the Tunguska site to account for the meteor that is said to have caused the wreckage. This indicates that while DeMucha read sources regarding Tesla, his research on Tunguska was a little thin. It is generally accepted by the seemingly countless scientists that have studied the phenomenon that the meteor exploded five or so miles above the surface, a fate that regularly befalls meteors higher in the atmosphere…wait, wait…I can’t say that. What I need to say is that these countless scientists from Russia and the U.S. and no doubt other places as well are all part of the evil conspiracy that is afoot to cover up the fact that NT was able to shoot a bazillion volts of electricity from the U.S. through either the atmosphere or the earth (I wasn’t clear about the exact route from DaMucha’s explanation) and drop it down or pop it out in Siberia. DeMucha said that NT took a shot at something during that same 24–hour period in ‘08 which is strong evidence in favor of this contention. The fact that there was a meteor shower associated with a perihelion of the Comet Encke two weeks prior was something obviously arranged by the Evil Conspirators to cover NT’s tracks. That certainly makes sense in this best of all possible conspiratorial worlds. In any other world someone who managed such a accomplishment would have immediately come forth to say, “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down all those trees with my own little electro-magnetic pulse generator.” And then they would have gone on to sell their machine to a world power as the weapon to end all wars. But those kind of simple contingencies are just not available in this world, the conspiratorial one—the Evil Conspirators make sure of that.

The second DeMucha point of interest was NT’s “black box.” DeMucha recounts a story where NT acquired, apparently from the manufacturer, a Pierce Arrow luxury automobile in the early 1930s. He replaced the engine with an 80 hp electrical motor. He produced from his brief case a little “black box” with an interesting array of never before seen vacuum tubes, set the box into a space on the dashboard, depressed two rods in the box and the car ran like a charm for nine days and at speeds up to 90 mph solely on the energy that the black box “scooped up” from the atmosphere and fed into the electric motor. This was to prove his contention that he could tap into the free source of energy that is flowing all around us. What eventually happened to the Pierce Arrow, DeMucha fails to say in the interview.

This is another case of DeMucha paying attention only to his NT sources and not doing any research on the supporting cast…in this case the Black Box. If he had researched Black Box phenomenon I doubt if he would have used the phrase because it puts his hero in a funny shade of light. The classic black box scam goes thus: A buys a regular used copy machine; in the old days a mimeograph, nowadays a xerox. He makes modifications to it, mostly in the form of a hidden compartment into which he places five or six crisp new $100 bills. A takes the machine to B and says that it is the perfect counterfeiting machine and he demonstrates its capabilities by turning out a couple of samples. These of course are ejected from the hidden compartment rather than being the output of any reproduction process. But it is accomplished with some difficulty and the machine obviously isn’t working at projected capacity. A tells B that he has run out of R&D capital and reluctantly agrees to sell him a one-third share in the machine for say $50,000. A of course has another prospective investor in another location and he is on his way to conclude the deal with him. “You’re just going off with the machine and my $50,000?” B asks A, “I would feel more secure if you left the machine with me as security. Bring the other investor here.” Again reluctantly A agrees and goes off with only B’s $50,000 to find the other man. As soon as A is out the door, B turns on the machine and after some struggle gets it to spit out the last couple of $100s. And that is the last he sees of any of the perfectly counterfeited money, and the last he ever sees of A.

There are several variations on the game: 1) A, with B’s 50 yards, acquires title to a gold mine that is abandoned as being no longer productive. From somewhere very far away A buys some gold dust. Then he builds a “black box,” a very complex looking machine with a lot of electronic bells and whistles and an interesting array of never before seen vacuum tubes and this he sets into a space at the end of an equally impressive lineup of crushers, rockers and sluice boxes and then he “salts” the Black Box with his gold dust and heads off to find someone who wants to buy a gold mine, along with a revolutionary new machine that can extract placer gold from what appears to be a non-bearing medium. A will sacrifice both for far below their potential earning value because his eight-year-old daughter is in immediate need of a life-saving operation that can only be done in Sydney, Australia, etc. etc. (I’m more familiar with this version of the story as I was once employed as a p.i. in the legal defense of a man accused of doing exactly this…good ol’ Uncle Ed, he lost, he was convicted and quickly jumped his pre-sentencing bail, fled to Florida and inside of days he was dead of cancer and was cremated. We got this word from his wife. Good ol’ Uncle Ed, he always paid in $100s.)

Variation 2) A invents a carburetor that turns water into combustible fuel.

Just because Marconi swindled NT out of his now recognized invention of the radio, doesn’t mean that NT didn’t have a few tricks of his own. One has to ask some questions: Why was NT’s nephew the only driver of the Pierce Arrow? Why didn’t the Pierce Auto Company buy NT’s black box, an item that would have almost certainly saved it from going into receivership just three years after NT’s nephew was speeding this car around at upwards of 90 mph? Why didn’t the nephew keep the car and exempt himself from ever having to buy gasoline again? Why didn’t NT ever explain to anyone how the black box worked? Finally, anyone with an IQ above a -3 who lived in a parallel non-conspiratorial world would have thought of several different ways to legally cover their ass and then sold for a couple of fortunes the black box along with its patent to the people at Standard Oil for example so they could keep it off the market until they could find a way to convert the company over to Standard Black Box Inc. But that is not the way things work in this most perfect of conspiratorial worlds where a victim in the popular cultural mind will always be 150 per cent victim for ever and always, and where it is against the laws of physics for such a victim to be a conspirator themself.

In this phase of the DeMucha interview he and the talk show host were speculating on what would have happened if NT had not been bamboozled out of his black box. We would all be living off the grid, lighting, heating, cooling our homes for only the negligible cost of a little black box. Indeed, we could have all been making gold out of gravel.

To One in the Dark V

(Please read this series of entries sequentially…from the bottom up.)

Wandering toward Conclusions
Wandering like a vagabundo: I like hats. Some time ago on receiving a commission for two years of work I designed a hat and had it made for me. It is a subtle and elegant vanity, charcoal and black. I was once told it was the finest looking hat in Santa Fe. I have another, tightly woven out of surprisingly tough paper in China, that is neither subtle nor elegant. It approaches in size and form the rakish, inelegant head-dress of Diego Alatriste, the fictional friend of the historical Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, author (among many other works) of El Buscon (“The Petty Thief” but translated into English as The Scavenger), controversially reputed to be one of the finest examples of Picaresque Novels from the 17^th Century. It is a first person narrative and so leaves out the author’s moralizations that are found in the typically third person omniscient narrative style of the genre.
Wandering toward conclusions I wonder if picaros might not be a better qualifier for us than “refugees” or “vagabundos.” Picaro, (Picara); the lowborn and unbound rogues who slip through what is palmed off as civilized just ahead of the (fill in the blank) _____________ .  (I ended the last installment of this series without the slights idea of where to go next…wait…eureka!…I’ll take it this way…)

The first fictional picaro I knew was Scuffy the Tugboat of whom I once wrote a post for Heartmind. The published piece was demolished by a hacker, but the copy I saved is the vanity below and it goes to a couple of points in this work:

Sitting here close to the top of that part of the Andes called a coastal range, shards of alto cumulus string out to the south and east. E. Harris sings “Hickory Wind,” I sample some beets pureed with coriander and sip a little ouzo, Lebanese ouzo called Arak, Sunday afternoon western Sud Americana time.

We wait for the chicken to finish roasting and wonder why in hell anyone would ever…ever…want to believe in a single god damned thing.

Time idles past like a sweet old Kenworth. The sounds, sights and the feel of the joyous power at hand are the ease-gotten gains. (There are thunderheads two miles deep down the range and thunder over the house.)

So why buy options in profitless stock? Why the belief, the faith?

Why put in for the insurance plan, the well-thought reasons for the moral, the approval of soc. and self? We’ve watched those markets for years and know them to pay no one but the brokers, and too little, too, at their best.

Did you come around here for the peace of it all? The certainty, perhaps? The deftly structured system to which you can pledge subordination? Needy for limits…this but not that? The four walls of sound profession? The constipation of philosophy? The assurance of Mission Control? The anchored soul with mortgage? A bathtub in which to float?

We were floating the Rio Grande through the Taos Box in a battered old raft called “The Charlie Allnut”: Michael the disillusioned lawyer, his lady Mahaba, my river-runner-groupie neighbor Marie, her sidekick, Sid the Shrink, from the Pen who was also the skinniest man in Santa Fe, and me. I was at the oars. We were kicking back through the placid middle stretches in the heat of late morning. Someone might have mentioned Alan Watts’s notion of the Tao as the “watercourse way”. In the light of this I mentioned how as I child, maybe three, could have been four, I learned that of the Tao from Scuffy the Tugboat, a Little Golden Book about a toy boat, tired of the confines of the bathtub, who makes his break for liberty when his little boy owner takes him for a field trip in the nearby brook. At large and alone Scuffy runs the brook that becomes a creek, that becomes a stream, that becomes a river; its breadth grows wide and its banks steep. Days and nights float past. Creek-side villages turn into towns, towns become cities. The fish that bump and splash at the brave little tug are growing pretty big, row boats give way to barges. Scuffy, though, pushes on through all that is a river’s evolution. He’s there to illustrate the principles of geography, but does he know his deeper teachings? Scuffy soon enough reaches the bay and heads to sea. And just as he passes the last pier he is scooped up by the father of the little boy who owned him way back at the headwaters. The two have been chasing after him all this way. They think they have saved him so it is home to the bathtub for Scuffy. We little ones were assured he was happy to be back.

The hearty crew of “The Charlie Allnut” was pleased with the story. I told them that Scuffy had been my favorite book for the longest time. But, there is that but…

“I never liked the ending,” I told them, “even when I was a little kid I knew it was a fucked up, sell-out, formula ending.”

“What..? No!”

“You wanted him to go to sea? You crazy?”

“He wouldn’t have lasted an hour.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but think of the glory.”

Sid turned to the rest of the crew and asked, “Is this the man we want driving our boat?”

Now Nelson and Jennings duet on “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. This wise woman and I are still wondering why anyone would ever hem around themselves with the slightest thread of a belief; risk any possibility for the hopeful illusion of the order of things.

She says something like, “When you are going out there, like standing right on the event horizon or even on the other side where you can’t see and there is nothing else…it gets pretty scary. That’s when things start to fall apart inside, all the structures.”

“I think one thing stays,” I say, “that knowing you can handle it.”

“Maybe,” she says, “but for me, all I know is that it’s so right.”

This wise woman….

 

Scavenging toward Conclusions
The River is a good motif for such a piece as this, so I’ll boost a riff out of another old rant and see if between the two rivers I can’t drive this one on home.

 

There is a stretch through the Grand Canyon where the river has sliced deepest into earth and running flat pushes swiftly through sheared strata that are a bazillion years old and have names like Vishnu Schist, solid, straight up, uncracked rock. There are no sand bars, no falls or rapids, or beaches, no gravel, no boulders and nothing sharp to slice the water so it sucks up air and turns white. The surface is flat and dark; from a distance it looks placid. These vertical walls narrow the channel so the passage of the river is like forcing a fifteen-amp charge through a ten-amp wire; things get ftritzy inside. The river has scoured and sanded the rock into polished deep undulations, tunnels, pockets, caves, ramps and corners that shape and push the water into too many conflicting directions; it tangles the flow for miles into a turbulent, multi-skeined knot of insane subsurface hydraulics: roils, eddies, backwashes, under tows, whirlpools and cross currents heaving against cross-current, against the walls and boats, boiling to the surface and sucking downward, forcing past each other with enough velocity to shear a wooden oar in two if it is caught between. Shallow fissures suddenly snap open between the currents, hiss across the surface like snakes and then as instantly disappear. It is a welter of over wrought, omni-dimensional ripples, reverberating at the power of 10. This simple landscape of dark flat water and black vertical rock is called The Inner Canyon.

 

Of the various meditation techniques that rely on energetic movement, I lean toward the more subtle fringes of Taoist Spiritual Alchemy and these have a historically documented root in shamanic practices. Looking at the phenomena from either position, alchemy or shamanism, it does not take long to realize, apprehend visually, the finely wrought, omni-directional, eternally reverberating, multi-skeined knot of turbulent energy and information that is the Whole of It engulfing Ourselves, the universal Inner Canyon, where ambiguity resonates to the 10th power. Nowhere can one take a core sample or cut a cross-section that will dependably tell one anything except how that specific location used to look, nowhere is there solid predictability, nowhere is there anything that can be made discreetly identifiable as one’s own, nowhere is there knowledge or experience or their feeble, schizoid cousin, memory, that isn’t constantly mutated beyond the recognition of the day before. Anything other than the liberating reconciliation to the omnipresent hegemony of ambiguity is a fantasy.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. One can scoot back from the edge of the flow, cobble up a little structure and inform it with some media, raise the booth in the market, consult and talk, draw electronic diagrams and make words like everyone else’s words. Fold it all into one civilizing movement, glove up and never touch the blood and push the line past all the provincial boundaries as the way to live Integral and take it to the person sitting in darkness.

To One in the Dark IV

(Please read this series of entries sequentially…from the bottom up.)

Context: The Bowers of Halandri
For several days M had meetings in the center of Halandri, a suburb on the slopes above Athens. When we walked there we often detoured a few blocks off the main avenue, Pendelis, to skirt behind rows of high-rise cells, an abandoned mansion, an empty hospital, along a footpath above the loosely forested, green belt banks of a shallow coulee. When Halandri had another one of its several different names, when there was still space between this village and Athens, and more trees in the coulee, Oberon and Titania were said to have bowers among them. Today they are refugees and they’ve owned that status for a long, long time. Fro