cosmic life

  

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Standing on the moon 
I got no cobweb on my shoe 
Standing on the moon 
I'm feeling so alone and blue 
I see the gulf of Mexico 
As tiny as a tear 
The coast of California 
Must be somewhere over here - over here

Standing on the moon 
I see the battle rage below 
Standing on the moon 
I see the soldiers come and go 
There's a metal flag beside me 
Someone planted long ago 
Old Glory standing stiffly 
Crimson, white and indigo - indigo

I see all of Southeast Asia 
I can see El Salvador 
I hear the cries of children 
And the other songs of war 
It's like a mighty melody 
That rings down from the sky 
Standing here upon the moon 
I watch it all roll by - all roll by

Standing on the moon 
With nothing else to do 
A lovely view of heaven 
But I'd rather be with you

Standing on the moon 
I see a shadow on the sun 
Standing on the moon 
The stars go fading one by one 
I hear a cry of victory 
And another of defeat 
A scrap of age old lullaby 
Down some forgotten street

Standing on the moon 
Where talk is cheap and vision true 
Standing on the moon 
But I would rather be with you 
Somewhere in San Francisco 
On a back porch in July 
Just looking up to heaven 
At this crescent in the sky

Standing on the moon 
With nothing left to do 
A lovely view of heaven 
But I'd rather be with you - be with you

Standing On the Moon
Grateful Dead

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Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.

It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.


—D.H. Lawrence
Apocalypse

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kindred

Arnhem Land Rock Art, Australia

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Karl Jaspers calls the primal connection that the first people had with the universe Pre-Axial Consciousness. David Suzuki finds this Pre-Axial Consciousness among aboriginal people today as well. 

"Aboriginal people do not believe they end at their skin or fingertips. The earth as mother is real to them, and their history, culture and purpose are embodied in the land. The aboriginal sense of the interconnection of everything in the world is also readily demonstrable and irrefutable scientifically." 

Indeed, the new quantum physics reveals, as Ilia Delio says, that "matter is not composed of basic building blocks but complicated webs of relations. Interconnectedness lies at the core of all that exists." 

—Fr. Richard Rohr

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The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. 

Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. 

Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. 

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compensation, Essays: First Series (1841)

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The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. 

The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. 

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.

—D.H. Lawrence

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energy dances

  

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Now the argument is, well, maybe my perceptions are inaccurate, but somewhere there is accuracy, scientists have it with their instruments. That’s how we can find out what’s really real. But relativity, quantum mechanics, have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. 

We think this is reality. But in philosophy, that’s called naïve realism: “What I perceive is reality.” And philosophers have refuted naïve realism every century for the last 2,500 years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and yet most people still act on the basis of naïve realism.

The notion that ‘reality’ is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like ‘things,’ probably as instant bio-survival cues.

Such ‘things,’ however, dissolve back into energy dances — processes or verbs — when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments.

In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that ‘things’ are constructed by our nervous systems and that ‘realities’ (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy functions.


—Robert Anton Wilson

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The vast marvel is to be alive… 

The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. 

Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. 

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul.

There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

—D.H. Lawrence

The Apocalypse

 

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A thousand times I have ascertained and found it to be true: 

the affairs of this world are really nothing into nothing.

Still though, we should dance.

—Hafiz

 

 

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strange world

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The little river twittering in the twilight,

The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,

            This is almost bliss.

And everything shut up and gone to sleep,

All the troubles and anxieties and pain

            Gone under the twilight.

Only the twilight now, and the soft “Sh!” of the river

            That will last forever.

And at last I know my love for you is here,

I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,

It is large, so large, I could not see it before

Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,

             Troubles, anxieties, and pains.

             You are the call and I am the answer,

             You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,

             You are the night, and I the day.

                         What else—it is perfect enough,

                         It is perfectly complete,

                         You and I.

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

—D.H. Lawrence 1885 – 1930

Bei Hennef

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For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. 

Death in such a case would be only another arrangement. 


—William H. Gass
Omensetter’s Luck 

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