Love Reign

Three for Brigid

Here are three recent poems in honor of the Fourth Annual Brigid in the Blogosphere Poetry Slam.

Partial Address

All souls
this is
by way of invitation
confirmation
and one white stone:

No burden light save self

Holy ancient fire
when dion dys still ate
and raging ageless
angel horde,
a cloud to witness
cacophonyof Pentecost
polyphony and euphony
and you well borne
eugenides myself,
Kristophoro Myself!

-- Copper : Abdal-Ataraxia


Not Not Not Vedant

The one constant is
a tone of coherence
deathless, unthought
a taste perceived and magnified

Whatever becomes
becomes id, becomes Ego, becomes God
no superlative save All, distraction
no moralizing ante-Christ
God is Ego inside-out
only God is Real

Word with God, Word become God
God made flesh, flesh made food
food made God and God made Word
one coherent word
deathless, unthought
a taste perceived and magnified

-- Copper : Abdal-Ataraxia


Observe

Everything seems to be humming along.
There is an unavoidable force in Time that says,
"Let's just hurry, hurry, hurry through the next part."

Maybe that should not be challenged.
Maybe it is mercy,
maybe it is dexterity,
maybe it is Grace.

The bees are meeting in caves and catacombs
feeding on the honey of many seasons
and many strange flowers
and they are almost ready to swarm
for a new home and a new Queen
and none shall cut them down
or contain them.

After the eleventh hour, Witches take the skies
then it's brahma-muhurta and Sunrise.

-- Copper : Abdal-Ataraxia

Ritual for Blessing & Animating Democracy Explained

Peace! I hope to be posting more and more regularly soon. Here's an interesting video from MagickTV of interviews with organizers of a Jan. 19th ritual of blessing in Washington, D.C.. It runs about 16:30.




And here is a much longer video of the inspiring ritual itself:

What happened to the Video

The "Manifest Obama" video that I had posted here is no longer available. It was pulled by its creators after it became a magnet for negative comments after conservative sensationalist (and Mormon) Glenn Beck mentioned it in one of his typically miscontextualizing screeds.

I respect the creator's wish to protect people in the video from the misinformation and false accusations created by Beck (and presumably by a large number of his viewers).

Beck rose to prominence in the wake of America's "War on Terrorism" and is a professional purveyor of fear and cynicism. He seems unable to perceive the video as an expression of prayerful hope and sees it instead as a mingling of messianic spirituality and politics.

That's the height of irony for a believing Mormon! As such, Beck is a good bit deeper in messianic electionism, American exceptionalism, and in religion-meets-politics, than any of the things he criticizes in recent commentary.

Here are some explanations for why it was pulled: one two

Some Problems with the West

[Image available as a poster]

The prevalent Western worldview is hampered by intellectual structures and practices that limit capacity, conceptual imagination, and our ability to adapt to reality.

Here's the first and perhaps most central problem: the West thinks that more data clarifies, that more data narrows explanatory and narrative possibilities. This strikes me as patently absurd.

That sense of narrowing is an illusion, and is often no more than shutting down perception and settling-in to bias. It is not, as advertised, the refinement of objective description; it is not refinement of description in any sense except the narrative sense. Sometimes, one accepts it for safety or for power over others (especially when settled narratives reward collective bias or greed), or because of some pressing expediency. The desire for safety comes from a species of panic (in one later Greek sense) as a profound fear of being overwhelmed by the All.

Postmodern cultural experience and the practical realities of the “information economy” illustrate conclusively that more data does not mitigate narrative or explanatory possibilities. Data proliferates and quickly escapes the capacity of the human mind to hold or understand, bringing a host of contradictions and counterindications, some of which we cannot see and many of which we actively choose not to see. At the neurological level, we--these "I's" who witness and "know"--are connected to the “external” cosmos principally through analogy. Only analogic thinking can reflect its woven nature, in which terms like metonymy and synechdoche are as functionally relevant as the vocabulary of physics (and in practical terms, more so). The magical principle of correspondence asserts that poetic analogy is not merely conceptual, but actual: that resonance, association and similarity are as relevant physically as they are poetically and that they may be more accurate descriptions of cosmology than traditional notions of causation.

Settling in to a specific working narrative is pragmatic, but it’s also deceptive. A narrative that works now is not the only possible narrative, not the only narrative that will work (even to produce material results or explain phenomena), and a narrative that works now may not work tomorrow, even if all that changes is the cultural context or the felt need for the results a given narrative yields.

An inability to see that 100 data yield more narrative and explanatory possibilities than 3 data is a failure of imagination, one that reveals a suppressed or lacking aptitude or an anxious retreat from immensity. Anomalies expand narrative possibility exponentially. Concurrence means only that a tool works well for locating similarities and recurrent synchronicities, but links between data points are always narrative links. Each one of them is conceptually limited by human aptitude, organically and culturally, but in reality is infinitely unlimited and equally connected to all other things. The concept of "degree" reflects narrative and conceptual reality only, and is true only of the developmental inner world.

In its frequently short-sighted technological pragmatism and domination by industry and concepts of “progress” and “mastery,” the West mistakes expediency for knowledge. (As well as the old saws about knowledge for wisdom and wisdom for Truth).

This kind of thinking colors the world mechanistically, and with the help of pharmaceuticals creates “better” workers and better soldiers and more efficient extraction of resources, oblivious in most instances to the reality of interconnection. From this vantage, "The West" is a harnessed horse on a closed track, one small region in the Mind, and something everyone agrees is not a place. Not even in the sense that "North" is a particular point. For East and West, there has never been a ground zero.

Technologically driven knowing pushes itself only until it achieves its objective and maximizes return, usually financial profit or military power. Then it settles. It almost never tracks complex interconnections, nor asks what could be given form if the 200,000 data points assume a different narrative relationship. It is not concerned individual human experience or individualized epistemological inflection. It does not conceptualize “becoming human.” It takes being human for granted, and hence never develops beyond the starting point as a receptive slate for whatever the first narrative is that works. Stuck, and for a lifetime.

Such knowing isn't self-aware when it comes to the actual nature of awareness as narrative. Epistemology is essentially narratology. When we fail to see the reality of complex and paradoxical interconnection--at material and ideational levels—we are extremely culture-bound and miss something central to being fully human: We are very much within a story.

In its rush to “objectivize,” mechanistic knowing usually fails to anticipate, resist or transcend neuro-linguistic programming, which operates in all human symbol systems including sensory perception (which is brain phenomena produced by presumed external stimuli and broken into cognitive units like "sky" and "tree" and "beauty" and narrativized by the internal witness; it is not reality itself), language, symbol and mathematics. The West too frequently confounds the tools of knowing with the knower. We represent Lady Justice with a blindfold, but the attribute would be more accurately offered to Lady Science, at least when she’s looking in the mirror. When the empirical apparatus is interrogated, pure empiricism falls. Our own personal “taints” (or tints) all our observations and all our observations of our observations. Acknowledged or not, the soul will have its say.

Such things as Occam's Razor and the contrivances of formal logic are results-oriented expediencies, culturally validated only by technology (see above) or by collective bias (see above). Ignoring anomalies, hard core Westerners generally go beyond these kinds of cognitive limits only when the thought-structure fails to work or does not work as expected.

Archeology and ancient history also often fall prey to this trap. Anthropology less so, since contemporary methodologies encourage self-awareness and interaction with living subjects and tend to interrogate witnessing biases. I have doctoral-level specializations in the US between 1492 and 1865. The humanities more concerned with remote time periods often amazingly settle on one narrative, even when scholars of much more recent data-filled periods--like twenty years ago, or 250, or 500--acknowledge multiple narrative possibilities. This is pronounced in privileged narratives of Greece and Israel and Egypt, and also in marginal narratives like those of Marija Gimbutas or Martin Bernal or David Frawley. The truth about human epistemology makes such things as "strict reconstruction" (or even "tradition" or racial and national identity) laughable. As a scholar of more recent cultural history, the definitive claims of scholars of the ancient world look about as sophisticated as blackface.

All narratives are houses of cards in constant flux. Imagine that: standing in a dynamic house of cards. In the West, science and scholarship have strong and trustworthy dynamics of generational reconception. People get tenure by finding and selling a new narrative... and by ignoring or pretending that the range of narrative possibility isn't actually infinite. It's the West... we have revolutions, not tradition; we look for experts to manufacture and demonstrate knowledge, rather than self-consciously creating it together, with mutual and egalitarian evaluations of effectiveness.

If something seems like an exclusive and self-evident truth without potential for variation, it means only that I have found the present limit of my imaginative or cognitive or biological powers. Settling for those means settling for limitation and limited tools. It may produce much technology and much change, but it isn't growth.

Others' limitations will vary from my own.

Hermetics, Shamans, a few physicists and a certain category of very influential linguists who are more appropriately called philosophers report that grammar and poetry are better metaphors for how reality works than "law," and that the whole concept of law itself might be reflective of a certain kind of stultifying superstition that ultimately keeps us, individually and collectively, from living richly.

A second major problem with the Western worldview is that in recent generations, it has attacked the principles of similtude and correspondence and attempted to eradicate the traditional languages of magic, religion, poetry and symbol.

The West has said that resemblance is superficial or accidental and by itself is meaningless. (That it has done this even while discovering evolution is a bizarre contradiction that I can't account for). It has done this in spite of the fact that our brains are wired associatively, and we are in essence associative and symbolic beings, literally constituted in self-awareness by a very rich corpus of symbolic associations growing only through resonance. It has done this in defiance of all that is organically human, and has precipitated more alienation from nature and the body than the 1500 years of Christianity that preceded "the West".

I am experientially confident that Western causality is a misperception of reality, and that similitude and correspondence (resonance) are generally more logically valid than causal perception. Cause and effect seem to work within “woven” structures, to be contextualized by an associational reality. Causality is therefore secondary (but not contradictory or irrelevant) to correspondence.

I am analytically confident that linear causality is a limiting and unsustainable misperception. I strongly suspect that the epochal crash of such thoughtforms is the force behind conscious and bodily evolution, and is the psycho-spiritual reality behind the nearly universal mytheme of apocalypse.

We're in a magical world where there is no boundary between mind and matter. I'm going to live more and more richly.

For Navaratri, and in Devotion to Fallen Sadhaks

Ya devi sarva bhutesu, shanti rupena sansitha

ya devi sarva bhutesu, shakti rupena sansthita

ya devi sarva bhutesu, matra rupena sansthita

Namastasyai, namastasyai, namastasyai, namo namaha

To the Goddess who is bodied forth as peace,

To the Goddess who is bodied forth as infinite energy,

To the Goddess who is bodied forth as mother,

I bow to Goddess, I bow to you, I bow to you.

News report of the deaths at Sri Devi's Temple

on Sept. 30, 2008.

May this ghastly prodigy inspire reflection and wisdom.

As the cucumber is released from the vine,

so may they now be free in God/dess.

Mage of the Day

A fun and insightful few minutes. (I will add the comment that magic needn't be as strictly inward as this segment, by itself, implies).

Free Mystic

The most attractive self-name for me—more than Pagan or Witch (both of which I accept and use)—is Free Mystic. I like that better because it’s looser and freer, and because it describes my transcultural sources and my refusal to commit to institution or collective ideation. Dogma and tradition (as institution or role) are things I see as always confining… as things that we reach for to block Spirit when it threatens our accustomed states of being or our partial desires. In practical, interpersonal terms I’m tolerant of any tradition that doesn’t impinge on my freedom, but in personal terms I’m radically iconoclastic. I like tradition as a folk palette, but as structure or ideology or “group think,” I am hostile to tradition. I see only harm in the adoption of borrowed ideas, unless those ideas are borrowed as a wedge or stepping stone. Ideas and practices are limitations, confining and grounding consciousness in a collective that is usually more interested in money (etc) than in the Great Work of becoming conscious. “Free Mystic” expresses my conviction that experience is primary, and that the objective of my spiritual growth is the annihilation of the mind and identification with the limitless All.

At best, it seems to me, tradition is the shell of an egg. It may be developmentally necessary, but if it is, so is leaving it behind. I am a hatchling. I may someday mature to be a Rooster before the Sun… but for now I am a chick randomly-not-randomly pecking for my food and true grit—and the Hen I seek shelter with is very loose in Her parenting. My spirituality no longer depends on community or shared ideas, though I continue to find freedom and support within the loose structures of Reclaiming and Fellowship of Isis, and in the idiosyncratic forms of religious expression I facilitate or teach. The shell has become skeleton or armature that I will carry for life (with modifications), but which also must be parted with. I'm working on not being irreparably bound to my skeleton.

At worst—and most often—tradition is a prison… a collective retreat from the risks and uncertainties of the encounter with Spirit. Tradition is an attempt to control and domesticate Spirit, to render it predictable and consistent. So too is conventional reason. Convention is a false or provisional agreement that must be learned and socialized—a false union. Spirit, however, is the actual experience of actual unity as material and spiritual reality. That actual union isn’t changed by mere ideas, nor by such things as race, class and gender, nor by divisions like Christian and Pagan. It’s always there, always conscious, always full. If convention doesn’t facilitate that actual experience, it’s at best worthless and at worst hostile. For me, articulating something is a way of excreting and disposing of it, putting it to rest, letting it out for a life of its own. I try to put it down and use it as a step.

I have been trying to make religion and spirituality cognate in my mind (after years of separating them), but it’s not taking. I don’t believe it. Rather, the attempt makes me more aware that religion is typically meant to reinforce limitation and confine all aspiration to the narrow streets of the human social world.

I prefer pleasure over pain, but I prefer freedom over confinement. I value wealth and ethics and stability for the reasons that others do—relative, temporal reasons rooted in the limitations of my reason, emotion and senses. But these things are not the point of my existence and do not possess the capacity to satisfy or satiate, and ultimately they are merely a matter of fashionable twists of logic maintained or altered in accordance with perceived self-interest. Social morality and concepts of beauty are entirely malleable, ideationally and biologically. I am not a Hellene.

When I was a teacher, I had a sign on my door that said "Absolute freedom is the image of God" and one in the office that said "Authority is Illusion." I believe those things deeply, and feel both desire and obligation to mention those things (one way or another) when authority is deployed over me. There is no authority that should not be resisted, no authority that is legitimate. I am opposed to institutional secrecy enough that I don't keep secrets. With sexuality and witchcraft, "outing" is sometimes an ethical obligation.

These things can make magic; they can heal the social self and do all sorts of other desirable things. But Kosmos, God and True Self are not only what's desirable. That's only half the Truth. We do not choose--we postpone.

I do not respect tradition-as-dogma nor tradition-as-institution. I think initiatory traditions are rackets. I advise and propagandize against them. I'm against commodification or profiteering on religious/spiritual teaching. I take what works and pass it on. Anything that works from anywhere--ideas are no one's property and I won't treat them as property. Hierachy is de facto illegitimate. The worthy teacher or true guru is an anti-guru; s/he corrals and eats sheep and liberates those who would be free.

I perceive a more valuable wealth within reach, a love that is actual unity, transcending social ethics and embracing all as self, and a stability that cannot be shaken because it is rooted in Conscious Spirit. Material wealth and social stability are not worthy ends in and of themselves, and sought for themselves alone will, I believe, always backfire. Static ease is not the purpose of existence, nor is any one-sided thing like Beauty. The only thing that really must change—that all the kosmos conspires to change—is the scope of selfhood. Everything else serves this, without regard for the passing fancies of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, left and right. The “Beauty” I have seen and seek inheres in all things, including all the things I hold in aversion, all the things I would run from. My body already dwells in a physical kosmos of that kind of Beauty… spirituality is about bringing consciousness along. All the social engineering of religion and politics and education is entirely beside the point.

So my truest passion is around the transformation of consciousness. Practice helps me to remember that all other passions are secondary, tertiary, or even oppositional to truest passion.

Life is short, all is in flux, pain shall always attend pleasure, and death is not the end.

Columbia: Dea Americana

The Queen of Heaven and Earth in Her Emergent American Form.