2018 comes into being after a
strangely mixed year of brave, awaited change and surrounding ominous
happenings—hope and woe. Gladly I recognize in me, a reorienting universal energy,
bārāq, a capacity that flows out of humility
to listen to the universal wisdom that is resident in old and new traditions
("Let one who hears, hear") and a readiness to respond meaningfully
with the gift of life (embodied intentionality), the courage to be and wonder among all that we view and experience
around us.
Mark Jarman lyrically captures this spirit in “Psalm 5”.
Lord of dimensions and the dimensionless,
Wave and particle, all and none,
Who lets us measure the wounded atom,
Who lets us doubt all measurement,
When in this world we betray you
James Baldwin embodied much woe in his bones of experience, learned and preached with his life and writing courageously of the need for wonder and offered to the world the all-important call to each individual—“to know yourself.” “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian [whose] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”
We are doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves
from the world. Yet each one of us is privileged to be stewards of the inner
life, which is accessible only through thought--a proper reverential of
attention. We human beings carry with us a human identity and potential for ongoing
human growth; this requires finding some kind of balance between the privilege
and the doom or the inevitability of carrying within us this incurably painful
human condition—reality as a whole, which Karl Jaspers called “the Encompassing.
Jason Silva is a post-modern philosopher who acts out rhetorically
philological thought as the ancients did. Here he challenges his audience to take
over the cognitive (perceptional) mechanisms to become what it is you are
beholding.
Stewardship
of internal life ultimately means taking control of your movie—this is key to
any and all satisfaction; to invest in immersive experiences that catapult you
into trance that steers/captivates one’s awareness so that you enter a state of
liminality that fuses cognition and dream, the space of poetry, the space of
reverie [transcendence].[3]
This
year’s challenges reveal the ground of being, more fully known, felt, more
stable, feeding the courage to be among the growing circle of influences within
the inner river of life while facing and engaging the outer world more awakened.
For me and you: what kind of habits or practices might cultivate a way of imaginal
wonderment that becomes a bridge between the two worlds, the inner self and the
outer world and turn our minds toward
the good for the sake of self, the other and the planet?
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