“Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the “parties” we’ve mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism–and who knows what we might attain?” – Hakim Bey
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Hope this finds you well. The next few post will be about concepts around liberation of the human spirit… or at least my takes on it. Anyway, I hope you like this entry!
Best,
Gwyllm
Best Occurrence Of The Week:
I am up the side of a house, and I look up to see a Red Tail Hawk plunge into the tree about 15 feet from me, going after the Jays. It was such a sensory rush, the Red Tail spinning and wheeling through the branches with talons extended as the Jays explode out of the tree shreaking in sheer terror as they fled in different directions. The sky is light blue, and the suns streaks down. A light breeze is blowing as the leaves fall from the tree where chaos and mayhem were but moments before.
I don’t know if the Hawk got any of the Jays, but they were gone for over a day, and quite cautious when they returned…. The neighborhood bullies had been taken down, if for but a day or so… 80)
Into The Zone Part I:
I have been up a ladder for about a week… no really. Painting an exterior in the South East. Wonderful old house, good people, great neighborhood.
As I work, and find my rhythm, I slip into modes of thought not always accessed for yours truly. The thoughts unfolded, concepts build up, break down, mutate and become something else. I entered into a ‘dreaming’, a fugue state. That is not to say I am removed from what I was doing, no as the thoughts percolate upward (or downward) my hands and fore-mind were incredibly engaged; the work flowed and everything glowed with a ‘rightness’ if that is the correct word.
This past week when I was first entering into this state I found myself considering the concept of TAZ… (Temporary Autonomous Zone) I was going over the occasions on which I was part of one. My mind went back over the years… to the Co-Ops, the Parties, The Communes, the Political Actions, to the days and nights entwined with someone I was loving… As I went over the events, happenings and times of wonder I realized that my quest for the PAZ… (Permanent Autonomous Zone) had been a major factor in my make up going back to at least 1966. The seeds go earlier, surely.
I recall sitting with friends and churning the waters of consciousness with discussions of inducing the Utopian Epoch, and what would bring it on, and how we would achieve it. “Ten years, in ten years…. We won’t even have to talk anymore, because everyone will know each others thoughts” said my friend Harry the Buddha. I can see him now, glowing with excitement. Just over the horizon, in all of our young minds then, a shining city. Of course in a year or so, things changed. Some of us died in the struggle, others faded away, and others kept on the best they could…. (more to follow)
On The Menu:
Links I Like
Robin Guthrie – Sparkle
Hakim Bey Quotes
Chaos – Hakim Bey
Ibn al Arabi: Poet & Philosopher
Biography: Ibn al Arabi
Robin Guthrie – Sunflower Stories
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Links I Like;
From Leana: October Forecast!
Mr. Crick’s Letters…
Astral Projection?
Druids Rool!
US Schools More Segregated Today Than The 50′s
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Robin Guthrie – Sparkle
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Hakim Bey Quotes:
“I maintain that (as usual) many sides exist to this issue rather than only two. Two-sided issues (creationism vs darwinism, “choice” vs “pro-life,” etc.) are all without exception delusions, spectacular lies.”
“Turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to the light; show yourselves!”
“Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant–the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past–imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world–despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb–a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture. ”
Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by “conviviality”, by “living together” in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. “True desires” – erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual – are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation.
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Chaos
Hakim Bey
CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.
Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.
Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.
No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.
There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin–your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.
To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age–shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.
Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror–everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.
Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.
Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.
The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they’d call it an act of terrorism–so let’s take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.
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Ibn al Arabi: Poet & Philosopher
When we came together
When we came together
to bid each other adieu
You would have thought that we were
Like a double letter
At the moment of union and embrace.
Even if we are made up
Of a double nature,
Our glances see only
One unified being…
I am absent and therefore desire
Causes my soul to pass away.
Meeting does not cure me
Because it persists both in absence
and in presence.
Meeting her produced in me
That which I had not imagined at all.
Healing is a new ill,
Which comes of ecstasy…
Because as for me, I see a being
Whose beauty increases,
Brilliant and superb
At every one of our meetings.
One does not escape in ecstasy
That exists in kinship
With beauty that continues to intensify
To the point of perfect harmony.
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When My Beloved Appears
When my Beloved appears,
With what eye do I see Him?
With His eye, not with mine,
For none sees Him except Himself.
—
Turmoil in your hearts
Were it not for
the excess of your talking
and the turmoil in your hearts,
you would see what I see
and hear what I hear!
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Wonder
Wonder,
A garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka’ba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Quran.
My creed is Love;
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief,
My faith.
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My heart has become capable of every form
My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols, and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba, and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love, whichever way his camels take. My religion and my faith is the true religion.
We have a pattern in Bishr, the lover of Hind and her sister, and in Qays and Lubna, and in Mayya and Ghaylan.
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Translation Of Desires
At the way stations
stay. Grieve over the ruins.
Ask the meadow grounds,
now desolate, this question.
Where are those we loved,
where have their dark-white camels gone?
Over there,
cutting through the desert haze.
Gardens in a mirage,
you see them,
enlarged to your eye
in the vaporous haze.
They have gone off seeking
Al-’Udhayb,
to drink its water
as cool as life.
I tracked after them.
I asked the East Wind.
Have they set up tents
or sheltered within the Lote Tree’s shade?
She said: I left their encampment
on the sand-tossed plain of Zarud,
the camels, weary
from the long night’s journey, complaining.
They have set up
high-covered pavilions
to shelter beauty
from the mid-day heat.
Get up your camels
and set off seeking
their traces, amber camels
pacing toward them.
When you stop
before the way-marks of Hajir
and cut across its ridges
and hollows,
Their stations will be near.
Their fire will loom before you,
kindling desire
into a raging blaze.
Kneel your camels there.
Don’t fear their lions.
Yearning will reveal them to you
as whelps
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Biography: Ibn al Arabi
Mystic, philosopher, poet, sage, Muhammad Ibn ‘Arabi is one of the world’s great spiritual teachers. Known as Muhyiddin (the Revivifier of Religion) and the Shaykh al-Akbar (the Greatest Master), he was born in 1165 AD into the Moorish culture of Andalusian Spain, the center of an extraordinary flourishing and cross-fertilization of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, through which the major scientific and philosophical works of antiquity were transmitted to Northern Europe. Ibn ‘Arabi’s spiritual attainments were evident from an early age, and he was renowned for his great visionary capacity as well as being a superlative teacher. He travelled extensively in the Islamic world and died in Damascus in 1240 AD.
He wrote over 350 works including the Fusûs al-Hikam , an exposition of the inner meaning of the wisdom of the prophets in the Judaic/ Christian/ Islamic line, and the Futûhât al-Makkiyya, a vast encyclopaedia of spiritual knowledge which unites and distinguishes the three strands of tradition, reason and mystical insight. In his Diwân and Tarjumân al-Ashwâq he also wrote some of the finest poetry in the Arabic language. These extensive writings provide a beautiful exposition of the Unity of Being, the single and indivisible reality which simultaneously transcends and is manifested in all the images of the world. Ibn ‘Arabi shows how Man, in perfection, is the complete image of this reality and how those who truly know their essential self, know God.
Firmly rooted in the Quran, his work is universal, accepting that each person has a unique path to the truth, which unites all paths in itself. He has profoundly influenced the development of Islam since his time, as well as significant aspects of the philosophy and literature of the West. His wisdom has much to offer us in the modern world in terms of understanding what it means to be human.
Ibn Arabi believed in the unity of all religions and taught different prophets all came with the same essential truth.
“There is no knowledge except that taken from God, for He alone is the Knower… the prophets, in spite of their great number and the long periods of time which separate them, had no disagreement in knowledge of God, since they took it from God.”
– Ibn Arabi
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Robin Guthrie – Sunflower Stories