You cannot dissuade someone using logic who is guided by centuries of training if they have never questioned the set of their lives. They are asleep, and willing to continue to do so. To question all the societal memes that they live and abide by would be devastating. One would have to look deep within to ferret out what is an authentic thought, and what is an accepted trope. People mouth homilies all of the time, the truth seems that they would rather live them, and accept them rather than discovering their authentic selves, and living a life of examination and discovery.
These were my thoughts on watching the election process in Alabama. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Moore will not be in the Senate, but what I find sad is the clinging to old forms of thought that are so destructive to the human spirit, and that stand in the way of a better future for those who come after… Still, change occurs though at times it appears to be so glacial.
I know that society needs both the pessimist, and the optimist. I also know that change must be tempered with caution as well. Yet, it is hard to watch the turmoil around us at this time. Never forget, that those that hold different opinions carry a load in their lives as well. Fears, sadness, love, the uncertainty. The best action IMO is to treat everyone with as much love and attention that you can muster. Opinions, politics are the thinnest skin on the onion of self, and being. At the core we all share the divine.
___
So, there is a sizeable issue this time, links, music, thoughts on plant consciousness, Al-Khidr the Green Man, the poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar taken from his “The Conference Of The Birds”… I find the last musical entry incredibly entrancing, and evocative. It is difficult to watch for a bit, but in all it is a fascinating creation.
Talking about creations, check out my calendars for 2018:
Desk Calendar!
Wall Calendar!
Great for gifts, and to keep up with what art I am producing as of late.
I hope your days and nights are sweet.
LOvE,
G
On The Menu:
The Links
Levitation 2018
On Plants…
Al-Khiḍr, the Green and Artistic Spiritual Guide
The Poetry Of Attar
Heilung Krigsgaldr
Just Sayin’
__________________
The Links:
Where Caesar First Tred
I Prefer Ghost…
Is It An Asteroid?
One To The Chest
__________________
Levitation 2018
___________________
On Plants:
“God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.” – Ibn Arabi
Perhaps more than dreams. If, by ingesting a plant, say, Salvia Divinorum (quid method) the plant shows me its view point of being a plant…(yes I have experienced this as perhaps some of you) or ayahuasca, along with certain fungi’s can do something quite similar, you are indeed walking with beings who are aware all around you.
They don’t wag their tails, lick your hands, purr or dance in the sea, but their signatures show on deeper levels.
Gwyllm
The Cognitive Abilities Of Plants…
And if that wasn’t enough… This: Something Really Fascinating Happens When You Give Plants Anaesthetic
Plants having similar reactions to anaesthetics… Who knew?
___________________
I had the privilege of studying under Samuel Lewis for a couple of years before his passing. It was a period of transition for me, from 4th Way School of thought, to Sufism, and Magick. He made the difference in my life with his light, and guidance.
Al-Khiḍr, the Green and Artistic Spiritual Guide (excerpt)
by H. Talat Halman
The prophets Elias and Khadir at the fountain of life, late 15th century. Folio from a khamsa(quintet) by Nizami (d. 1209); Timurid period. Opaque watercolor and silver on paper. Herat, Afghanistan, now at The Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution
In 1925, on the third night of his first retreat, 29-year old Samuel Lewis suddenly felt a presence. Before him came the Sufi sage Khwaja Khiḍr, the Green Master. Khiḍr offered Murshid Sam the choice between the gifts of poetry and music. Murshid chose poetry. Decades later, through the Dances of Universal Peace, he also received the gift of music.
After three consecutive nights of Khiḍr’s visits, Murshid “began writing incessantly” (Lewis 1986: 29-30). And Murshid Sam, whose vigor and vitality in later years challenged his much-younger disciples, wrote that the “proof of the validity” of a visit from Khiḍr “comes first in the physical and mental vigour of the person blessed by Khwaja Khiḍr, exactly in accordance with the traditions” (Lewis 1975: 12).
The great 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz also received the gift of poetry from Khiḍr after a forty-night vigil. In Muslim tradition, Khiḍr is widely known as the guide of Moses and Alexander the Great, a wali (saint), a prophet, and one of four immortals along with Enoch (Idris), Jesus, and Elijah. Murshid Sam described Khiḍr and Elijah as “the two ‘guardian spirits’ of this world and the next” (Lewis 1986: 298). Like the Qur’an’s description of Khiḍr’s gift of mercy (rahman) and direct inner knowing (‘ilm al-ladunni), Elijah heard God’s intimate “still small voice” (I Kg. 19:12).
Murshid also wrote that, according to Qabbalah, Khiḍr is Jethro — the biblical father-in-law of Moses who taught Moses the Name of God in the form “I am that I am” (Lewis 1975: 207). Hazrat Inayat Khan called Khiḍr “the guiding angel of all seeking souls” (Inayat Khan: 1927, 105). Meher Baba reported that on the night St. Francis received his stigmata at Alvernia, Khiḍr visited him and gave him the “touch of grace” that made him a perfect master (Kalchuri: 14, 5011).
Khiḍr’s story stands at the center of the Qur’an. The Prophet Muhammad expanded on the story, further detailing Moses’ journey with Khiḍr. In the Persian Alexander Romances (Iskandar Nama), Khiḍr appears as Alexander’s deputy and cook who gained immortality by drinking the water of eternal life. His name, however spelled and pronounced — al-Khadir, al-Khiḍr, al-Khizr (Arabic), al-Khezr (Farsi), H1z1r (Turkish), or Khidlir and Khizir (Indonesian) — means literally, “the Green”.
Asked by his companions about Khiḍr, the Prophet Muhammad explained that after al-Khiḍr sat on barren land, the ground turned green with vegetation. Khiḍr’s transmission is “green,” and alive. John Matthews describes the archetype of the Green Man as “the spirit of nature … an ancient symbol of nature and fertility,” expressed in the Norse World Tree Yggdrasil, Attis and Adonis, Odin, Osiris, the King of the Wood, and the May King and Harvest King.
Khiḍr brings a gift that Sufis realize as the treasure of gnosis within the heart. Some Sufis teach that we will all meet Khiḍr at least once in our lifetime, that you will recognize him when you shake hands with a white bearded man with no bone in his thumb. In the lore of Sufi saints, Khiḍr sometimes bestows a mantle (khirqa), a primary symbol of Sufi initiation. Nizamuddin ‘Awliya received from Khiḍr a special litany. Rumi’s son Sultan Veled compared Rumi’s transforming relationship with Shams-i Tabrizi to that between Moses and al-Khiḍr.
Khiḍr rescues and protects people in times of danger and distress. He saves the pure in heart from theft, drowning, snakes, and scorpions. In Indian miniatures, Khiḍr travels on top of a large fish, intimating the image of Vishnu’s first avatar, Matsya: the fish that saved the first man, Manu. In a Turkish story, an old white-bearded man hailed a tourist bus and asked the driver to wait while he went to bring his sick grandchild. Minutes passed and the old man did not return. When a passenger came forward, he discovered the driver had died. Everyone realized that the old man was Khiḍr and had saved their lives.
Al-Khiḍr, the Universal Green Man
How does Khiḍr exemplify the universal archetype of the Green Man? Numerous are the stone images of the Green Man that grace household gardens, homes, and churches. Medieval cathedrals feature Green Man faces framed with foliage. Mayday celebrations include Jack-in-the-Green and the green May King and May Queen. (Anderson) St. George and St. Michael’s color is green. The Hindu avatar Rama is green. The Tibetan yogi Milarepa turned green by eating mostly nettles.
Sir Gawain was initiated by the Green Knight. As described by Brian Stone, the character and actions of the Green Knight remind us of Khiḍr:
This on his first appearance he is described successively as a terrifying giant (ll. 137-40), a handsome and well-built knight (ll. 141-6), a weirdly green — and hence, implicitly supernatural — person (ll. 147-50). And on his last appearance, besides all these, he appears as a warm and sympathetic human being (ll. 2333-6), an omniscient confessor who judges with accuracy and compassion, and above all with authority (ll. 2338-99), and finally as a human, subtly diminished by the termination of his supernatural function
Like the Green Knight, Khiḍr is vitriolic in the alchemical sense of being a transforming agent. For example, the green sage Yoda trains Luke Skywalker. Just as Khiḍr challenged Moses, Yoda initially challenged Luke’s aptitude and preparedness for Jedi training (Star Wars V). In a martial arts film co-written by Bruce Lee, The Silent Flute (Circle of Iron), the story of Moses’ journey with al-Khiḍr appears in a martial arts setting. The Moses figure, Cord the Seeker, seeks training from a blind kung-fu master (played by David Carradine). Their journey exactly parallels Khiḍr’s story in the Qur’an.
William Anderson compares an assortment of “Green Men,” including Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysis, and Robin Hood. Like Osiris and Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh’s guide Khiḍr stands where waters grant eternal life. Utnapishtim who dwelt “at the two rivers” instructed Gilgamesh to dive for the plant of immortality, “Never-grows-old” at the bottom of the sea. Like Khiḍr, Utnapishtim’s name means “He who saw life.”
After the Flood, the god Enlil blessed him and his wife and placed them “in the distance at the mouth of two rivers.
Al-Khiḍr, Alchemy, and Psychology
In the Alexander Romance, Khiḍr found the elixir of life in the land of darkness. This land is the alchemical nigredo. Green is also the color of Hermes Trismegistus, who imparted the secret of immortality in both the Emerald Tablet and the Grail Cup (Krater) in the Corpus Hermeticum.
In western Asia, Moslem or Hindu symbolic art shows the Saint, Al Khizr, dressed in a green coat being carried on top of the water by a fish which conveys him over the river of life.
Jung in his main essay on al-Khiḍr writes:
Anyone who gets into that cave [the cave of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a story also related in the Qur’an’s 18th chapter], that is to say into that cave which everyone has within himself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, will find himself involved in an — at first — unconscious process of transformation. By penetrating into the unconscious he makes a connection with his unconscious contents. This may result in a momentous change in personality in the positive or negative sense. The transformation is often interpreted as a prolongation of the natural span of life or as an earnest of immortality. The former is the case with many alchemists, notably Paracelcus (in his treatise De vita longa), and the latter is exemplified in the Eleusinian mysteries.
Thus the story teaches us to find the elixir of life and the gems of wisdom in our shadow. The places that we initially cannot see in our inner journey, can impart creative, volatile, and valuable energy that we can transmute and thereby bear spiritual fruit.
Jung explains that Moses is the ego and Khiḍr is the unconscious, a vast ocean into which the “fish” (Moses’ consciousness) disappeared and reappeared again at that rock — the lapis. In that transformation, Moses had new access to what Semnani called the “al-Khiḍr of your being.”
Because Khiḍr’s knowledge is symbolized by “water,” we learn that this flowing reality cannot be set in stone. Immortality and eternal youth cannot be rigid like rocks. What Khiḍr transmitted gave immortality to Moses and Alexander. Through Khiḍr we receive a gift of immortality — not physically perhaps — but truly collectively, culturally, and spiritually. The Sufi master Sherif Baba described Moses’ journey with Khiḍr as our own journey. Our unconscious, symbolized by the cooked fish, awakens through the revivifying waters of divine love and is transformed into a higher consciousness. Khiḍr is the God-friend who recreates people by intensive relationship and connection and so brings out of us the child of our being, a verdant soul.
Khiḍr and Nature
As trees exhale oxygen, Khiḍr exudes an inspiration of inner knowledge that bears new fruits of wisdom and discernment. As plants turn sunlight into food, so we receive from Khiḍr the light of the eternal garden. Khiḍr’s knowledge is imparted in the way flowers favor the air with their fragrance: a bestowal unseen, but felt and known. Khiḍr represents this renewal of spirit and respect for the earth and creatures. Rabbi Kook wrote of the vegetable world, “Every part of the vegetable world is singing a song and breaking forth a secret of the divine mystery” (Besserman: 1994, 2). That reality is Khiḍr.
Khiḍr’s authority is natural: like nature, he is green and ever-rejuvenating. He is fresh, abundant, stunning, and unpredictable. Khiḍr does not depend on linear hierarchies; he branches out in multiple directions. And like nature, Khiḍr’s lessons include the natural disasters we do not understand: the storms, volcanoes, and earthquakes we cannot or do not want to explain. According to the Prophet Muhammad, it was when Moses thought he was the wisest man on earth that God sent him to learn from Khiḍr.
Khiḍr and Transformation
Al-Khiḍr’s authority is natural, not institutional or hierarchical. What Khiḍr imparts is renewal and rejuvenation. The discovery of Khiḍr’s secret points not to something already there in nature, but to a discovery of what can be created, of what we can do next, of an ultimately alchemical transformation. For example, in 2004 when the Tsunami struck Indonesia, India, and Southeast Asia, the question for most people in its midst was not, “Why did this happen?” but rather, “What can we do now? How can we make life better? What’s possible?”
That’s why in the story of Khiḍr in the Qur’an, his relationship with nature differs from that of other Green Men such as Adonis or Attis or Osiris. Khiḍr represents much more than the mystery — as profound and beautiful as it is — of the dying and resurrecting god. Khiḍr represents a further horizon: nature’s transformational possibility. Khiḍr’s actions do more than justify themselves: they open up new roads, new destinies, new possibilities. Khiḍr imparts lessons in transformation and mediates the experience of death and the possibility of attaining immortality. Further, the story of Khiḍr and Moses models the master-disciple relationship. And the story of Khiḍr and Moses whispers some of the mysteries of predestination and theodicy if we listen.
Nature is not merely a sentimentally beautiful experience; it offers not only soft sweet beauty but also overwhelming majesty. Khiḍr reminds us of this in the way he embodies nature and initiates us into its presence. Pir Vilayat has vividly described al-Khiḍr’s natural initiations:
And the Al-Khiḍr of your soul puts you through terrible tests, puts you through a quagmire of iniquities so you may come out unscathed, puts you through the test of drowning, through the test of fire, through the test of air, and finally through the test of truth.
Here is the initiation of “acts of God,” the overwhelming tsunamis, the raging forest fires, the winds of hurricanes, and all of the stark reality such traumas transition us into.
In the story in the Qur’an, al-Khiḍr practices nature’s qualities of breaking down, killing, and rebuilding to give birth to transformations leading to new fates and new fortunes. Hazrat Inayat Khan quotes a Persian couplet that expresses this: “It is the gardener who knows which plant to rear and which to cut down.”
Like nature, Khiḍr is active, dynamic, and alchemical. Khiḍr is also, as the Alexander Romance hints, like a fire. Khiḍr has passed through the alchemical stages of nigredo, albedo, and rubedo. He has manifested and integrated the elements and energies of earth, water, air, and fire. Khiḍr shows us we must care for nature because — among so many reasons — what Hazrat Inayat Khan calls the “sacred manuscript of nature” is the intimate scripture that inspires fresh, new, “green,” experience for our spirit, soul, and body.
Fariduddin Attar narrates that when the early Sufi master Ibrahim ibn Adham, the former prince of Balkh, learned from “one of the great men of Faith” the Greatest Name of God,” he invoked that name “and immediately he beheld Khiḍr, upon whom be peace.” Thus Murshid Sam wrote of Khiḍr in The Jerusalem Trilogy, quoting from the Messenger Shiva who identifies himself:
Ishvara, Osiris, Asar, Asher,
Variations of the One Holy Name,
Taught to Moses by Khiḍr in the form:
‘Ehyeh asher ehyeh’ – I am Ishvara who was, is, will be,
That One who is the Only-Only-Only,
Forevermore, and on and on, … (Lewis: 1975, 207)
Talat Halman is Assistant Professor of Religion at Central Michigan University where he teaches courses in Islamic Studies and World Religions. This article on the Green Man is derived from a body of work on al-Khiḍr to be published by Fons Vitae as Where Two Seas Meet: The Story of al-Khiḍr and Spiritual Guidance. He holds initiations in the Ruhaniat, the Sufi Order, and Sherif Baba’s Rifa’i-Marufi lineages.
“Al-Khiḍr, the Green and Artistic Spiritual Guide (excerpt)” courtesy: The Sound Journal Feb 2010 issue
__________________
The Poetry Of: Farid ud-Din Attar
Extractions from “The Conference Of The Birds”
The moths and the flame
Moths gathered in a fluttering throng one night
To learn the truth about the candle light,
And they decided one of them should go
To gather news of the elusive glow.
One flew till in the distance he discerned
A palace window where a candle burned —
And went no nearer: back again he flew
To tell the others what he thought he knew.
The mentor of the moths dismissed his claim,
Remarking: “He knows nothing of the flame.”
A moth more eager than the one before
Set out and passed beyond the palace door.
He hovered in the aura of the fire,
A trembling blur of timorous desire,
Then headed back to say how far he’d been,
And how much he had undergone and seen.
The mentor said: “You do not bear the signs
Of one who’s fathomed how the candle shines.”
Another moth flew out — his dizzy flight
Turned to an ardent wooing of the light;
He dipped and soared, and in his frenzied trance
Both self and fire were mingled by his dance —
The flame engulfed his wing-tips, body, head,
His being glowed a fierce translucent red;
And when the mentor saw that sudden blaze,
The moth’s form lost within the glowing rays,
He said: “He knows, he knows the truth we seek,
That hidden truth of which we cannot speak.”
To go beyond all knowledge is to find
That comprehension which eludes the mind,
And you can never gain the longed-for goal
Until you first outsoar both flesh and soul;
But should one part remain, a single hair
Will drag you back and plunge you in despair —
No creature’s self can be admitted here,
Where all identity must disappear.
___
The Lover
‘A lover’, said the hoopoe, now their guide,
‘Is one in whom all thoughts of self have died;
Those who renounce the self deserve that name;
Righteous or sinful, they are all the same!
Your heart is thwarted by the self’s control;
Destroy its hold on you and reach your goal.
Give up this hindrance, give up mortal sight,
For only then can you approach the light.
If you are told: “Renounce our Faith,” obey!
The self and Faith must both be tossed away;
Blasphemers call such action blasphemy —
Tell them that love exceeds mere piety.
Love has no time for blasphemy or faith,
Nor lovers for the self, that feeble wraith.
___
The Nightingale
The nightingale raises his head, drugged with passion,
Pouring the oil of earthly love in such a fashion
That the other birds shaded with his song, grow mute.
The leaping mysteries of his melodies are acute.
‘I know the secrets of Love, I am their piper,’
He sings, ‘I seek a David with broken heart to decipher
Their plaintive barbs, I inspire the yearning flute,
The daemon of the plucked conversation of the lute.
The roses are dissolved into fragrance by my song,
Hearts are torn with its sobbing tone, broken along
The fault lines of longing filled with desire’s wrong.
My music is like the sky’s black ocean, I steal
The listener’s reason, the world becomes the seal
Of dreams for chosen lovers, where only the rose
Is certain. I cannot go further, I am lame, and expose
My anchored soul to the divine Way.
My love for the rose is sufficient, I shall stay
In the vicinity of its petalled image, I need
No more, it blooms for me the rose, my seed.
The hoopoe replies: ‘You love the rose without thought.
Nightingale, your foolish song is caught
By the rose’s thorns, it is a passing thing.
Velvet petal, perfume’s repose bring
You pleasure, yes, but sorrow too
For the rose’s beauty is shallow: few
Escape winter’s frost. To seek the Way
Release yourself from this love that lasts a day.
The bud nurtures its own demise as day nurtures night.
Groom yourself, pluck the deadly rose from your sight.
__________________
Heilung – Krigsgaldr
A Remarkable Video… Watch to the end plz.
__________________
Just Sayin’
