Author: Gwyllm

Poetry Alert:

Dale Pendell will be in Portland Oregon tonight at Powell’s Hawthorne Store at 7:30 for a reading from his newest book: Inspired Madness: The Gifts of Burning Man
This is a must-attend event! Be there or be square!

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Lots hopping on Radio Free Earthrites! New Music, and soon an expanded spoken word channel.

Tune In At: http://87.194.36.124:8002/
Awaiting the events of today… Cloudy and cool, finally.
Gwyllm
On The Menu For Today:

Death Of A Carpet

The Earth-Shapers

Poetry For a Hazy Day: Robert Graves

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Death Of A Carpet: We finally retired our 150 year old Baluchistan Carpet. It will soon be appearing in our household as floor pillows, runners etc. We are determined to keep it going. It was a gift to us some 18 years ago, from an interesting friend of my mother, Gene Goullard out of San Francisco. He has long since past on, but his related history of the rug gave it a history that was curious, and unique at the same time. He was a classical musician and you could see the marks rubbed into the rug from the grand piano… He loved to recount the various debaucheries that occurred under the piano, etc. He would go on for hours. Suffice to say we cleaned it thoroughly …
We once had an appraiser come out to look at it. He was a nice Persian gentleman who noted it was past its prime, but gave us the approximate age (hence the 150 years) and he said it had been heavily used (obviously), yet he praised it, and told us of its tribal origins (since forgotten) and he wished us many years of use, which we have had.
It served us well, Rowan learned to walk on it, it has witnessed a families life with all the drama and fun, it has been at the center of many a party, and even as it got ever more threadbare, there was always praise for its beauty. Finally the rips and the bare bits have overwhelmed it. Time for change once again….

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The Earth-Shapers

In Tir-na-Moe, the Land of the Living Heart, Brigit was singing. Angus the Ever-Young, and Midyir the Red-Maned, and Ogma that is called Splendour of the Sun, and the Dagda and other lords of the people of Dana drew near to listen.
Brigit sang:
Now comes the hour foretold, a god-gift bringing .

A wonder-sight.

Is it a star new-born and splendid up springing Out of the night?

Is it a wave from the Fountain of Beauty up flinging Foam of delight?

Is it a glorious immortal bird that is Winging Hither its flight?
It is a wave, high-crested, melodious, triumphant,

Breaking in light.

It is a star, rose-hearted and joyous, a splendour Risen from night.

It is flame from the world of the gods, and love runs before it,

A quenchless delight.
Let the wave break, let the star rise, let the flame leap.

Ours, if our hearts are wise,

To take and keep.
Brigit ceased to sing, and there was silence for a little space in Tir-na-Moe. Then Angus said:
“Strange are the words of your song, and strange the music: it swept me down steeps of air–down–down–always further down. Tir-na-Moe was like a dream half-remembered. I felt the breath of strange worlds on my face, and always your song grew louder and louder, but you were not singing it. Who was singing it?”
“The Earth was singing it.”
“The Earth!” said the Dagda. “Is not the Earth in the pit of chaos? Who has ever looked into that pit or stayed to listen where there is neither silence nor song? “
“O Shepherd of the Star-Flocks, I have stayed to listen. I have shuddered in the darkness that is round the Earth. I have seen the black hissing waters and the monsters that devour each other–I have looked into the groping writhing adder-pit of hell.”
The light that pulsed about the De Danaan lords grew troubled at the thought of that pit, and they cried out: “Tell us no more about the Earth, O Flame of the Two Eternities, and let the thought of it slip from yourself as a dream slips from the memory.”
“O Silver Branches that no Sorrow has Shaken,” said Brigit, “hear one thing more! The Earth wails all night because it has dreamed of beauty.”
“What dream, O Brigit?”
“The Earth has dreamed of the white stillness of dawn; of the star that goes before the sunrise; and of music like the music of my song.”
“O Morning Star,” said Angus, “would I had never heard your song, for now I cannot shake the thought of the Earth from me!”
“Why should you shake the thought from you, Angus the Subtle-Hearted? You have wrapped yourself in all the colours of the sunlight; are you not fain to look into the darkness and listen to the thunder of abysmal waves; are you not fain to make gladness in the Abyss?”
Angus did not answer: he reached out his hand and gathered a blossom from a branch:
he blew upon the blossom and tossed it into the air: it became a wonderful white bird, and circled about him singing.
Midyir the Haughty rose and shook out the bright tresses of his hair till he was clothed with radiance as with a Golden Fleece.
“I am fain to look into the darkness,” he said. “I am fain to hear the thunder of the Abyss.”
“Then come with me,” said Brigit, “I am going to put my mantle round the Earth because it has dreamed of beauty.”
“I will make clear a place for your mantle,” said Midyir. “I will throw fire amongst the monsters.”
“I will go with you too,” said the Dagda, who is called the Green Harper.
“And I,” said Splendour of the Sun, whose other name is Ogma the Wise. “And I,” said Nuada Wielder of the White Light. “And I,” said Gobniu the Wonder-Smith, “we will remake the Earth!”
“Good luck to the adventure!” said Angus. “I would go myself if ye had the Sword of Light with you.”
“We will take the Sword of Light,” said Brigit, “and the Cauldron of Plenty and the Spear of Victory and the Stone of Destiny with us, for we will build power and wisdom and beauty and lavish-heartedness into the Earth.”
It is well said,” cried all the Shining Ones.
“We will take the Four Jewels.”
Ogma brought the Sword of Light from Findrias the cloud-fair city that is in the east of the De Danaan world; Nuada brought the Spear of Victory from Gorias the flame-bright city that is in the south of the Dc Danaan world; the Dagda brought the Cauldron of Plenty from Murias the city that is builded in the west of the De Danaan world and has the stillness of deep waters; Midyir brought the Stone of Destiny from Falias the city that is builded in the north of the De Danaan world and has the steadfastness of adamant. Then Brigit and her companions set forth.
They fell like a rain of stars till they came to the blackness that surrounded the Earth, and looking down saw below them, as at the bottom of an abyss, the writhing, contorted, hideous life that swarmed and groped and devoured itself ceaselessly.
From the seething turmoil of that abyss all the Shining Ones drew back save Midyir. He grasped the Fiery Spear and descended like a flame.
His comrades looked down and saw him treading out the monstrous life as men tread grapes in a wine-press; they saw the blood and foam of that destruction rise about Midyir till he was crimson with it even to the crown of his head; they saw him whirl the Spear till it became a wheel of fire and shot out sparks and tongues of flame; they saw the flame lick the darkness and turn back on itself and spread and blossom–murk-red–blood-red–rose-red at last!
Midyir drew himself out of the abyss, a Ruby Splendour, and said:
“I have made a place for Brigit’s mantle. Throw down your mantle, Brigit, and bless the Earth! “
Brigit threw down her mantle and when it touched the Earth it spread itself, unrolling like silver flame. It took possession of the place Midyir had made as the sea takes possession, and it continued to spread itself because everything that was foul drew back from the little silver flame at the edge of it.
It is likely it would have spread itself over all the earth, only Angus, the youngest of the gods, had not patience to wait: he leaped down and stood with his two feet on the mantle. It ceased to be fire and became a silver mist about him. He ran through the mist laughing and calling on the others to follow. His laughter drew them and they followed. The drifting silver mist closed over them and round them, and through it they saw each other like images in a dream–changed and fantastic. They laughed when they saw each other. The Dagda thrust both his hands into the Cauldron of Plenty.
“O Cauldron,” he said, “you give to every one the gift that is meetest, give me now a gift meet for the Earth.”
He drew forth his hands full of green fire and he scattered the greenness everywhere as a sower scatters seed. Angus stooped and lifted the greenness of the earth; he scooped hollows in it; he piled it in heaps; he played with it as a child plays with sand, and when it slipped through his fingers it changed colour and shone like star-dust–blue and purple and yellow and white and red.
Now, while the Dagda sowed emerald fire and Angus played with it, Mananaun was aware that the exiled monstrous life had lifted itself and was looking over the edge of Brigit’s mantle. He saw the iron eyes of strange creatures jeering in the blackness and he drew the Sword of Light from its scabbard and advanced its gleaming edge against that chaos. The strange life fled in hissing spume, but the sea rose to greet the Sword in a great foaming thunderous wave.
Mananaun swung the Sword a second time, and the sea rose again in a wave that was green as a crysolite, murmurous, sweet-sounding, flecked at the edges with amythest and purple and blue-white foam.
A third time Mananaun swung the Sword, and the sea rose to greet it in a wave white as crystal, unbroken, continuous, silent as dawn.
The slow wave fell back into the sea, and Brigit lifted her mantle like a silver mist. The De Danaans saw everything clearly. They saw that they were in an island covered with green grass and full of heights and strange scooped-out hollows and winding ways. They saw too that the grass was full of flowers–blue and purple and yellow and white and red.
“Let us stay here,” they said to each other, “and make beautiful things so that the Earth may be glad.”
Brigit took the Stone of Destiny in her hands: it shone white like a crystal between her hands.
“I will lay the Stone in this place,” she said, “that y
e may have empire.”
She laid the Stone on the green grass and it sank into the earth: a music rose about it as it sank, and suddenly all the scooped-out hollows and deep winding ways were filled with water–rivers of water that leaped and shone; lakes and deep pools of water trembling into stillness.
“It is the laughter of the Earth!” said Ogma the Wise.
Angus dipped his fingers in the water.
“I would like to see the blue and silver fishes that swim in Connla’s Well swimming here,” he said, “and trees growing in this land like those trees with blossomed branches that grow in the Land of the Silver Fleece.”
“It is an idle wish, Angus the Young,” said Ogma. “The fishes in Connla’s Well are too bright for these waters and the blossoms that grow on silver branches would wither here. We must wait and learn the secret of the Earth, and slowly fashion dark strange trees, and fishes that are not like the fishes in Connla’s Well.”
“Yea,” said Nuada, “we will fashion other trees, and under their branches shall go hounds that are not like the hound Failinis and deer that have not horns of gold. We will make ourselves the smiths and artificers of the world and beat the strange life out yonder into other shapes. We will make for ourselves islands to the north of this and islands to the west, and round them shall go also the three waves of Mananaun for we will fashion and re-fashion all things till there is nothing unbeautiful left in the whole earth.”
“It is good work,” cried all the De Danaans, “we will stay and do it, but Brigit must go to Moy Mel and Tir-na-Moe and Tir-nan-Oge and Tir-fo-Tonn, and all the other worlds, for she is the Flame of Delight in every one of them.”
“Yes, I must go,” said Brigit.
“O Brigit!” said Ogma, “before you go, tie a knot of remembrance in the fringe of your mantle so that you may always remember this place–and tell us, too, by what name we shall call this place.”
“Ye shall call it the White Island,” said Brigit, “and its other name shall be the Island of Destiny; and its other name shall be Ireland.”
Then Ogma tied a knot of remembrance in the fringe of Brigit’s mantle.

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Poetry For a Hazy Day: Robert Graves

The Travellers’ Curse after Misdirection

(from the Welsh)
May they stumble, stage by stage

On an endless Pilgrimage

Dawn and dusk, mile after mile

At each and every step a stile

At each and every step withal

May they catch their feet and fall

At each and every fall they take

May a bone within them break

And may the bone that breaks within

Not be, for variations sake

Now rib, now thigh, now arm, now shin

but always, without fail, the NECK

—
Welsh Incident

‘But that was nothing to what things came out

From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.’

‘What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?’

‘Nothing at all of any things like that.’

‘What were they, then?’

‘All sorts of queer things,

Things never seen or heard or written about,

Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar

Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,

Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,

All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,

All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,

Though all came moving slowly out together.’

‘Describe just one of them.’

‘I am unable.’

‘What were their colours?’

‘Mostly nameless colours,

Colours you’d like to see; but one was puce

Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.

Some had no colour.’

‘Tell me, had they legs?’

‘Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.’

‘But did these things come out in any order?’

What o’clock was it? What was the day of the week?

Who else was present? How was the weather?’

‘I was coming to that. It was half-past three

On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.

The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu

On thrity-seven shimmering instruments

Collecting for Caernarvon’s (Fever) Hospital Fund.

The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,

Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,

Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them

First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,

Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,

Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,

Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward

Silently at a snail’s pace. But at last

The most odd, indescribable thing of all

Which hardly one man there could see for wonder

Did something recognizably a something.’

‘Well, what?’

‘It made a noise.’

‘A frightening noise?’

‘No, no.’

‘A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?’

‘No, but a very loud, respectable noise —

Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning

In Chapel, close before the second psalm.’

‘What did the mayor do?’

‘I was coming to that.’

—

Warning to Children

Children, if you dare to think

Of the greatness, rareness, muchness

Fewness of this precious only

Endless world in which you say

You live, you think of things like this:

Blocks of slate enclosing dappled

Red and green, enclosing tawny

Yellow nets, enclosing white

And black acres of dominoes,

Where a neat brown paper parcel

Tempts you to untie the string.

In the parcel a small island,

On the island a large tree,

On the tree a husky fruit.

Strip the husk and pare the rind off:

In the kernel you will see

Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled

Red and green, enclosed by tawny

Yellow nets, enclosed by white

And black acres of dominoes,

Where the same brown paper parcel –

Children, leave the string alone!

For who dares undo the parcel

Finds himself at once inside it,

On the island, in the fruit,

Blocks of slate about his head,

Finds himself enclosed by dappled

Green and red, enclosed by yellow

Tawny nets, enclosed by black

And white acres of dominoes,

With the same brown paper parcel

Still untied upon his knee.

And, if he then should dare to think

Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,

Greatness of this endless only

Precious world in which he says

he lives – he then unties the string.

The Buddha and all sentinent beings

are nothing but expressions of the one

mind. There is nothing else.

Saw the new Harry Potter film, “The Order of the Phoenix” Thursday. I think it is the best so far, lots of levels. Recommended.
Rain last night, thunder, and wondrous beauty. Cool this morning, a nice break from how it’s been over the last several days. We were watching Errol Flynn in “Captain Blood”…. excellent old film!
Off to work, and a full weekend, and don’t forget:
Dale Pendell

Monday the 16th, 7:30PM Powell’s Books on Hawthorne
In part a nonfiction discussion of the Burning Man festival, in part a poetic romp through Nevada’s Black Rock desert, Dale Pendell’s Inspired Madness: The Gifts Of Burning Man is both an irreverent introduction for those curious about the notorious event and an exhilarating reminiscence for veteran “burners.”

Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

On The Menu:
The Links

A lesson in Karma

Huang Po Quotes & Poems

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The Links:

Check out the Richard Pryor one…

Magic mushroom

Worms…. falling from the sky?

Dog of a ban

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A lesson in Karma

-Robert Anton Wilson
Lao-Tse says (at least in Leary’s translation) that the Great Tao is most often found with parents who are willing to learn from their children. This remark was to cause me considerable mental strain and dilation around this time in our narrative, because my children had become very self-directed adolescents and were getting into occultism with much more enthusiasm and much less skepticism than I thought judicious.
For a few years, we could not discuss these subjects without arguing, despite my attempts to remember good old Lao-Tse and really listen to the kids. They believed in astrology, which I was still convinced was bosh; in reincarnation, which I considered an extravagant metaphor one shouldn’t take literally; and in that form of the doctrine of Karma which holds, optimistically, that the evil really are punished and the good really are rewarded, which I considered a wishful fantasy no more likely than the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell. Worst of all, they had a huge appetite for various Oriental “Masters” whom I regarded as total charlatans, and an enormous disdain for all the scientific methodology of the West.
My own position was identical to that of Aleister Crowley when he wrote:
We place no reliance

On Virgin or Pigeon;

Our method is Science,

Our aim is Religion.
After every argument with one of the kids, I would vow again to listen more sympathetically, less judgmentally, to their Pop Orientalism. I finally began to succeed. I learned a great deal from them.
A “miracle” then happened. I know this will be harder for the average American parent to believe than any of my other weird yarns, but my horde of self-willed and self-directed adolescents began to listen to me. Real communication was established. Even though I was in my 40s and greying in the beard, I was able to talk intelligently with four adolescents about our philosophical disagreements, and our mutual respect for each other grew by leaps and bounds.
This, I think, is the greatest result I have obtained from all my occult explorations, even if the unmarried will not appreciate how miraculous it was.
Luna, our youngest-the one who might have levitated in Mexico and who had her first menstrual period synchronistically on the day Tim Leary was busted in Afghanistantaught me the hardest lesson of all. She had begun to paint m watercolors and everything she did charmed me: it was always full of sun and light, in a way that was as overpowering as Van Gogh.
“What do all these paintings mean?” I asked her one day.
“I’m trying to show the Clear Light,” she said.
Then, returning from school one afternoon, Luna was beaten and robbed by a gang of black kids. She was weeping and badly frightened when she arrived home, and her Father was shaken by the unfairness of it happening to her, such a gentle, ethereal child. In the midst of consoling her, the Father wandered emotionally and began denouncing the idea of Karma. Luna was beaten, he said, not for her sins, but for the sins of several centuries of slavers and racists, most of whom had never themselves suffered for those sins. “Karma is a blind machine,” he said. “The effects of evil go on and on but they don’t necessarily come back on those who start the evil.” Then Father got back on the track and said some more relevant and consoling things.
The next day Luna was her usual sunny and cheerful self, just like the Light in her paintings. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” the Father said finally.
“I stopped the wheel of Karma,” she said. “All the bad energy is with the kids who beat me up. I’m not holding any of it.”
And she wasn’t. The bad energy had entirely passed by, and there was no anger or fear in her. I never saw her show any hostility to blacks after the beating, any more than before.
The Father fell in love with her all over again. And he understood what the metaphor of the wheel of Karma really symbolizes and what it means to stop the wheel.
Karma, in the original Buddhist scriptures, is a blind machine; in fact, it is functionally identical with the scientific concept of natural law. Sentimental ethical ideas about justice being built into the machine, so that those who do evil in one life are punished for it in another life, were added later by theologians reasoning from their own moralistic prejudices. Buddha simply indicated that all the cruelties and injustices of the past are still active: their effects are always being felt. Similarly, he explained, all the good of the past, all the kindness and patience and love of decent people is also still being felt.
Since most humans are still controlled by fairly robotic reflexes, the bad energy of the past far outweighs the good, and the tendency of the wheel is to keep moving in the same terrible direction, violence breeding more violence, hatred breeding more hatred, war breeding more war. The only way to “stop the wheel” is to stop it inside yourself, by giving up bad energy and concentrating on the positive. This is by no means easy, but once you understand what Gurdjieff called “the horror of our situation,” you have no choice but to try, and to keep on trying.
And Luna, at 13, understood this far better than I did, at 43, with all my erudition and philosophy… I still regarded her absolute vegetarianism and pacifism as sentimentality.

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Huang Po Quotes & Poems

Quotes:

Only awake to the One Mind and there is nothing whatever to be attained.
This pure Mind, the source of everything, shines forever and on all with the brilliance of its own perfection. But the people of the world do not awake to it, regarding only that which sees, hears, feels and knows as mind…. If they would only eliminate all conceptual thought in a flash, that source-substance would manifest itself like a sun….

…To awaken suddenly to the fact that your own Mind is the Buddha, that there is nothing to be attained or a single action to be performed – this is the Supreme Way….

People are scared to empty their minds

fearing that they will be engulfed by the void.
What they don’t realize is that

their own mind is the void.
Here it is – right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.
Our original Buddha-Nature is, in highest truth, devoid of any atom of objectivity. It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy – and that is all. Enter deeply into it by awakening to it yourself. That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside. Even if you go through all the stages of a Bodhisattva’s progress towards Buddhahood, one by one; when at last, in a single flash, you attain to full realization, you will only be realizing the Buddha-Nature which has been with you all the time; and by the foregoing stages you will have added nothing to it at all. You will come to look upon those aeons of work and achievement as no better than unreal actions performed in a dream.
This is why the Tathagata said, “I truly attained nothing from complete, unexcelled enlightenment.” He also said: “This Dharma is absolutely without distinctions, neither high nor low, and its name is Bodhi.” It is pure Mind, which is the source of everything and which, whether appearing as sentient beings or Buddhas, or as the rivers and mountains of the world which has form, or as that which is formless, or penetrating the whole universe, is absolutely without distinctions, there being no such entities as selfness and otherness.

—-
Poems:
Enlightenment
When practitioners of Zen fail to transcend

the world of their senses and thoughts,

all they do has no value.

Yet, when senses and thoughts are obliterated

all the roads to universal mind are blocked

and there is no entrance.

The primal mind has to be recognised along with the senses and thoughts.

It neither belongs to them nor is independent of them.

Don’t build your understanding on your senses and thoughts,

yet don’t look for the mind separate from your senses and thoughts.

Don’t attempt to grasp Reality by pushing away your senses

and thoughts.

Unobstructed freedom is to be neither attached not detached.

This is enlightenment.
—

The Real Buddha
People perform a vast number of complex practices

hoping to gain spiritual merit as countless as the grains

of sand on the riverbed of the Ganges:

but you are essentially already perfect in every way.

Don’t try and augment perfection with meaningless practice.

If it’s the right occasion to perform them, let practices happen.

When the time has passed, let them stop.

If you are not absolutely sure that mind is the Buddha,

and if you are attached to the ideas of winning merit from spiritual practices, then your thinking is misguided and not in harmony with the Way.

To practice complex spiritual practices is to progress step by step:

but the eternal Buddha is not a Buddha of progressive stages.

Just awaken to the one Mind,

and there is absolutely nothing to be attained.

This is the real Buddha.

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About Huang Po
“…his words were simple, his reasoning direct, his way of life exalted and his habits unlike the habits of other men. Disciples hastened to him from all quarters, looking up to him as to a lofty mountain, and through their contact with him awoke to Reality. Of the crowds which flocked to see him, there were always more than a thousand with him at a time.”
Thus P’ei Hsiu (pronounced pay shoo), a scholar-official of great learning according to Blofeld, described Huang Po (hwong bo; Japanese: Obaku), whose teachings he recorded for posterity. Blofeld also tells us that P’ei Hsiu was devoted to Huang Po, so we can forgive him if he may have used a little puffery in describing the size of the crowds always in attendance, but his description of the man rings with honest conviction.
Lest you get the impression that Huang Po was mild-mannered, though, you might be interested to know that his teacher, Pai-chang (whose teacher was Ma-tsu), compared him to a tiger in his ferociousness.

Be a bud sitting quietly on the hedge.

Be a smile, one part of wondrous existence.

Stand here. There is no need to depart.

-Thich Nhat Hahn

Very warm in Portland tonight, at 10:40 it is still 85f… got up to 106f today! Yikes. Sweating. Anyway, busy day, lots of things going on!
An early announcement: Dale Pendell will be speaking at Powell’s on Hawthorne this coming Monday evening the 16th of July. I will have more details for you soon.
Dale will be reading from his newest book: ‘Inspired Madness’ which is about the culture of Burning Man… So stay tuned, more info soon!
Our friend Jan who works at Powell’s Hawthorne is very excited, and hopes you all will show up. A good time is assured!

We have had a great turn out for Radio Free Earthrites! Lots of new stuff, and lots of new listeners! Join in!
Ta Ra for now,
Gwyllm
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On the Menu:

The Links

The Quotes

Asanga

Poems of Thich Nhat Thanh…

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The Links:

Unearthing history at ‘prehistoric Glastonbury’

Benedict Builds More Bridges!

The more Greek gods the merrier

Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History

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The Quotes:

“I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.”
“The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.”
“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”
“The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. “
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
“The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.”

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Asanga
Asanga was one of the most famous Indian Buddhist saints, and lived in the fourth century. He went to the mountains to do a solitary retreat, concentrating all his meditation practice on the Buddha Maitreya, in the fervent hope that he would be blessed with a vision of this Buddha and receive teachings from him.
For six years Asanga meditated in extreme hardship, but did not even have one auspicious dream. He was disheartened and thought he would never succeed with his aspiration to meet the Buddha Maitreya, and so he abandoned his retreat and left his hermitage. He had not gone far down the road when he saw a man rubbing an enormous iron bar with a strip of silk. Asanga went up to him and asked him what he was doing. “I haven’t got a needle,” the man replied, “so I’m going to make one out of this iron bar. “Asanga stared at him, astounded; even if the man were able to manage it in a hun-dred years, he thought, what would be the point? He said to himself: “Look at the trouble people give themselves over things that are totally absurd. You are doing something really valuable, spiritual practice, and you’re not nearly so dedi-cated.” He turned around and went back to his retreat.
Another three years went by, still without the slightest sign from the Buddha Maitreya. “Now I know for certain,” he thought “I’m never going to succeed.” So he left again, and soon came to a bend in the road where there was a huge rock, so tall it seemed to touch the sky. At the foot of the rock was a man busily rubbing it with a feather soaked in water. “What are you doing?” Asanga asked. “This rock is so big it’s stopping the sun from shining on my house, so I’m trying to get rid of it.” Asanga was amazed at the man’s indefatigable energy, and ashamed at his own lack of dedication. He returned to his retreat.
Three more years passed, and still he had not even had a single good dream. He decided, once and for all, that it was hopeless, and he left his retreat for good. The day wore on, and in the afternoon he came across a dog lying by the side of the road. It had only its front legs, and the whole of the lower part of its body was rotting and covered with maggots. Despite its pitiful condition, the dog was snapping at passers-by and pathetically trying to bite them by dragging itself along the ground with its two good legs.
Asanga was overwhelmed with a vivid and unbearable feeling of compassion. He cut a piece of flesh off his own body and gave it to the dog to eat. Then he bent down to take off the maggots that were consuming the dog’s body. But he suddenly thought he might hurt them if he tried to pull them out with his fingers, and realized that the only way to remove them would be on his tongue. Asanga knelt on the ground, and looking at the horrible festering, writhing mass, closed his eyes. He leant closer and put out his tongue. The next thing he knew, his tongue was touching the ground. He opened his eyes and looked up. The dog was gone; there in its place was the Buddha Maitreya, ringed by a shimmering aura of light.
“At last,” said Asanga, “why did you never appear to me before?”
Maitreya spoke softly: “it is not true that I have never appeared to you before. I was with you all the time, but your negative karma and obscurations prevented you from seeing me. Your twelve years of practice dissolved them slightly so that you were at last able to see the dog. Then, thanks to your genuine and heartfelt compassion, all those obscurations were completely swept away and you can see me before you with your very own eyes. If you don’t believe that this is what happened, put me on your shoulder and try and see if anyone else can see me.” Asanga put Maitreya on his right shoulder and went to the marketplace, where he began to ask everyone: “What have I got on my shoulder?” “Nothing,” most people said, and hurried on. Only one old woman, whose karma had been slightly purified, answered: “You’ve got the rotting corpse of an old dog on your shoulder, that’s all. “Asanga at last understood the boundless power of compassion that had purified and transformed his karma, and so made him a vessel fit to receive the vision and instruction of Maitreya. Then the Bud-dha Maitreya, whose name means “loving kindness,” took Asanga to a heavenly realm, and there gave him many sublime teachings that are among the most important in the whole of Buddhism.

_______

Poems of Thich Nhat Thanh…

Drink Your Tea
Drink your tea slowly and reverently,

as if it is the axis

on which the world earth revolves

– slowly, evenly, without

rushing toward the future;

Live the actual moment.

Only this moment is life.

—
Looking For Each Other
I have been looking for you, World Honored One,

since I was a little child.

With my first breath, I heard your call,

and began to look for you, Blessed One.

I’ve walked so many perilous paths,

confronted so many dangers,

endured despair, fear, hopes, and memories.

I’ve trekked to the farthest regions, immense and wild,

sailed the vast oceans,

traversed the highest summits, lost among the clouds.

I’ve lain dead, utterly alone,

on the sands of ancient deserts.

I’ve held in my heart so many tears of stone.

Blessed One, I’ve dreamed of drinking dewdrops

that sparkle with the light of far-off galaxies.

I’ve left footprints on celestial mountains

and screamed from the depths of Avici Hell, exhausted, crazed with despair

because I was so hungry, so thirsty.

For millions of lifetimes,

I’ve longed to see you,

but didn’t know where to look.

Yet, I’ve always felt your presence with a mysterious certainty.
I know that for thousands of lifetimes,

you and I have been one,

and the distance between us is only a flash of though.

Just yesterday while walking alone,

I saw the old path strewn with Autumn leaves,

and the brilliant moon, hanging over the gate,

suddenly appeared like the image of an old friend.

And all the stars confirmed that you were there!

All night, the rain of compassion continued to fall,

while lightning flashed through my window

and a great storm arose,

as if Earth and Sky were in battle.

Finally in me the rain stopped, the clouds parted.

The moon returned,

shining peacefully, calming Earth and Sky.

Looking into the mirror of the moon, suddenly

I saw myself,

and I saw you smiling, Blessed One.

How strange!
The moon of freedom has returned to me,

everything I thought I had lost.

From that moment on,

and in each moment that followed,

I saw that nothing had gone.

There is nothing that should be restored.

Every flower, every stone, and every leaf recognize me.

Wherever I turn, I see you smiling

the smile of no-birth and no-death.

The smile I received while looking at the mirror of the moon.

I see you sitting there, solid as Mount Meru,

calm as my own breath,

sitting as though no raging fire storm ever occurred,

sitting in complete peace and freedom.

At last I have found you, Blessed One,

and I have found myself.

There I sit.
The deep blue sky,

the snow-capped mountains painted against the horizon,

and the shining red sun sing with joy.

You, Blessed One, are my first love.

The love that is always present, always pure, and freshly new.

And I shall never need a love that will be called “last.”

You are the source of well-being flowing through numberless troubled lives,

the water from you spiritual stream always pure, as it was in the beginning.

You are the source of peace,

solidity, and inner freedom.

You are the Buddha, the Tathagata.

With my one-pointed mind

I vow to nourish your solidity and freedom in myself

so I can offer solidity and freedom to countless others,

now and forever.

—

A Teacher Looking For His Disciple
I have been looking for you, my child,

Since the time when rivers and mountains still lay in obscurity.

I was looking for you when you were still in a deep sleep

Although the conch had many times echoed in the ten directions.

Without leaving our ancient mountain I looked at distant lands

And recognized your steps on so many different paths.

Where are you going, my child?

There have been times when the mist has come

And enveloped the remote village but you are still

Wandering in far away lands.

I have called your name with each breath,

Confident that even though you have lost your

Way over there you will finally find a way back to me.

Sometimes I manifest myself right on the path

You are treading but you still look at me as if I were a stranger

You cannot see the connection between us in our

Former lives you cannot remember the old vow you made.

You have not recognized me

Because your mind is caught up in images concerning a distant future.

In former lifetimes you have often taken my hand

and we have enjoyed walking together.

We have sat together for a longtime at the foot of old pine trees.

We have stood side by side in silence for hours

Listening to the sound of the wind softly calling us

And looking up at the while clouds floating by.

You have picked up and given to me the firstred autumn leaf

And I have taken you through forests deep in snow.

But wherever we go we always return to our

Ancient mountain to be near to the moon and stars

To invite the big bell every morning to sound,

And help living beings to wake up.

We have sat quietly on the An Tu mountain’ with the

Great Bamboo Forest Master

Alongside the frangipani trees in blossom.

We have taken boats out to sea to rescue the boat people as they drift.

We have helped Master Van Hanh design the Thang

Long capital we have built together a thatched hermitage,

And stretched out the net to rescue the nun Trac Tuyen When!

The sound of The rising tide was deafening

On the banks of The Tien Duong river.

Together we have opened the way and stepped

Into the immense space outside of space.

After many years of working to tear asunder the net of time.

We have saved up the light of shooting stars

And made a torch helping those who want to go home

After decades of wandering in distant places.

But still there have been times when the

Seeds of a vagabond in you have come back to life

you have left your teacher, your brothers and sisters

Alone you go…
I look at you with compassion

Although I know that this is not a true separation

(Because I am already in each cell of your body)

And that you may need once more to play the prodigal son.

That is why I promise I shall be there for you

Any time you are in danger.

Sometimes you have lain unconscious on the hot sands of frontier deserts.

I have manifested myself as a cloud to bring you cool shade.

Late at night the cloud became the dew

And the compassionate nectar falls drop by drop for you to drink.

Sometimes you sit in a deep abyss of darkness

Completely alienated from you true home.

I have manifested Myself as a long ladder and

Lightly thrown myself down

So that you can climb up to the area where there is light

To discover again the blue of the sky and the

Sounds of the brook and the birds.

Sometimes I recognised you in Birmingham,

In the Do Linh district or New England.

I have sometimes met you in Hang Chau, Xiamen, or Shanghai

I have sometimes found you in St. Petersburg or East Berlin.

Sometimes, though only five years old, I have

Seen you and recognized you.

Because of the seed of bodhchita, you carry in your tender heart.

Wherever I have seen you, I have always raised

My hand and made a signal to you,

Whether it be in the delta of the North, Saigon or the Thuan An Seaport.

Sometimes you were the golden full moon hanging

Over the summit of The Kim Son Mountain,

Or the little bird flying over the Dai Laoforest during a winter night.

Often I have seen you

But you have not seen me,

Though while walking in the evening mist your clothes have been soaked.

But finally you have always come home.

You have come home and sat at my feet on our ancient mountain

Listening to the birds calling and the monkeys

Screeching and the morning chanting echoing from the Buddha Hall.

You have come back to me determined not to be a vagabond any longer.

This morning the birds of the mountain joyfully welcome the bright sun.

Do you know, my child, that the white clouds

Are still floating in the vault of the sky?

Where are you now?

The ancient mountain is still there in this

Place of the present moment.

Although the white-crested wave still wants to

Go in the other direction,

Look again, you will see me in you and in every leaf and flower bud.

If you call my name, you will see me right away.

Where are you going?

The old frangipani tree offers its fragrant flowers this morning.

You and I have never really been apart. Spring has come.

The pines have put out new shining green needles

And on the edge of the forest, the wild Plum

Trees have burst into flower.

In one of the great court banquets, everyone was seated according to rank, awaiting the entry of the king. In came a plain, shabby man and took a seat above everyone else. His boldness angered the prime minister, who ordered the newcomer to identify himself. Was he a minister? No, more. Was he the king? No, more. “Are you then God?” asked the prime minister. “I am above that also,” replied the poor man. “There is nothing beyond God,” retorted the prime minister. That nothing,” came the reply, “is me.”

—

Something to start your week with…. I am excited especially by the work of Nina Serrano, I hope you enjoy her poetry as much as I do…
Gwyllm
—-

On The Menu:

The Links

Tales of Mulla Naruddin

Poetry: Nina Serrano (with a great article link!)

Art: Persian Minatures…

_______
The Links:

Metaphysical China: Buddha/Mary calling?

In Turkey: UFO over Didim

Babies not as innocent as they pretend

Brain Research, Nanotech and the Military

Iraqi Insurgent Propaganda Posters

___________
Tales of Mulla Naruddin
Mulla Nasruddin is about to engage in litigation. He says to his lawyer: ‘If I sent the judge 100 gold pieces, what effect would that have on the ruling of my case?’
The lawyer is horrified. ‘You do that,’ he says, ‘and he’ll find against you for sure – you might even be arrested for attempted bribery!’
– ‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure, I know that judge!’
The case was heard, and the Mulla won.
‘Well,’ said the lawyer, ‘you did get justice after all, you can’t deny that…
‘Mind you, said Nasruddin, ‘the gold pieces also helped…’
‘You mean you actually sent the judge money?’ howled the lawyer.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mulla Nasruddin – ‘but of course, I sent the gold in the other man’s name!”

—

It is 4am and Nasruddin leaves the tavern. He walks the town aimlessly. A police officer stops him and says, “Why are you out wandering the streets this late at night?” “Sir,” replied Nasruddin, “If I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago.”

—

Alone in the Desert (retold by Nasruddin)
Ah, it was a time of bustling cities and pressing obligations! After a time, I grew weary of the pace and needed a respite, a quiet time in which to gather my inner peace again. So I took the barest necessities and went into the desert, to be alone in the endless space under the vast sky, and to have only the stars and the sand for company.
It was a blessed time. Each day I awoke before the sun, and fell asleep to the light of shooting stars. I prayed at the appointed times and meditated early and late. I slept more soundly than I ever slept before, and woke refreshed and happy. The peace began to grow like a clear pool in my heart.
I was sleeping one night when I heard a sound. Is it not true that a tiny sound so often heralds great occurences? I heard the sound of a scratching on my tent. Perhaps a desert rat, or the wind. I opened my eyes, and all was dark. I peered into the darkness, and dimly discerned a shape barely outlined in the faint starlight that permeated the cloth of the tent. It was a man, stealthily entering.
I didn’t want to intrude; his concentration seemed to be intense. Besides, I was a little curious, so I lay and watched. He apparently planned to rob me of all my possessions, not knowing I had only brought the barest necessities. He rooted around for a few moments, and stood up. I could see he had a good load on his back. In the faint light I could just discern both of my table lamps and my golf clubs.
He exited the tent, and I could hear him depositing the booty on the ground a little distance away. Just as I thought, he returned for more. He was a little longer the second time, but when he stood, I saw he was carrying my grandfather clock. When he picked up my color television, it was the last straw.
I jumped up and followed him out of the tent.
“Stop!” I cried. He froze in his tracks. Slowly, with trembling limbs, he set his load on the ground, and turned.
“I am lost!” he stammered. “I was trying to find my way and stumbled on this tent.”
“And decided to take everything in it?” I asked.
“You have caught me.” He hung his head in shame. “I am at your mercy. I have stolen, and I must pay the price.”
I looked at him with what I hoped was a piercing gaze. “We have no magistrates here, save that I was once a mulla. We do have common sense and compassion.”
He looked at me wonderingly. I went on. “I see by your garb you are a poor man, and by the doll showing from your pocket that you are a family man.”
“I am,” he replied. “We have fallen on hard times.”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t make them harder, young man,” I said. “Where I come from, if we do a job, we do it one hundred percent. You have been sloppy, and have not completed your task. You forgot this.” And I handed him the small bag of gold I always keep at the foot of my bed.
He looked at me dumfounded. “What do you mean, effendi?”
“I mean this is your most fortunate day,” I replied. “I have just this night renounced ownership of all my possessions, and returned them to their rightful owner. Do you know who that is?”
“Allah?” he asked, weakly.
“But of course!” I cried, warming to my subject. “All these goods are not mine; they belong to Allah, and are at the disposal of everyone. So you see, young man, by the greatest stroke of fortune, on this night, of all nights, in this tent of all tents, you did not steal, because the goods belonged to you already. Now are you going to take the gold or not?”
The young man was silent for a moment, then fell on his knees.
“Oh, great shaikh! You are beyond all wisdom! I have never heard anything so wise or so compassionate. You are the most wise and generous of all men! I repent of my misdeeds, and throw myself on your mercy. Please take me as your disciple, and teach me your profound philosophy.”
“Ah, I am pleased with you, my son.” I replied. “You can never earn more than a bachelor’s degree with me, because I am a bachelor.”
He looked up at me , wondering what nonsense this was. And surely, wisdom and nonsense are often difficult to distinguish.
“I will take you as my companion and teach you what I can. You may share my tent. Now that you have unburdened me of these possessions, there is plenty of room!”
So that is how I met Tekka. He has since become a good and loyal friend, as I am to him.
Peace be upon you; I must now depart.

___________
Poetry: Nina Serrano

Poets in San Francisco

(A legend about Anais Nin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
It feels good to write poems in San Francisco

But it would be better if someone

wanted to read listen and talk about poems

in San Francisco.
There is a place where poets meet and love each other

Once I thought it was San Francisco

but when I got there their coffee houses turned into dress stores.
I think the place where poets meet

lies in an inner space between

The ribs the lungs and hurting loneliness.
A poet fills his bags with rose petals

and empties it on the head

of another poet.
Her hair is full of petals.
There love poems rhymed and metered bloom dirty plume and festoon

and in that moment of raining flowers

is the place I want to be.

—
The past
Sometimes the past slams the door in your face

Even if you phone first to say that you are coming

Even if you politely bring a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy

It’s no matter to the impervious past

that doesn’t care about furture consequences

because they already happened

The past turns its back and leaves me pounding on its portals

My cries echo in the dust.

—
Visiting the Hometown
Fifty years ago she’d been a woman

And I a little girl

But on this day we both walked as grandmothers

through the familiar east side streets

It used to be the poor and workaday part of town

fifty years ago

But now the shops, the stalls, the cafes and crowds

Make it the happening hood

The town changed as much as we

Only our love stayed the same.

—

Also, don’t miss this article….

The Assassination of a Poet: Memories of Roque Dalton

—-

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

-Salvador Dali

Late Afternoon… hot but full of beauty. Golden light streaming through the windows, playing in shadows in the yard. A moment of suspension, a moment of summertime grace.
On the Menu

The Links

Celtic Tales: The Devil’s Mill

Quotes & Poetry: Fredrico Garcia Lorca

Art: Salvador Dali
This edition is dedicated to Roberto Venosa who is having an opening of his art at:
F E N A R I O · G A L L E R Y

881 Willamette St | Eugene, OR 97401 | 541.687.9333
This evening at 6:00PM until 9:00PM (the show runs 7/6 – 8/2 )
If in Eugene or close by, check it out and tell Roberto and Martina I say Hi!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

________
The Links:

jam band fan or taliban?

The bizarre sponge that’s floating in outer space

DNA reveals Greenland’s lush past

‘Serpent’ stones unearthed

_________

________

Celtic Tales: The Devil’s Mill
Beside the River Liffey stands the picturesque ruins of a mill, overshadowed by some noble trees, that grow in great luxuriance at the water’s edge. Here, one day, I was accosted by a silver-haired old man that for some time had been observing me, and who, when I was about to leave the spot, approached me and said: “I suppose it’s after takin’ off the ould mill you’d be, sir?”
I answered in the affirmative.
“Maybe your honour id let me get a sight iv it,” said he.
“With pleasure,” said I, as I untied the strings of my portfolio, and drawing the sketch from amongst its companions, presented it to him. He considered it attentively for some time, and at length exclaimed:
“Throth, there it is, to the life–the broken roof and the wather-coorse; ay, even to the very spot where the gudgeon of the wheel was wanst, let alone the big stone at the corner, that was laid the first by himself;” and he gave the last word with mysterious emphasis, and handed the drawing back to me with a “thankee, sir!” of most respectful acknowledgment.
“And who was ‘himself,” said I, “that laid that stone?” feigning ignorance, and desiring to “draw him out,” as the phrase is.
“Oh, then, maybe it’s what you’d be a stranger here?” said he
“Almost,” said I.
“And you never hear tell of L–’s mill,” said he, “and how it was built?”
“Never,” was my answer.
“Throth, then, I thought young and ould, rich and poor, knew that–far and near.”
“I don’t, for one,” said I; “but perhaps,” I added, bringing forth some little preparation for a lunch that I had about me, and producing a small flask of whisky–” perhaps you will be so good as to tell me, and take a slice of ham, and drink my health,” offering him a dram from my flask, and seating myself on the sod beside the river.
“Thank you kindly, sir,” says he; and so, after “warming his heart,” as be said himself, he proceeded to give an account of the mill in question.
“You see, sir, there was a man wanst, in times back, that owned a power of land about here – but God keep us, they said he didn’t come by it honestly, but did a crooked turn whenever ’twas to sarve himself–and sure he sould the pass, and what luck or grace could he havw afther that?”
“How do you mean be sold the pass?” said I.
“Oh, sure your honour must have head how the pass was sould, and he bethrayed his king and counthry.”
“No, indeed,” said I.
“Och, well,” answered my old informant, with a shake of the head, which he meant, like Lord Burleigh in the Critic, to be very significant, “it’s no matther now, and I don’t care talkin’ about it; and laist said is soonest mended–howsomever, he got a power of money for that same, and lands and what not; but the more he got, the more he craved, and there was no ind to his sthrivin’ for goold evermore, and thirstin’ for the lucre of gain.
“Well, at last, the story goes, the divil (God bless us!) kem to him, and promised him hapes o’ money, and all his heart could desire, and more too, if he’d sell his soul in exchange.”
“Surely he did not consent to such a dreadful bargain as that?” said I.
“Oh, no, sir,” said the old man, with a slight play of muscle about the corners of his mouth, which, but that the awfulness of the subject suppressed it, would have amounted to a bitter smile–” oh, no, he was too cunnin’ for that, bad as he was–and he was bad enough, God knows–he had some regard for his poor sinful sowl, and he would not give himself up to the divil, all out; but the villian, he thought he might make a bargain with the ould chap, and get all he wanted, and keep himself out of harm’s way still; for he was mighty cute–and throth, he was able for Ould Nick any day.
“Well, the bargain was struck, and it was this-a-way: The divil was to give him all the goold ever he’d ask for, and was to let him alone as long as he could; and the timpter promised him a long day, and said ‘twould be a great while before he’d want him, at all, at all; and whin that time kem, he was to keep his hands aff him, as long as the other could give him some work be couldn’t do.
“So when the bargain was made, ‘Now,’ says ‘the Colonel to the divil, ‘give me all the money I want.’
“‘ As much as you like,’ says Ouid Nick. ‘How much will you have?’
“You must fill me that room,’ says he, pointin’ into a murtherin’ big room, that he emptied out on purpose–’you must fill me that room,’ says be, ‘up to the very ceilin’ with goolden guineas.’
“‘And welkim,’ says the divil.
“With that, sir, he began to shovel in the guineas into the room like mad; and the Colonel towld him, that as soon as he was done, to come to him in his own parlour below, and that he would then go up and see if, the divil was as good as his word, and had filled the room with the goolden guineas. So the Colonel went downstairs, and the ould fellow worked away as busy as a nailer, shovellin’ in the guineas by hundherds and thousands.
“Well, he worked away for an hour and more, and at last he began to get tired; and he thought it mighty odd that the room wasn’t fillin’ fasther. Well, afther restin’ for a while, he began agin, and he put his shouIdher to the work in airnest; but still the room was no fuller, at all, at all.
“‘Och! bad luck to me,’ says the divil; ‘but the likes of this I never seen,’ says he, ‘far and near, up and down–the dickens a room I ever kem across afore,’ says he, ‘I couldn’t cram while a cook would be crammin’ a turkey, till now; and here I am,’ says he ‘losin’ my whole day, and I with such a power o’ work an my hands yit, and this room no fuller than if I began five minutes ago.’
“By gor, while he was spakin’, be seen the hape o’ guineas in the middle of the flure growing littler and littler every minit; and at last they wor disappearing, for all the world, like corn in the hopper of a mill.
“Ho! ho!’ says Ould Nick, ‘is that the way wid you,’ says he; and with that he run over to the hape of goold–and what would you think, but it was runnin’ down through a great big hole in the flure that the Colonel made through the ceilin’ in the room below; and that was the work he was at afther he left the divil, though he purtended he was only waitin’ for him in his parlour; and there the divil, when he looked down through the hole in the flure, seen the Colonel, not content with the two rooms full of guineas, but with a big shovel throwin’ them into a closet a one side of him as fast as they fell down. So putting his head through the hole, he called down to the Colonel:
“‘Hillo! neighbour,’ says he.
“The Colonel look up, and grew as white as a sheet when he seen he was found out, and the red eyes starin’ down at him through the hole.
“‘Musha, bad luck to your impudence!’ says Ould Nick; ‘is It sthrivin’ to chate me you are,’ says he, ‘you villain?’
“Oh! forgive me this wanst,’ says the Colonel, ‘and upon the honour of a gintleman,’ says he, ‘I’ll never–’
“‘Whisht! whisht! you thievin’ rogue,’ says the divil, ‘I’m not angry
with you, at all, at all; but only like you the betther, bekase you’re so cute. Lave off slaving yourself there,’ says he, ‘you have got goold enough for this time; and whenever you want more, you have only to say the word, and it shall be yours at command.’
“So, with that the divil and he parted for that time; and myself doesn’t know whether they used to meet often afther or not; but the Colonel never wanted money, anyhow, but went on prosperous in the world–and as the saying is, if he took the dirt out o’ the road, it id turn to money wid him; and so, in coorse of time, he bought great estates, and was a great man entirely–not a greater in Ireland, throth.”
Fearing here a digression on landed interest, I interrupted him to ask how he and the fiend settled their accounts at last?
“Oh, sir, you’ll hear that all in good time. Sure enough it’s terrible, and wondherful it is at the ind, and mighty improvin’ – glory be to God!”
“Is that what you say,” said I, in surprise, ” because a wicked and deluded man lost his soul to the tempter?”
“Oh, the Lord forbid, your honour! but don’t be impatient, and you’ll hear all. They say, at last, after many years of prosperity, that the old Colonel got stricken in years, and he began to have misgivin’s in his conscience for his wicked doin’s, and his heart was heavy as the fear of death came upon him; and sure enough, while he had such mournful thoughts, the dlvii kern to him, and tould him he should go meld hiss.
“Well to be sure the ould man was frekened, but he plucked up his courage and his cuteness, and towld the divil, in a bantherin’ way, jokin’ like, that he had partic’lar business thin, that he was goin’ to a party, and hoped an ould friend wouldn’t inconvaynience him, that a-way–”
“Well,” said I, laughing at the “put off” of going to a party, “the devil, of course would take no excuse, and carried him off in a flash of fire?”
“Oh, no, sir,” answered the old man, in something of a reproving, or, at least, offended tone – ” that’s the finish, I know very well, of many a story such as we’re talkin’ of, but that’s not the way of this, which is thruth every word, what I tell you.”
“I beg your pardon for the interruption,” said I.
“No offince in life, sir,” said the venerable chronicler, who was now deep in his story, and would not be stopped.
“Well, sir,” continued he, “the divil said he’d call the next day, and that he must be ready; and sure enough, in the evenin’ he kem to him; and when the Colonel seen him, he reminded him of his bargain that as long as he could give him some work he couldn’t do, he wasn’t obleeged to go.
“‘That’s thrue,’ says the divil.
“‘I’m glad you’re as good as your word, anyhow,’ says the Colonel.
“‘I never bruk my word yit,’ says the ould chap, cocking up his horns consaitedly–’ honour bright,’ says he.
“‘Well, then,’ says the Colonel, ‘build me a mill, down there by the river,’ says he, ‘and let me have it finished by to-morrow mornin’.’
“‘Your will is my pleasure,’ says the ould chap, and away he wint; and the Colonel thought he had nick’d Ould Nick at last, and wint to bed quite aisy in his mind.
“But, jewel machree, sure the first thing he heerd the next mornin’ was, that the whole counthry round was runnin’ to see a fine bran-new mill, that was an the riverside, where, the evenin’ before, not a thing at all, at all but rushes was standin’, and all, of coorse, woudherin’ what brought it there; and some sayin ’twas not lucky, and many more throubled in their mind, but one and all agreein’ it was no good; and that’s the very mill forniust you, that you were takin’ aff and the stone that I noticed is a remarkable one–a big coign-stone–that they say the divil himself laid first, and has the mark of four fingers and a thumb an it, to this day.
“But when the Colonel heerd it, he was more throubled than any, of coorse, and began to conthrive what else he could think iv, to keep himself out iv the claws of the ould one. Well he often heerd tell that there was one thing the divil never could do, and I dar say you beard it too, sir–that is, that he couldn’t make a rope out of the sands of the sae; and so when the ould one kem to him the next day and said his job was done, and that now the mill was built, he must either tell him somethin’ else he wanted done, or come away wid him.
“So the Colonel said he saw it was all over wid him; ‘but,’ says he,’ I wouldn’t like to go wid you alive, and sure, it’s all the same to you, alive or dead?’
“‘Oh, that won’t do,’ says his frind; ‘I can’t wait no more,’ says he.
“‘I don’t want you to wait, my dear frind,’ says the Colonel; “all I want is, that you’ll be plazed to kill me before you take me away.’
“‘With pleasure,” says Ould Nick.
“‘But will you promise me my choice of dyin’ one partic’lar way?’ says the Colonel.
“‘Half a dozen ways, if it plazes you,’ says he.
“‘You’re mighty obleegin’, says the Colonel; ‘and so,’ says he, ‘I’d rather die by bein’ hanged with a rope made out of the sands of the sae,’ says he, lookin’ mighty knowin’ at the ould fellow.
“‘I’ve always one about me,’ says the divil, ‘to obleege my frinds,’ says he; and with that he pull out a rope made of sand, sure enough.
“‘Oh, it’s game you’re makin’,’ says the Colonel, growin’ as white as a sheet.
“‘The game is mine, sure enough,’ says the ould fellow, grinnn’, with a terrible laugh.
“‘That’s not a sand-rope at all,’ says the Colonel.
“‘Isn’t it?’ says the divil, hittin’ him acrass the face with the ind iv the rope, and the sand (for it was made of sand, sure enough) went into one of his eyes, and made the tears come with the pain.
“‘That bates all I ever seen or heerd,’ says the Colonel, sthrivin’ to rally, and make another offer–’ is there anything you can’t do?’
“‘Nothin’ you can tell me,’ says the divil,’ ‘so you may as well lay, off your palaverin’, and come along at wanst.’
“‘Will you give me one more offer?’ says the Colonel.
“‘You don’t deserve it,’ says the divil, ‘but I don’t care if I do;’ for you see, sir, be was only playin’ wid him, and tantalising the ould sinner.
“‘All fair,’ says the Colonel, and with that he ax’d him could he stop a woman’s tongue.
“‘Thry me,’ says Ould Nick.
“‘Well, then,’ says the Colonel, ‘make my lady’s tongue be quiet for the next month, and I’ll thank you.’
“‘She’ll never throuble you agin,’ says Ould Nick; and with that the Colonel heerd roarin’ and cryin’, and the door of his room was throwin’ open, and in ran his daughter, and fell down at his feet, telling him her mother had just dhropped dead.
“The minit the door opened, the divil runs and hides himself behind a big elbow-chair; and the Colonel was frekened almost out of hi
s siven sinses, by raison of the sudden death of his poor lady, let alone the jeopardy he was in himself, seein’ how the divil had forestall’d him every way; and after ringin’ his bell, and callin’ to his servants, and recoverin’ his daughter out of her faint, he was goin’ away wid her out o’ the room, whin the divil caught hould of him by the skirt of the coat, and the Colonel was obleeged to let his daughter be carried out by the servants, and shut the door afther them.
“‘Well,’ says the divil, and he grinn’d and wagg’d his tail, and all as one as a dog when he’s plaz’d–’ what do you say now?’ says he.
“‘Oh,’ says the Colonel, ‘only lave me alone antil I bury my poor wife,’ says he, ‘and I’ll go with you then, you villian,’ says he.
“‘Don’t call names,’ says the divil; ‘you had better keep a civil tongue in your head,’ says he; ‘and it doesn’t become a gintleman to forget good manners.’
“Well, sir, to make a long story short, the divil purtended to let him off, out of kindness, for three days, antil his wife was buried; but the raison of it was this, that when the lady, his daughter, fainted, be loosened the clothes about her throat, and in pulling some of her dhrees away, he tuk off a gould chain that was an her neck, and put it in his pocket, and the chain had a diamond crass on it, the Lord be praised! and the divil darn’t touch him while he had the sign of the crass about him.
“Well, the poor Colonel, God forgive him! was grieved for the loss of his lady, and she had an iligant berrin, and they say that when the prayers was readin’ over the dead, the ould Colonel took it to heart like anything, and the word o’ God kem home to his poor sinful sowl at last.
“Well,’ sir, to make a long story short, the ind if it was that for the three days o’ grace that was given to him the poor deluded ould sinner did nothin’ at all but read the Bible from mornin’ till night, and bit or sup didn’t pass his lips all the time, he was so intint upon the holy Book, but sat up in an ould room in the far ind of the house, and bid no one disturb him an no account, and struv to make his heart bould with the words iv life; and sure it was somethin’ strinthened him at last, though as the time drew nigh that the inimy was to come, he didn’t feel aisy. And no wondher! And, by dad! the three days was past and gone in no time, and the story goes that at the dead hour o’ the night, when the poor sinner was readin’ away as fast as he could, my jew’l! his heart jumped up to his mouth at gettin’ a tap on the shoulder.
“‘Oh, murther!’ says he. ‘Who’s there?’ for he was afeard to look up.
“‘It’s me,’ says the ould one, and he stood right forninst him, and his eyes like coals o’ fire lookin’ him through, and he said, with a voice that a’most split his ould heart: ‘Come!’ says he.
“‘Another day!’ cried out the poor Colonel.
“‘Not another hour,’ says Sat’n.
“‘Half an hour?’
“‘Not a quarther,’ says the divil, grinnin’, ‘with a bitther laugh. ‘Give over your readin’, I bid you,’ says he, ‘and come away wid me.’
“‘Only gi’ me a few minits,’ says he.
“‘Lave aff your palavering, you snakin’ ould sinner,’ says Sat’n. ‘You know you’re bought and sould to me, and a purty bargain I have o’ you, you ould baste,’ says he, ‘so come along at wanst,’ and he put out his claw to ketch him; but the Colonel tuk a fast hould o’ the Bible,’ and begg’d hard that he’d let him alone, and wouldn’t harm him antil the bit o’ candle that was just blinkin’ in the socket before him was burned out.
“‘Well, have it so, you dirty coward!’ says Ould Nick, and with that he spit an him.
“But the poor ould Colonel didn’t lose a minit–for he was cunnin’ to the ind–but snatched the little taste o’ candle that was forninst him out o’ the candlestick, and puttin’ it an the holy Book before him, he shut down the cover of it and quinched the light. With that the divil gave a roar like, a bull, and vanished in a flash o’ fire, and the poor Colonel fainted away in his chair; but the sarvants heerd the noise–for the divil tore aff the roof o’ the house when he left it–and run into the room, and brought their master to himself agin. And from that day out he was an althered man, and used to have the Bible read to him every day, for be couldn’t read himself any more, by raison of losin’ his eyesight when the divil hit him with the rope of sand in the face, and afther spit an him–for the sand wint into one eye, and he lost the other that-away, savin’ your presence.
“So you see, sir, afther all, the Colonel, undher heaven, was “too able for the divil, and by readin’ the good Book his sowl was saved, and, glory be to God! isn’t that mighty improvin’?”

________
Garcia Lorca: Quotes and Poetry
“Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.”

The Quotes:
“Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness.”
“In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.”
“New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world’s greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.”
“The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.”
“To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”

___________
The Poetry….
Ode to Salvador Dali

A rose in the high garden you desire.

A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.

The mountain stripped bare of Impressionist fog,

The grays watching over the last balustrades.
The modern painters in their white ateliers

clip the square root’s sterilized flower.

In the waters of the Seine a marble iceberg

chills the windows and scatters the ivy.
Man treads firmly on the cobbled streets.

Crystals hide from the magic of reflections.

The Government has closed the perfume stores.

The machine perpetuates its binary beat.
An absence of forests and screens and brows

roams across the roofs of the old houses.

The air polishes its prism on the sea

and the horizon rises like a great aqueduct.
Soldiers who know no wine and no penumbra

behead the sirens on the seas of lead.

Night, black statue of prudence, holds

the moon’s round mirror in her hand.
A desire for forms and limits overwhelms us.

Here comes the man who sees with a yellow ruler.

Venus is a white still life

and the butterfly collectors run away.
–
Cadaqués, at the fulcrum of water and hill,

lifts flights of stairs and hides seashells.

Wooden flutes pacify the air.

An ancient woodland god gives the children fruit.
Her fishermen sleep dreamless on the sand.

On the high sea a rose is their compass.

The horizon, virgin of wounded handkerchiefs,

links the great crystals of fish and moon.
A hard diadem of white brigantines

encircles bitter foreheads and hair of sand.

The sirens convince, but they don’t beguile,

and they come if we show a glass of fresh water.

–
Oh Salvador Dali, of the olive-colored voice!

I do not praise your halting adolescent brush

or your pigments that flirt with the pigment of your times,

but I laud your longing for eternity with limits.
Sanitary soul, you live upon new marble.

You run from the dark jungle of improbable forms.

Your fancy reaches only as far as your hands,

and you enjoy the sonnet of the sea in your window.
The world is dull penumbra and disorder

in the foreground where man is found.

But now the stars, concealing landscapes,

reveal the perfect schema of their courses.
The current of time pools and gains order

in the numbered forms of century after century.

And conquered Death takes refuge trembling

in the tight circle of the present instant.
When you take up your palette, a bullet hole in its wing,

you call on the light that brings the olive tree to life.

The broad light of Minerva, builder of scaffolds,

where there is no room for dream or its hazy flower.
You call on the old light that stays on the brow,

not descending to the mouth or the heart of man.

A light feared by the loving vines of Bacchus

and the chaotic force of curving water.
You do well when you post warning flags

along the dark limit that shines in the night.

As a painter, you refuse to have your forms softened

by the shifting cotton of an unexpected cloud.
The fish in the fishbowl and the bird in the cage.

You refuse to invent them in the sea or the air.

You stylize or copy once you have seen

their small, agile bodies with your honest eyes.
You love a matter definite and exact,

where the toadstool cannot pitch its camp.

You love the architecture that builds on the absent

and admit the flag simply as a joke.
The steel compass tells its short, elastic verse.

Unknown clouds rise to deny the sphere exists.

The straight line tells of its upward struggle

and the learned crystals sing their geometries.

–
But also the rose of the garden where you live.

Always the rose, always, our north and south!

Calm and ingathered like an eyeless statue,

not knowing the buried struggle it provokes.
Pure rose, clean of artifice and rough sketches,

opening for us the slender wings of the smile.

(Pinned butterfly that ponders its flight.)

Rose of balance, with no self-inflicted pains.

Always the rose!

–
Oh Salvador Dali, of the olive-colored voice!

I speak of what your person and your paintings tell me.

I do not praise your halting adolescent brush,

but I sing the steady aim of your arrows.
I sing your fair struggle of Catalan lights,

your love of what might be made clear.

I sing your astronomical and tender heart,

a never-wounded deck of French cards.
I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.

I sing the small sea siren who sings to you,

riding her bicycle of corals and conches.
But above all I sing a common thought

that joins us in the dark and golden hours.

The light that blinds our eyes is not art.

Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.
Not the picture you patiently trace,

but the breast of Theresa, she of sleepless skin,

the tight-wound curls of Mathilde the ungrateful,

our friendship, painted bright as a game board.
May fingerprints of blood on gold

streak the heart of eternal Catalunya.

May stars like falconless fists shine on you,

while your painting and your life break into flower.
Don’t watch the water clock with its membraned wings

or the hard scythe of the allegory.

Always in the air, dress and undress your brush

before the sea peopled with sailors and ships.

—
Adam
A tree of blood soaks the morning

where the newborn woman groans.

Her voice leaves glass in the wound

and on the panes, a diagram of bone.
The coming light establishes and wins

white limits of a fable that forgets

the tumult of veins in flight

toward the dim cool of the apple.
Adam dreams in the fever of the clay

of a child who comes galloping

through the double pulse of his cheek.
But a dark other Adam is dreaming

a neuter moon of seedless stone

where the child of light will burn.

—
Debussy
My shadow glides in silence

over the watercourse.
On account of my shadow

the frogs are deprived of stars.
The shadow sends my body

reflections of quiet things.
My shadow moves like a huge

violet-colored mosquito.
A hundred crickets are trying

to gild the glow of the reeds.
A glow arises in my breast,

the one mirrored in the water.

—-

“The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer — they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”

-Ken Kesey

I meant to get this out on the 4th, but life got in the way. We had a great 4th, at John Gunn’s as usual…. A mixture of people the veritable melting/mixing pot. Bulgarians, Russians, Brits, Oklahomans, Acupuncturist, you name it. I ran into Jan from Powell’s book store, who I have known for some 14 years, but didn’t know that John knew… Lots of giggles, fireworks and people in various states of consciousness. The youngest was 16 month old Calvin with a Mohawk haircut, to Doris (John’s Mom) in her 80′s. A great day and evening…
On The Menu:

Ken Kesey Quotes

Video Goodness

Timothy Leary and his Psychological H-Bomb

Poetry: Allen Ginsberg For A Sunny Afternoon

Art: Gwyllm Llwydd
Have a good one!
Gwyllm

________________

Ken Kesey Quotes:
“I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”
“Take what you can use and let the rest go by”
“You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.”
“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”
“When people ask what my best work is, it’s the bus. I thought you ought to be living your art, rather than stepping back and describing it.”
“If Shakespeare were working right now, he wouldn’t be working with a quill pen. He would be working with whatever the cutting edge of theatrical drama would be. And this is where literature is headed.”
“Everywhere I go, I feel the hunger for people wanting to be part of a ritual.”
“Fascism wants Baptism coast to coast.”
“Goodness is something that is about to happen. It is by virtue of its nature it will happen.”

________________
Video Goodness For Ya All!
From Victoria: Flying Humanoids Filmed Over Mexican Skies

_______________
_______________
Guernica – Vancouver Film School (VFS)

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_______________
_______________
From Peter: Annual Budd Bay Mud Race….

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________________

(illustration from G. Llwydd’s ‘Indras’ Web’)
Timothy Leary and his Psychological H-Bomb

By Robert Anton Wilson

From an Robert Anton Wilson article circa 1964…

The future may decide that the two greatest thinkers of the 20th Century were Albert Einstein who showed how to create atomic fission in the physical world and Timothy Leary who showed how to create atomic fission in the psychological world. The latter discovery may be more important than the former; there are some reasons for thinking that it was made necessary by the former.
Nuclear fission of the material universe has created an impasse which is not merely political but ideological, epistemological, metaphysical. As Einstein himself said, atomic energy has changed everything but our habits of thought and until our habits of thought also change we are going to drift continually closer to annihilation. Timothy Leary may have shown how our habits of thought can be changed.
After the outburst of unfavorable publicity about Dr. Leary in the mass magazines in November and December 1963, most readers presumably know who Timothy Leary is and what he has been doing.
He is the man who, together with Dr. Richard Alpert, conducted several experiments at Harvard on “psychedelic” (mind-altering) chemicals; as a result of these experiments, Dr. Leary pronounced some very shocking and “radical” ideas at various scientific meetings, and attempted to implement these ideas by setting up an organization through which these mind-changing chemicals could be legally made available to whomever wanted them.
When the authorities found out what Dr. Leary was attempting, the laws were quickly changed to make the distribution of these chemicals a government monopoly, and Dr. Leary and Dr. Alpert were removed from their positions at Harvard.
Leary and Alpert now live, with an “extended family” of 22 others, in an old estate in Millbrook, New York, and I drove up there on a recent week-end to get their side of the story and find out what their present plans are.

–

Let me admit that several of my best friends have been kicked out of various university positions, like Leary and Alpert, for thinking independent thoughts, the one crime never permitted in an American university. I found Leary and Alpert the least embittered of any of these expelled heretics that I have ever met.
”Harvard was right,” Leary says calmly. “We were planning to leave anyway, before they asked us to. We believe in every man’s right to play his own game, but he must contract with others as to where and when the game should be played, what the rules are, and so forth. Nobody has the right to inflict his game on others. We don’t believe, for instance, that a baseball team has the right to charge out onto a football field where a game is in progress and start their own game and get in everybody else’s way. Harvard had a verbal game, and we’ve got a non-verbal game. Obviously, we have to find our own field.”
The “extended family” mentioned above is part of Leary’s game. Criticisms of the restricted, authoritarian mold of the patriarchal family have been around for about a hundred years now, such criticisms coming equally vehemently from Marxists, Reichians, anarchists and Borsodians. Leary, instead of merely criticizing the patriarchal-authoritarian family game, has started his own libertarian and decentralized family game.
The extended family at Millbrook consists of Dr. Leary and his town children, Dr. Alpert, Dr. Ralph Metzer and his wife and children, a jazz musician and his wife and five children, a Negro family, and one or two others. Various visitors are continually coming and going – among them Catholic priests, psychologists, anthropologists, beatniks, ex-convicts who became friends of Leary’s during his work in the prisoner rehabilitation field, Buddhist monks, etc. – and a sign immediately inside the front door of the main house tells you:
Like other games, the visiting game is best played when the parties involved have an explicit contract as to the roles each shall play and the over-all rules.

If you are an invited guest, please contact the member of the family who invited you.
If you are uninvited, please restrict your visit to one hour and remain here until one of us can be with you to show you about.

–

The Millbrook community is on an estate of 5,000 acres and includes twenty small cottages as well as the two castle-like main houses. The “family” remains in the bigger of the two main houses, except when somebody wants to withdraw for a while for meditation, writing, or just to escape other people’s games.
”We have our own transcendental games, which are just as much of a hang-up as the conventional social games,” Dr. Alpert told me, with a wide grin. “When it gets too gamey for somebody, out to the cottage he goes.”
Leary was already playing an interview game when I arrived – Dr. Roger Wescott, the anthropologist-poet-libertarian-epigramatist-linguist-semanticist, was making a tape with Dr. Leary, so my wife and I wandered around examining the house. It was the Frankenstein’s Castle sort of place that rich families used to build back in the 19th Century, but finished in very modern style.
There were few paintings, but lots of collages – one that I particularly remember was a psychedelic collage made up of photos of William Burroughs, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and other distinguished experimenters with chemical consciousness-expansion, together with sensational headlines about these chemicals, and the formulas for these chemicals; another was a really wild and way-out thing featuring a score of nude gals from Playboy interspersed with Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and other meditative oriental figures.
Dr. Alpert joined us and we began chatting about the reactions of various groups to psychedelic research. Alpert admitted that he had never read any Oriental philosophy until after his first experiences with LSD and psilocybin (the two principal mind-enlarging chemicals.)
”I was a logical positivist,” he said, “and all Oriental thought seemed primitive and irrational to me. But after my first trans-ego experience with psilocybin I realized that a lot of their religious thought was really a very apt description of this type of consciousness-expansion.”
Dr. Leary, meanwhile, had escaped from Dr. Wescott’s interview-game and was plunged into a game that seemed to be even more enjoyable to him: baseball. Watching him belt the ball with great zest and considerable skill for his 43 years, I recalled his famous comparison of baseball and psychotherapy in his explosive essay, “How to Change Behavior”:
In terms of the epistemology and scientific method employed, the ‘game’ of baseball is superior to any of the so-called behavioral sciences. Baseball officials have classified and they reliably record molecular behavior sequences (the strike, the hit, the double-play, etc.) Their compiled records are converted into indices most relevant for summarizing and predicting behavior (R.B.I, runs batted in; E.R.A, earned run average, etc.) Baseball employs well-trained raters to judge those rare events which are not obviously and easily coded. These raters are known as umpires.
When we move from behavior –science to behavior-change, we see that baseball experts have devised another remarkable set of techniques for bringing about the results which they and their subjects look for: coaching. Baseball men understand the necessity for sharing time and space with their learners, for setting up role models, for feedback of relevant information to the learner, for endless practice of the desired behavior.
…Baseball is a clean and successful game because it is seen as a game…The nationality game it is treason not to play, (and it is treason not to play), the racial game, the religious game, and that most treacherous and tragic game of all, the game of individuality, the ego game.

–

When I was able to lure Dr. Leary back into another interview-game, we retired to the kitchen with a Catholic monk, who was also trying to interview Dr. Leary, and my wife made some coffee. I asked Dr. Leary how he happened to adopt the game model for his scientific papers on human behavior – did he acquire it from sociologist Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, from mathematician von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, or was it just in the air in behavioral sciences these days?
“Well, it’s been in the air for quite a while,” he said, “and I may have used it once or twice in the old days, but it really came home to me after my first psychedelic experience.” This occurred on vacation in Mexico, where an anthropologist game him one of the “magic mushrooms” which the Indians say “allows a man to see God.”
Leary knew that the mushroom contained the alkaloid, psilocybin, described by psychiatrists as a “psychototomimetic” (insanity-producer) or “hallucinogenic” (hallucination-producer). Curious, he ate it and waited to see what would happen. For four hours, his mind “whiled around in some strange universe outside of my ego.” Nothing in all his psychological training could explain or even verbalize the nature of this experience.
He had been teaching academic psychology for over ten years and practicing as a therapist with disturbed individuals for eight years, but he suddenly realized that there were aspects of the human consciousness which Western science had never described, explained or even investigated.
”I kept searching for words to describe what had happened,” he told me, “and finally I remembered the game model and I said: ‘The space game came to an end, then the time game came to an end, and then the Timothy Leary game came to an end.’”
While the game metaphor is very evocative of the after-effect of the experience, in which one sees very clearly the arbitrary nature of the social roles people play, I personally prefer, in describing the experience itself, my own atomic fission metaphor. The ego, the psychological individuality of man, is literally blown to atoms. The decentralized consciousness which remains is described as “union with God” by Western mystics, as “the blessed void” by Eastern mystics, and as “schizophrenic lunacy” by dogmatic old-school materialists. Because this experience has usually been associated with religion and sometimes with very superstitious religion, a large portion of the scientific community prefers the third description and regards Dr. Leary’s work with considerable hostility.
The typical psychedelic experience – and here I shall attempt to describe it in neutral terminology – seems to consist of four stages.
First there is a gradual disorientation, accompanied sometimes by nausea and sometimes by anxiety. Psychedelic chemicals seem to act, primarily, on the colloidal structure of the living protoplasm; the action of both nerves and muscles depends upon whether the colloids are expanding toward sol-state or contracting toward gel-state.
The psychedelics seem to lead to an expansion, which means that the muscles lose a great deal of their chronic tension (everybody in our society is defending himself muscularly as well as psychologically) and the nerves transmit more information.
In the second stage, the new relaxation and new information begin to be accepted by the body, and no longer cause nausea and anxiety. At this point, new perceptions break through – some of them probably hallucinatory, some of them probably not. You typically see colors brighter, hear music clearer, see motions in a new esthetic way; you may also see something as odd as the alcoholic’s pink elephant.
In the third stage, hallucinations give way to the unstructured perceptions of infancy or idiocy: space and time break down into arbitrary patterns inside yourself which you no longer have the energy to project onto the world (through all this, which burns up considerable energy, you are getting tireder and tireder.) At the end of this stage, with a strong psychedelic, the ego pattern itself is an abstraction which you no longer have the energy to hold onto as “reality.”
Through both the hallucinatory and transcendental phases of the experience, the body is in a peculiar ecstasy which may, possibly, be our natural state before social conventions fouled us up, or may be an artificial creation of the chemicals.
Finally, in the fourth phase, the ego gradually re-establishes itself, space and time reappear, the ordinary socially-defined “reality” restructures itself. But you are never again able to believe that this social “reality” is all of reality or that your ego is all of you.
Actually there is nothing very “mystical” (in the pejorative sense of that word) about Dr. Timothy Leary. Many subjects have reported, after psychedelic experiences, that they achieved “telepathy”, or that their “astral body” left their “physical body” or similar spiritualistic claims. Dr. Leary is rigidly empirical about such matters. He ahs devised an experiment which might shed some light on the “telepathy” claim, and he is trying to devise an experiment that would test the “astral body” claim, but he will not offer an opinion until the experiments are repeatedly performed.
Questioning him at great length on these matters, I discovered in him a genuine and vehement distaste for opinion in scientific matters. He will keep his mouth shut until he has an experience to report. Indeed, any question I asked him on a matter which had not yet been experimentally explored by himself or some other scientist led him inevitably, not into an opinion, but into a suggestion as to what sort of experiment might shed some light on the subject. Buckminster Fuller, in my experience with him, has that type of mind; most other scientists, in spite of aiming for it, do not really have it.
The game-model, like the models of modern physics, is similar in structure to the events it seeks to explain; that is, it is offered as a model, not as “the thing-in-itself.” Modern science more and more recognizes that there is no thing-in-itself. “The map is not the territory,” as Korzybski used to say. The value of the game model in describing, analyzing, predicting, and changing human behavior is that it lends itself – much more than Freud’s “ego,” “id,” “censor,” etc. or academic psychology’s “stimulus” and “response” – to a joint personal-and-interpersonal framework.
A man plays his own personal games, but he plays them according to socially-learned rules.
”Even the catatonic,” Leary likes to point out, “is playing a socially-learned game: the withdrawn ‘crazy’ person, with all sorts of socially-learned ritual ‘crazy’ gestures; and his game achieves its object, which is to get other people to treat him as a withdrawn ‘crazy’ person and ignore him most of the time. In a mental hospital, the catatonics are very successful in getting the staff to play this game according to these rules.” Leary also points out how the paranoiac easily draws others into his game of “you reject me all the time.
Leary applies the game model to all human behavior except for random gestures, physiological reflexes and instinctual movements. All other human movements, he points out, follow “highly systematized sequences,” and each of these highly systematized sequences embodies a socially-learned game, which is artificial, tribal, and arbitrary.
Roman Catholicism is a game in which you make certain ritual gestures, splash yourself with water on certain occasions, refuse certain foods on certain occasions, etc.
Prison is a behavior-change game with four teams – cons, guards, administration, and psychotherapists – and Leary regards it as one of our most tragic games because all four teams have different goals.
Freudian psychotherapy is another behavior-change game, involving only two players, with rigidly prescribed rules; in this case, although the goals of the two players are different, they
do not sharply collide as in the prison game.

—

The ego-game, which is usually a one-upsmanship game, is the game least likely to be seen as a game by the players of it, unless – through chemicals, through the abnormal breathing exercises of Buddhism, through stroboscopic lights, or through some traumatic experience – they achieve the non-game perspective of a trans-ego awareness.
Dr. Leary’s baseball analogy, quoted earlier, has sharpened his eye for precision in goal-planning. When he started his prisoner-rehabilitation project at Massachusetts State prison, he discarded all of the vaguely-worded traditional goals of “psychotherapy,” “socialization,” “increased maturity,” etc., and set a very simple measurable goal. He was dealing with 37 convicts who were due for parole within a year. His goal was defined as “keeping the cons on the street.” The measurement was simple: one year after release, “Where are the bodies of the cons in space-time?” If most of them are back in prison, as most cons usually are one year after release, Leary’s behavior-change game would have failed its goal.
One year after release, 75% of Leary’s cons were out on the streets, 25% were back in prison. The usual rate on discharged cons is exactly the reverse, 75% back in stir, 25% still outside. His behavior-change game had shown considerable promise.
At this point, however, Leary was discharged from Harvard, others were put in charge of the prison project, and more traditional psychotherapy games were instituted. A year later, most of the cons were back in the joint again. “Society didn’t really like the results of our game,” Leary told me philosophically. “Most people are still hung up on the blame-game, the punishment-game, the monotheism-game and the cops-and-robbers game. They didn’t like seeing the cons start learning new games.”
One of the many things that made Leary appear as a shady character around Cambridge was that his first experiment in an “extended family” there included several of the ex-cons, as well as – horrors—a beatnik with long womanish hair. The neighbors complained. Leary once wrote in a scientific paper, “The convicts are no longer subjects to me. They are my brothers.” This kind of thing just doesn’t go over in the world of academic psychology.
Actually, Leary had started to abandon the dichotomy of therapist-and-patient, researcher-and-subject even before he got interested in psychedelics. It occurred to him that this game forced psychology into an authoritarian mold which, although useful in explicating the typical behavior of individuals in our authoritarian society, did not indicate all the potentials of humanity.
He began such unorthodox approaches as calling the “subject” a “research associate” and seeing to it that he was treated that way; having a group of subjects – pardon, research associates – give a test to a group of psychology graduate students before the students gave the test to them; asking the research associates to tear up a questionnaire and write down what they thought was important about what had happened; and tearing down the separation between authoritarian scientist and obedient subject in every other conceivable way.

—

By the time he got to the prisoner rehabilitation program, he had arrived at such an anarchistic standpoint – anarchistic in the etymological sense of non-authoritarian, not in the pejorative sense of chaotic – that most of the time the convicts were giving instruction and even orders to many of the graduate psychology students in the project.
Leary’s behavior-change game involves three stages: (a) a preparation in which the persons who are trying to learn new games are taught everything presently known about psychedelic chemicals and their effects, including the opinions of those who do not see any beneficial value in these chemicals; (b) several sessions in which various persons partake of the chemicals and explode their egos – this always begins with the psychologists, so that the rehabilitation group is not asked to take any “risks “ that the coaches haven’t taken first; (c) Re-training.
In this last stage, Leary eschews most Freudian and traditional therapy and takes a common-sense approach very similar to Dr. Albert Ellis’ “rational therapy.”
The coaches use traditional baseball methods on the trainees: setting up role models for the new games, rehearsing the trainees in the new games, feeding back corrections of errors, practice of the desired behavior.
”We’ve now got to the point,” Dr. Leary told me, “of analyzing every game into its nine components. These components are Roles, Rules, Rituals, Goals, Language, Values, Strategies, Recurrent Sequences of Movements, and Characteristic Space-Time Locations. The last two are the easiest to observe, record, and analyze. If you want to know what games a man is playing, share space-time with him, see the flow, flow, flow of his movements during several 24-hour periods. Then you can begin analyzing what Roles he is playing, what Strategies he uses to reach his Goals, etc. An unhappy man is either playing a game he doesn’t fully understand or is playing games that are intrinsically unprofitable.”
What games is Dr. Leary himself playing these days?
”This is a sabbatical year,” he told me. “Dick (Dr. Alpert) and I are writing a couple of books, taking stock, thinking things over. We – the whole family here – are engaged in ego-transcendence games. We’re trying to find out, in a small experimental community, how much of the non-game perspective of the psychedelic experiences can be carried over into daily life.”
”We’ve already found one of the great dangers,” Dr. Alpert put in. “There’s a spiritual one-upsmanship game, too. ‘My ego-loss experience was more oceanic, or more cosmic, than yours.’ All the great Eastern mystical traditions are aware of this, and have gimmicks for counteracting it. We’re studying all of their games for carrying ego-transcendence into ordinary life.”
I asked Leary about the supposed dangers of the psychedelic chemicals – the great bugaboo being that occasional paranoiac or schizophrenic behavior results from these chemicals, and that some have claimed that such psychotic damage can be permanent.
Leary emphasized again that, in his research, over 90% of all volunteers have had “good” experiences, and that “bad” experiences are caused by the authoritarian doctor-patient game which some researchers have force on their subjects. Given in a libertarian, humanistic context, the chemicals almost always produce the ego-transcending experience, and, when something unpleasant does occur, it is always temporary.
”Psychologists are always dragging people into small rooms,” he said, “giving them test papers to fill out, and generally enforcing their own game on them. With psychedelics, this just doesn’t work. All that the poor guy becomes aware of, as his consciousness expands, is that he’s on the weak end of an authoritarian relationship. Magnified, as these chemicals magnify things, that feeling becomes paranoia. It’s the same with that other dread that people have, the fear that these chemicals can be used for seduction by unscrupulous persons. It just doesn’t work. You give LSD to a girl and try to seduce her and she’ll see you as a conspirator, which is just what you are. She might even see you as a Wolf or a Devil and start screaming.”
All the time Dr. Leary was speaking to me there was a strange sort of contact between us. I have felt this previously with a few people who have successfully gone through Reich’s peculiar physical-psychiatric therapy, and with three Japanese Zen teachers I used to know, and with very few others.
Dr. Leary is not afraid to touch you, psychologically, and he is not afraid of being touched. There are no walls around his person. My wife also commented on this after we left. Leary also has the kind of weary, patient eyes that some Chinese and Japanese Buddhas have. At one point, he admitted to me that, before he really understood how to use psychedelics, he had 20 paranoiac experiences (and 150 “good” ones): the paranoias may well have taught him as much as the ecstasies. I think he could say even more sincerely than Freud, “Nothing human is alien to me.”
Lately Leary has been experimenting with literary methods of conveying the feel of a psychedelic experience on the printed page. He finds great promise in the permutation-and-combination method of William S. Burroughs, who, in The Soft Machine and The Exterminator, takes a page of his own prose, a newspaper story, a page of Shakespeare, a poem by Rimbaud, etc. cuts them into pieces, shuffles, and copies down the result. The same pieces are reshuffled, and a second, and third, and maybe a fourth combination is tried. Then a few more pieces are thrown in, and the shuffling starts again. (The results of this are far less chaotic than one would imagine. Burroughs has created a prose of truly poetic, and hypnotic, fascination.)

—

In telling of his own experiments with this method of composition, Leary subtly began imitating Burroughs, and his face took on the embittered squint of the photos of Burroughs I have seen: a remarkable unconscious empathy. I remarked that, “Sick as he is, Burroughs is our greatest writer since Joyce.” Leary said quietly, “Oh, I don’t think he’s sick.”
The Catholic monk, who had gathered from our previous conversation that Burroughs is a homosexual ex-confidence man and morphine addict who killed his common-law wife while trying to shoot an apple off her head, smiled gamely and asked me for the names of Burroughs’ books so he could read them.
Later, Leary was talking of scientific objectivity in psychology. “The way they’ve always gone about it, their objectivity is completely subjective,” he said. “They design the experiment and the ‘subject’ is trapped in their little grooves and runs right down the track to the point where they want him to land. All they’re doing is getting out of an experiment what they feed into it. I said at a psychologist’s convention that Gautama Buddha was the greatest psychologist of all time, and they were shocked.”
I had one last question before I left. “Some games just aren’t worth playing. Nowadays, the war game is one that may kill us all. Do you think your work can help teach human beings how to give that game up and learn a new game?”
Timothy Leary’s handsome Irish face looked tired and patient and I knew he had heard that question several hundred times. “I certainly hope so,” he said. Then he grinned, and told me about Allen Ginsberg, the time Leary gave him LSD in an experiment. “He tried to call Kennedy on the phone, to persuade him and Khrushchev to try it. He was sure it would save the world.” Timothy Leary looked sad and tired again. “I would like to hope so,” he said.
Driving home, my wife said to be suddenly, “It used to bug me that I never met Freud or Einstein. Well, now I can tell my grandchildren that I met Timothy Leary.”
Allen Ginsberg,Tim Leary & Ralph Metzner -1964

___________________

Poetry: Allen Ginsberg For A Sunny Afternoon

Haiku (Never Published)

Drinking my tea

Without sugar-

No difference.
The sparrow shits

upside down

–ah! my brain & eggs
Mayan head in a

Pacific driftwood bole

–Someday I’ll live in N.Y.
Looking over my shoulder

my behind was covered

with cherry blossoms.
Winter Haiku

I didn’t know the names

of the flowers–now

my garden is gone.
I slapped the mosquito

and missed.

What made me do that?
Reading haiku

I am unhappy,

longing for the Nameless.
A frog floating

in the drugstore jar:

summer rain on grey pavements.

(after Shiki)
On the porch

in my shorts;

auto lights in the rain.
Another year

has past-the world

is no different.
The first thing I looked for

in my old garden was

The Cherry Tree.
My old desk:

the first thing I looked for

in my house.
My early journal:

the first thing I found

in my old desk.
My mother’s ghost:

the first thing I found

in the living room.
I quit shaving

but the eyes that glanced at me

remained in the mirror.
The madman

emerges from the movies:

the street at lunchtime.
Cities of boys

are in their graves,

and in this town…
Lying on my side

in the void:

the breath in my nose.
On the fifteenth floor

the dog chews a bone-

Screech of taxicabs.
A hardon in New York,

a boy

in San Fransisco.
The moon over the roof,

worms in the garden.

I rent this house.
[Haiku composed in the backyard cottage at 1624

Milvia Street, Berkeley 1955, while reading R.H.

Blyth’s 4 volumes, “Haiku.”]

—
Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters

Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof

out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross

surveys the city’s blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers

‘ll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I’m taking

your picture, pigeons. I’m writing you down, Dawn.

I’m immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.

O Thought, now you’ll have to think the same thing forever!

—

Crossing Nation

Under silver wing

San Francisco’s towers sprouting

thru thin gas clouds,

Tamalpais black-breasted above Pacific azure

Berkeley hills pine-covered below–

Dr Leary in his brown house scribing Independence

Declaration

typewriter at window

silver panorama in natural eyeball–
Sacramento valley rivercourse’s Chinese

dragonflames licking green flats north-hazed

State Capitol metallic rubble, dry checkered fields

to Sierras- past Reno, Pyramid Lake’s

blue Altar, pure water in Nevada sands’

brown wasteland scratched by tires
Jerry Rubin arrested! Beaten, jailed,

coccyx broken–

Leary out of action–”a public menace…

persons of tender years…immature

judgement…pyschiatric examination…”

i.e. Shut up or Else Loonybin or Slam
Leroi on bum gun rap, $7,000

lawyer fees, years’ negotiations–

SPOCK GUILTY headlined temporary, Joan Baez’

paramour husband Dave Harris to Gaol

Dylan silent on politics, & safe–

having a baby, a man–

Cleaver shot at, jail’d, maddened, parole revoked,
Vietnam War flesh-heap grows higher,

blood splashing down the mountains of bodies

on to Cholon’s sidewalks–

Blond boys in airplane seats fed technicolor

Murderers advance w/ Death-chords

Earplugs in, steak on plastic

served–Eyes up to the Image–
What do I have to lose if America falls?

my body? my neck? my personality?

—

When the Light Appears

You’ll bare your bones you’ll grow you’ll pray you’ll only know

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

You’ll sing & you’ll love you’ll praise blue heavens above

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

You’ll whimper & you’ll cry you’ll get yourself sick and sigh

You’ll sleep & you’ll dream you’ll only know what you mean

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

You’ll come & you’ll go, you’ll wander to and fro

You’ll go home in despair you’ll wonder why’d you care

You’ll stammer & you’ll lie you’ll ask everybody why

You’ll cough and you’ll pout you’ll kick your toe with gout

You’ll jump you’ll shout you’ll knock you’re friends about

You’ll bawl and you’ll deny & announce your eyes are dry

You’ll roll and you’ll rock you’ll show your big hard cock

You’ll love and you’ll grieve & one day you’ll come believe

As you whistle & you smile the lord made you worthwhile

You’ll preach and you’ll glide on the pulpit in your pride

Sneak & slide across the stage like a river in high tide

You’ll come fast or come on slow just the same you’ll never know

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

_____

Roberto & Martina will be there for the Opening Reception on July 6th 6-9PM. (Address: 881 Willamette St Eugene, OR 97401)
Not to be missed if you are in the area, Roberto’s art is fantastic!
You may be able to get furhter details at www.fenariogallery.com

________
Look at Love…
Look at Love…

how it tangles

with the one fallen in love
look at spirit

how it fuses with earth

giving it new life
why are you so busy

with this or that or good or bad

pay attention to how things blend
why talk about all

the known and the unknown

see how unknown merges into the known
why think separately

of this life and the next

when one is born from the last
look at your heart and tongue

one feels but deaf and dumb

the other speaks in words and signs
look at water and fire

earth and wind

enemies and friends all at once
the wolf and the lamb

the lion and the deer

far away yet together
look at the unity of this

spring and winter

manifested in the equinox
you too must mingle my friends

since the earth and the sky

are mingled just for you and me
be like sugarcane

sweet yet silent

don’t get mixed up with bitter words
my beloved grows

right out of my own heart

how much more union can there be
-Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

translated by Nader Khalili

——

There is a candle in your heart…
There is a candle in your heart,

ready to be kindled.

There is a void in your soul,

ready to be filled.

You feel it, don’t you?

You feel the separation

from the Beloved.

Invite Him to fill you up,

embrace the fire.

Remind those who tell you otherwise that

Love

comes to you of its own accord,

and the yearning for it

cannot be learned in any school.

-Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

translated by Sharam Shiva

—

Max Ernst, The Temptation of St. Anthony 1945

This is a return to old form. Overwhelming, but I am sure you might be able to wade through it all. Monday Afternoon on the NW Corner of the Left Coast… We had a great weekend… Lots of people, talking, drinking, eating… Here is to the beauty of the summer!
Bright Blessings
G

—

On The Menu:
Max Ernst Bio

The Linkage…

Cultural Differences Made Visible…

Excerpt From: The Candle of Vision

L’AGE D’OR

Poems of Love & Devotion: Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi

Art: Max Ernst

His Biography…
b. 1891, Bruhl, Germany; d. 1976, Paris
Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Bruhl, Germany. He enrolled in the University at Bonn in 1909 to study philosophy, but soon abandoned this pursuit to concentrate on art. At this time he was interested in psychology and the art of the mentally ill. In 1911 Ernst became a friend of August Macke and joined the Rheinische Expressionisten group in Bonn. Ernst showed for the first time in 1912 at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne. At the Sonderbund exhibition of that year in Cologne he saw the work of Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. In 1913 he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and traveled to Paris. Ernst participated that same year in the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon. In 1914 he met Jean Arp, who was to become a lifelong friend.
Despite military service throughout World War I, Ernst was able to continue painting and to exhibit in Berlin at Der Sturm in 1916. He returned to Cologne in 1918. The next year he produced his first collages and founded the short-lived Cologne Dada [more] movement with Johannes Theodor Baargeld; they were joined by Arp and others. In 1921 Ernst exhibited for the first time in Paris, at the Galerie au Sans Pareil. He was involved in Surrealist activities in the early 1920s with Paul Eluard and André Breton. In 1925 Ernst executed his first frottages; a series of frottages was published in his book Histoire naturelle in 1926. He collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev that same year. The first of his collage-novels, La Femme 100 têtes, was published in 1929. The following year the artist collaborated with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel on the film L’AGE D’OR (see below).
His first American show was held at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, in 1932. In 1936 Ernst was represented in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1939 he was interned in France as an enemy alien. Two years later Ernst fled to the United States with Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married early in 1942. After their divorce he married Dorothea Tanning and in 1953 resettled in France. Ernst received the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and in 1975 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum gave him a major retrospective, which traveled in modified form to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1975. He died on April 1, 1976, in Paris.

_________
The Linkage:

Mapping nature’s ancient monuments

El Árbol del Tule

How a dead frog could help you woo a lover

Strange fish in Monaco’s harbour

Under new law, NM must grow its own pot, distribute it

__________
Cultural Differences Made Visible…

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__________

Max Ernst Die ganze Stadt Dissertation Paul Klee 1970

<img width='500' height='353' border='0' hspace='5' align='left' src='http://www.earthrites.org/turfing2/uploads/Max_Ernst_Die_ganze_Stadt_Dissertation_Paul_Klee.jpg'

Excerpt From: The Candle of Vision

by AE (George William Russell)

The Many – Coloured Land
I have always been curious about the psychology of my own vision as desirous of imparting it, and I wish in this book to relate the efforts of an artist and poet to discover what truth lay in his own imaginations. I have brooded longer over the nature of imagination than I have lingered over the canvas where I tried to rebuild my vision. Spiritual moods are difficult to express and cannot be argued over, but the workings of imagination may well be spoken of, and need precise and minute investigation. I surmise from my reading of the psychologists who treat of this that they themselves were without this faculty and spoke of it as blind men who would fain draw although without vision. We are overcome when we read Prometheus Unbound, but who, as he reads, flings off the enchantment to ponder in what state was the soul of Shelley in that ecstasy of swift creation. Who has questioned the artist to whom the forms of his thought are vivid as the forms of nature? Artist and poet have rarely been curious about the processes of their own minds. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the highest ecstasy and vision are conditioned by law and attainable by all, and this might be argued as of more importance even than the message of the seers. I attribute to that unwavering meditation and fiery concentration of will a growing luminousness in my brain as if I had unsealed in the body a fountain of interior light. Normally we close our eyes on a cloudy gloom through which vague forms struggle sometimes into definiteness. But the luminous quality gradually became normal in me, and at times in meditation there broke in on me an almost intolerable lustre of light, pure and shining faces, dazzling processions of figures, most ancient, ancient places and peoples, and landscapes lovely as the lost Eden. These appeared at first to have no more relation to myself than images from a street without one sees reflected in a glass; but at times meditation prolonged itself into spheres which were radiant with actuality. Once, drawn by some inner impulse to meditate at an unusual hour, I found quick oblivion of the body. The blood and heat of the brain ebbed from me as an island fades in the mists behind a swift vessel fleeting into light. The ways were open within. I rose through myself and suddenly felt as if I had awakened from dream. Where was I? In what city? Here were hills crowned with glittering temples, and the ways, so far as I could see, were thronged with most beautiful people, swaying as if shaken by some ecstasy running through all as if the Dark Hidden Father was breathing rapturous life within His children. Did I wear to them an aspect like their own? Was I visible to them as a new-comer in their land of lovely light? I could not know, but those nigh me flowed towards me with outstretched hands. I saw eyes with a beautiful flame of love in them looking into mine. But I could stay no longer for something below drew me down and I was again an exile from light.
There came through meditation a more powerful orientation of my being as if to a hidden sun, and my thoughts turned more and more to the spiritual life of Earth. All the needles of being pointed to it. I felt instinctively that all I saw in vision was part of the life of Earth which is a court where there are many starry palaces. There the Planetary Spirit was King, and that Spirit manifesting through the substance of Earth, the Mighty Mother, was, I felt, the being I groped after as God. The love I had for nature as garment of that deity grew deeper. That which was my own came to me as it comes to all men. That which claimed me drew me to itself. I had my days and nights of freedom. How often did I start in the sunshine of a Sabbath morning, setting my face to the hills, feeling somewhat uncertain as a lover who draws nigh to a beauty he adores, who sometimes will yield everything to him and sometimes is silent and will only endure his presence. I did not know what would happen to me, but I was always expectant, and walked up to the mountains as to the throne of God. Step by step there fell from me the passions and fears of the week-day, until, as I reached the hillside and lay on the grassy slope with shut eyes, I was bare of all but desire for the Eternal. I was once more the child close to the Mother. She rewarded me by lifting for me a little the veil which hides her true face. To those high souls who know their kinship the veil is lifted, her face is revealed, and her face is like a bride’s. Petty as was my everyday life, with the fears and timidities which abnormal sensitiveness begets, in those moments of vision I understood instinctively the high mood they must keep who would walk with the highest; and who with that divine face glimmering before him could do aught but adore!
There is an instinct which stills the lips which would speak of mysteries whose day for revelation has not drawn nigh. The little I know of these I shall not speak of It is always lawful to speak of that higher wisdom which relates our spiritual being to that multitudinous unity which is God and Nature and Man. The only justification for speech from me, rather than from others whose knowledge is more profound, is that the matching of words to thoughts is an art I have practised more. What I say may convey more of truth, as the skilled artist, painting a scene which he views for the first time, may yet suggest more beauty and enchantment than the habitual dweller, unskilled in art, who may yet know the valley he loves so intimately that he could walk blindfold from end to end.
I do not wish to write a book of wonders, but rather to bring thought back to that Being whom the ancient seers worshipped as Deity. I believe that most of what was said of God was in reality said of that Spirit whose body is Earth. I must in some fashion indicate the nature of the visions which led me to believe with Plato that the earth is not at all what the geographers suppose it to be, and that we live like frogs at the bottom of a marsh knowing nothing of that Many-Coloured Earth which is superior to this we know, yet related to it as soul to body. On that Many-Coloured Earth, he tells us, live a divine folk, and there are temples wherein the gods do truly dwell, and I wish to convey, so far as words may, how some apparitions of that ancient beauty came to me in wood or on hillside or by the shores of the western sea.
Sometimes lying on the hillside with the eyes of the body shut as in sleep I could see valleys and hills, lustrous as a jewel, where all was self-shining, the colours brighter and purer, yet making a softer harmony together than the colours of the world I know. The winds sparkled as they blew hither and thither, yet far distances were clear through that glowing air. What was far off was precise as what was near, and the will to see hurried me to what I desired. There, too, in that land I saw fountains as of luminous mist jetting from some hidden heart of power, and shining folk who passed into those fountains inhaled them and drew life from the magical air. They were, I believe, those who in the ancient world gave birth to legends of nymph and dryad. Their perfectness was like the perfectness of a flower, a beauty which had never, it seemed, been broken by act of the individualised will which with us makes possible a choice between good and evil, and the marring of the mould of natural beauty. More beautiful than we they yet seemed less than human, and I surmised I had more thoughts in a moment than they through many of their days. Sometimes I wondered had they individualised life at all, for they moved as if in some orchestration of their being. If one looked up, all looked up. If one moved to breathe the magical airs from the fountains, many bent in rhythm. I wondered were their thoughts all another’s. one who lived within them, guardian or oversoul to their tribe?
Like these were my first visions of supernature, not spiritual nor of any high import, not in any way so high as those transcendental moments of awe, when almost without vision the Divin
e Darkness seemed to breathe within the spirit. But I was curious about these forms, and often lured away by them from the highest meditation; for I was dazzled like a child who escapes from a dark alley in one of our cities of great sorrow where its life has been spent, and who comes for the first time upon some rich garden beyond the city where the air is weighted with scent of lilac or rose, and the eyes are made gay with colour. Such a beauty begins to glow on us as we journey towards Deity, even as earth grows brighter as we journey from the gloomy pole to lands of the sun; and I would cry out to our humanity, sinking deeper into the Iron Age, that the Golden World is all about us and that beauty is open to all, and none are shut out from it who will turn to it and seek for it.
As the will grew more intense, the longing for the ancestral self more passionate, there came glimpses of more rapturous life in the being of Earth. Once I lay on the sand dunes by the western sea. The air seemed filled with melody. The motion of the wind made a continuous musical vibration. Now and then the silvery sound of bells broke on my ear. I saw nothing for a time. Then there was an intensity of light before my eyes like the flashing of sunlight through a crystal. It widened like the opening of a gate and I saw the light was streaming from the heart of a glowing figure. Its body was pervaded with light as if sunfire rather than blood ran through its limbs. Light streams flowed from it. It moved over me along the winds, carrying a harp, and there was a circling of golden hair that swept across the strings. Birds flew about it, and over the brows was a fiery plumage as of wings of outspread flame. On the face was an ecstasy of beauty and immortal youth. There were others, a lordly folk, and they passed by on the wind as if they knew me not or the earth I lived on. When I came back to myself my own world seemed grey and devoid of light though the summer sun was hot upon the sands.
One other vision I will tell because it bears on things the ancients taught us, and on what I have to write in later pages. Where I saw this I will not say. There was a hall vaster than any cathedral, with pillars that seemed built out of living and trembling opal, or from some starry substances which shone with every colour, the colours of eve and dawn. A golden air glowed in this place, and high between the pillars were thrones which faded, glow by glow, to the end of the vast hall. On them sat the Divine Kings. They were fire-crested. I saw the crest of the dragon on one, and there was another plumed with brilliant fires that jetted forth like feathers of flame. They sat shining and starlike, mute as statues, more colossal than Egyptian images of their gods, and at the end of the hall was a higher throne on which sat one greater than the rest. A light like the sun glowed behind him. Below on the floor of the hall lay a dark figure as if in trance, and two of the Divine Kings made motions with their hands about it over head and body. I saw where their hands waved how sparkles of fire like the flashing of jewels broke out. There rose out of that dark body a figure as tall, as glorious, as shining as those seated on the thrones. As he woke to the hall he became aware of his divine kin, and he lifted up his hands in greeting. He had returned from his pilgrimage through darkness, but now an initiate, a master in the heavenly guild. While he gazed on them the tall golden figures from their thrones leaped up, they too with hands uplifted in greeting, and they passed from me and faded swiftly in the great glory behind the throne.

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L’AGE D’OR 1930

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Max Ernst – Ubu Imperator

—–

Poems of Love &amp; Devotion: Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi

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.

—
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!

—

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.

—
Oh, her beauty–the tender maid!
Oh, her beauty–the tender maid! Its brilliance gives light like lamps to one travelling in the dark.

She is a pearl hidden in a shell of hair as black as jet,

A pearl for which Thought dives and remains unceasingly in the deeps of that ocean.

He who looks upon her deems her to be a gazelle of the sand-hills, because of her shapely neck and the loveliness of her gestures.

Max Ernst – The Eye Of Silence

A busy Saturday; customers, estimates, working in the studio cleaning it out getting artwork together for a new project… We finally crashed and burned just as we were heading out to a party – dead in the water by 6:00PM. We hit the store, came home and watched Tim Burton’s ‘Sleepy Hollow’…
Around 8:00Pm, we got a call from James Kent of Dosenation.com and Tripzine fame, with his good friend Patrick. James was down from Seattle, visiting the in-laws and off for a camping trip.
They came over an hour or so later, and we had a drink of absinthe, and an outrageously good conversation. We got to cover a bit of James’ “Psychedelic Information Theory”, discussing those Mantis, Elves and other entities that have been reported from the other side. Andy Letcher’s book, “Shroom” came up. James was pretty enthused about it, I have yet to read it, though it is on the list… I brought up Graham Hancocks’ “Supernatural”, which he hadn’t read… 80)
It turns out that Patrick (remember him) is a middle eastern musician, playing Oud and various other instruments. We talked a bit about some of our current favourites, like Niyaz and others. Patrick is heading off to Spain to record a new album. Hopefully I will get a copy of his last one for Radio Free EarthRites
It was a great time, and as usual, James brings a load of interesting information with him. It was nice meeting Patrick, and sharing a glass of Absinthe into the late evening….

—-

On The Menu:

The Links

A giggle from Scotto…’Multidisciplinary Association for Getting High’

Ayahuasca Reading

Earth Intruders….

Poetry: A Time Suspended: Hafiz

Art: Gwyllm Llwydd
This edition dedicated to our friend John Gunn (and especially the Hafiz poetry) who we were blessed with hanging out with on Friday night. John Gunn is the first friend I made when we moved to Oregon. He has introduced us to a wonderful community of people, who have become very close to us.
Much Love John!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

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The Links:

Montana Meth Project

Frisky deer lead police to marijuana farm

Most Presidential Candidates Back Medical Marijuana Patient Protection

_________

A giggle from Scotto…’Multidisciplinary Association for Getting High’

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Ayahuasca Reading

~ Peter Lamborn Wilson

Read by Peter Lamborn Wilson on WBAI 99.5FM NYC sometime in 1994 during one of his Ayahuasca shows (same as the icaro tape). In this audio transcription unknown words are spelled phonetically and marked with (sp) when they first appear.
Ayahuasca Drinkers among the cha-ma (sp) Indians by Heinz ku-sel (sp) see what I mean? Originally appeared in the Psychedelic Review, 1965 Read from reprint in the Psychozoic Press I lived for seven years traveling and trading in the upper Amazon region and often heard stories about the effect of ayahuasca.
Once on a long canoe trip down the river my Indian companion had chanted the song of the Goddess of Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, a Quechua word meaning ‘vine of death’ is the collective name for various climbing tropical lianas and also designates the tea prepared from the leaves of the vine, either by itself or in combination with other leaves. Indians and the Mestizos alike visit the ayahuasquero or witch-doctor when they are ailing or think they need a general check-up, or want to make an important decision, or simply because they feel like it.
Among the scattered half-casts and natives of the swamps and rainforests of the Ucayali region the ayahuasca cult plays a significant role in their religious medical practices and provides them with a good deal of entertainment. Repeatedly I heard how in a vision induced by drinking the tea prepared from the liana the patient had perceived the specific plant needed for his cure – had later searched and found it in the jungle and had subsequently recovered.
To the enigmatic mind of the Indian ayahuasca opens the gate to the healing properties of the forces of nature at whose mercy he lives. A recurrent theme whenever the natives refer to the results of the drug is the vision of the ‘Procession of Plants,’ with garlic, ‘the king of the good plants’ leading the way. Garlic, tobacco, quinine and oh-hey (sp), a tree latex, are at the head of a long line of friendly elf-like plants which, in ayahuasca visions, bow to mankind, offering their services. The Campa Indians, sturdy fellows, who today specialize in drawing mahogany and cedar logs for the sawmills in Iquitos undergo a purge of ayahuasca before they enter the flooded areas of the forest to float out the logs and assemble them into tremendous rafts. For a cure of that nature they prepare themselves by a prolonged diet, avoiding meat, salt, alcohol and sugar.
Aside from the main use of the drug for curing or keeping the consumer in good general condition, ayahuasca will, according to its users, induce clairvoyance and may for example solve a theft or prophesy the success or failure of a given enterprise. A man might be planning a trip to a certain river where he knows of a good place to tap rubber, but to be sure of good results he will consult ayahuasca first. After that, more than likely, he will abandon the enterprise altogether and set off in another direction to pan gold, hunt peck-oh-re (sp) or do something else.
In these unhurried hours and days I arrived at an insight into the native’s fantastic beliefs and images, the richness of which is equaled only by the growth of the surrounding vegetation. Their superstitions, ideas and images freely cross and recross the borderline of reality in strangely patterned ways. Their stories have one thing in common – man, plant and animal are one, forever woven into an inextricable pattern of cause and effect. Later I found that ayahuasca visions are fabrics that illustrate endless combinations of this pattern. Man, plant and animal also passively undergo the irradiations of each other. Irradiations of powers that to us are mostly non-existent. Somehow sometimes they even acquire each other’s characteristics.
Once, while drifting in a canoe the Campa Indian with me disturbed the silence by imitating the voice of the kuto-mono (sp), a copper colored monkey. A kuto-mono from the shore answered him, a third joined in. After a while the whole shoreline seems to come alive with kuto-monos. The natives use this ability to imitate voices to such a degree that hunting takes on the character of treacherous assassination. Though hardly in the way of an equivalent, the animal world puts out a bird that I heard one night on the pa-cha-tey-ah (sp) River. It filled the darkness with an ascending scale of glass clear notes. Quite likely it is a beautiful scale but nevertheless it resembles the hysterical laughter of an insane women. It shocked me. I felt upset, mocked, laughed at. Everything calls in the jungle.
Once a Campa Indian in my boat when we were drifting far from the shore was called by ayahuasca! He followed the call and later emerged from the forest with the a sampling of the fairly rare liana that today is cultivated by the ayahuasquero in secret spots. I myself certainly did not hear the call.
If this jungle life and its irrational mutual dependency forms a picture of general confusion, ayahuasca is the magic mirror that reflects this confusion as something beautiful and attractive. For whomever I listened to, all manifested the enjoyment of a wondrous spectacle that was pleasing to the senses. If fearsome visions occurred they said that the ayahuasquero could easily dispel them by shaking a dry twig near the ear of the affected drinker; or by blowing the smoke of a cigarette on the crown of his head. The aesthetic climax of the spectacle was, they claimed, the ‘vision of the goddess with concealed eyes,’ who dwelt inside the twining tropical vine.
Many times I listened to these tales but it never crossed my mind to try the liana myself. It belonged definitely to the local Indian lore, to something sordid, outside of the law, something publicly frowned upon like the binding up of the heads that the cha-ma (sp) practice on their babies; or like burying one twin alive as they also do; or so many other equally fantastic or ghastly things.
In 1949 I had my headquarters in a white washed brick house in pu-cul-pa overlooking a wide curve of the Ucayali. Pu-cul-pa at that time was a village of about 200 homes, a Catholic church, an American Protestant mission, a Masonic temple and two primitive hotels. The place had gained some importance by being at the end of the only road precariously connecting Lima and the Pacific with a navigable river of the Amazon system. It also had an airport which could be used when the ground was dry. After the war and the falling of prices for rubber, the importance of the road decreased and Pu-cul-pa fell back into the stagnation of a Peruvian jungle settlement.
At that time I realized that my days in the jungle were coming to an end and in spite of being somewhat skeptical about the possible effects of the drug, I decided to try it. I drank the bitter salty extract of the vine three times. It seemed too much trouble to look for a venerated great ayahuasquero like Juan in-uma (sp) who lived up the river near masi-eh-sia (sp). There were a number of less widely esteemed fellows in pu- cul-pa such as no-lore-bey (sp) who was recommended to me as the most reliable of the witch doctors in the village. Hs hut was the last upstream in the long row of buildings above the steep shore of pu-cul-pa.
It was there that I found myself sitting on an empty gasoline crate while other people squatted on the floor. I drank the required dose, about a quart, and nothing happened. The only noticeable effect was an increased auditory sensitivity which is the reason why the drug is usually consumed in secluded places at night. A neighborhood rooster crowed recklessly which upset me considerably for it seemed to happen right inside my head. The people in the hut were disturbed also – they sighed and shifted their positions uneasily. No-lore-bey blamed the ineffectiveness of the drug on the fact that it had not been freshly prepared.
Another evening the guide who carried my blanket led me to a hut far outside the limits of the village. The hut, a typical structure of a floor on stilts without walls covered by a thatched roof, b
elonged to sal-dani-ah (sp), a mestizo I did not particularly like who had many patients in the village. I lay down on the raised floor of beaten palm bark, overlooking the clearing, and sal-dani-ah handed me a bottle of ayahuasca. I started to drink and heard him singing behind a partition where he was tending his patients. I listened carefully to the startling song that is always sung in ken-cha (sp), the language of the highland Indians which only old people in the Ucayali region speak. The song starts with a shrill musical question and continues with a series of answers intermixed with hissing sounds and syncopated with guttural noises produced with the tongue against the palate.
I drank the whole dose sal-dani-ah had prepared for me and felt slightly dizzy and nauseated. After a while I climbed down from the raised floor using the ladder, made as usual by hacking footholds into an upright log. The clearing and surrounding jungle looked as though covered with white ashes in the strong moonlight. From the hut behind me I heard sound of voices speaking monotonously. I heard sal-dani-ah intermittently singing the song or administering his cures. One of the procedures used to relieve a pain is actually to suck the pain out of the hurting member. When this has been often enough the pain is supposed to be located in the doctor’s mouth and removed from there by spitting. Again my stimulated hearing reported those awful noises so intensely that at times they were hard to endure.
The next day sal-dani-ah attributed this failure to the fact that I has a slight cold. I was more skeptical than ever. After all, if unlike those people, I was not able to hear the call of the plant, or to walk noiselessly through the jungle maybe I lacked also the required acuteness of senses to meet the iridescent goddess.
I am glad that I went a third time. I made another appointment with no-lore-bey for a Saturday night. I walked out to his place at the edge of the forest at about 10pm. I realized that his one room house that stood in darkness and silence was crowded and waited outside till he emerged. I told him that I would rather not join the crowd and he obligingly showed me a good-sized canoe pulled up for repairs and resting about twenty feet from the cane wall of his shack towards the edge of the jungle. I wrapped myself in a blanket and lay down comfortably; my shoulders against the cedar walls of the dugout – my head resting on the slanting stern. I felt relaxed and full of expectation. No-lore-bey had appeared eager and confident. A small barefooted Indian with something queer and slightly funny about his face he showed a nervousness that did not go with his sturdy build. He seemed to be never quite present as if continuously distracted by frequent encounters with his vegetable gods and devils. His eyes were not steady but pulled in different directions. While something fearful, there was something very happy about this man, as if a hidden gaiety were buried under his worried features. He believed himself smart and powerful. He lived a glorious life, even if sometimes he seemed to go to pieces in his effort to walk back and forth professionally between two equally puzzling worlds. I remembered seeing him once in the como-sari-ah (sp) in conflict with one of them (one of those equally puzzling worlds), accused again of leading a disorderly life and practicing quackery. He was standing in his formerly green trousers before a wooden table and the Peruvian flag answering the rude guardia-seville (sp) with a humble smile – his eyes going apologetically in all directions.
He soon appeared with a gourd full of liquid he had carefully prepared by stewing for hours the leaves of the vine with those of another plant who’s name possibly was his secret. He squatted at the canoe and whispered, his eyes going sideways, ‘Gringo, today you will experience the real thing. I will serve you well. We will have the true intoxication. You will be satisfied, wait and see..’ and he left me alone.
After a while a girl approached me from the hut and asked for a cigarette. She lighted it, inhaled, and for a moment I saw her wide face surrounded by hard black hair, then she walked noiselessly back into the hut. A two-eye-oh (sp) bird began to call repeatedly high above my face. The whistling and melodious sound at the end of his call seemed to touch me like a whiplash. A truck loaded with cedar boards left the village and on the distant highway accelerated madly and shifted gears. By that time I knew the drug was working in me. I felt fine and heard no- lore-bey whispering near my ear again, ‘Do you want more? Shall I give you more? Do you want to see the Goddess well?’ And again I drank the full gourd of cool bitter liquid. I cannot say how often no-lore-bey was present whispering and drinking with me, singing the song near my ear and far away, treating his patients and making those awful primitive noises that I despised. There was another sound that upset me more than anything, like something round falling into a deep well, a mysterious, slippery and indecent sound. Much later I found out that it was produced by normally innocuous action of no-lore-bey ladling water out of an old oil barrel by means of a small gourd. I yawned through what seemed to be an interminable night till the muscles of my face were strained. Sometimes I yawned so hard that it seemed to me as loud as the roaring of the sea on a rocky coast. Things got so gay, absorbing and beautiful that I had to laugh foolishly. The laughter came out of my insides of its own accord and shook me absurdly. At the same time I cried, and the tears that were running down my face were annoying, but they kept running madly and no matter how often I wiped my cheeks I could not dry them.
The first visual experience was like fireworks. Then a continuously creating power produced a wealth of simple and elaborate flat patterns and color. There were patterns that consisted of twining repeats and others geometrically organized with rectangles or squares that were like Maya designs or those decorations which the cha-ma paint of their thin ringing pottery. The visions were in constant flux. First intermittently, then successively the flat patterns gave way to deep brown, purple or beige depths like dimly lighted caves in which the walls were too far away to be perceived. At times snake- like stems of plants were growing profusely in the depths, at others these were covered with arrangements of myriads of lights that, like dewdrops of gems, adorned them. Now and then brilliant light illuminated the scene as though by photographic flash showing wide landscapes with trees placed at regular intervals or just empty plains. A big ship with many flags appeared in one of these flashes. A merry-go-round with people dressed in brightly colored garments in another. The song of no-lore-bey in the background seemed to physically touch a brain-center, and each of his hissing, guttural syncopations hurt and started new centers of hallucinations which kept on moving and changing to the rhythm of his chant. At a certain point I felt helplessly that no-lore- bey and his song could do ANYTHING with me. There was one note in his song that came back again and again which made me slide deeper whenever it appeared, deeper and deeper into a place where I might lose consciousness. If, to reassure myself, I opened my eyes, I saw the dark wall of the jungle covered with jewels – as if a net of lights had been thrown over it. Upon closing my eyes again I could renew the procession of slick, well-lighted images.
There were two very definite attractions. I enjoyed the unreality of a created world. The images casual, accidental or imperfect but fully organized to the last detail of highly complex, consistent, yet forever changing, designs. They were harmonized in color and had a slick sensuous polished finish. The other attraction of which I was very conscious at the time was inexplicable sensation of intimacy with the visions. They were mine and concerned only me. I remembered
an Indian telling me that whenever he drank ayahuasca he had such beautiful visions that used to put his hands over his eyes for fear someone might steal them. I felt the same way. The color scheme became a harmony of browns and greens. Naked dancers appeared turning slowly in spiral movements. Spots of brassy lights played on their bodies which gave them the texture of polished stone. Their faces were inclined and hidden in deep shadows. Their coming into existence in the center of the vision coincided with the rhythm of no-lore-bey’s song and they advanced forward and to the sides, turning slowly. I longed to see their faces. At last the whole field of vision was taken up by a single dancer with inclined face covered by a raised arm. As my desire to see the face became unendurable it appeared suddenly in full close-up, with closed eyes. I knew that when the extraordinary face opened those eyes I experienced a satisfaction of a kind I had never known. It was the visual solution of a personal riddle. I got up and walked away without disturbing no-lore-bey. When I arrived home I was still subject to uncontrollable fits of yawning and laughter. I sat down before my house. I remembered that a drop of dew fell from the tin roof and that its impact was so noisy that it made me shudder. I looked at my watch and realized it was not yet midnight. The next day, and for quite some time I felt unusually well.
Three years later in a letter from pu-cul-pa I heard that no-lore-bey had been accused of bewitching a man into insanity and had been jailed in Iquitos.

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Earth Intruders….

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A Time Suspended: Hafiz

All the Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement

And love.
Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence

Lie beside an equator

In your heart.
Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting
While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You.

—
No More Leaving
At

Some point

Your relationship

With God

Will

Become like this:
Next time you meet Him in the forest

Or on a crowded city street
There won’t be anymore
“Leaving.”
That is,
God will climb into

Your pocket.
You will simply just take
Yourself
Along!

—
Let Thought Become Your Beautiful Lover
Let thought become the beautiful Woman.
Cultivate your mind and heart to that depth
That it can give you everything

A warm body can.
Why just keep making love with God’s child– Form
When the Friend Himself is standing

Before us

So open-armed?
My dear,

Let prayer become your beautiful Lover
And become free,

Become free of this whole world

Like Hafiz.

—
I’ve Said It Before and I’ll Say It Again
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

It’s not my fault that with a broken heart, I’ve gone this way.
In front of a mirror they have put me like a parrot,

And behind the mirror the Teacher tells me what to say.
Whether I am perceived as a thorn or a rose, it’s

The Gardener who has fed and nourished me day to day.
O friends, don’t blame me for this broken heart;

Inside me there is a great jewel and it’s to the Jeweler’s shop I go.
Even though, to pious, drinking wine is a sin,

Don’t judge me; I use it as a bleach to wash the color of hypocrisy away.
All that laughing and weeping of lovers must be coming from some other place;

Here, all night I sing with my winecup and then moan for You all day.
If someone were to ask Hafiz, “Why do you spend all your time sitting in

The Winehouse door?,” to this man I would say, “From there, standing,

I can see both the Path and the Way.

There is a time in the span of civilizations when creative energy and the human spirit are wholly, if briefly focused. When this occurs culture in all its manifestations reaches its zenith. The moment passes; civilizations decline, only to be replaced by others. This process of life appears cyclic. Communities become tribes, turn into nations and become empires which, like suns, radiate their energy to the limits of their power, then decay and finally vanish, leaving behind only traces. This cycle, which may continue until our sun–or our planet–fails us..

[from back of Time Zone/by Sätty]

Happy Friday! A large entry for today, featuring the art of Sätty, the poetry of Wang Wei, and the wisdom of Soren Kierkegaard..
Please check out the radio as well, as it is humming along quite nicely!
Enjoy!
Gwyllm

_______

What Is On The Menu:

The Linkage

Massive Attack – Butterfly Caught

The Silent Temple

The Gates of Paradise

Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

On The Mountain: Wang Wei’s Poetry

Art: Sätty
I first became aware of Satty in late 1966 (I believe). I found a poster of his that I admired greatly in a head shop. I saved my money up, and eventually bought it. It was of a Moire Pattern with a boat of collaged men and women from various ages spiraling down into eternity… A lost craft, a ship of possible fools, embarking on the infinite journey. It was there on the wall for many of my early inner-journeys, I wish I still had that poster, it sticks to this day in my head.
Sätty was the first collage/montage artist that moved me. He still does. The artwork for this edition comes from the only, ONLY site on the web that has any amount of his work. It boggles my mind how his work could be lost like this. You have probably seen his work… in various publications including Terence McKenna’s books (Terence was a true fan!). It seems fantastic that his work goes unmentioned and un-noted.
Satty was, and is an original. He certainly helped shape my art impulses, and I still get excited when I find his works. I certainly cherish the bits I have, but these were a struggle to find…
He died in 1982, falling off a ladder while being drunk/high. He was on the edge of publishing some vital new works, and sadly this never came to fruition.
The collage work that I have included aren’t my favourites, but what is available at the present. Still, I am grateful that they are still there to be seen, but for how long? Please check out Wilfred Sätty at Zpub.com. If you like his work, let them know. Maybe a homage to Sätty will help bring his art back to the light of day…
-Gwyllm

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The Linkage:

Temporary Temples

Incan bones found in Østfold

Rise of man theory ‘out by 400,000 years’

Buried ‘aliens’ are really tree trunks

___________
okay, I have read my fair share of books written by P.D. James over the years, but I had no idea about this one until I just saw the film that was made from it.
The film really an amazing bit of work; dark, very dark but with a message that is so timely. It makes you think about borders, artificial limits, and what passes for democracy, and human rights. There seems to be a dearth of those last two components, and it seems that everything around them is driven at this point by fear.
The film was riveting but the real joy for me was the commentary and interviews afterwards. Truly, if you get a chance please see this. Yes, the film rubs your face in it. But what is shown on the film is going on in the world. There is much hope and humanity in this film. I recommend it, and be aware it is a rough ride.
– Gwyllm

_______________
Massive Attack – Butterfly Caught

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The Silent Temple
Shoichi was a one-eyed teacher of Zen, sparkling with enlightenment. He taught his disciples in Tofuku temple.
Day and night the whole temple stood in silence. There was no sound at all.
Even the reciting of sutras was abolished by the teacher. His pupils had nothing to do but meditate.
When the master passed away, an old neighbor heard the ringing of bells and the recitation of sutras. Then she knew Shoichi had gone.

—

The Gates of Paradise
A soldier named Nobushige came to Hakuin, and asked: “Is there really a paradise and a hell?”
“Who are you?” inquired Hakuin.
“I am a samurai,” the warrior replied.
“You, a soldier!” exclaimed Hakuin. “What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? Your face looks like that of a beggar.”
Nobushige became so angry that he began to draw his sword, but Hakuin continued: “So you have a sword! Your weapon is probably much too dull to cut off my head.”
As Nobushige drew his sword Hakuin remarked: “Here open the gates of hell!”
At these words the samurai, perceiving the master’s discipline, sheathed his sword and bowed.
“Here open the gates of paradise,” said Hakuin.

________________

Soren Kierkegaard Quotes:
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
Be that self which one truly is.
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.
Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
Don’t forget to love yourself.
During the first period of a man’s life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.

__________
On The Mountain: Wang Wei’s Poetry

Mount Zhongnan
The Tai Yi peak

is near the capital of Heaven.

Its range stretches

all the way to the coast.

As I look back,

the white clouds are close in.

As I look close up,

the blue mists suddenly disappear.

The middle ridge divides into

two ever-changing sceneries.

On dark or clear days

each valley has a different view.

Wanting to put up

at some one’s place for the night,

I ask a woodcutter

on the other side of the stream.

——
Thanking Associate Prefect Zhang
I prefer to live a quiet life

in my later years.

Indifferent I am to

all mundane affairs.

A long-range plan

is not in my thought.

Returning to my old woods

was the only thing I sought.
The pine wind

blows loose my sash;

The mountain moon

shines on my lute.

You ask about

the ultimate truth of life.

The fishermen’s song

drifts deep above the shore.

—
Birds Calling in the Ravine
I’m idle, as osmanthus flowers fall,

This quiet night in spring, the hill is empty.

The moon comes out and startles the birds on the hill,

They don’t stop calling in the spring ravine.

—
Returning to Songshan Mountain
The limpid river runs between the bushes,

The horse and cart are moving idly on.

The water flows as if with a mind of its own,

At dusk, the birds return to perch together.

The desolate town is faced by an ancient ferry,

The setting sun now fills the autumn hills.

And far below high Songshan’s tumbling ridges,

Returning home, I close the door for now..

–