Sacred Ram Skull Staff by Susan Tooker of Spinning Castle
Month: April 2013
Be careful. The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and interdependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind. Words create words, reality is silent. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
This is interesting because, on one hand, I’ve heard one of my professors say that if you cannot explain your ideas, they are nothing. If you cannot make them concrete in communication, and they remain in your head, what’s the point? Legitimize them with words, share them with others in language.
At the same time, he insists that language isn’t actually that important. It’s just a byproduct of how our brains are structured. Language is not behind cognition.
An interesting contradiction, isn’t it? On the one hand, ideas for the sake of ideas may seem frivolous. On the other, language is simply a medium by which to express ideas, and is incapable of communicating them directly. As Aldous Huxeley put it in The Doors of Perception;
“Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
And of course, on the third hand, reality and our ideas about reality are two altogether different beasts.
Men are terrified of a woman’s depth of love and the energy that moves as a woman’s sexuality and emotions. And, at the same time, men want nothing more in this life than to merge completely with a woman’s devotional love and wild energy. Only as a man outgrows his fear can he handle a woman’s tremendous love- energy without running. And only such a man is worthy of your devotional offering in a committed intimacy.
Ave Babalon
The Blind Prophet and the Young Scholar
Long ago, in the age of mysteries and brutality, a blind prophet lived on a holy mountain. The jagged crags of stone and monolithic trees pierced the heavens, but the prophet had no love for the infinite cold above, for the stars could never dazzle in those misted eyes, which in turn could never see the prophet’s shadow cast by moonlight or stretched tall and frail by the sun. The prophet worshipped the earth below, for it carried all known things above it. The prophet’s ears heard the secret whispers of tectonic plates as they shifted their burdens. Moss tickled the prophet’s feet with loving mischief. Best of all, the sea that crashed against the mountain’s bottomost ledges had carried a young scholar to the blind prophet’s shores.
Know, O man, that Light is thine heritage.
Know that darkness is only a veil.
Sealed in thine heart is brightness eternal,
waiting the moment of freedom to conquer,
waiting to rend the veil of the night.Some I found who had conquered the ether.
Free of space were they while yet they were men.
Using the force that is the foundation of ALL things,
far in space constructed they a planet,
drawn by the force that flows through the ALL;
condensing, coalescing the ether into forms,
that grew as they willed.Outstripping in science, they, all of the races,
mighty in wisdom, sons of the stars.
Long time I paused, watching their wisdom.
Saw them create from out of the ether cities
gigantic of rose and gold.
Formed forth from the primal element,
base of all matter, the ether far flung.~ Thoth
Dr. John Dee’s obsidian Scrying Stone, through which he and Edward Kelly communicated with angels. These communications were the foundation for Dee’s system of Enochian magic. I saw this in the Yale Center for British Art, as part of an exhibit of Horace Walpole’s collection at Strawberry Hill, which was Walpole’s home and the first construction of the gothic revival. (Walpole also wrote the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764.) Seeing this legendary mirror gave me shivers of joy and wonder.
“The mirror, made of highly-polished obsidian (volcanic glass), was one of many Mexica cult objects and treasures brought to Europe after the conquest of Mexico by Cortés between 1527 and 1530. Mirrors were associated with Tezcatlipoca, the Mexica god of rulers, warriors and sorcerers, whose name can be translated as ‘Smoking Mirror’. Mexica priests used mirrrors for divination and conjuring up visions.”
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/d/dr_dees_mirror.aspx