I wonder

if people understand the intimacy of what is happening in these pages: a soul lain bare. To pull no punches is a difficult trick to master, but that is what I have attempted to do here in these pages. I’ve been doing this for almost five years now, and if one were so inclined, they would have one of the most in depth understandings of a human being for that timeframe as could perhaps be possible.
What’s on my mind?
What’s not on my mind?
Right now…
Good-bye.
It’s a bit premature, admittedly.
However, what most people fail to understand is that this is my last opportunity to find a space among other human beings.
I’ve been a lot of places, done a lot of things, and want for nothing but time to appreciate the splendors that are granted to the sentient.
That is not, however, leisure time. To appreciate something properly is a lot of work, and that’s what I want to do.
Here’s a secret that nobody knows—soul laying bare: should the venture fail, society will lose me. Not that that’s any kind of significant loss for something as mighty as society, and it would be more like a self-imposed hermitage than anything else.
“Living as if I weren’t even here”
Why would you want to do that?
Do you know how much living you must be capable of in order to make it appear as if you weren’t there? There is no getting around the fact that you are. No matter how much you tell yourself that your “being” is just electric impulses flying around your brain, and that this is all a kind of illusion being fostered by the sensory information that is coming in to the brain, there is no getting around the question that, based on all probability, I probably shouldn’t be, and yet here I am.
What a question that is.
I have investigated many questions. That question wins. It beats them all. What is it about something that makes it seem like there ought to be nothing?
The only answer nature can’t give man, but the only real question we want answered is this: what are we supposed to be doing here?
All right, we are. What now? What comes next? What is it about life that makes me want to do more and more of it? To climb more mountains, to dig in the earth, plant seeds and see what she can grow. To touch what it means to be a part of the natural order of things once again.
Damnit all to shite and fuck!!!!
I’m lost there aren’t I.
GODDAMNIT!
Why don’t I just go write Walden.
Fuck.
But that’s where it’s at, isn’t it?
That’s why Walden is Walden. Nature. She has taken on an entirely new nature in the past couple of weeks as a result of the fact that I am now beginning to look at nature on a cosmic scale. In other words, nature was worked out a system of systems that works consistently and strings these systems together in order for things to keep moving. One of the unfortunate drawbacks of all these systems is that they eventually fail. You could almost say that nature is BUILT with a failure device inside it, constantly acting, trying to fail, if only to learn. At any rate, this aspect of nature repeats itself at the level of cells and at the level of the universe in equal aspects.
It’s actually quite hard to imagine, but perhaps that’s just me. I just had a hard time imagining NOT writing. I think I was actually trying to not write this week, just to see how things went, but then, as soon as I started doing it, the fingers just wanted to keep going. There’s your fucking Hume for you, too. He’s been showing up like a bad rash recently.
That’s how my brain works, by the way, and I know it is: input through reading, process through subconscious (who knows how long this can take), and output through action based on learned outcomes. I read Hume more than six months ago, but my brain is only really now coming to understand the significance of the things he was talking about.
That, and I feel too much. It can be dangerous, sometimes, because I know that there are areas of my mind that I could go into that would make me feel so much I would probably vomit. Caroline. Can’t go there. She’s been coming up in my mind lately, and flashes and rushes of memories go through me so hard it’s like being punched repeatedly in the stomach: the good and the bad altogether. I owe her everything. It’s hard to imagine my character without her in my life.
Being in this place is weird. The rememberer has been remembering things that it hasn’t remembered in a long, long time. I have pity for people who can recall memories readily at any time. Having access to those depths of emotion at your constant beck and call would be too much for me and I’d have a breakdown. Perhaps it’s because I don’t remember the details of things… all I remember are the impressions, feelings, and emotions. The details, where everything was, what who was wearing, and everything surface gets lost in the intricacy and detail of the sketched feeling that I put together in my head to go with image.
Neruda understands: why do I feel the whole of your love at once?
The whole of love is pleasure, pain, bliss, fury, and even things like boredom, consolation, and most things in between. The whole of anything is all of those things. I’m afraid that that’s just the way it works when you take on the whole of something.
Here’s a whole something I’m not sure I’m ready for: another relationship. I’ve been through the mill now. I’m jaded. I’m aware that I’m jaded. I’m aware that I’m full of shit. I’m aware that I’m not very good at socializing. What I want is more clearly stamped in my head than ever. It’s a later-twenties male sexual revolution. We don’t want what we used to want. If we wanted a ho, we’d go to the club and get some chick all fucked up and convince her that having sex with us is a good idea. Vapid is a word that quickly comes to mind. I don’t have time for that. I also don’t have time to deal some old bullshit relationship that isn’t bound for a life together, while, simultaneously know that I don’t want “a life together” just yet AND how painful it is to get into a relationship knowing that it’s going to end.
It doesn’t hurt any less simply because you know it’s going to end, and sometimes it hurts more. That’s not fair. There’s a quandary for you:
What am I supposed to do about love now?

Change

is what’s needed, and change is what’s planned, but we need your change.

In brief:
My compatriot(s) and myself are heading off to the lands of the east(ern United States).
Whilst others might join, the two main adventures are:
Myself (currently employed as sub-vice grill overlord and pizza creator extraordinaire—go to Grinder’s in the Crossroads district of Kansas City…
That’s where you’ll find me, all my fancy degrees and ideas, and great philly cheesesteaks.
Namelessfacelessother: best friend and confidante of myself for more than a decade, and currently about to graduate with what we’ll call a degree in biodynamic agriculture.
The two of us, with other like-minded folks, have a vision.
That vision is based on family, love, care, devotion to learning and effort, the perpetual quest into the character of the human being, and awareness of all that is around us.
We want to see how much of our stamp we can cut out of nature, how much we can develop within her and with her to use the relationship to its fullest, how we can rip ourselves out of the blind numbness of a pervasive ideological culture—and before anybody says anything: they are ALL pervasive ideological cultures…that’s almost the point of a country.
What we want to know is if culture, standing alone and unthreatening, can survive inside the other culture.
We’re pretty sure it can.

So, in stage one, we will build a farm.
It will be as self-sustaining as possible.
It will be biodynamic.
It will be organic.
It will become a part of the nature around it.

Thus the need for change… pocket change… lots of it.

You see, we have the funding for the land and the house already—praise whatever entity it is that pops into your mind when you say your prayers, but we need to find a place in the very literal sense of the term.

So, myself and my compatriot—with his wife in London wishing he and myself the best of luck I’m sure—are going to find a place.

On the ground, in a car/truck/van/camper/whatevermakesitselfavailabletous we will set off to look at lands in the east coast that are near to universities with appropriate doctoral programs (we all want to continue our educations), to hospitals (my compatriots wife has recently graduated from Med School and is looking to be Dr. Mrs. Compatriot in the USA), to fishing (and potentially hunting) possibilities, to mountains (as much as the Midwest is my home, my heart belongs in rather more rugged terrain), and with the appropriate kind of soil for growing the most diverse crops.

We have managed to both acquire one month of time to devote purely to this adventure.

We will be in a car together.
We will scout the land together.
We will sleep in our mode of transportation or camp when possible.
We need only money for food and gas for thirty days.

I, on behalf of—even though he might not approve—my compatriot, therefore plead with you for your bits of spare change, shrapnel, coins, or whatever you want to call them.

Make a little jar and write on it:

Change
For Eli and Jesse’s Road Trip
And Change

Then, dump all that spare change you get into it. We’re not asking for any more than to help us out for the next two months… we leave on May 1st.

If it makes you feel better about the donation, the scope of the biodynamic organic farm extends even further into the future, but you can email me for the dynamic unveiling of that surprise… which isn’t really at all surprising if you are even vaguely aware of who I am…

Anyhow, pocket change please.
Can we have it?

Know that your donation today
Could have a huge impact on tomorrow.

(obviously we accept cash, checks, and gas card donations as well… don’t get it twisted… if you want to help us out like that, we’d be SUPER HAPPY about it.)

{All donators eligible for free stays at “Sated”←potential name for farm}

May all beings be happy,
May all your change be good,
And may the seeds of
Equanimity ripen in your mind.

Peace
Much Love
And Gonzo
Myself

changesated@live.com

Also, go to poeticmindofeli.blogspot.com

Communion

It is now that we break bread.

Here is my body, which I give unto you—residence in the present: body mind spirit.
Take and eat.
Here is my blood, which I give unto you—what can flow more clearly from the soul than words.
Take and drink.

Invocation finished. I mixed them… did you see it?
Damn my eyes.

Everybody I meet seems to want to talk about the soul. Everybody everywhere who is sufficiently aware of themselves, their environment and their culture seems to have a nagging draw toward the things of the ephemera.
A lot of people don’t even realize that what they are attempting to describe is precisely within my personal understanding/definition of soul.
I laugh when thinking of defining the soul.
It’s like trying to define “an.” What does “an” mean?
Well, it’s an article.
I didn’t ask what its function was. I asked for its definition.

Can you see my path?

Function. Utility.
Perhaps we are here to be of some use, but perhaps this use-value goes beyond our scope of understanding and means something on the universal scale.

Seekingly find being.

We must all seek for the thing-in-itself inside the thing-in-itself. As these things—soul, god, and the like—exist as words, it is in the nature of words themselves that the nature of these things can be investigated. If the things of the spirit take primacy over the things of the physical world, then why is the manifestation of those spiritual things in the form of language?
What is god without the name of God?

In the beginning was THE WORD, and THE WORD was with god, and THE WORD was god. From a purely grammatical point of view, the message here is obvious, and yet it has been overlooked for so long. THE WORD is the subject. God is the object. Anybody who’s studied anything about the nature of the subject/object debate can understand this importance.

Sartre’s gaze: in becoming the object of another’s gaze I recognize in myself my perpetual state of object-hood. To all others I am an object of scrutiny. When we are not subject, our psyches feel terror.

I’m mixing things up again, and I know it, but we lie to ourselves perpetually and explain away our insignificance by making ourselves the most important being on the planet. That is, until somebody looks at us.
That’s how fragile it is my friends.
As soon as we recognize the fact that we are just some object in the mind of the Other, the structure cracks and has the potential for total collapse.

Most people feel all of this as opposed to knowing what they are feeling and why, but their experience with it is similar to everybody’s. The eyes are portals to the soul. When two people’s eyes meet, if they linger there at all, they cannot help but give away enough of their soul for the other to feel them—every piece contains a map of it all.

So, it’s no real mystery why most people want, in the deepest parts of themselves, to discuss the deepest part of existence. What is it about something—the fact that something “is”—that makes us believe there probably about to be nothing? We look around at the great cosmic fluke that has given rise to our various civilizations, and what the reasoning person sees is that based on all probability none of this should be here.

But nature has her ways, and they are not so different from human ways, but they occur on such a magnificent scale that there is no REAL way to comprehend it. Nature goes beyond the Earth: our planet is in the nature of the universe. Nature has a policy of attempting to give as much possibility to everything as it possibly can. In other words, even if the probability were to read something like 1:1,000,000,000—nature can usually supply the billion or two or three that it requires to find that one. The almost billion other attempts are all important, but they are also pretty standard failures. It is the anomalies that need to be investigated. It is in the point-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-one percent that we ought to be looking: these are the ones whose mysterious point of soul has extra-perceptual manifestations of spirit. The probability of YOU, and YOU alone existing is astronomical. Perhaps there is something in the universe that makes of some people’s probability beyond astronomical and places them squarely within the universal. Find these people. Their soul peaks out consistently, no matter how much they attempt to hide it. It emanates from them sub-consciously, spiritually and it carries weight unlike any kind of physical burden—and you’d better believe it’s a burden: imagine the weight of feeling the pull of the universe without having any idea what it is, how it came to be, or why it pulls you in the directions it does.

To feel is an enormous thing. To feel the universe is indescribable.

To those earnestly seeking to know, I bid you seek fervently and find forever everywhere.

I experience the most joy when sending my love through spiritual channels to those I love all over the world. Maybe, sometimes, you feel something good for half a second for absolutely no reason… well, you might’ve just been a part of my daily love dosings. Now, in no particular order, I give my love to:

May all beings be happy.

Timeline

of my life
(Part II).

The importance of my time in New York City should not be underplayed. What made it so important was that my intellectual and emotional development was occurring simultaneously. My body and my mind were going through a phase of intense growth, with the resultant growth pains—breaking hearts and broken minds. The reading, understanding, reflection, and searching into the self of the mind and spirit made of me something else. When I left, I was not what I was, I was what I was going to be: an artist, a writer, a wanderer, and free. I had been writing a book that was making my lose my mind called Fodder… it was suspended until I return to New York City.

That was the summer of 2008. I took a road trip across the country with my ex-girlfriend. We stayed in Tennessee. We were not meant to be. It was fun. We were not meant to be.

In the Fall of that same year, I sent my resume to a recruiter whose job it was to find jobs in Korea for teachers of English as a second language.

In September of 2008, I was on my way to Ochang, South Korea. On my first night in Korea, in a small town where I can’t seem to find ANY English, my co-worker Bon brings me a quart of milk and a two liter bottle of water. I thank him, cry, and nestle into my tiny bed.

While in Korea the most appropriate question might be: what didn’t I do. Most of it I did with one or two other people, but a lot of it was alone… honja.

There’s something called Mudfest which seems to speak for itself.
There’s BIFF—an international film festival in Busan.
I got paid money to play my guitar and entertain people.
I went busking on the streets of Suwon.
I hosted an open mic night.
I learned to hate Seoul.
I learned to speak some Korean.
I met the best human female I think I have ever met in my life (Park Inae… I love you dearly).

However, one of the most important things I did was reading. I read everything. I was in Korea for two years, and in those two years I put such titles as Being and Nothingness, The Republic, A Treatise of Human Nature, Phenomenology of Spirit, Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and Vanity Fair among countless other novels and books of poetry.

It was during this time that I was also writing a book about the experience of being a foreigner/teacher in South Korea.

It was during this time that I wrote a play in three acts based on Voltaire’s Candide and the idea that man exists in three states: suffering, boredom and work—which became the three acts.

I fell in love with a Super-Korean girl named April. She was lovely, older, and a great lover, but her Korea streak made her need to seek other attentions. It ended.

I met truly good people. I was party to what I’d assume is a felony. Friends of mine who were in a band that was playing in Dagu on the same night as our city hockey team was playing Dagu decided to rent a giant bus and take everybody together. A mini-fridge was thrown out a window. A fire extinguisher was discharged into my room. Fleeing happened. We were involved.

Nights of soju and roses.

After my contract finished in September 2009, I went to another school in November in Suwon, but I took a wee break to visit my recently married friends in London (the aforementioned Italian bird and high school wrestling buddy) and Agent X in New York City.

Korea was a peak of freedom. I climbed mountains. I ascended where westerners hadn’t dreamed of seeing. I searched through the depths of literature and the soul. The very first F1 race in Korea happened in 2010, and I was there for it by myself. It was beautiful. I wandered around the tiny town of Mokpo. They have these little parks and tiny hills to climb. There’s a giant jjimjilbang next a bus terminal where we caught a shuttle to the race. I almost got stuck in the race parking lot… alone… in the middle of nowhere… but hey, we’ve been there before.

No fear. No edge. When having a plan is good, having no plan is fine, and needing a plan is as good as anything, something happens to the mind.

I suppose that it would be possible to say that I accepted the reality of nature. When put into a natural situation, even if harsh, I could survive or die and be happy either way. It’s hard to die in manmade situations if you’re simply paying attention. Be very aware all the time, thinking, “Now I am living in this way.”

The truth holds no fear for me, nor does the bone-crunching power of nature—unless you consider it in the same vein as the fear of god: knowing but at peace with.

It is 2011. I haven’t really been in Kansas City for a decade. I live with Agent X. The future is fuzzy, but I can see an outline. This residence is my seventeenth roof to live under in ten years. May all beings be happy…

and may my loved ones feel the happiness I desire for them in every moment. Share love. Share life. Be well. Be calm. Go forth. Go safely. Do intently. Do proudly.

Let’s Be Very Clear

about something: reading is one of the most productive uses of a body’s time. Perhaps that’s precisely the point: a body’s time. If the body’s time is pondered for a second, what comes immediately to mind is death, so how on earth is reading a justifiable part of that relatively short existence?
The soul.
The soul is universal and eternal and infinitesimally small and infinitesimally large and permeates everything.
But of course there arises the eternal question, the question that has plagued science and religion (to a lesser degree) from the beginning of time—I couldn’t help myself:
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Perhaps a better rendering of the question might be:
What is it about something that makes us believe there should be nothing?
The latter question would probably be answerable, and that answer would be that we see the universal structure everywhere: it is present in the very smallest particles, it is viewable in the night sky and our understanding of astronomy, and you can even find it in reading.
What is this structure that we see?
(I can see we’re on a basic ontological search here…)
Mostly-empty space, is what it turns out to be.
At a cellular level, most of the atomic structure is a cloud, a haze, and a constantly moving something-or-other.
Have you ever seen a picture of a galaxy? Looks a lot like a cell to me.
I bet the universe looks like that.
But I suppose I’ve been avoiding the “why” question that I posed earlier.
Basically, I like to avoid discussing why questions because they inevitably lead to metaphysical inquiry, and metaphysics is not my strong suit because it seems to me to be based largely on things like belief. If I were to categorize the different kinds of physics, I would say that general, observable physics would be precisely that: observable. We can watch the rules and principles that we believe to be true actually happen—thereby offering a kind of “proof” for the them. However, metaphysics deals with things that are—rather unfortunately or very fortunately depending on how you look at it—almost always experientially based.
The words I chose to use there are very specific and I want to make sure that metaphysics—or at least Eli metaphysics—is not reduced to a purely subjective perspective. Just because metaphysical understanding has at least one foot in the experiential aspect of humanity does not mean that an entire blanket of personal experience can be thrown over the whole situation: there are always teachers that come before and disciples that come after any kind of metaphysical experience. In other words, you have to be prepared for the experience by some kind of coach who has been there before, and you will be so changed by the experience yourself that you will in turn attempt to guide others seeking metaphysical experience. In a lot of ways, the experiencing of why is a community project.
Why is there something instead of nothing?
“Happiness is the virtuous activity of the soul.” That’s some bastardized Aristotle for you, but he places this caveat on that activity:
over the course of a lifetime.
Inside the body’s time are two other times: the time of the mind and the time of the soul.
One of them marches steadily onwards (the body).
The other two are based on the initiative of the possessor.
The power of the mind is basically limitless, and the same can be said of the soul, but it takes time and dedication to develop either of them. It is for this reason that Aristotle decided that the virtuous activity of the soul needed to extend over the course of an entire lifetime.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that we will probably never know from a scientific perspective why there is something instead of nothing. If we take what we know about nature and apply it to the universe, then our universe is probably just a cell in the skin of the universal fabric that spreads its one fact throughout everything it touches: is-ness.
If God—capitalization intentional—exists, then he must necessarily be bigger than the universe: what good is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present god that isn’t big enough to be everywhere at the same time, able to out-muscle anything, and know absolutely everything?
No good. God isn’t dead, but it’s a fuck-tonne bigger than we could ever imagine, and I believe that her name might be Nature.
We call it Mother Nature and think of trees in autumn or lakes during the summer or snow drifts in winter and giddy springs, but our sight is very short. It is probably more likely that Mother Nature extends to the galaxy as well. The nature of the galaxy is to spin around a giant black hole. The nature of our solar system is to spin around the sun. It turns out that nature is probably extendable to the very reaches of the universe and—perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here—beyond.
What is the one incontrovertible fact about nature? Is-ness.
Nature is also imbued with a very slippery touch of magic.
Oak trees growing from acorns? Magic.
So, you’re telling me that we bury this in dirt, keep giving it water, and that’s about it? Yup. It turns out that the process (while infinitely more complicated in reality) is basically that simple. Imagine the entire earth as the brain and the products of the mental work the things that make the earth such a beautiful place—trees and streams and whatnot. The core and the movement and all the stuff we don’t see would be the world’s sub-consciousness and the visible stuff would be the consciousness. The planet would be the body. The soul would be the magic of the fact that it is.
Why is there something instead of nothing?
“Nothing comes from nothing.”—Many people said it, but notably Shakespeare
Because without something to work on, nothing gets worked on… the work stops. Realistically, we are probably here to develop as fully as possible the unique manifestation of universe that we are—that what the ancients believed at any rate. The truth of the matter is that we are probably an accident based on a pure numbers game:
“Billions and billions and of planets, huh? That ought to be enough for a while. Let’s see what happens. We can always make more next time. We’re not super busy.” Maybe we’re a product of nature attempting to create something that can overcome her at last, but she simply hasn’t quite gotten the recipe perfect yet.

Composed on Valentine’s Day

and related to love. These days, I can’t get these Laura Marling lyrics out of my head. It’s disconcerting because they are deeply involved with things that I would like to think of myself as being deeply involved in—if not presently.
I have an unhealthy relationship with love. To say that I love to love love, would be only to understand what Joyce meant. We are all pieces of love. Love is a part of the universal structure. Nature is love. It’s hard, sometimes brutal. Sometimes, when unrequited or scorned, it can be downright vicious. But it can be gentle and humble and sweet and lying dormant for ages. It’s not our awareness that makes us special creatures in the universe, it’s our awareness of our awareness (damned tautology) and the resultant reflection, allowing for reason that make of us unique manifestations of universal energy.
I don’t know if anybody has ever really considered it before, but perhaps humanity, with its layered awareness is actually a punishment.
The great order of the universe is composed of who-knows-what kind of logic. Perhaps it is those creatures that will beat themselves to death—physically or mentally—attempting to understand this awareness they have of the world around them that are the scorned creatures of the universe. Most animals content themselves to the understanding that they need to find food and shelter, procreate, and try to stay alive. Humans are different. We want more.
Perhaps that’s part of where love comes into play. It is a higher level of existence to understand the great cosmic order wherein part of staying alive is creating for one’s mate and progeny the ability to continue existence. It is the satisfaction of one of the highest callings of nature: survive.
In some ways, surviving is the easier of nature’s dual calling. Reproduction, especially for humanity—and this is where it can become quite a trying task to be a human—can take place in two different realms.
While at first glance it doesn’t seem as though these two worlds, as opposed to a unified one, would cause all that much harm: you simply have to pick. Ah, but the problem is, of course that these two worlds (the physical and the intellectual/mental) interact with each other, are inseparable from each other, and even exist in the exact same place at the exact same time. As is probably pretty evident, that one remove brings with it both the possibility of cataclysmic disaster and inconceivable joy—where the former is something like a cutting off of one’s self from their awareness and the latter is something like coming to a kind of harmony and balance within the universal spectrum.
Words, words. Nothing but sweet words that turn into bitter orange wax in my ears.
But love and the mind are not strangers to each other, and they are both on pretty decent terms with the body, so why shouldn’t love be the web that weaves them together and makes of itself such a delightful nuisance?
The love of the mind, the love of the body, and the love of the soul are all very different breeds of the same species. There are some people whose genetic makeup just clicks with your genetic makeup, and when your two parts come together there is a whole lot of joy, thoroughgoing joy. There are people who stimulate your mind in such a way that, though they might not be what you are normally physically attracted to, the fact that they stay in your mind—haunting it as it were—for so long and popping into it at such strange times that you can’t help but gravitate toward them. There are people you are drawn to, or who happen to cross your path, whose soul (unique manifestation of the universe) reaches out and connects to another soul such that there can never be a severing: it is as if they could actually communicate with each other through the universal schema of symbolization and communication which renders space and time impotent.
Sometimes vaulting into the heavens leaves one with as tendency toward flights of rhetorical fancy, but never fear because the fall always leaves one bruised and slightly more cautious the next time… slightly.
There are merits to all of them. It is very nice to have somebody there to take care of those bodily needs that seem to creep up as a matter of course for the human body—both men and women get the craving. It is also very nice to have somebody there to talk to, to listen to, to learn from, to teach, and to deal with the things of the mind. It is also very nice to have that soul mate.
Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult to find what people refer to as “the one.” To find a soul mate is incredibly difficult. The soul has so many strands, threads, strings, colors, styles, and whathaveyou that the chances of bumping into one that fits your particular network of soul whatever is pretty chancy I’d say—by which I’d mean nearly impossible. A mind-mate is somewhat more probable, as the mind is based on the structure of the universe—finding a mind that is structured similarly to yours can be somewhat trying, but determination and effort will find you attaining your prize. The body, with its physicality makes just about any tool capable of pleasure. The flexibility, shape, and size of each particular unit is taken into the alternate aspects of their partner(s), and it makes pleasure possible from just about anybody.
It’s hard to say whether or not the pyramid of pleasure is oriented properly with the soul at the top and pointing towards to the heavens with the base of the body holding us steadily to the earth—primacy being sometimes relative—or if it’s not something inverted with the point of the soul creating a fulcrum whereby the body and mind must remain in balance or the whole structure begins to lean and tilt with the potential for falling over completely. Either way, what we see when we look at the thing with the proper set of eyes is that they are all connected, all important, and all necessary of thorough investigation.
My loves are spread all over the world. I have not known physical love in a couple of months. A mind with which to commune would be pleasant in the extreme, but unfortunately the style of my mind makes me too pensive and standoffish to seek these minds out. The nature of my soul makes me a wanderer, a finder, and a perpetual bad bet for the long run. Of course it’s because I’m scared. Did you think I didn’t know that? Fear runs rampant in the parts of my mind that desire my own breed of greatness. The nature of the fear is something that might bear discussion, but it is definitely there.
At any rate, in my present solitude—which is not entirely un-welcome—I reach out to the ones that I have loved, the ones I will love, and those for whom my love transcends time and space. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been loved by those who have loved me—from family to lovers—and perhaps luckier to have loved those same people. I regret none of my relationships. My inadequacies and deficiencies as a human being have made me, unfortunately, a villain of the highest caliber, and I carry it with me every day. No regrets, no surrender. I love those people perhaps more powerfully now I see the effect they have made on my life. Share love today.

The Soul Searching

There is a perpetual hesitancy in the words of those that would attempt to put words to truths which sit outside the scope of language: all translation is loss, and doubly so when translating the matter of the spiritual world.
Science’s biggest problem is that it makes too much sense.
Religion’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t make enough sense.
As with most things, the reality is not in the extremes.
There are always anomalies. That’s the point of them, to be. But one example cannot supply enough oomf for a reasoning, sentient being—at least, it shouldn’t. This seems to be where they both get in trouble. The one camp gives proofed evidence, and the other the evidence of faith and belief, which are rationally irrational.
It is at this point that everybody usually picks a side. People start saying that you have to believe this and that. Fuck them. Even that, using that particular word, would be abominable to some. It’s all about control.
So I have become a myopic spiritual vagabond.
I know because I see repeated structures, and that this sits nicely with me.
But I suppose I should tell the story of how my understanding of these terms came to be, so either buckle in for a quick tour of my spiritual upbringing or fast forward a bit to the parts at the end which are undoubtedly bound to be better than this rag.
My father is a music minister. He and my mother attended a Christian college in College City, Arkansas—while this seems like a preposterous name for a REAL city it is in fact a real place and home to Williams Baptist University. At any rate, Sundays were spent in church watching my father lead the music and learning more than anybody should probably need to know about any book (and that’s coming from me).
At any rate, as usually happens, unhappy children rebel against their parents. My morality and spiritual quest took a back seat for a couple of years.
Then, one day I picked up a book called The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle. I read it from cover to cover. It’s basically about what it takes to build a great society. What do you need? Great men. How do you get great men? Genetics? True, but is it possible to make them? It should be. Education. This is how the ancients viewed education: training the citizen to be the best possible citizen (and therefore human being) they could be. It is inside this desire to create a thoroughly decent human being that we find the questions of morality, desire, turpitude, and, alternately, the place of truth and honesty in the life of the citizen.
This was, in other words, the birthplace of logic. In the course of this logic, there cropped up the eternal question: what of the soul? The ancients went crazy. There is a whole science full of its own signs and significations that the Neo-Platonists got into where they were actually defining the soul—or attempting to do so. Over-zealous as they may have been, they did interesting work and proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that interest in this issue of the soul would probably not die out quickly.
It didn’t. It should also be noted here that, in the language of that era (and I believe most people are dealing with Latin here) soul, mind, and reason all translate as roughly the same word—think about that in terms of the good book for a second.
(Quick side note: I think that Christians are doing themselves a very great disservice in cutting themselves off from other potential readings of their book. There are incredible lessons in that book that get missed because we don’t know how to read it.)
Anyhow, with the fall of the Roman Empire came the Dark Ages and for 1000 years, with many of the manuscripts of the ancients lost, the Christian church grew.
Then came the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the bastions of Christianity started falling and making way for thinkers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre, Kant, Steiner etc etc etc, and the intellectual revolution was underway… but all great thinkers come upon the one question that will perpetually baffle:
“I say my good man, but what of this “soul” business?”
But it was essentially shelved and labeled “a bummer” because there was simply no way to know—I believe this was sort of the birth of Nihilism: if there’s no way to know, then what’s the point? Please, for the love of god, don’t go getting all technical with the definitions of Nihilism because I could’ve just have easily phrased it: if there’s no way to know, then everything’s true! To believe in nothing is actually quite a feat. At any rate, you catch my drift I’d imagine.
Steiner once said that the spirit surrounds the unique physical manifestation of itself, and then went on to describe it as something that actually penetrates through the layers of physical self and extends beyond, out into space. “In his later years, Velazquez never painted things. He painted the space around them.”
That’s where the spirit can be most easily seen. When it gets all mixed up with the physicality of the body, strange things happen.
All things that can be said to be share the similar trait of being. They are all connected by this, if by nothing else. And it could be said that that connection, whatever it is, is the universal spirit. People, animals, planets, galaxies, and whatever else was, is, will be are unique physical manifestation of the universal spirit—a bit like an arm hair or a pimple or a fingernail: never exactly the same, although they look awfully goddamned similar.
Well, I looked all over. I found eastern texts to contain a similar kind of structure, albeit in different words or a different style. It seems like there are four basic elements to human existence: the body (the seat of the spirit and the mind), the consciousness (sensations of external and internal sense), the subconscious (involuntary activity), and the spirit (the answer to the question: “why is there something instead of nothing?”).
Religions are usually a manifestation of a too-heavy emphasis on only one or two aspects of existence. The key is balance.
That’s a lie. The key is effort. Balance is impossible. One of the unique quirks of the universe is that nothing NOTHING is perfect (if only because nature doesn’t understand the terminology), and balance is a kind of perfection. One must try diligently to achieve that which they know is, in the end, not achievable because that is the path that will lead them towards knowledge of the world that lies inside of everything, that universal spirit that pervades everything, tearing through what we think is impenetrable, and making of us all unique universal manifestations, special, and ultimately dead, but that’s okay: to not enjoy sentience would be the greatest sin of all.
Heidegger has this thing about the four-fold: the heavens, the earth, the mortals and immortals. The earth is the consciousness: it makes the sensory world possible. The heavens are the sub-conscious: think the word “god” and you might be on to something. The mortals are the bodies that we receive: our unique manifestation. The immortals would be the spirit: immortality and eternity permeating every thing.