Ghost Song

I'm sorry I haven't posted in a long time.  Eastwind only has one place on the edge of the community where I can access the internet and I rarely get up here.  Here's a song I just wrote.  I don't have a recording yet, but we do have a recording studio which i should really become familiar with.
Ghost
The ghost of the past
The size of the life it encompasses
 Pulls you back
As you try to anticipate how it will haunt you next

But you must realize
That you are more than the flesh and blood that
Hold you back
Awaken to the dawn burning in your eyes

Let go of your ghost
Its just a memory that fades when you
Open your eyes
To the new day that surrounds you

Even the dark
Can’t banish this light
the present reveals
When you silence your mind

And realize that you are
All that fills your eyes


I spent a lifetime haunted by
A ghost I could never escape
Until I looked into God’s eyes
And from my slumber I did wake

And I realized that even when this body passes away
That I would never die because only my ghost dissipates

Until that day
Nothing meant anything to me
And darkness reigned
So long as I desired not to see

But when I opened my eyes
that moment I glimpsed the divine
I was changed
And my mind was clarified

And all I felt was love
For all I could see

All lives have these moments where
Everything falls into place
But then they disappear as they came:
Without a trace

But if you let go of your desire
Ghosts wont chase those moments away
And you’ll live forever in this love
That greets you like a brand new day

So let go of your ghost
Its just a memory that fades when you
Open your eyes
To the new day that surrounds you

Even the dark
Can’t banish this light
the present reveals
When you silence your mind

And realize that you are
All that fills your eyes

An Ejection From Your Conformity To This Reality

All I see Is Fire

Life:
Illumination
Smoldering embers waiting for a flame,
For a moment of clarity,
Burning bright in the night of time.

Illumination is the night
Pushing forward life's eternal movement:
Sustenance of Being in the twilight of its revelation

Present is the flame
Brighter in the immanence of its realization,
In the clarity of its all embracing love
Cast aside by the ignorant
In favour of the darkness: its own creation.

Embrace me in this love
As we walk together in our fire
Through these lands of embers and darkness
Wanting nothing more
Than to see this whole world in flames.

Dissection of the Eye

Philosophy

Strange telemetries

Mathematical imaginings

The optics deceive

But only for the moment it takes

To let the Image live

Not frozen behind a pane

But moving

All-encompassing

Alive

You are neither optics nor capturer of Image

Image does not capture life in the optics

Image is not for the optics
Optics are for the Image

Optics are

Only through Image

The Image's shadow

Is the life of the optics

Image gives shadows
to optics
As optics

Image is

Optics and Life

Image is everything

And life is the knowing of Self

Life is the illusion that there is other than the Image

Through other

There is Self

Self is the Image that dissolves the other

When optics dissolves itself into Image
There is only love

Because there is only Self

Immanence…

A Circle in the Square

A Circle In The Square

The grid is white

The grid is grey

The grid is black

I am here in the grid:

The grid that unfolds in front of me;

The grid that orders

The grid that holds at bay the natural order of things.

I walk down one of the many corridors of the grid

Corridors divided by concrete and steel

Jutting from the earth

In smooth straight lines refracted from their surroundings.

Like circuits on a board

The corridors transmit their thoughts:

Transmit their people

To their intended destinations.

Elated by a little success

Downcast by a little failure

They judge according to the grid

And move according to its design

The subtle curves of their bodies 

So out of place in their surroundings,

Walk along the straight lines and sharp turns

Walk along the city streets.

I am caught up in these city streets

Reminded of what I’m missing

Finding solace only in my memories

Of the roots, the leaves and soil…

But now I enter the square

And there alone stands a tree:

The tree is green

The tree is brown

The tree is alive.

A tree with disorderly bark

Flowing of its own initiative.

The tree that curves

Like the bodies that surround it.

The tree that whispers to the passers by

Of something that they’ve forgotten.

The tree that sinks its roots into the soil

That brings its dark waters to the brightness of the sun.

Could these city dwellers  

Imagine what it meant

For a tree to suck the rain down from the sky?

Do they not see how the rain is lost

Falling on the unforgiving pavement

And disappearing down the gutter’s drain?

I am exiting from the gutter’s drain:

No longer do I live as these memories,

No longer do I live as this longing

A longing that carries these thoughts

Forth towards a future that they desire

A future always failing to resolve their lack.

I am born anew…

Now I find myself as these surroundings and what they frame

The wondrous being that stands here in the sun’s radiance:

Like the present materializing from the formless One

And casting the past into its oblivion

This tree stands among the destruction

Of concrete, pavement and order

Arising from disparate light, water and air

To reclaim what was paved over.

As this tree

I am released from the desires the grid has imprinted upon me;

Released from the past to which it holds me;

Released from the future towards which it presses me on;

Released

Towards the boundless identity

That blesses these eyes with the love of what they see.

The tree reminds me why I laugh.

Laugh at the fleetingness of the grid’s construction

Laugh at the nothingness at which it grasps

Laugh at its judgments that attempt to divide all they touch

But most of all,

I laugh at myself

For letting it take me away…

God Touches A Stone

-->

The world must become your church, life must become your ministry and humanity must become your congregation.

Before I begin, let me say that I am entirely indifferent to matters of religion.  At worst, religion binds the individual to a community defined by dogma, structure, zealotry and the illusory identification with "the community of the faithful".  At best, religion is merely a means to an end -and it is this end (identification with God, existence, the One etc.) as means that I am concerned with.  Because of this, I do not discriminate among the different faiths -including atheism-, but instead, I examine the personal spirituality of the individual.  Religion provides a language and a structure in which to express this spirituality but ultimately, spirituality is an individual's personal expression of how they relate to the divine/Self.  One can participate with all one's efforts and energy in religion but have no spirituality -that is, no relation to the divine.  Likewise, one can have no religion but be the most spiritual person in the world.  To the society of his day, Jesus Christ appeared as the latter person.  The son-of-man broke with the religious traditions of his day to such an extent that he appeared a dangerous heretic to all that heard him but did not understand.  Jesus did not identify as an individual (he was/is Christ: he identified with/as God) but this did not mean that he wasn't afraid to stand out (in his society) as an individual: he spoke truth in an age and a society of lies.  For this reason he was crucified.

Now more than ever, the righteous must not be afraid to stand out as individuals.  Now more than ever, we find ourselves in a society of lies: the lie of the selfish consumer, the lie of false prosperity provided by the Federal Reserve, the lie of the false sense of power brought about by endless global war, the lie of the greatness of the wealthy and of celebrities, the lie of a society of atomized individuals.  Like Jesus Christ before us -who refused to identify as born of the corrupt Roman/Jewish world around him, but rather identified himself as the one born of God (of truth, Identity, One etc.)- the time has now come for the faithful to forge a new society, and with it, a new identity by which the corrupt society of our time might know us.
If I had to circumscribe myself as an individual (something I am loathed to do) I would do so by identifying as a libertarian (neither right nor left, capitalist nor socialist).  Ultimately this identification as libertarian is more of a belief in the abandonment of one's own individuality -and thus the liberation of Self (God, Identity, One etc.)- than it is an identification of oneself as a lone individual.

The first step in moving towards this new society consists not of making war on our "enemies" nor silencing those who disagree with us (for these are the tactics of the followers of lies) but rather, personal spiritual purification.  This consists not only of changing our lifestyle (involving ourselves more in the community and world around us, providing ourselves and our neighbors with more of the things we need to live, having a personal connection with the earth as well as with the sustenance the earth provides etc.) but also in changing that with which we identify:

When we fixate on "our" past and future, we bring "ourselves" away from the creator as we are drawn to the worldliness of creation.  God is the creator (God is Identity/One).  Though creation arises and passes away, the creator stands eternal -indifferent to the flux and flow of creation such that only God is capable of all creation and all creation exists only through its active revelation by the creator.  All that is revealed is (in) God.   Revelation/creation is ongoing.  Sin is identifying as created.  Jesus' ministry was founded in order to guide humanity away from identifying as created/worldly and towards identifying with/as the creator.  Identity is God. Identification with Identity takes place as (in) God.

God Touches A Stone (Christ Revealed)

Suddenly,

A loving smile radiated from his lips

Whose truth they understood more than his words:

“take,

eat;

this is my body”

Peter took the bread.

Peter put it to his lips.

Peter did not understand.

Puzzled stares

Dart towards each other

Finding no answers in their search.

The moment’s silence

Draws

Out.

(Though they felt his light,

they understood not his words.

But he could feel it in their eyes…)

His hands lifted the clay cup from the wood table.

“drink from it,

all of you”

Peter stepped forward.

Peter drank from the cup,

Peter felt the warmth radiate from his center,

And yet he did not understand

Still fettered in the shackles of his worldly birth

He watched

Puzzled

As the others put it to their lips.

The wine

Presented no sign to those expecting:

The simple drink from the rough cup

Sat humbly in the shepherd’s hand;

Worldly to those who did not yet know Him.

“This is my blood”

But no blood flowed from his veins.

No cut violated his body

And no bitter taste of salt and iron lingered in their mouths.

But suddenly Peter understood

As his thoughts brushed against God’s perfection.

Breaking free from the world’s tethers,

To accept his present, divine birth:

Given by Himself.

Given by Christ’s revelation:

He revealed himself in the cup,

In the wine,

In the faces of his followers,

In the dirt floor and thatched ceiling,

In the eyes:

For the first time

He shared the eyes of his beloved teacher

Who cast his gaze into the depths of his own.

Behind the eyes of the son of man

He saw the infinite identity of his father’s smile

That bore itself on the son’s complexion

Who lived there in his father’s words

As they were given to him by his faith

That kept him in the moment of his father’s unfolding creation.

Peter did not know what it was to be lost

Until God found him in his blind questioning

And struck all ego from his mind

And blessed his tongue with these words:

“This is... Me
This is Truth

This is God

This 
is 
Christ”

Experiment III/Kontext

I am living in the city now.  The city is a disease upon the earth and a self-inflicted wound on mankind.  It dampens the senses and isolates us more and more in direct proportion to the extent to which it pulls us together.  I'm honestly surprised that I could even bring myself to finish this poem.  I'm afraid that it will be the last enlightened piece of literature that I produce for some time.  On the drawing board I have poems about isolation in the city, the state, the first communion at the last supper, and finally a poem about people who cannot stand to be in silence with others.  My inspired moments are far and in between but I will do what i can to change that and make the most of it when it does happen...

Experiment III

I give this poem to you.

I wanted to tell you what I am, what you are.

Though time and space seem to separate us,

I tell you:

We are together now.

It is Ourself that I’m trying to impress on you:

The now in which the words pass by

Contains our voice speaking these thoughts;

The future as it becomes the past.

We are this future,

Which consciousness faithfully reflects

As it leaves our unthought Self

To dance in the firmament of the mind.

This future is the One

That holds the present and the past

As it reveals itself as everything

When we glimpse its shadow.

So drop this poem from your hands

And drop these thoughts from your mind

So that the reader might take the time

To free itself of words and listen…

 God I can't stop listening to good Russian electronic music!

Peak Government

I had to re-post this article because it succinctly articulates so much of what I feel against government intervention. 

Big government means no free market.  They tell us that the unbridled free-market caused the 2008 financial crisis and our inability to escape it.  This seems to be true since some of the biggest market players (and makers) are implicated in (and I would argue guilty of) the crimes of our time.  This argument, however, fails to consider the possibility that the very government that its adherents turn to in order to solve these problems might actually be the problem in the first place.  Take a closer look at some of the companies that are so reviled (for instance: Monsanto, Wall Mart, Exon Mobil, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc.) and you will find that all have in common ties with the government or a business strategy of fitting into a dynamic in private society created by the government (Wall Mart for instance, fits into the "globalization" dynamic created by the Fed's cheap money that encourages excessive consumption and discourages productive pursuits  at the "center" [aka the USA] and moves production -at the expense of consumption- to the periphery [aka china et al.].  It also benefits from the Fed and Government because many of its patrons are also on Social Security, welfare, unemployment etc.).

Dis-empower the state  and you will end the reign (and the existence) of its parasite corporations.

Big government is also a symptom and a cause of the spiritual disconnection of humanity from its own experience of itself and, through this, a disconnection with the ecology in which it lives.  The transfer of risk from one's own shoulders -say, the risk of poverty and the social consequences of poverty- also transfer the face of the stranger who represents the problem (represents it as both cause and effect) -the face of the poor and the face of the cause of poverty (corrupt governments that team up with corporations and especially financiers to steal your wealth through inflation as they use the state to keep you on financial life support while they gut you and your children of your future)-  from your gaze.  This dynamic of appealing to the state re-enforces personal isolation and selfishness which ultimately re-asserts itself in society as something that requires more state intervention.  This selfishness, meanwhile,  runs rampant over people and environment as both are disregarded in the quest (which the state and parasite corporations have institutionalized) for money and power.

The only way to end this dynamic is to do it PERSONALLY.  This change goes down to the essence of one's existence (an essence which I have tried to capture in poems such as Displacement, Dance of Silence, Solution and Experiment 2) as well as the concrete actions in which we engage in order to change our unfeeling and corrupt world that we live in (I have also attempted to addressed this aspect of concrete personal actions and experience with the world in poems such as The Illusions of Progress, The Future of an Illusion and Dust). 

This article is re-posted from http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/acknowledging-arrival-peak-government-part-1/75356 and was written by Charles Hugh Smith who writes on http://www.oftwominds.com/.

I don't necessarily agree with everything in the article but it's a great place to start.

Acknowledging the Arrival of Peak Government

Most informed people are familiar with the concept of Peak Oil, but fewer are aware that we’re also entering the era of Peak Government. The central misconception of Peak Oil -- that it’s not about “running out of oil,” it’s about running out of cheap, easy-to-access oil -- can also be applied to Peak Government: It’s not about government disappearing, it’s about government shrinking.
Central government -- the Central State -- has been in the expansion mode for so long that the process of contracting government is completely alien to the nation, to those who work for the State, and to those who are dependent on the State. Thus we have little recent historical experience of Peak Government and few if any conceptual guideposts to help us understand this contraction.
Peak Government is not a reflection of government services or the millions of individuals who work in government; it is a reflection of four key systemic forces that drove State expansion are now either declining or reversing.

The Four Key Drivers of State Expansion

The twin peaks of oil and government are causally linked: central government's great era of expansion has been fueled by abundant, cheap liquid fuels. As economies powered by abundant cheap energy expanded, so did tax revenues.
Demographics also aided Central States’ expansion: as the population of working-age citizens grew, so did the work force and the taxes paid by workers and enterprises.
The third support of Central State expansion was debt, and more broadly, financialization, which includes debt, leverage, and institutionalized incentives for speculation and misallocation of capital. Not only have Central States benefited from the higher tax revenues generated by speculative bubbles, they now depend on debt to finance their annual spending. In the U.S., roughly one-third of Federal expenditures are borrowed every year. In Japan -- which is further along on this timeline, relative to America -- tax revenues barely cover social security payments and interest on central government debt; all other spending is funded with borrowed money.
The fourth dynamic of Central State expansion is the State’s ontological imperative to expand. The State has only one mode of being, expansion. It has no concept of, or mechanisms for, contraction.
In my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, I explain this ontological imperative in terms of risk and gain. From the Central State’s point of view, everything outside its control poses a risk. The best way to lower risk is to control everything that can be controlled. Once the potential sources of risk are controlled, then risk can be shifted to others.
Put another way, once the State controls the entire economy and society, it can transfer systemic risk to others: to other nations, to taxpayers, etc.
In effect, the State’s prime directive is to cut the causal connection between risk and gain so that the State can retain the gain and transfer the risk to others. The separation of risk from gain is called moral hazard, and the key characteristic of moral hazard can be stated very simply: People who are exposed to risk and consequence act very differently than those who are not exposed to risk and consequence.
Every time the Central State guarantees something, it disconnects risk from consequence and institutionalizes moral hazard.
To take but one example of many, when the Central State guarantees mortgages so lenders and originators cannot lose and the borrower can’t lose more than his modest 3% down payment, then everyone in the chain is encouraged to pursue risky speculations because the State has disconnected risk from the consequence of a potentially large loss. The risk hasn’t vanished; it has simply been transferred to the taxpayers, who absorb the inevitable losses that result when speculation is encouraged.
Separating risk from gain inevitably generates systemic instability. The entire credit-housing bubble can be seen as proof of this dynamic.
All four of the causal factors itemized above are turning against continued expansion:

• The key energy source of global transportation, liquid fuel, is no longer cheap and easy to access.
• The demographics have reversed as the population of State dependents is soaring.
• Debt has expanded to the point that servicing that debt now threatens the financial stability of the State and its currency.
• The State’s separation of risk and consequence is generating systemic instability.

There are plenty of models of State expansion -- democracy, socialism, communism, theocracy, and so on -- and none for State contraction. This suggests that the down slope of Peak Government will be disorderly and rife with unintended consequences.

The Failure of Separation of Powers

The predominant Western model of governance assumes, incorrectly, that a “separation of powers” within the State will limit the State’s appetite for control. But rather than limit the State’s expansion, the State’s subsystems -- the institutions of executive power, legislative power and judicial power -- are competing to gain as much control as possible over both the State itself and the nation’s social and financial systems.
This competition doesn’t weaken or limit the State; rather, it lends the State a fearsome competitive advantage, as each institution gains power as the State expands. So even though the competition between the three may appear to limit the power of each, in aggregate this competition only increases the State’s expansion as each seeks to outdo the others in reach, influence, and power.
Regardless of which institution wins or loses a particular squabble, the State inexorably expands its control and power. And just as inexorably, elites within the State -- systemically protected from the risk created by their policies -- will experience a rising sense of omnipotence as their private power rises in tandem with the State’s expansion.
These powers also offer State elites a way to radically lower their own risk and dramatically increase their private gain by leveraging the State’s vast powers to their own private benefit.
In other words, not only does each agency and branch of the State seek to expand its reach and power, so, too, does every individual within the State who can leverage the power of the State to protect his/her own individual gain.

The State as Protector of Private Gain

The Central State is granted unique powers of coercion by its membership (the citizenry) to protect them from the predation of foreign powers, individuals, and subgroups seeking monopoly. The citizens grant the State this extraordinary power to protect their freedom of faith, movement, expression, enterprise and association and to insure that no subgroup can dominate the nation for their private gain.
Granting this power to the State creates a risk that the State itself may become predatory. To counter this potential, the State has the self-limiting mechanisms of a separation of powers such that no one institution or agency can dominate the State and thus the nation.
But as we have seen, the separation of powers has failed to limit the expansion of the State; rather, it has become a competitive advantage, feeding the State’s expansion. There are no State-based limits on the State’s concentration of wealth and power.
There is a great irony in this concentration of power in the State: the power is concentrated to protect the citizenry from predation and exploitation, but that concentration becomes an irresistible attractor for all those seeking to increase their private gain via monopoly, cartels, collusion, fraud, and other forms of predation.
The wealth that can be concentrated in private hands is not limited or self-regulated, and so private concentrations of wealth inevitably exceed the ethical threshold of individuals within the State (i.e., their resistance to bribes and self-interest). This structural imbalance leaves the State intrinsically vulnerable to the influence of private wealth. Once this wealth has a foothold of influence within the State, it can then bypass the State’s internal controls and become the financial equivalent of cancer: a blindly self-interested organism bent solely on growth at the expense of the system as a whole.
Rather than protect the citizens from exploitation, the State’s primary role becomes protecting the private gains of elites who have taken effective control of the State’s vast powers.

The Death Spiral of an Expansive State

We can now see that the Central State faces an impossible contradiction: to pursue its primary purpose of protecting the citizenry from predation, it is granted powers that enable it to evade its own self-limiting mechanisms. Private concentrations of wealth gain control over the State’s machinery of governance, and the resulting partnership of private and State elites suppress the mechanisms that were intended to limit private influence over State power.
To enhance their own power, these elites increase the State’s reach until it dominates the entire political, social, and economic system. This sets up an inherently self-destructive feedback loop in which the State’s actions to protect its self-serving elites weaken both the State and the nation. The State’s inefficiencies pressure the nation’s output, even as the State increases its share of the national income to maintain its self-serving elites and quiet its potentially restive dependents. The more the State expropriates, the less surplus is left for productive investment, and so the nation’s output continues to decline.
This dynamic creates a positive feedback loop (i.e., a death spiral) of higher taxes and lower investment in productive assets.

I Send My Regards To The Philosopher

I Send My Regards To The Philosopher                                              

Lost in the somnolence of his solitude

The poet’s hell

Lies in the heaven of his existence

That he cannot see

With eyes closed

And back turned towards the future:

His game composed through endless hindsight,

But no sight for what is here…

But I am here…

And I looked into his eyes…

Lost

In his dualities and questions,

Frustrated with only heaven’s silence for an answer,

He vowed to fill the world with words,

But still stopped to listen to mine:

“Do not feel the guilt of change

As words seem to lose their meaning

As they fly away from you

And drift into the sky.

In this moment together

Do not fight time as it moves forward

And wait forever for abstract completion,

That escapes us even now

As we dance

Into the present’s dawn.”

Now that was old school.

The Nature Of Time

Time: The Illusion Still In The One Who Sees (Heidegger)
Now, the future walks
As self, in the present, towards
The worn path to the past.



Time: The Fact Of The In-One (Laruelle)
The present future,
As yet unexperienced,
Holds present and past.

We Know Each Other

The stranger walked

As the Moment shone from eyes

Betraying a soul

That shadowed the glory of its Revelation.

Fate locked two gazes

That knew of the other’s inner flame:

A knowledge no words could hope to capture

Though both followed separate paths…

Do we know each other

As we walk these city streets

Whose blindness we find so lacking

In the fleeting glance

that passed us by?

Guest poet: Up and Down (a poem)

Originally from http://tumblngphilopoet.tumblr.com/
Author: Paul Dolinsky

Up and Down (a poem)

                 Thesis
Temporality is on display
All is day, there is no night
There are no boundaries
History is obsolete
All is present
               Antithesis
See what you can see
Before it seizes you,
Pulls you down,
then lifts you up
Into the heights,
Flagellates you,
Yes, so you can rise again.
             Synthesis
The empty mind is the luminous mind.
The luminous mind creates light
and the beings who inhabit its world.
That is the synthesis.

Sign/kilowatts

Sign

Left

in the lurch

           

            Time

       flies

                        By

            Free for

the taking

                        But

Words fail

of their own account

            To redeem

               Themselves

                   In the

            Wake

            Of their

binding reality 

Dust

   

The wanderer follows

No hallowed path

Set forth for her

By the sagacious few.

Nor does she live

To build her past

For far off futures

Whose seeds are sewn.

No familiar face

Has she ever seen

That greets her where

She decides to sleep

But travels with

The wind in her hair:

The only companion

She chooses to keep.

All empires return

To dust that birthed

Them from the nothingness

Of barren ground,

And push the ambitious

To build them tall

For fleeting futures

On foundations unsound.

Such men still laugh

At one like her

Who possesses nothing

In their eyes,
And lives in chaos

Of shifting destiny

With no respect

For human lies.

But no future goal

Controls her fate

Nor worldly tethers

Bind her past

So she is free

To contemplate

Her relation to

The earth so vast.

She is the dust

from God’s fingers

that’s fallen on

Ungrateful land

And shows the blind

And sinful people

Their origin from

The present at hand.

They deride and mock

Or at best ignore her

And value what God

Did not confer

But she is more

than the earth and sky

And none can take

What belongs to her.