Dare to leap into the origin. Asvaghosa, The Awakening of Faith
Be alert for you do not know which day your Lord is coming. Matthew 24:42
Dare to leap into the origin
into the Glasgow
the greater glasgow
on your own
by your self
riverring here riverring there.
Dare to engineer the origin,
engineering based on the human heart,
dare to move
dare to know
through one’s own organs:
Organise
Originate
Dare
To Engineer
To Navigate
To re-member
To intuit
These are the verbs of being
The existential imperatives!
Do not listen to people,
especially those in power,
decorated with titles and awards. Instead
watch how they live, see how they are, how they behave…
See their soul through their actions,
not through their words.
Their message is their living
not their hollow proclamations.
Be aware, and beware!
as deceivers and predators walk amongst you.
Being on the lookout - alertness and vigilance -
is the sign of every intelligent creature.
Intelligence, the ability to decrypt,
To read
between
The sign of every human
being.
Slow down! Open up!
Speed and screens are symptoms of dementia.
Dementia a sign of our separation from Mind.
Engage the engines!
Braincraft, bodycraft…
The art of moving under your own steam
is the art of the origin,
the art of being.
Tool on tool makes the machine.
Beware of those who wish to convey you,
who wish to think and thank you.
For they are devils in disguise. Predators preying
on the weak and the wounded. Not quite the blind leading the blind
as the self-unaware
deceiving and misleading
the impoverished and impressionable.
Do everything yourself! Never give your life-force away for anything.
Be especially aware of the buzzwords of banality:
Comfort, ease, convenience…
View them as eagles view men
with suspicion if not disdain
for they will corrupt you,
get inside you, camouflage your origins,
lay waste to your ingenious treasury
of engines…
Get out into the land; let the local lure you:
Plants, birds, rocks…
Place!
Genius loci.
Crags and coasts.
To know your territory is to know your self.
Learn of the wind from the wind.
Treat birds and plants as your long lost cousins.
Relatives of a much wider - much wiser -
family.
Now,
Reassess the abstracts:
God, Family, Love…
In aboriginal terms,
as they flow out from you,
not as they have been inherited,
as they have been handed
down
to you.
Consider developing the self
before consigning it
to a lifetime of purgatory
behind a desk
enclosed in a pen,
behind an engine
emphatically not yours.
Consider the stars as part of your self:
Consider language the configuration of consciousness.
Consider not languaging, and when you do, consider carefully your words.
Words require work to know who they are.
There are phantonyms in our midst, spectral words
that are not part of the logos,
but which have been corrupted to conform
to a limited corporate objective.
Consider then the body: the corporate and the corpus…
The bodies within bodies, the great body
that encompasses all other bodies.
Consider it carefully.
Do not be a passenger in your own body.
Consider ‘it’ as all.
Then think of religion as a binding back, perhaps even as a binding to,
not of bondage, but of delicate connection, fragile filaments
reaching out into the cosmos as a whole.
Consider the real radical,
Homo radix,
as a ‘root-human’,
as a being dependent on the soil,
dependent on the soul of the whole,
from which he flows and flowers.
Our own roots, our own dendrites,
whether you like it or not,
are inexorably caught up with the roots of trees
with the taproots of stars.
Consider even the planet as human
or the human as planet
wandering-wondering,
poetically,
through the cosmos.
Consider the true, the good, and the beautiful
as an outpouring of the undistorted self.
Kosmos as the beautiful whole
integral to the human.
Then, consider the self as indefinite,
the boundaries of which are not to be found on this planet
perhaps not even on this plane.
Consider the imagination
unlimited by the spatio-temporal
as an aspect of what you call ‘god’.
Then consider ‘god’ as its source suggests
as a gathering together of goodness,
a goodness which includes evil,
as inexorable connectivity
through which the voice of the individual is expressed.
Then consider the individual as indivisible,
not dependent on the eye,
but rather Mind.
Mind, as they say in Glasgow,
here in the grey green hollow,
to remember
to recall
to re-enchant.
Sing your song then.
2.
Dare to explore the source code of words….
Their original states,
their original meanings:
Idiot, human, demon…
And be surprised when you learn how they have been dislodged
from the Word.
If we saw language as sacred
then to abuse it and bludgeon it,
to discriminate against certain word-races,
would be a crime,
and advertisers, politicians, newscasters, and authoritarians,
would be held accountable for war-crimes.
The real terror is desecration. Of language, of land, of love.
The true terrorists those
who by their actions and inactions
allow such desecration to occur:
Unbridled consumption is an obesity of brain.
The man-handling of language, the man-handling of land,
the obsession to decorate
effectively, to deracinate,
a pathology of being.
War is their business,
the commodity is the military;
the troops the over-consuming herds:
Consider civilization as all-out war.
The considering itself is a process of delicate unlearning.
Consider then the nature of business:
The state of being busy,
and its antithesis, stillness.
Be still and know!
Be busy and barren.
Dare to question that little external brain
you carry around in your heavy hands
and lovingly rub
like a magic lamp:
It guides and placates you like a little lost dog
yet the genie, the genius, is the engine inside you.
Dare to examine the nature of memory
the nature of navigating, of manual steering,
the membranes of the brain like an old growth forest.
Depending on technology to do it for you
techno-dependency
akin to withering.
Dare to explore the world of silence…
the world of solitude
that lurks behind every façade.
For they, even before nature, are your true parents.
Consider the state of our domesticity
where home is a noun, and homing
something done by pigeons.
Consider our lack of savagery,
and soul-ecology,
where wildness and wilderness enrich the spirit
and the tamed - the sedentary and sedated -
depletes it.
Consider then the nature of travel, and its perversion, tourism:
Planetary gallivanting and quantity surveying
prostituting place and industrializing culture.
Travel like charity begins at home.
To travel is to travail; to travail to work.
Travelling as an educative enterprise. A pilgrimage.
Tourism as a form of low-end entertainment.
Consider the essential as essential to living,
and the superfluous and extraneous as not.
Do not ever tell me you need anything!
Be on the lookout for those who manufacture ‘needs’
for they are the pushers
and you the users.
Soon those needs will become essential to your life.
Until you realize that life is not living.
Become the carpenter - the craftsman,
the joiner -
who hones the wood, unites it, conjoins it,
with other woods.
Consider ‘man’ as a mutation of hu-man,
the creature connected to soil,
homo radix,
not the arrogance of
homo sapiens.
The crises:
Economic
Ecologic
Existential
are all
man-made
And most of all
Consider the nature of being aware:
Be aware of all these considerings:
self-observation - self-excavation - is the key
to the root-human.
Atop the Kilpatrick Plateau.
The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once said God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!"
