Versification - Quareness Series 116th "Lecture".
Sanity.
My troubled mind has struggled
Confronting the unconscious, and
Hoping it might lead to an awakening,
To break-through rather than breakdown.
Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Heracles,
Orpheus, Aeneas and Carl Jung himself,
I've searched deep in the underworld
For what I've not previously thought.
Naming the most beautiful of things
Diogenes the Cynic pointed us towards
Something like free thought and expression,
Uncomplicated accepting of gifts from the gods.
A depth and acuteness of vision enables
Our seeing through the facades of sanity
With a heady mixture of fear and fascination,
Simultaneously both distressing and liberating.
Normal can mean having confused and restricted priorities,
With much in the way of anxiety, distress and self-deception
Potentially feeding into fanatical and destructive behaviours,
Rather than those calm, contained and constructive idealisms.
Imprisoned in our arbitrary lives sans scope and range
And locked up in our own dark and narrow subjectivity,
We're unable to take leave of ourselves, as we look around
Barely seeing possibility and rarely seeing a bigger picture.
Those escapees from Plato's cave of shadows
Might well appear to dwell in worlds of their own,
Only because they've delved much more deeply
Than those many "sane" people all around them.
Mere sanity may not be all it's cracked up to be
Where a prevalent state of dormancy and dullness
May hold less vital potential even than madness,
When we're normally inclined to be out of our minds.
Footnote: We could all go mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another?
Feeling in the Dark.
Change can be confusing and disorientating
Like as for the caterpillar inside the chrysalis.
But for us it's simply the nature of self-initiation,
With a chance to explore the right timing and
Purposeful design in this human experience.
In translating our mess into meaning
We're free to feel rather than fix,
Allowing the base tones to coexist
In the symphony of treble notes.
And through this portal of acceptance
We can drop into the okayness of it all.
As an artist would perceive in true vision
A requirement for paradox and uncertainty,
Our fulfillment and happiness may require
Ceasing our seeking for the magic antidote,
Foregoing a quick fix for nuance and meaning.
Hooked on convention reinforcing mental powerlessness
We're disinclined towards other than filling a prescription,
And avoiding embracing the negative in a larger process
Sees us entrapped within an attractive air of validation...
Tempting but ultimately keeping us arrested as children.
To reclaim agency and become adult, we must
Assume a responsibility for all our responses
And for all the challenges that come our way,
With all of our parts and flaws out on the table
Feeling our way in the space between stories.
Footnote: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when Man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.” - the poet John Keats in 1817.
Openness.
Keeping our hearts and minds open
Nourishes the wisdom in our knowing
What we think we know may be illusion.
That unseen within an upside down glass
Remains inside wherever the glass goes,
Until this enclosure breaks and it escapes
Emerging into full embrace with outside air.
The soul too can merge again
With omnipresent wholeness
When our mortal certainties die,
Freed by open hearts and minds.
And if there is a hell, maybe it's a fitting state
For those who've created it and believe in it?
Footnote: Much (all?) "truth" tends to lose its credibility when we place our own convictions as a doctrine.
An Uncertain Truth.
Why do so many of us today persist
In trying to build a house of certainty
Upon those shifting sands of opinion?
Seeking out our island of contentment
Paddling about in a sea of disillusion
Searching for the lighthouse of clarity.
Opportunity knocking on hypocrisy's door
Comes oft well dressed in zealous glamour
Pushing promotion on ahead to take the floor.
And tyranny can hide in specialist clothes
Power seeking in society's gaps and cracks
Neither previously noticed nor taken seriously.
What's bathed in doctrine cannot really persist
Within set coherent and compelling perspectives
Since each and every one of us seeks our own truth.
Footnote: “Freedom is always freedom for the dissenter!” - Rosa Luxemburg.
Amazing Grace.
See this Universe of ours encased
Within a jacket of cause and effect
Determining what happens to us all,
As whatever we do has consequence.
Step off a cliff...feel the consequence,
Make a mistake...face the consequence,
Yell at somebody...wait for consequence,
Seems we can never escape consequence.
Then again there's this thing called "grace"
Wherein dire consequence may be diverted,
So as to loosen that jacket of cause and effect
And step outside the bands of our cosmic house.
Amazing grace may get to grow from changing
A cosmic house detail in our stepping outside,
Enfolding us in deeper resonating conversion,
Real enough even if short on scientific testing.
Footnote: Changing events in the cosmic house must include quantum changing of both history and the future?
In Time.
Being just in time can be confusing
Seeing as how we're always just in time,
Quite a different thing to being just on time.
For us present always seems past
As soon as we perceive it in passing,
Although we can only truly be present.
With the past, present and future
Shading our existential place in time,
We may perceive paradox in all things.
Such is our life on this Earthly plane,
A conundrum laid before us which
We must learn to live well with.
Footnote: Perhaps permanent present can only be past all time?
Leaving Nirvana.
There's loved life experience in the womb of Nirvana
But as birth approaches and things grow restricted
There's compression with little room to manoeuvre,
Being squeezed into a slow to expand passageway
As our infantile world is being radically overturned.
It's the hero's journey we are born to undertake
With our having to break through into the light,
A great release from that feeling of entrapment
Teaching the psyche to endure and persevere.
Footnote: The way back to heaven may be to endure and persevere through hell?
Where Music Chimes.
What we see when we don't know what we see
Is a reality not made of matter but of what matters,
Perspective provided by music directly experienced.
In this partly patterned and predictable landscape
Upon which our own perceptual system must focus,
We notice little notches of novelty to keep us engaged.
It's an analogue of our far from simple real world
Within complex series of constant shifting patterns,
A layered flower bursting forth into temporal unfolding.
We're never going to run out of what we don't know
When being means there's always something new to learn,
And accepting or resenting must have a huge bearing upon us.
All art speaks of what lies outside the domain of our suppositions
And we need to pay attention outside the limitations of our knowledge,
Allowing the unknown patterns there to expand where music chimes for us.
Footnote: Aesthetic language is about what things mean and how to act...it's both abstract and concrete at the same time.
Beyond Fear.
Drowning in what we've collected
We may less and less comprehend
Those islands of understanding
In a veritable flood of information.
Our culturally-supported beliefs
Giving meaning to our perceptions
Create that mindset as a collective
In our passing it on and around.
We decide together what we'll fear
But moving beyond fear into curiosity
We might discover the body's own wisdom
Reflected within the healing of our illnesses.
With conditioned beliefs influencing our physiology
Maybe our experience of fear is partially seeding
Those symptoms ultimately diagnosed as disease
As our bodies respond intelligently to distress.
Interfering with the body we may keep the fight alive
But you cannot really win the battle against yourself
Whereas faith in the body's capacity to self-regulate
May greatly help to truly heal us and to shed our fear.
Choosing to bring curiosity to the challenge of illness
To support the body through it rather than interfere
Reveals a sense of our truest selves patiently waiting
Underneath those experiences of physical healing.
Illness may be deeply meaningful and purposeful
An experience of literally showing us to ourselves
With trust in the inbuilt design of the body's journey
Lighting our way to wellness on the other side of fear.
Footnote: Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear?
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
April, 2020.