tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3486548026396371631.post591270031761077814..comments2023-01-14T10:55:41.498-08:00Comments on Masks of Origin: Descent to the Merkavah/ Part 2 (Revision)Brian Georgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01256565918271803962noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3486548026396371631.post-53237726582779070352012-06-11T06:53:52.486-07:002012-06-11T06:53:52.486-07:00Hi Ogotiele,
Many thanks for your wonderful comme...Hi Ogotiele,<br /><br />Many thanks for your wonderful comment! There is enough material in it--and in your follow up emails--for several essays. Perhaps you would be interested in fleshing out the details of your experience at the Goenka retreat, and your reservations about the method, and then reformatting your comment as an essay? I will send you a link so that you can post as a guest writer. I have almost finished my response to several of the issues that you raise, but I will post this as a column a bit later on.Brian Georgehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01256565918271803962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3486548026396371631.post-43267970852756505732012-06-04T16:01:24.252-07:002012-06-04T16:01:24.252-07:00Hello Brian,
Many, many thanks for this article! ...Hello Brian,<br /><br />Many, many thanks for this article! It hits straight at the heart of my apprehension about the Goenka method, and gives me permission to articulate my dissent. <br /><br />Over the course of the program I heard so much about life being misery and my mind kept asking: why is it so? If all is nothing but passing sensations, I ask: what is the method to the madness of the anitya? Why did they ever arise to pass away? <br /><br />And while at it, I thought about some of your ideas and realized quite clearly that I am a happy pagan- not afraid of death, not afraid of misery: you once said something about the need to “respond with orgiastic laughter to a dare.” <br /><br />This paganistic, ecstastic hubris sustains the wheels of the universe, creates joyous illusion, distributes ashe, occasions a pleroma of tragic beauty whose alternative is nothingness and dearth. We’ll pass away. So what? My understanding of human existence was never really so turgid as to create anxiety over our passing away. That which arises to pass away is also the thing that exists beyond mind and matter. We have always been a wish-fantasy of the chthonic realm. We are a trick of frozen light. An offshoot of a cosmic prank, a love note from nothing to nothing. The real miracle, I think, is not enlightenment. The real miracle is the illusion of separation, of movement, of the head that thinks and the legs that walk, the real, magical feat is the creation of pain. <br /><br />Your article not only implicitly assumes this, it makes a powerful yet subtle prognostication of the way forward (I use way forward lightly) which is “repair the rip in the structure of the cosmos.” As you said- the peace on earth is not ours, we must travel on the wings of paradox to our true home. We are not the meek to whom the inheritance of the earth has been promised. We must see our true face! And your writing nails it, kills it. After it, there’s nothing to say, nothing to add: I cannot overstate how much pleasure and understanding I derive from reading your works! One day I had to burst out to my colleagues in the MFA world-forget your fatuous obsession with plot and publishability, come and see writing and bow! You write so well about these things that comments are almost superfluous lol. Your writing has anticipated it all. The ultimate challenge is a paradox, a paradox which the reading of your works, over the course of several months, has illuminated quite clearly for me: Can we still make Ashe dance after we have repaired the rip in the structure of the cosmos? You make two suggestions- we have to master the art of bi-location, to be the shadow and the substance at the same time, to equip our hardware with a factory-fitted fully developed Eshu and then some. But the second suggestion- a gnostic quote- is more tantalizing,and hints at the "end of all descent... geometrically encoded in its origin": “He is superior to the Universals in his privation and unknowability. For he is not perfect but he is another thing that is superior...He is not corporeal. He is not incorporeal. He is not a number. He is not a creature. Nor is he something that exists...And he is much higher in beauty than all those that are good, and he is thus unknowable to all of them in every respect. And through them all he is in them all, not only as the occult knowledge that is proper to him. And he is united with the ignorance that sees him.” Achieving this will be the ultimate triumph of Ashe. We would have flown into that which cannot be named!Ogotielehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08128646138653870465noreply@blogger.com