Metaphysics manifested in art

18th June 2020 (iai.tv)

Seamus Perry 

| Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford

In the work of Samuel Coleridge we find a fascination with the unconscious mind. Like the German idealists, the much celebrated poet sought to explore the twilight between acts of agency and the creativity that appears to spring from an imagination beyond our control. 

No one knows when Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his mysterious, insistently memorable poem ‘Kubla Khan’, but most scholars think it was the autumn of 1797. Coleridge, who would have been twenty-five if that’s right, had produced a masterpiece but it seems as though he did not know quite what to do with it. In succeeding years he recited it from memory at dinner parties as a turn, and to judge by the reports to remarkable effect, but he clearly did not think to publish the poem, as though not quite sure what he had produced: it only appeared, almost twenty years after its composition, because Byron, who had heard it recited, was so taken with it. Even then, in the preface he added to the poem Coleridge felt the need to explain that he was printing the work ‘as a psychological curiosity’ and not on ‘the ground of any supposed poetic merits’. Few great poems can have made a more hesitant appearance in the world.

In its own way, though, the preface was a remarkable and highly successful piece of advertising because in it Coleridge span a story (how much of it true who can say?) about the circumstances of the poem which quickly became a modern legend.

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire.   In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in ‘Purchas’s Pilgrimage’: ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto.  And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.’   The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.   At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

Many resourceful scholars and enthusiasts have hunted for the farmhouse in question and sought to relate the oriental scenery of the poem to the landscapes of north Somerset, and indeed the story does not sound entirely implausible as an explanation for the fragmentary nature of the poem. But Purchas His Pilgrimage (1626), the travel book to which he refers, is an immense and lavish work which even Coleridge would be unlikely to take on an excursion and an extremely unusual thing to find in a farmer’s book collection. So the story must be an invention as much as it is a diverting piece of anecdotage, and what it invents is a myth of literary creativity as the work of the unconscious mind. The ‘images rose up before him as things’, accompanied by the words to describe them, and all ‘without any sensation of consciousness of effort’: magically, the poem wrote itself.

The story must be an invention as much as it is a diverting piece of anecdotage, and what it invents is a myth of literary creativity as the work of the unconscious mind.

The ‘anodyne’ that Coleridge took was opium, a customary medication at the time, but here it liberates the poet into the sublime internal spaces of the mind, an up-to-date version of the inspired rhapsode whom Socrates describes with such appalled fascination in Plato’s Phaedrus: ‘he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success’, says Socrates, ‘and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen’. That the writing of poetry required something more than the determination to write a poem was a key part of many Romantic theories of imagination: ‘A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry”’, said Shelley, ‘The greatest poet even cannot say it’; and Coleridge agreed, though of course he recognised, as did Shelley, that, outside the colourful myth of the ‘Kubla Khan’ preface at least, the conscious will must come into it somehow. In his autobiography-cum-aesthetic-treatise, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge said that the imagination at work in the making of art was something ‘co-existing with the conscious will’, a slightly obscure form of phrasing which attempts to splice volition and unconscious activity.

Ruth Padel, Ken Binmore and Mary Midgley discuss what scientists might learn from poets

The business of imagination extended far beyond poetry. The imagination that Coleridge described in Biographia, somehow co-habiting the poet’s mind alongside conscious purpose, was itself merely an echo of a much more profound and ubiquitous imagination—what he called the ‘primary’ as opposed to the ‘secondary’ imagination—that operated unconsciously, or pre-consciously, all the time: ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception’, as he put it, very impressively, in Biographia,‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. Just as God calls the cosmos into existence through his divine fiat so the god-like agency of imagination summons the incoherent data of the world into the owned reality of human experience. Coleridge, unusually for his day, read deeply in the literature of German idealism, which is full of philosophical wonder at all the things the mind does before you know it. ‘Man’s noblest activity is that which knows not itself’, as Schelling says; or, as Fichte put it, more abstractly, ‘the apperceptive faculty of the mind is an activity which contains the ultimate basis of all consciousness, but never itself comes to consciousness’. This sort of language was not to the taste of most Englishmen who might, if asked, have accepted as wholly uncontentious Locke’s conception of the self as a ‘conscious thinking thing’ able to ‘consider itself as itself’; but Coleridge took to such German mysteries with great enthusiasm, compelled by the idea that, in the depths of his being, ‘Man exists … to himself & to God alone/—Yea, in how much only to God—how much lies below his own Consciousness’. He saw the attempt to describe the unknowable basis of life—‘depths of Being below, & radicative of, all Consciousness’—as a positively heroic endeavour, writing in his notebook of ‘the original unific Consciousness, the primary Perception, & its extreme difficulty’, and reminding himself ‘to draw a lively picture of the energies, self-denials, sacrifices, toils, trembling knees, & sweat-drops on the Brow, of a philosopher who has really been sounding the depths of our being—& to compare it with the greatest & most perseverant Labors of Travellers, Soldiers, and whomever else Men honor & admire—how trifling the latter!’

Coleridge’s attraction to the unconscious part the mind had to play in the depths of German metaphysics was no doubt connected with the interest he had always had more generally in the psychology of unconscious acts. What he called ‘facts of mind’ were, as he told a friend, ‘my darling studies’, and chief among those were phenomena that seemed to cast some dim light on, in his phrase, ‘the twilight realms of consciousness’. One evening, for instance, sitting by his fire, he found himself doing something which he thought worthy to record at once in his notebook:

Seeing a nice bed of glowing Embers with one Junk of firewood well placed, like the remains of an old Edifice, and another well nigh mouldered one, corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put on three pieces of Wood, that exactly completed this perishable architecture, tho’ it was 11 o’clock, tho’ I was that instant going to bed, & there could be in common ideas no possible use in it. Hence I seem (for I write, not having yet gone to bed) to suspect, that this desire of totalizing, of perfecting, may be the bottom-impulse of many, many actions, in which it never is brought forward as an avowed, or even agnized as a conscious motive.

Coleridge, unusually for his day, read deeply in the literature of German idealism, which is full of philosophical wonder at all the things the mind does before you know it.

Behaviour like this, motivated by impulses about which one can only retrospectively speculate, fascinated him as it implied that the mind had a structure in which different levels were variously known or knowable. Episodes that suggest as much—moments when, as he put it, ‘our nature seemed to act by a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against it’—feature repeatedly in his voluminous notebooks, like case histories. When confronted by an especially lovely night sky, for example: ‘Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the Sky, and in a trance I had worshipped God in the Moon…’, where the use of the past tense to describe one’s own experience is curiously self-alienating. ‘Imagine a Poet’, he once instructed himself, presumably with self-reference, ‘intensely watching a Tree in a Storm of Wind, unconsciously imitating its motions with his body’. Finding yourself doing something is a phenomenon that crops up in many places. For instance, at the close of his handsome poem of tribute to Wordsworth, having listened rapt to his friend reciting his autobiography, The Prelude, over successive evenings, Coleridge describes his response as the last lines were uttered, ‘scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close’: ‘Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound— / And when I rose, I found myself in prayer’. Prayer was not something he decided to do but something he discovered himself doing, and in this respect his behaviour resembled that of his most famous creation:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware. 

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

The Mariner is saved from his hellish experience by having the correct response to the savage beauty of the sea creatures (that’s how he sees it anyway); but it is very striking that the blessing he bestows upon them is only recognised for what it was after the event and at the time went ‘unaware’, a word with which he and his author are so taken that it is repeated in troubled wonder. As though in a trance, he must have blessed them, rather like discovering that ‘he had worshipped’ the moon: the act of blessing (if there was one) arises from the most obscure origins that are almost completely resistant to enquiry—a place of which one is ‘semi-demi-conscious’, to use the fine phrase he once wrote in his notebook.

This is all complicated by the emphasis that Coleridge placed as a moralist on the importance of the will. As consciousness expands, he told his readers with robust purpose in a work called The Statesman’s Manual, it encounters more and more of ‘the terra incognita of our nature’ which ‘our will may conquer and bring into subjection to itself under the sovereignty of reason’. He deplored the prevailing psychological theories that attributed human consciousness to the association of ideas for that implied, oddly enough, that mental activity was something that happened to you (you don’t choose to associate this idea with that) rather than something that you did. In his poetry unconscious activity is sometimes a thing to be feared. At the climax of his unfinished poem ‘Christabel’, for instance, the lovely and guileless heroine is faced with the ghastly spectacle of Geraldine, a snake-woman, and her response is unwittingly to begin emulating what she sees: ‘And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, / Still picturing that look askance / With forced unconscious sympathy’. Her lack of consciousness is there a kind of liability or weakness.

Dreams were fascinating because they occurred at the very edge of the conscious self, somehow both the product of your mind and something that happened to it.

Coleridge’s mind typically worked in antithetical ways, and he was careful when he printed the elated opiate possession of ‘Kubla Khan’ to pair it off with something which, as he said in the preface, described ‘with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease’. This was a poem called ‘The Pains of Sleep’, the vivid and appalling rendition of a bad trip, in which the loss of individual agency is something unspeakably awful:

A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did …

We would probably seek to explain such a dream in Freudian terms, and the analyst would discover much excellent material in the notebooks to be sure; but whatever the accuracy of the analysis in its own terms it would involve a conception of ‘the unconscious’ that Coleridge himself did not entertain. He seems to have been the first person to use the word ‘subconsciousness’ (in the privacy of his notebook) but it was untouched by a theory of repression. The idea that you never really forget anything appealed to him, it is true: ‘it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, with all the links of which, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self, is coextensive and co-present’; but the agency that pushed some of those acts and thoughts into unconsciousness was not pathological. Coleridge once proposed to dedicate ‘an entire work to the subject of Dreams’, one of innumerable unrealised projects; and yet after a lifetime observing his sleeping life with the keenest interest he still confessed himself ‘incapable of explaining any one Figure of all the numberless Personages of this shadowy world’. He typically attributed his recurrently terrible dreams to his bad digestion or his posture in bed or some chance suggestion: Freudian dreams are, in duly complicated ways, expressions of the will, whereas for Coleridge the principal source of the pains of sleep was, as he lamented, ‘the passiveness of the Soul to the Body’. Dreams were fascinating because they occurred at the very edge of the conscious self, somehow both the product of your mind and something that happened to it, an elusive state which language might just hope to catch through the interstices of a double negative: ‘a most strange dream’, as Coleridge wrote at one point, ‘When not unconscious that she dreamt, the soul / Questions herself in sleep’. Not quite unconscious; but not conscious, of course; instead, ‘not unconscious’.

Part of his admiration for The Prelude, no doubt, was for Wordsworth’s tentative exploration of the unconscious life, an interest which, no less surely, had developed in conversations with Coleridge in the first place. ‘Yes, I remember when the changeful earth, / And twice five summers on my mind had stamped / The faces of the moving year’, says Wordsworth at one striking point, ‘even then / I held unconscious intercourse with beauty’. A paradoxical claim, to remember so clearly something that was happening unconsciously, but something that speaks eloquently to a Coleridgean interest in the mind as a thing of different levels, variously accessible—‘the mysterious gradations of Consciousness’, as he put it in his notebook.

Seamus Perry
18th June 2020

You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat (Goodreads Author)

A “provocative and seductive debut” of desire and doubleness that follows the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities as she endeavors to lead an authentic life (O, The Oprah Magazine)

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East―from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine―Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings―for love, and a place to call home.

(Goodreads.com)

By Craig Hamilton (integralenlightenment.com)

In this 20-minute audio clip, Craig explores one of the fundamental obstacles to authentic spiritual awakening: the fact that deep down, most of us don’t really believe that profound change is possible. For reasons rooted in our ancient evolutionary past, we’re wired to see ourselves, the world, and reality as fixed, static, unchanging.

In this short workshop, Craig guides you through a series of contemplations and practices designed to help you break “the spell of solidity” and open your heart and mind to the unimaginable possibility of genuine spiritual enlightenment.

Below the audio is an edited transcript of the talk, if you’d prefer to engage the content in that way. 01:1919:15

Want to download the mp3 version? Click here.

_______________________________________________________________________________

What if you could transform your entire life into a spiritual experience?

Despite peak experiences that show us how life could be, most of us still find that day-to-day challenges pull us back into our old, unenlightened habits. But what if your entire life could become a spiritual practice—and a spiritual experience? What if every relationship, every moment at work, every minute at play could be infused with a profound sense of purpose and the freedom and clarity of enlightened awareness?

In this 90-minute audio workshop with spiritual teacher Craig Hamilton, you’ll discover the simple shift that can transform your spiritual practice and open the door to an awakened life.

>>Learn more and register for The Key to Evolving Beyond Ego here.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Transcript

A big part of our exploration in our evolutionary laboratory has been into understanding what the real obstacles are to the higher potential becoming fully manifest and then developing effective spiritual practices to help us step beyond these obstacles once and for all so that we can fully embody this extraordinary possibility.

One of the interesting things we’ve found is that although all of us have a lot of little habits and tendencies that seem to be obstacles on our spiritual path, most of these are actually red herrings. This means that the things that we tend to think are obstructing us on the path aren’t really what gets in our way. Not in a deeper sense. In other words, if we were to list what we see as the internal obstacles on the path, we might put things like laziness or a busy mind or a lack of focus or a lack of will. While any of those things can be a challenge on the path, they aren’t really the biggest obstacles to growth. 

The first major obstacle to our higher evolution is going to sound rather mundane, but its implications are actually incredibly far-reaching and they affect all of us to a person. It has to do with our assumptions about change. You see, deep down, most of us don’t really believe that profound change, radical change, extraordinary change is actually possible. I’m not saying we’re cynical. I’m talking about even those of us who are really optimistic and hopeful and positive.

What I’m talking about is that whenever we think about trying to change something or about reaching for a higher possibility, because of the way we’ve evolved, most of us tend to assume things are much more fixed, much more static, much more unchanging than they actually are. It’s part of how we’re wired. During the vast eons of our early evolution, things changed so slowly that in one person’s lifetime it seemed like nothing was changing at all. Technology didn’t change. You had the same stone tools when you were born as you did when you died. You ate the same food. You saw the same people. There was no real change visible other than just a person growing up.

So essentially we’re deeply wired to look at the world around us and the world within us and see it as something that is standing still, that is not moving. Carter Phipps published a wonderful book a few years ago called “Evolutionaries” in which he explores this emerging evolutionary worldview that a lot of us are so excited about. If you haven’t read it, I strongly encourage you to check it out.

In this book he named the very thing I’m talking about. He called it the “spell of solidity.” His point was that even though we all believe in evolution in some way, there is a deeper more persistent belief that the world we live in is static. The world is unchanging, and so are we. Even today when technology is changing at such a rapid rate, we still tend to assume things are much more fixed and unchanging than they actually are.

For instance, on a societal level, when we look out at the many problems facing humanity in the world right now, whether it’s ending poverty, stopping human trafficking, dealing with climate change, we tend to see these issues as intractable and unfixable. Or on a cultural level, when we look at things like human greed, self-interest, cruelty, violence, they all seem so deeply rooted in our human nature that we have a hard time imagining how these things could ever really change. It’s human nature after all, right? So they say.

Similarly, on an individual level, when we take up efforts to try to change our own consciousness and our own behavior, we also tend to assume that our own nature is much more permanent and unchanging than it actually is.

The reason we have a hard time imagining great change, as I said before, is that we’re wired to assume things are static. To put it slightly differently, it’s because we haven’t yet really let in the implications of evolution. Now, again, I know if I ask who here believes in evolution, everybody would probably raise their hand. But just because we believe in the theory doesn’t mean we’ve truly let it in, and faced and accepted all of its implications.

The fact that everything under the sun is always changing is only just beginning to sink in for most of us. In fact, it’s not just everything under the sun, it’s everything in the cosmos. Evolution isn’t just something that’s happening within the universe. The universe, properly understood, is a process of evolution. That includes you. You are also evolution.

What I’m saying is that in order to counter this spell of solidity, this assumption of stasis or limitation, we need to begin to open ourselves up to the reality that this whole cosmos, as static and as solid as it might appear, is in fact evolution in motion–and so are we. What this means in practice is that we need to constantly question the appearance of solidity and stasis, and realize that things are not as solid as they seem.

Let’s put this into practice. When you look around and you see something that seems stuck or immovable, take a step back to a larger timeframe. When you do this, you can see that it hasn’t always been this way and it won’t always be this way. Whatever it is, it’s going to change.

We have to realize that if you took a snapshot of the way things were at any point historically, you would have never imagined where they were going. Imagine if you had been present in the moments before the Big Bang when there was basically nothing going on and someone said, “Hey, pretty soon this is going to all blow up into this big huge cosmic fire.” You would have said, “Right. That’s preposterous. Nothing like that has ever happened before.”

Or imagine you were here about half a million years after the Big Bang when there were just chaotic burning gases flying around and no sign of order at all. If someone had said, “Hey, pretty soon all this chaos is going to start to organize itself into stars and galaxies,” that voice of limitation would have said, “Where’s the evidence for that? This is just burning chaotic gas.”

Or let’s say you were here about six billion years ago shortly before the emergence of life and all that existed was just dust and rocks and water, and someone had said, “Hey, believe it or not, pretty soon this amazing thing called life is going to explode into existence and it’s going to be green and lush. There will be plants and animals with eyeballs and teeth.” For something like that to be born out of basically just dust and rocks and water, would have seemed impossible.

Or even on a cultural level. Think back to when slavery was publicly condoned and accepted as a natural part of civilized life. Imagine how it seemed just a decade or two before slavery was abolished in the US. If you had said, “Slavery is going to become outlawed in a short time,” people would have said you were dreaming. It seemed impossible from that vantage point.

So to begin stepping out of this assumption of limitation or the spell of solidity, here’s a little practice that you can try. I want to invite you to take some time to think about the things in the world that seem the most intractable, the most immovable, the most unchanging and stuck, and just bring them to mind one at a time. For each, step back and look at it in evolutionary context, which means seeing each of these seemingly intractable issues as really just a current step in a progression of evolution.

You might all have different lists. I know some people will say, “Oh, there’s no way we can change things because corporate greed or the military industrial complex runs everything.” What does it mean to look at that in an evolutionary context?

We don’t have to step back very far to realize that corporations and big industry are relatively new inventions. They only came into existence within the last couple of hundred years as social inventions in response to a certain need and a certain opportunity. Are they going to stay the same way as they are now? No. They’re going to change over time as they fail to meet the needs of our changing world. That’s what drives evolution. Old structures don’t meet new needs, so they fall away and new structures are born. How long is that going to take? I don’t know. Is it going to happen? I guarantee it.

Or you might think about something like war. War has been around in some form pretty much from the beginning. We’ve had isolated moments here and there where it wasn’t happening. But what has changed? The number of people willing to go to war with each other is decreasing dramatically. It used to be that everyone was fighting everyone else. In his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” the anthropologist Jared Diamond said there was a time when if you encountered a member of another tribe in the woods there were only two responses. Either you would try to kill them or you’d run away from them before they killed you.

Now we have alliances and treaties and economic partnerships between most of the human race. How long will it be before we no longer go to war with each other? I don’t know. But if you look at the gradual trajectory, it seems quite certain that we’re going to get there eventually. 

Now, you might wonder what all this has to do with spirituality and  your own transformation. I’ve been talking a lot about societal evolution. Well, the reality is that when it comes to our own transformation and awakening, most of us have a hard time imagining how dramatically things can change for us as well. We’ve had a certain experience of life up to this point and tend to think things will remain more or less the same, even if we’ve already changed in a lot of positive ways over time.

When it comes to the possibility of spiritual transformation, most of us can’t really conceive of how radically our own consciousness, our own experience of living, and our own response to life could shift. Part of the reason is that we aren’t really in touch with how much we’ve already changed in our life. It’s just a funny thing about human psychology. When we look back in our memory and try to remember what it was like to be 10 years old or 20 years old or some younger age, we tend to re-imagine that event as though  the person we are now was having that experience back then. But that’s not what was happening. We’re a profoundly different person than we were when we were at age 10 or 20. 

We’re in a process of emergence. In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that we are a process of emergence. Anything you could say about the kind of person you are or what defines you isn’t really a statement about how you are in any static or solid sense. It’s just a statement about how you are now. You’re fluid. You’re a process. You’re not a stable, unchanging thing.

I know that that can be a little disconcerting to the part of ourselves that imagines us to be a permanent static being. But if you can stay with it a bit, you’ll start to feel the thrill of being in motion. That’s what’s really true about us. We’re in motion. We’re a process of unfolding. It’s much more exciting than just being a static entity anyway. And it’s true.

It’s only when we can begin to open to this reality of unending change that we can really make room for the possibility of dramatic transformation. So I’m inviting us all to look at ourselves through evolutionary eyes for a moment in order to make room for the kind of awakening and transformation that we’re exploring here today. From this evolutionary perspective, I want to invite you to consider that the highest possibilities you sense for yourself are also real, living possibilities. They’re visions and glimpses of who you can become, of how extraordinary life can be. We need to be true to them.

I already mentioned one practice you can do to begin to work on this assumption of limitation, and there’s a second practice I want to leave you with. There are two parts to it.

First, I want to invite you to become what I call an evolutionary detective, doing evolutionary detective work on yourself. This means going through your day (and your life) noticing all the ways that you’re buying into this spell of solidity or this presumption that things really can’t change. Notice all the ways it shows up in your own experience every day. Just pay attention. You can document it if you want. If you’re really a rigorous detective, you can write it down and begin to study it.

The second thing is: whenever you notice this assumption of limitation asserting itself, take some time to look at the situation through evolutionary eyes. Expand the timeframe and realize that radical change has always been going on and whatever change you can envision is certainly possible if you’re willing to make room for it. I encourage you to engage in these practices both in relation to things in your outer life like your projects, your relationships, the world at large, etc. And also in relation to your own inner life, your own spiritual transformation.

The goal of this practice is to begin to live in what I call a consciousness of possibility; rather than an assumption of limitation.

Almost 8 Hours of Music!

Radio EarthRites Presents: “The Turtle Island Mix”

Starting This Solstice: 6:00PM Pacific Coast Time

Radio EarthRites: 

https://gwyllm.com/radio-earthrites/ 

A distinct array of diverse musics… Radio Liberation!

#internetRadio#radio#music#musicheals

Sink the Mind into the Heart

A simple but potent exercise you can do every day.

Posted by Bentinho Massaro on Thursday, June 18, 2020

Bentinho Massaro

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosewood massacre
Part of the nadir of American race relations
The remains of Sarah Carrier’s house, where two black and two white people were killed in Rosewood, Florida in January 1923
Show map of FloridaShow map of the United StatesShow all
Coordinates	29°14′0″N 82°56′0″W
Date	January 1–7, 1923
Target	Black people
Deaths	6 black and 2 white people (official figure) 27 to 150 in some reports[1]

The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida. At least six black people and two white people were killed, though eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot. Racially motivated violence against people of color was more common in the United States in the early 20th century. Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre,^[2] including a well-publicized incident in December 1922.

Before the massacre, the town of Rosewood had been a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Trouble began when white men from several nearby towns lynched a black Rosewood resident because of accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been assaulted by a black drifter. A mob of several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors from the town hid for several days in nearby swamps until they were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. No arrests were made for what happened in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by its former black and white residents; none ever moved back, none were ever compensated for their land, and the town ceased to exist.

Although the rioting was widely reported around the United States at the time, few official records documented the event. Survivors, their descendants, and the perpetrators remained silent about Rosewood for decades. Sixty years after the rioting, the story of Rosewood was revived in major media when several journalists covered it in the early 1980s. Survivors and their descendants organized to sue the state for having failed to protect Rosewood’s black community. In 1993, the Florida Legislature commissioned a report on the incident. As a result of the findings, Florida became the first U.S. state to compensate survivors and their descendants for damages incurred because of racial violence. The incident was the subject of a 1997 feature film directed by John Singleton. In 2004, the state designated the site of Rosewood as a Florida Heritage Landmark.

Officially, the recorded death toll of the first week of January 1923 was eight (six black and two white). Some survivors’ stories claim there may have been up to 27 black residents killed, and assert that newspapers did not report the total number of white deaths. Minnie Lee Langley, who was in the Carrier house siege, recalls that she stepped over many white bodies on the porch when she left the house.^[3] A newspaper article in 1984 stated that reports of up to 150 victims may have been exaggerations.^[4] Several eyewitnesses claim to have seen a mass grave filled with black people; one remembers a plow brought from Cedar Key that covered 26 bodies. However, by the time authorities investigated these claims, most of the witnesses were dead or too elderly and infirm to lead them to a site to confirm the stories.^[5]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre

The Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Anti-Christ is a work originally published in 1895 and written by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This is a book which is seen as an assault by Nietzsche on the institution of Christianity and focuses on the “slave morality” and the apathy of Western Christianity. Believeing that Christianity is a poinoner, the author uses a systematic and detailed attack upon the popular interpretation of Christ’s words by St. Paul and his followers. This edition also features an introduction written by H. L. Mencken. The Anti-Christ is highly recommended for those who are interested in the religious beliefs of Friedrich Nietzsche and also those who enjoy his writings.

(Merriam-Webster.com)

You’ll look at it differently after reading this

At its most basic, genial is an agreeable little word meaning “cheerful and pleasant.” It’s easy to like genial people. We hope to encounter them in retail experiences; we like doctors and teachers we can describe as “genial”; we might even try to be genial folks ourselves.

But this word is more than its most common use.

‘Genial’ originally meant “of or relating to marriage or generation.” These days, it usually means “cheerful and pleasant.”

It began life in the mid-1500s with a meaning that may have made our grandparents blush: “of or relating to marriage or generation,” as in “the genial bed.” And if the example doesn’t make it clear enough, we’ll point out that generation here has to do with the baby-making procreation kind of generation, not the group of people born and living during the same time period.

This original meaning is hardly surprising when we consider the word’s Latin origin: it comes directly from genialis, which itself comes from Latin gignere, which means “to beget“—that is, to become the father of someone.

Between genialis and gignere etymologically, however, there’s the Latin word genius, which is also the source of our word genius. Genius originally referred to one of the special spirits that the ancient Romans believed accompanied each person through life as a protector, but also referred in Latin to “natural inclinations.”

That history is apparent in another meaning of genial. In the mid-1600s, the word developed the meaning “native, inborn,” as in “a person’s genial predispositions.” And around the same time, another meaning, “favorable to growth or comfort,” as in “genial sunshine” or “soil genial to the plant,” also came into use.

The more common meaning of genius is apparent in another meaning of genial: “displaying or marked by genius.” That meaning (which have been influenced by German, in which genial can have the same meaning) is now rare.

And none of the various meanings of genial is as common as the meaning of “marked by or diffusing sympathy or friendliness,” as in “We were greeted by her genial assistant.” That meaning developed in the mid-1700s.

There is another word genial—unrelated to the one we’ve been treating—that is likely known only to those with some connection to the medical field. It rhymes with denial, and it means “of or relating to the chin.” Like the word chin itself, it traces back to the Greek word genys, meaning “jaw” or “cheek.”

All of which goes to show you that you don’t really know a word until you’ve seen everything your dictionary has to tell you about it.