That mysterious thing we call reality

Oculus divinorum (2004-2015)

There’s a reason I haven’t posted here in a long time. After everything that has come to pass, my focus has irrevocably shifted. It’s a shift that has been well documented on this blog, the O.div, the Diviner’s Eye, which I began with Greymatter over a decade ago.

It’s been a 180 since then; I don’t have an interest in seeing into the future. In fact, I don’t believe there is this entity called “the unconscious” as described by Freud or Jung, and in particular, some kind of universal collective unconscious, or the Self archetype. These models have their usefulness of course, but it is funny reading how I wrote about such things in the past. There are many ways something can be “real.” I suppose I don’t much care whether something is real or not, I’m more concerned with how such concepts are applied.

I still read tarot, still look to the skies, still do my LBRPs, still record my dreams, still do yoga, still meditate. But these rituals serve a very different function for me than they have in the past.

I dreamed last night that I was being introduced to a new meditation exercise in which my sangha and I all laid ourselves into open, porcelain coffins and acted as if we were dead. One of our teachers walked from the foot of each coffin to the next, making a throwing gesture with his arms. This motion was meant to mime the tossing of earth that would bury us. And the earth was solely comprised of all the decisions and actions we had taken in life. And I lay there as he threw my life back at me, this imaginary earth, and I was moved to tears.

From dust, to dust.

When I began this blog, I dedicated it to the god Dionysus. It was a call to rupture. In 2007, following a technical disruption that took the O.div offline for a month, it returned online and I wrote the following:

“Modernity’s song is the endless wail of the alarm call, of the siren. At least, I wish it could be. A song that pierces the dreamlike, unconscious grooves and rhythms of everyday life, a song that warns us of danger or that signals the occurance of an accident, of damage, of trauma. But most of all, it is sometimes a song that promises hope for anonymous aid, aid that rushes towards a scene of an equally anonymous violence…”

I’ve sounded my alarm call here for over 10 years. And now, I believe it is time for me to listen.

Thank you for your presence and attention.

~Isthmus

 

when in doubt, give

This post is for everyone, in the spirit of the Christmas season. I sometimes forget this, so it’s also for myself.

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Original Title: amor vincit omnia
Original Post Date: November 14, 2007 @ 1:54pm

flickr/babukadja

This Scorpionic post is dedicated to all my friends and readers who fear their death and the brevity of their lives, who fear the void of nonexistence and its meaninglessness, who are abhorred at the degeneration of our mortal coil as it unravels towards its termination.

A beautiful quote from anchoress, Julian of Norwich, who was featured in an earlier post about Venus-Neptune. [will add this post soon – IN]

In this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, “What can this be?” And the answer came to me, “It is all that is made.” I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, “It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of God.”

I do not believe in ideas like heaven, afterlives and reincarnation after death etc.; they are spaces and patterns knowable to the living for in life, one can experience death and rebirth without truly dying afterall. Physical death to me, is the cessation of existence in which you are completely obliterated. The space between breathing in and breathing out. A time where all tension dissolves, that perfect stillness you try to attain, lying in savasana, corpse pose.

I used to desire the nothingness of death that other people feared, the ultimate in nihilism. But now I believe in eternal love. There is no existence after death, only love.