Tag Archives: aware space

caught in the crosshairs

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'Crosshairs', computer art by Danielle Navarro

…

I am caught in the crosshairs: At the still-point of being, where the wondrous ever-presence of that-which-can’t-be-lost and the streaming sadness of my losses intersect.  And cannot be torn apart.

It mystifies me that some speak of ‘Awareness’ as something separate from what it ‘awares’, or of ‘Knowing’ as separate from its ‘knowns’.  As though one can step out of consciousness and still be conscious…

The idea-lisation of some kind of primary state – Atman, Godhead, Emptiness, Creation – that somehow exists apart from the activity of my experience, turned out to be a monstrous red herring.  I muse that it might be the most unholy black joke, the ultimate conspiracy of misinformation that humanity has dreamed up.  But what do I know?

This:  Primordial* Awareness is inseparable from both the capacity to be aware, and whatever activity it is awareing.  It’s also inseparable from the space in which the entire show appears.  I can’t face it.  I can’t escape it.  Imagine the relief of realising there’s no way out and nothing to escape.

Please check it out for yourself.

Mark Nepo expresses this seamless interaction exquisitely in his poem, ‘Adrift’

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ADRIFT

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief.  The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat.  The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger.  In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

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Mark Nepo

Art by Sydney-based computational artist Danielle Navarro

* Primordial comes from the Latin words primus, ‘first’ and ordiri, ‘to begin’.
When something is described as being primordial, it means it has existed since time was invented.  No wonder I feel weary.

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may you shine as golden space

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May your Solstice be pure gold.  May it bring the healing that enables full immersion in non-conceptual wholeness.  May you shine as golden space.

 

We are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon.  We were not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it.  We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking.  And the earth, together with the sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space.  So that we are the mind, ultimately, of space … each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons.

– Joseph Campbell

 

Max Gimblett, Eagle

 

Later … I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out.  Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars.  The moon was gone.  The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration.  The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars.  And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable.  And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold.

– Iris Murdoch’s character Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea 

 

– – –

 

Now that I see in Mind, I see myself to be the All.
I am in heaven and on earth, in water and in air.
I am in beasts and plants.
I am a babe in the womb and one that is not yet conceived
and one that has been born,
I am present everywhere.

– Upanishads

 

Painting by New Zealand / New York artist Max Gimblett Eagle, 2015
Leaves of gold, gesso, resin, gelatin, 23.75kt rosanoble gold leaf on wood panel, 850 x 840