Beyond Knowing

Zdzisław Beksiński, Untitled

Excerpt from Loren Eiseley's book "The Star Thrower", chapter "The Hidden Teacher":

"(...) I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider. It happened far away on a rainy morning in the west. I had come up a long gulch looking for fossils, and there, just at the eye level, lurked a huge yellow-and-black orb spider, whose web was moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass at the edge of the arroyo. It was her universe, and her senses did not extend beyond the lines and spokes of the great wheel she inhabited. Her extended claws could feel every vibration throughout that delicate structure. She knew the tug of wind, the fall of a raindrop, the flutter of a trapped moth's wing. Down one spoke of the web ran a stout ribbon of gossamer on which she could hurry out to investigate her prey."

The Treasure Map

William Blake's Ancient of Days

Check out first the posts "Alien Within" and "The Great Mystery".

Excerpt from Aldous Huxley's book "The Perennial Philosophy", chapter "Time and Eternity":

"(...) The Sufi", says Jalal-uddin Rumi, "is the son of time present". Spiritual progress is a spiral advance. We start as infants in the animal eternity of life in the moment, without anxiety for the future or regret for the past; we grow up into the specifically human condition of those who look before and after, who live to a great extent, not in the present but in memory and anticipation, not spontaneously but by rule and with prudence, in repentance and fear and hope; and we can continue, if we so desire, up and on in a returning sweep towards a point corresponding to our starting place in animality, but incommensurably above it.

Civilisation, the Ego and Fear

In Hoc Signo Vintes by Zdzisław Beksiński

I'll try to explain with this post the relationship between civilisation, the ego and fear.

What is the Ego?

The Ego is a mechanism, or a filter, that our minds create to keep us in tune with the reality in which we live. The Ego is constantly making a censorship of the infinity of information and sensations that constantly surround us, allowing in only the signals that comply with our mental program (our belief systems, behaviour patterns, education, etc) that we have assimilated since the early days of childhood. This mechanism is very important for the psychological integrity of the individual.

The Beast Within and Without

Buddha pacifies a raging elephant

It is possible to look at the mystery of Life from a variety of perspectives. If we believe in any one of them, it will always look real. An interesting perspective suggests that human thought and reason are a specialisation of Nature in response to the need for survival.

Existence is a huge burden and may even become a living hell when under the weight of fear and the need for defence from an outside threat. When we see what the primitive man had to face at the start of his journey one can almost feel a certain compassion for him. Just look for example at the first part of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Primitive man is depicted as an animal struggling for survival every day. From every side lurked the danger that threatened the primary directive present in every living being: SURVIVAL. It is from this danger that our fear was born.

Words are not It

samsara

Again, from Aldous Huxley's book "The Perennial Philosophy", chapter "Truth":

 "(...) The experience of seeing the sky or having neuralgia is incommunicable; the best we can do is to say "blue" or "pain", in the hope that those who hear us may have had experiences similar to our own and so be able to supply their own version of the meaning. God, however, is not a thing or event in time, and the time-bound words which cannot do justice even to temporal matters are even more inadequate to the intrinsic nature and our own unitive experience of that which belongs to an incommensurably different order.