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| Photo of Bloodroot just budding, April 6 |
Butterfly
sleeping
on the temple
bell.
Buson, ~1750
in The
Essential Haiku
R. Haas, Ed. p.108.
The
butterfly, prime archetypal image for transformation, sleeps as if
consciousness is not fully availed; perhaps the wings will spread and
flight begin when the resonance with the deity sounds.
Antonio
Machado in Spain offered a similar summons a hundred and fifty years after Buson was writing haiku in Japan. Still
a century ago, Machado said that all Jesus’ words were one word: Velad. Robert Bly translates that word as “Wakeup” (Times Alone, pp. 108-109). Velad might also be interpreted as
keeping a vigil, even the watch set “before the holy sacrament when it is manifested” (http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/velad
).
Yet
more recently, but still forty years ago, Robert Ornstein in Psychology of Consciousness elaborates
the resistance to coming awake: the
scientific study of the possible alterations in human consciousness still
evokes many misguided ideas and unfortunate opinions . . . Others reject the
idea of alterations in consciousness immediately. For them, a true and
agreed-on “common sense” reality exists, and anyone deviating from their
version of the external reality is either foolish or “insane.”
Ornstein references evidence that “normal” consciousness: is
not stable and is not unitary at all. Both the mode and the contents of
ordinary consciousness alter radically due to situational factors like hunger
and other needs, and to more enduring factors such as a person’s language,
training, and profession. . . we should consider the differing continua of
experience that vary on one scale of arousal from sleep to full awakening, on
another scale from linearity to simultaneity, and also from internal control to
external. . .
Today, our
study in Good Stories aims to advance
consciousness, and we assert that human progression can move toward increasing
peace and justice; but this does require Waking Up! We read Brian Boyd’s
interpretation of The Odyssey telling
of the evolving capacity to defer immediate gratification: refusing to stay
with the demi-goddess, not choosing intoxication, and not giving up on the
eternal return home. In deliberately engaging the continua of experience, concrete to symbolic, of making connections internally and socially, we work toward quantum consciousness.
Strangely
enough, to wake up often means to dream, to imagine worlds that are inspired by
good stories, and to play across the multiple tracks of composing digital
media. Velad! Spread butterfly wings again--Spring.
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| April 27, 2013 |
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| July 23, 2013 |
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