Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

It takes talent to capture a landscape that appeals to me. I want my art to toss boomerangs of provocations my way and usually all landscapes offer is vastness and serenity. Not that those are negative things, but I want my snow globe world to be shaken, you know? Brooklyn-based artist Erika Somogyi paints landscapes that fit this mold, offering depth layers beyond nature’s simplistic beauty. Enjoy. And once again, thank you my love for you is a stampede of horses for being an amazing art blog.

You can snag this and other Mike Monteiro prints over at 20×200.

If there is a right idea and a wrong idea, the answer is not to meet in the middle.  If you want to improve schools and it costs $40,000 to hire a new public school teacher and you compromise with Republicans by spending half that and giving the other $20,000 in tax breaks to oil companies, it doesn’t work, although this is defined as “reaching across the aisle”.  Oil companies are doing well; our public schools, not so much.  Anyone who says throwing money at schools doesn’t help obviously can’t comprehend the difference between a 40 and a 10 student classroom.  Hire more and better teachers.

Universal consensus is an impossible ideal and should not be the goal. Politicians who say this stuff — including Obama — are just pandering to what they believe is their centrist base, those people who don’t have opinions and want everyone to get along.  Centrist is not a helpful place to be — either you want to help the more oppressed members of society or you think they don’t matter, that they deserve to be where they are.  I don’t see how anyone can not have an opinion on this.

By the way, for an amazingly coherent explanation of why our banking system is failing, check out this episode of This American Life.  You can listen for free online.

• An interesting post and comment thread juxtaposing God and Adolf Hitler.
• Sorry, Thanks, a movie based in San Fran’s Mission District.  I adore Wiley Wiggins, of Dazed and Confused and Waking Life fame.
• Instead of buying spices when you need them, spend 20 bucks at a local spice store to stock up on fresh tastes.  If there isn’t a good shop near you, try Seattle-based World Spice.  I especially love their different salts and its a gourmet treat to have miniature bowls of salts from around the world with each meal.  And here is a fantastic article about stocking a kitchen.
• Yep, this exists: Audition, an online RPG based on dancing.  I’ve heard there are addiction issues with this game in Korea.
• Cute Things Falling Asleep.
• A harshly entertaining photoshop tutorial series called You Suck at Photoshop.
• Green Lantern: Will World, a surprisingly mindblowing comic book with tasty colorful art.  Get it.
• Check out this guy’s house.

Post-modernism is perhaps best spoken of in the more accurate nomenclature of the programs and their effects taking place within contemporary cultures including post-colonialism and post-structuralism. It is also imperative that in these words they are not considered as referring to temporal conditions as post-modernism has often mistakenly been interpreted. They instead are indicative of ongoing methodologies and programs that connote a continuing process of consciousness changing the horizon and meaning of justice, humanity, hegemonies, and approaches to interpreting our social worlds that favor righting oppressive forces. How one lives with the ethical challenges presented through post-colonialism/post-structuralism will be contextual to their surrounding contexts but is also influenced by an individual’s theological framework. One’s theological anthropology and faith commitments can set patterns of praxis and either determines the ease or difficulty of interfaith dialogue. Exemplary of one theological framework that can be argued to support a theological anthropology and ethics amenable to interfaith dialogue and the progression of radical social-justice work is that of ibn Arabi (1165-1240). Sheikh Akbar Ibn Arabi wrote of a mystical depiction of divinity that avoided the Islamic sin of shirk (associationism with the divine or idolatry) and balanced between pantheism and transcendent theism, in what he called absolute unification. His mysticism has tones of Neo-Platonic thought where the cosmos is good as opposed to fallen and infused with divinity, but differs in that within ibn Arabi there is no hierarchy of emanations. The ‘center’ of god is at the margins, all encompassing and not distanced through spheres of angelic realms or differentiation between creator and created. This affirmational stance towards the world is welcoming to pacifist, mutually vulnerable, and compassionate action and the wholeness of a person; including their sexuality, psychology, and sociality. When one nurtures a theology of ‘absolute unification’ they may avoid the obstacles of guilt, fear, pride, and other trappings of the ego. Rom Landau writes of ibn Arabi’s distinctive philosophy, that while “the God of religion manifests Himself in man as both virtue and sin, the God of the mystic reveals Himself in a manner that is beyond virtue and sin.” Leaving sin and virtue as arbitrary and passing names given in culture allows judgments and egos to be relaxed in the face of a pervading divinity that expands into all expressions and experiences. Arabi writes in Tarjumanu ‘l-Ashwaq that god may be found in the study of a monk, an idol, animals, religions and that love is the summation of his faith. Where love is wholly definitive, moralizing is revealed to be merely cultural and illusory. The non-dualism of sin and virtue includes the abolishment of heaven and hell also. The ethics fostered by ibn Arabi are clear and can be summarized in his statements written in Fusus: ‘love loves love’ and ‘were it not for Love [residing] in the heart, Love (God) would not be worshipped.’ The compassionate heart of love that sees and loves past distinction, keeps at bay the shirk of egoism, and does not feel compelled to judge and retain dualisms of heaven and hell propels spiritual ethics to a level that is direly needed in the contemporary global social milieu. Democratic ideals can fully occur with humanity blossoming within individual authenticity without fear. Justice can focus on distributive egalitarianism and restorative models versus a retributive model. With the philosophical chains of hell broken, the physical dungeons of political prisoners and the prison-industrial complex can be weakened. Lastly, interfaith dialogues can occur with a compassion that sees all religions and beliefs as joined in absolute unification.

Time for an updated Crooked Glasses post!!  Several readers (the first two photos below) shared their awesomenesses, and the rest are from around my random life.  To everyone else: Please send in your Crooked Glasses photos to mindandflowers [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks Hans-Jörg and Emily and everyone who has participated in the Crooked Glasses Project.  See more crooked images here.

I love art that is multidimensional, something I can look at forever and be constantly ushered new thoughts about universalities and details that I hadn’t noticed before.  Check out the Pasadena based Christian and Rob Clayton, two brothers whose art just blows up in your face.  I discovered them on one of my favorite art blogs, my love for you is a stampede of horses.

Marvell at once questions the contemporary narrative of Hermeticism’s role in Twenty First Century technoscience and poses opportunities for how new retrievals of Hermetic thought already present in science may allow for post-modern thought including theological and technocultural. The prevailing myth of North Atlantic scientific histories is that Hermeticism was conquered and replaced by Modern philosophy and the scientific revolution exemplified in empiricist and mechanistic traditions inspired by Roger Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. This has been in part to inadequate appraisals of Hermeticism, says Marvell, using Umberto Eco as illustrative. Eco writes of occultic tradition, “Anti-scientific by definition, these Middle Ages keep going under the banner of the mystical weddings of the micro- with the macrocosm.”[1] The trivializing of the Hermetic tradition dismisses the important imaginaries offered to current scientific undertakings and presupposes a transformative sea-change in technoscience that expunged Hermetic thought which Marvell regards as discreditable. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions brought forward the premise of sciences’ conservatism and ideological adherence with the past which would support theorizing that conceptual structures from Renaissance Hermeticism and esoteric traditions would survive, although modified in ‘Modern’ science. Francis Yates’ seminal Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition supports this theory and demonstrates that in fact it was sustained Hermetic influence that availed Modernist science much of its successes. The elision of Hermeticism’s role may act as part of retrojecting Twentieth Century ideology and agenda unto the Seventeeth, and also acts as a redaction of science history that privileges Anglo-American philosophies.

            A new retrieval of Hermeticism via Marvell’s program in Transfiguring Light opens a multifaceted discourse to a myriad of applications and concrete, immediately relevant conclusions. The matters of human existential concern and meaning making can be evaluated in terms of functions of the imagination, and Marvell as well as Ioan P. Couliano before him finds both Magic and Science as comprising the outcome of the imagination in dress only perceived as disparate. Marvell constructs a frame whereby individuals and their sociality are not exempted from deeper relationality with the cosmos, and innovation of the imagination can accelerate solutions for conditions presented to humanity. This frame avoids the ‘flattening’ that accompanies “contemporary post-structuralist and postmodern theory…[which] ‘flattens’ the cosmic into the social.”[2] The conflation of the cosmic into the discursive powers evaluated in Critical Theory acts as a reduction of the spiritual dimension of human life can be rectified throught the use of the hermeneutical tool Marvell names ‘vertigral architectonics’, or its shortened form ‘vertigral’. A neologism inspired by Eugene Jolas, vertigral speaks to the recapture of the human which transcends the horizontal social discourse to uncover “certain manifestations of consciousness [that] may be seen to be operating within an imaginary that integrates human beings and the cosmic through the instrumentality of the body considered as a pneumatic communication device.”[3] This vertigral lens, setting humanity and the cosmos in a revived and intentional fashion has profound application to how subjectivity and bodies are located and described.

            Marvell uses Oswald Spengler’s evaluation of history and models of consciousness to illustrate how the imagination and humanity’s choice of worldviews, prime symbols, have far-reaching impact on social possibility and oppressive forces within technoculture. Spengler’s 1959 The Decline of the West divides history of consciousness into a tripartite system of imaginative emphases being the Classical, Magian, and Faustian. The Magian mode appeals to a deep-ecology appreciation of radical unity, a sense of ‘We’ that is in stark contrast to what Spengler sees as the individualist egoism that dominated much of the Modern period. Marvell likens the Magian symbol structure of consciousness to that accessed in Hermetic thought and Rene Thom’s description of the cosmos. Marvell writes, “Thom considers rocks, human beings, and a jet of water as all being formally equivalent…all these diverse forms or functions are but simple deformations of the one, universal model: an anima mundi.”[4]

            Bodies are also granted a new perspective when the Hermetic imagination is uncovered within contemporary technoscience, profiting new models that distance themselves from the mechanism and dualism of Cartesian corporeality. The machinic model of bodies later supported through Modernism by Descartes, Newton, Laplace, was first criticized as early at the 1600’s by Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. Cudworth’s Neo-Platonic and Christian apologetical system was leveled largely as a critique of the Hobbesian reduction of all human experience to motion and atoms. Current understandings of subatomic particles, and the ‘impoverishment’ of human intersubjective exchange being reduced to physical bodies in mechanical interaction leads Marvell to posit bodies as pneumatological and integrated within pneumatic system. The pneumatic economy, or system bolstered by Hermetic corporeal imagination coincides largely with the Tantric Buddhist model on a number of points. First, there is a radical interconnectedness of all bodies. The primary community of pneumata-bodies in erotic and holistic overlap and union speaks to a harmony of humanity that needs not yet appeal to essentialism. Secondly, Marvell writes that there is to each an open relationship to the Real. Reality and meaning are not distant from any and creates a sense of equality among all, and can act as a response to “the technological rationalism that has so divided nations and peoples in modern times.”[5] Thirdly, the embodied ‘self’ is not constrained to categories, essences, or prescriptive forms but is seen as radically heterogeneous in terms of corporeal and incorporeal existence.

            Marvell’s estimation of corporeality acts a central location to three interconnected themes that together act to restate Ioan P. Couliano’s ‘cosmization of humankind’ and capture what Hermetic philosophy still brings to the technocultural. The first is the spinther, the divine spark or ‘alien light’ that animates and infuses bodies, the second being the subtle body, and lastly the anima mundi. As the last point of  the ‘animated world’ suggests, the three themes are modes or aspects of one encompassing micro-macro economy and can be summarized in the Hermetic dictums of ‘all in all’, and ‘as above so below’. The first theme of the photic spark has a long history and has a powerful albeit often unrecognized location in contemporary mythos; often unconsciously nodded to within the ‘metaphysics of light’. The role of the sun in the Republic’s cave allegory carried then through Neo-Platonism, the Kabbalah, and Judeo-Christian tradition have all participated in privileging light in Western philosophy, science, and myth. Importantly also is the Hermetic text of Poimandres. Here in the discourse of Hermes Trismegistus and Poimandres there are allusions to Genesis, the Gospel of John, and the metaphysics of light. “I saw an endless vision in which everything became light…‘I am the light you saw,…who existed before the watery nature…the lightgiving word who comes from mind is the son of god.’”[6] The originary light of Hermeticism was gleaned by physician and Paracelsian iatrochemist Robert Fludd (1574-1637) who subordinated the traditional Aristotelian hyle (matter) to lux (light).

            The ‘subtle body’ occurs within occultic and mystic traditions spanning a number of cultures and essentially depicts living bodies as enfolded series of psycho-spiritual bodies that operate on various levels of existence. These layers of bodies can include descriptions of nadis, chakras, and Kabbalistic body/sefirotic correlations. The models of bodies and subtle bodies have appeared increasingly in various healing sciences. Nicholas Goodrick-Clark writes, “Throughout the twentieth century, a broad front of practical esotericism has directly contributed to a range of alternative therapies and technologies, which emphasize these elements of will, intentionality, and subtle energy.”[7] The subtle energy that like light permeates bodies is only one expression of the same gradations and expressions of the subtle pneumatic and psyche of which the cosmos is comprised. The concern of subtle bodies, while seemingly esoteric to some contemporary cultures, it can be revealed to have relation to theological tenets of Christian faith, the observance and protection of which many remain to find of great importance. Robert Fludd, in responding to Patrick Scot’s claim that the Philosopher’s Stone was not material, appealed to subtle bodies to maintain the lapis philosophorum within material nature, which directly is connected to some Christian forms of incarnation. Marvell writes of Fludd’s philosophy that it revealed “the close connection between alchemy conceived of as a revivification of the Adamic/Christ ‘logos-code’ encrypted in the subtle body and the connection between Hermetic alchemy and the imaginary of early Christianity.”[8]

            The third theme is that of the anima mundi which can be summarized in the work of Giordano Bruno, who declared the perceptible material world and world of imperceptible spirit as inexorably adhered. In terms of subtle bodies, anima mundi declares that mind and matter differ only by degree. The anima mundi formulation of the cosmos queers the boundaries between organic, inorganic, material, spirit, living, dead, life, and ‘artificial’ life. A popular Western philosophical iteration of this thought was the panpsychism forwarded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz spoke of the spiritus coagulans, (spirit made dense) which depicts the entirety of the cosmos as on an infinite spectrum and all occurring as a ‘psychic moment’ and existing in harmony. Leibniz stated that the cosmos existed in a ‘pre-established harmony’ as a singular unconflicting thought. Founding this pre-established ‘spirit made dense’ were invisible, shapeless, ‘windowless’ monads; which can be rudely compared with atoms or sub-atomic particles. These monads of Leibniz recall Plotinus’ ‘monos pros monon’ (from the one to the One). The most infinitesimal and fleeting were comprised of and comprised the highest monad, or ‘God’.

            Leibniz’ influential philosophy alone stands as just one restatement of the Hermetic imaginary that remained, although suppressed, throughout the Modern era. The possibilities that it opens to contemporary post-modern, post-structuralist scientific endeavors are many; compassion and post-colonialist theorizing, advances in Process Theology, steps towards articulating the limits of unified theories, deep ecology, cyborg ethics, and avoiding technocratic controls and oppressions. Discovering the Hermetic imaginaries that survived through Lucretian and Newtonian descriptions of the world offers the vertigral hermeneutical tool to philosophers, theologians, faith communities, and others to view avenues of progress in post-modern landscapes.

The tension that exists within an individual’s personal spiritual journey and their responsibility is likened to that of the ruling class depicted in many ancient wisdom literature, specifically the genre of ‘mirror for princes’. One’s personal power to effect change in their world towards justice, beauty, and compassion is evinced in one’s integrity in their personal enlightenment and spiritual path. This essay will introduce thoughts as to the role of community in religion with two particular emphases; an individual’s relationship in community and inroads towards communities’ sharing in contemporary interfaith dialogues.
            The Buddhist model of community is in Sanskrit ‘Sangha’ meaning ‘assembly’ or ‘community’. Originally instituted by Gautama Buddha and considered among the Three Jewels of Buddhism, alongside Buddha and Dharma, Sangha avails roads towards speaking of the communal aspect of religion. Traditionally, the Sangha had been considered to include only the sphere of the monastics. These ascetics were charged with continuing and manifesting the Dharma. However, the meaning has over the course of time been expanded to include laypeople of yogic or tantric practice and can be spoken of those who actively embody the teaching of Buddha.
            This expanded meaning opens the idea of community within the Buddhist tradition, revealing that the heart of Dharma is greater than strict allegiance to terms or particular cultural expression. An individual’s nurturance of compassion for all things and practicing the gracious and unfearing acceptance of each moment can be considered to include them within the Middle Way and honoring to the Buddha. Widening the horizon of the Sangha, it can be considered to include those who personally embody hospitality, wisdom, release of attachment, and sacrificial and egoless service. This widened ground does not in anyway however expect or advocate a ‘unified’, universalized similarity or reduction to sameness among practitioners of various faith traditions. The Dalai Lama states in The Good Heart, “We should also be careful not to reduce everything to a common set of terms so that at the end of the day we have nothing left to show that is distinct between our specific traditions.”[1]  There is instead of a leveling down to sameness, an elevation of each individual to consider compassion and openness to instruction from various individuals and communities. As the Dalai Lama also reminds, the Buddha left a number of teachings behind, some of which seem to even contradict each other, to prevent lapses into dogmatism. He says concerning this, “when I understand the truth of this, I am able to truly appreciate the richness and value of other traditions.”[2]       
            In Arabic, a word meaning community is Ummah, and can be used to denote the Arab world, the Arab diaspora, or “community of believers”. In the Qur’an, Ummah Wahida connotes “One Community” and within that context of radical oneness, the Charter of Medina (once Yathrib) includes Jewish tribes and ensures harmony with all groups. Non-Muslims were seen as co-equals in rights and protections. The peaceful heart of mutual trust, respect, and diversity sustained through religious and sociopolitical in Medina under the guidance of the Propet Muhammad illustrates the wide breadth and scope of Ummah community. Keeping in mind the trouble associated with reduction to similarities, which is a subtle form of imperialistic co-opting and can be fueled by arrogance and misappropriation, the Qur’anic verse 29: 46 helps point towards a wider horizon of community: “We believe what has been sent down to us, and we believe what has been sent down to you.. Our God and your God is one, and to Him we submit.”[3] There is within this verse a feeling of unity within difference, a cohering affiliation of respect amidst variety. This is truly the mark of a healthy community by any measure.
            In Christian terms community can be often spoken of as an organismic whole, constituted by radical diversity coalesced to create a dynamic whole. This ‘body’ as pictured in Ephesians 5:30 and elsewhere remind that all the individuals in a community are sacred, meaningful, and absolutely necessary. Saint Paul writes of the necessity of diversity within the community and that each individual’s talents and strengths are to be applauded on their own terms-each one’s individuality when respected and allowed to flourish makes the community greater than the sum of its constitutive parts. Ibn Arabi speaks to the integrity and importance of each individual’s path in his writing al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya. Here, in the nineteenth chapter, he writes, “Each person among the people of Allah has a ladder particular to him by which no one else ascends.”[4] Each path, or ladder, has epiphanies or divine revelations which are direct and personal to the individual and lead one from revelations of divine acts, to divine attributes, and finally to the divine essence which is ineffable and formless.
            While the traditions briefly examined above each reveal wide, respectful, and compassionate postures in the formation of broad community, ibn Arabi’s allusion to the ladder emphasizes that the depth of community is likewise as important to the breadth and that its spiritual depth is found in the individuals comprising the community. The individual must travel their own path in the process Sufi mysticism calls fana, ‘to pass away’. The process Arabi details as ‘passing away’ involves leaving the ego, pride, social constructions, individualism, passing worldly concerns, all that is mutable, and lastly even the divine attributes until only direct divine presence remains. This may be spoken of in a tripartite process travelling from religion, to faith, to truth. In Arabic, this may be spoken of as ilm, mar’ifa, and mukashifa. As an individual sojourns on their singular path, they transcend simple objective knowledge of their communal religious tradition, to an intuitive personal owning of it through sincere inspiration. Lastly, one will enter into continued saintly being of the truth whereby one refrains from relying on authorities or traditions. Each moment is filled with divinity and limitations of doctrine of objective knowledge pass away and are replaced with intimacy with the divine. This depth of spirituality within the individual brings creativity and stability to the health and wholeness of the widening community. Communities may begin to more actively pursue interfaith dialogue as a spiritual practice when its members are rooted in deep spirituality for they can surpass the fear associated with ego.
            Individuals and the many communities they participate in within the complex web of sociality can be spoken of as different aspects or modes of the same human condition. The microcosm and macrocosm are bound intimately to the extent that the condition of any single individual creates the condition of the social world. No person is exempt or left out from the social equation; in Martin Heidegger’s terms we are always being-with (Mitsein). Despite our immersion in culture however, we are never completely determined by it. There is available to each the ability to radically reshape and transform their networks towards deeper and broader communities of religious compassion. Rumi wrote of the interdependence of individuals in community and the spiritual power in each. In Two Kinds of Intelligence, Rumi writes that there is an inherited, acculturated knowledge. By this measure, hierarchies are created, and one competes with others to attain ever more ‘knowledge’. However, there is a second knowledge that is ever new, unique to each, and boundless. “This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.” A dynamic model of sociality grants the community’s integral role in encouraging the unfettered flowing of this ‘fountainhead’. Interfaith dialogue is never undertaken by autonomous and discrete individuals, but by interdependent, intersubjective communal parties. When individuals’ fountains of knowledge are celebrated, worldly wisdom is not annulled, but complimented by the heart of compassion. It is this heart of compassion which will foster communities where interfaith dialogue flourishes.

Bonnie and I took a trip to San Diego and Baja, Mexico.  We had enough fun to be illegal in 49 States and the District of Columbia.  Click here for the entire photo album!

Our dancing buddies. Those sombreros are not big enough.

Mariachi and son. They are singing about a dove.

Monk trying his shoe.

Ant pushing an appliance.

I offered him $200 for his shirt. And he bit me.

Bienvenidos a Ensenada!!!!

For a Shake Face Photo -- Step one: loosen cheeks; Step two: shake face; Step three: have someone take photo.

Shake Face!!

Gold bigass head.

After massive quantities of hot sauced tacos from the stand behind us. My bowels would later feel the effects. The girl on the right is Sarah. We stayed on her sailboat.

Please appreciate my surfing apparel.

Skeezy surfshop dude.

Fuzzy picture. But so amazing!!

Viva Mexico!!

Viva San Diego!! I like to imagine confetti spraying from their mouths.