Summer and the Herme Moon
Thursday gratefuls: Two Koreas. Korea. Seoah. Flying to Incheon. All appliances good for 220. Adapters. Next chapters. Fourth Phase. Facing aging straight up. Happy, but real. Joyous and knowing that death comes next. Burn away everything but love. Start now. Look for the sacred wherever you can find it. Speak your revelation with confidence. Do not go silent in the face of mystery.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Psilocybin
One brief shining: Once upon a time there was an old man who lived on top of a Mountain in a rust colored cedar sided house with blue solar panels and tall Lodgepole Pines and gray white Aspens who wrote early in the morning, then read all sorts of books, had meals with his friends and family, talked to others over the internet, watched TV, slept in the cool Mountain nights, and was happy.
Still thinking about revelation. Picked up an old Mircea Eliade book yesterday, The Sacred and the Profane. As important to my thinking as Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. Different takes on the religious experience but the main phenomenological writers in a long stream of theologians and historians of religion. Realized in reading the first chapter again that I’m approaching the religious experience in the same way as they do. What’s going on here? What’s it like? How have humans made meaning out of these encounters. Set aside dogma, charisma, bureaucracy, observance, ritual or at least bracket them. What’s common about the devotee’s of the world’s religions if anything? Not syncretism, nothing to do with what the religions say, but all about what they do.
I’m not interested in as broad a sweep as that though, I have no academic journal mouths to feed. No. I’m wanting to make as much sense of my own experiences as I can. Eliade reminded of a missing element in my look at revelation. The sacred. Or whatever it is. The what that is revealed. Is it in fact one thing? The Sacred? Or is it multiple things? Is it even a thing? If so, of what quality? And the epistemological question, how do we know what we know about it? Is it out there? Or, in here?
Let’s go back to that Rainy Night Watcher. Did his appearance reveal something out there? Or, something in me? Or, both? Does see what you’re looking at always mean take in information about what you see in as unfiltered a way as possible. Or, does it mean, how do you interpret what your eyes take in? In the instance of the Rainy Night Watcher there were two actors. The Elk and me. Did he see me as a glimpse into the other world? That of the creatures in metal who long ago invaded his territory? Or, did he look at me with wonder and awe as I looked at him? In wonder and awe.
For the moment I’m going to come down on the side of the sacred as a thing, a hidden dimension of our World, of our cosmos, too. Consider the quantum realm. Consider the opposite, the macro realm, the Universe as a whole. Consider the spectrum of data our senses cannot experience. Consider the mystery our inner lives are to others whom we know, even those whom we know intimately. Does the sacred reside in any or all of these? Still on the journey. This most ancientrail.
