William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence"

William Blake's famous poem.

Auguries of Innocence
by William Blake

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro' all its regions.
A dog starv'd at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight
Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand'ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus'd breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won't believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever's fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov'd by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov'd
Shall never be by woman lov'd.

The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider's enmity.
He who torments the chafer's sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother's grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar's dog and widow's cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer's song
Poison gets from slander's tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy's foot.

The poison of the honey bee
Is the artist's jealousy.

The prince's robes and beggar's rags
Are toadstools on the miser's bags.
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return'd to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar's rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier, arm'd with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer's sun.
The poor man's farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric's shore.

One mite wrung from the lab'rer's hands
Shall buy and sell the miser's lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant's faith
Shall be mock'd in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.

He who respects the infant's faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour's iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket's cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation's fate.
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's winding-sheet.

The winner's shout, the loser's curse,
Dance before dead England's hearse.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

The ground for conscious being

It is both fascinating and frightening how lost we can be in the world of apparitions due to subtle contractions and attachments of our psyche—the phenomena of which we tend to be unaware. We get used to a limited perspective on ourselves and on others; we develop some basic agreements with the world during the process of growth and interaction with the other, we co-create the worldspace where we live that includes our thoughts, things that we say, things how we say, our memories, visions, sensations, body movements, chronic energy fixations, and the totality of it all is our self which we present to the loved ones and the hated ones and the world at large.

It is dramatic that our self, as it constantly grows towards more maturity and embrace and experience and becoming more aware of itself by including more and more entities into its space of being-in-the-world, at earlier stages can learn and adapt to the world, construct the basic sets of its elements in a way that in the future would become self-evident as self-contractions and subtle attachments that hinder liberation and hide essential qualities of one's own human being, of one's own profound truth under limited adaptive masks or personae of which we are not aware for initially and genealogically these masks were developed in order to comply with the requirements and agreements that the other and the environment told us, showed us in the days when we were just starting to make first steps towards self-consciousness and conscious liberation. And these masks of which we are not yet aware, the shadow patterns of our co-existence contaminate our whole life and communion with the ones we love and prevent us from being fully and self-recognizably who we are, radiant blissful fluctuations of the Spirit's meaningful, passionate, unlimited unfolding, the unfolding that is personally embodied in the Soul, the ego, and the bodymind.

The Spirit is always present in our life as the very fact that we are aware. In fact it is the space of awareness, of consciousness that is aware of us and all our life right now. In this space the wisdom and compassion grow and stabilize as structures, as fractals, as flowers. Giving space to yourself the way you fully and deeply are in your true embodied nature means grounding yourself in awareness and putting everything that exists in life into this ground, washing with its liberating rain the basics presets of your tetra-constructed¹ being and knowledge of the world and how to engage with it. In the space of awareness the spontaneity occurs that breaks ice of the old and allows novelty to emerge, and the novelty brings new excitements and flow of life and the conscious awareness always liberates them from attachment, for the attachment per se is something of which we can become conscious in the space of awareness.

The names of attachments, fixations and repressions are Legion. They hide everywhere in your private and public worldspace and they cause you to develop a false concept of the self, a false self. You get used to move in a certain way and not the other; and you unconsciously consider these movements to be the boundaries that divide the territory of your self from the foreign land of not-self, the unknowing land that brings anxiety by its very existence. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in movements. You get used to have certain sensations and feelings in the body; and you may not even be aware of the fact that these are only sensations and feelings that emerged in the process of growth; and you just take them for granted. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you feel your body. You get used to have certain thoughts and preconceived ideas in your mind; and these ideas are always more limited than the mystery of the world and your self. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you think about yourself and existence.

You get used to hearing a limited spectrum of sounds, seeing limited things, enjoying limited moves, experiencing limited emotions, playing limited roles, having a limited diapason of dreams, and living a limited range of possibilities of life. And all of it in the totality of who you are you present as a total message of your existence to others. And others respond, both consciously and unconsciously, to this message as a whole with their being. Of course, you are responding to their message as well.

If I am so attached to these things that I don't even let them into my awareness so as to let go of them, how not to get lost in this vortex of apparitions and how to finally arise above the process of recreating the suffering, the suffering that is constantly shared with others? If there is nothing in my self that I can ground myself in, for it all is essentially a fleeting and constructed experience, what is the way to freedom? How can I free myself to being fully embodied and yet unattached? The ultimate way is to ground yourself in something that has no content and yet is always already present, in a presence that constitutes the basic undeniable dimension of the being-in-the-world that is closer to you than your self.

That which is always already present and yet has no content is the silent awareness, the very framework of attention, the very space of consciousness in which everything you are reading right now as you are sitting in a certain posture, feeling certain sensations and thinking ideas and making various micro- and macro-movements is arising moment to moment. This awareness is your best fucking friend forever. Ground yourself in awareness and allow yourself making new moves, approaching people in new ways, playing new roles, having a fresh taste of feelings in the body, no matter how silly you think those are, for these very thoughts of silliness are just temporary clouds in the sky of your awareness that come and go, come and go like flowing waves in the ocean cradled by the wind which is the Spirit whispering.

Ground yourself and help your beloved to ground themselves in awareness and then look into their eyes and make funny faces, scream and cry and move and liberate and dance together and give the full space to feelings in the body and suffering in the life for this is the path to healing and redemption and underneath suffering you can find profound happiness if you actually follow this advice, this practical injunction. Constantly remind yourself and others of this translucent awareness and the power of the present moment and the glory of all-pervading silence by being a living example.

The quietude is the Spirit smiling to you.

¹ Tetra-construction is the term that points to biological, psychological, cultural, and social factors of development and evolution. See, e.g., Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 2006.

The translucent revolution and basic moral intuition

Sometimes ideas to write something in the blog strike me like a lightning. You know, you suddenly have a vision; and there is a certain drive in the back of your head to make this vision real—right away, without hesitation, otherwise the idea will haunt you. There is nothing to wait, there is only the quiet meeting between the Idea and you. You are like an antenna that catches a signal from the dreamy frequencies. Aleksei Tolstoy wrote about the process of creativity in a poem: "Vainly, o Artist, you think you're the one who's creating…" To say that this creation or that inspired writing is something that I did single-handedly feels the same as to say that a fisherman created the fish that he just caught. That's just bollocks. (This, however, is not the same as saying that the artist bears no responsibility for what he or she expresses in the work of art and how it is done. Neither it means that the flow of creative impulse is not affected by the individual's structure of consciousness and cultural background.)

My blog is entitled "dreams of translucence." This is partially a tribute to Arjuna Ardagh's book The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World (2005). Despite the fact that the book's subtitle has a new-agey ultrapositivish smell, and I am very far from being fond of the entire New Age movement (of course, some savvy guys are there, but what I mean is the worst case of it, with magical thinking, mentally-invented narcissistic spirituality, "I—and no one else—create my own reality"-attitude, and retarded common sense), this is a nice attempt to showcase the notion that there is a growing population of individuals in the world whose life was significantly influenced by profound spiritual glances, peak & plateau experiences and transpersonal states of consciousness. The other reason is that I simply like the word translucent, how it sounds, and what meaning it has. Ardagh provides the following definition for the term:

Translucent n. 1. an individual who has undergone a spiritual awakening deeply enough that it has permanently transformed their relationship to themselves and to reality, while allowing them to remain involved in ordinary life in a process which is evolutionary and endless. 2. an individual with a glowing appearance, as though light were passing through. adj. an individual or object that exhibits translucence.

Translucence n. 1. the quality or state of being translucent.

The Translucent Revolution tries to convey an important message, it is well-written and inspiring. It seems that the weakest part of the book, however, is that most of the so-called translucents mentioned there are not actually ordinary people like you and me working in the field of common world action, they are people who earn their money by playing the role of spiritual teachers, giving seminars, leading retreats, and writing books—you can rarely hear a story of a brilliant scientist who underwent transpersonal transformation and now works on transforming her field from within or of a businessman who brought his company to a success and greater good through implementing the practical injunctions he learned in the process of spiritual growth or of a politician who openly tells the story of his or her maturation towards genuine spiritual insights. All you can hear is the same old story, over and over again, as if it were an endless Groundhog Day:  

There was a young man named John;
In honest business a fortune he won.
 Upon meeting the God
 He left all he had
And became the bestselling author who writes tons of books, teaches seminars, and does nothing good to actually benefit humanity.

Very few of the individuals described in the book are actually the people who support their life by transcending but including the conventional ways of living and doing business in their own field. The story is terrifyingly monotone: a person who was or was not successful in his or her ordinary life has a spiritual experience, leaves the job and starts teaching seminars, writing books, and eventually earning money by consulting other people in terms of his or her spiritual insights—or, we can state it differently, by trying to persuade those who are willing to pay into their own system of beliefs and life style, with the latter being a life style of a preacher. 

Mark Tourevski was one of the first to point this out to me; and I find it a valid and important criticism. During virtually hundreds of hours of our dialogues we have been analyzing the current situation in the field of spiritual transformation, transformative seminars,  experiential workshops in transpersonal psychology, coaching and consulting and how it helps ordinary lives and businesses in terms of healthy transformation toward deeper dimensions of meaning-making and being-in-the-world. We knew that there is profound wisdom in this entire human potential movement; and yet we were discussing the basics of how to integrate this wisdom with the healthy transcending-but-including growth. And, actually, we came to some very disturbing conclusions. 

We were struck by the fact how difficult it actually was to find a case of a healthy and genuine spiritual transformation with a person who successfully used spiritual insights to benefit his or her current path (not to flee from it), to successfully transform business (not to ruin it), to apply the principles he or she learned on seminars to current life without escaping from the reality of  conventional business, family, and the cruel world at large. Especially in the USA, there is a huge industry of "spiritual transformation," where myriads of teachers, consultants, coaches, and alternative therapies ask for serious investments; and yet the cases of successful and healthy transformation which did not lead a client to a financial collapse or a divorce or becoming a coach or a teacher her- or himself and rather helped him or her to transcend towards novelty but healthily include the old are extremely rare. The sad truth is that sometimes a very talented professional leaves the field and starts to live carelessly teaching and writing books that  almost anyone can write while the real wisdom that the world needs is applying the collected insights to the very field he or she has left. One needs to bring the profound discoveries and meanings one has learned to the very place one is trying to escape. To these very mundane people, co-workers, friends, and relatives that are around you. I believe it is simply not enough just to run from the world to, say, an ashram in India if that means dissociating from the shared reality…

And we are not mentioning the fact that such huge amounts of spiritual/transformative "truth" being sold on the market is dubious itself. Everyone can have a transpersonal insight of various sort, but at the moment very few are actually qualified to take responsibility to teach others. Sometimes you can see people going nuts during their "meetings with God" and thinking that they are now fully enlightened and can teach. But it usually takes many years and even decades of careful work and studying to master any discipline to become a pro. And, furthermore, the process of transformation, growing, and maturation itself is very tough, it can provoke profound crises in one's own life, the crises of which most of the teachers are being silent; is that because they are afraid that if they were truthful enough  about the dangers of transformation many people would ignore their books and seminars?

For me the basic questions in this field are those of ethics and standards of efficiency, effectiveness, and legitimacy (for a very useful definition of this triad see Torbert et al., 2004). Nowadays it is simply not enough to claim that your approach, be it spiritual, psychological, organizational, coaching, etc., works; you have to provide some evidence, some standards to test your claims. One has to adopt a post-metaphysical framework towards his or her own action-inquiry. Such a framework posits that it is not enough just to offer your service on the market and see if anyone buys it; otherwise, it looks like the good old American "there's a sucker born every minute." Are you truthful to yourself and others about what responsibilities you take and what effects it will have on the client? What are the explicit and implicit agreements that you as, for example, a consultant or a teacher propose in your service? What are your motifs? Ask yourself, "Is what I do for a living sincere, truth-based, and morally good?"

Any violation of basic moral intuition can be disastrous, for it would undermine both the depth and the span of the actions you undertake in collaboration with others. (Large-scale consequences of such a violation can be a topic for a separate blog post which I am not ready to write yet.)

The all-pervading duḥkha

The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to my dearest friend a few days ago. I thought it's precious enough to share with the world:

Last night, when I was going to sleep I had that time when everything in life seems... feels sore. All the dreams, actions, responses, goals, memories, the entire manifested realm seemed impermanent and sore. This feeling was reminiscent of duhkha; and, indeed, it probably is exactly what it was. I felt duhkha in my body, its movements, in my mind's thoughts, ideas, concepts, in the world around, the world that strives for something. I felt duhkha in the dreams we share and in the moments we try to stop. I felt duhkha in my research paper that I write and in the hundreds of books that I read or will have to read so as to make the research more or less accomplished. I felt duhkha in my desire to be richer financially. I felt duhkha in my desire to be richer spiritually. I felt duhkha in the way the world was presented to my awareness at the moment. I felt duhkha and a desire to die and to arise liberated and reshaped in a different form. These were the precious moments of realizing at least for that period that there is virtually nothing to personally cling to, to want, to desire, to force oneself into. I fell asleep and had dreams and as I woke up the duhkha unveiled something beneath its sheath, something mysterious and yet blissful, something ultimately joyful and knowing. 

While there is always duhkha in the relative world of living, beneath it there is ultimate joy of participation in the constant co-creation of the manifested realm. And I realized that the thing I want the most at this moment, even though wanting itself is duhkha, is transforming myself to be able to always already be connected with the vast universe of different magnitudes of experiencing- and being-in-the-world. Life as it is in its unknowingness is nothing compared to life that is enriched with knowingness, jnana, and energies of the Kosmic creativity. I humbly pray to my innermost being to realize my deepest potential and to transform the utterly familiar into a completely different world of the mysterious. To realize my supreme identity and liberate that of others is what my living is for. To have fun surfing the waves of the ocean of primordial awareness. No amount of gold in the world, no amount of traveling, no amount of lesser experiences can overbuy this awareness which turns everything into gold and the most profound experience of being by leaving it perfectly the way it is now—a changing manifestation of the Unborn.

And, perhaps, the most painful and joyful is to let go of these words as well as of their opposites for giving the space to actual reality beneath them.

For those interested, a very detailed and yet simply-written article on duḥkha can be found in Wikipedia.

One question a day makes you healthier

From now on you can ask me any question anonymously or non-anonymously by using formspring.me. It is a nice and simple web2.0 social environment to conveniently ask a question you didn't dare or were too lazy to ask before. And what I probably like the most about it, this ask-a-question thing supports your imagination.

The picture of Dorian Gray

There is a confession I have got to make. I love movies. Frankly speaking, I am a movie maniac. I watch every decent movie that comes within my reach when I have time. (And sometimes I free all my time, leave everything aside for the sole purpose of watching a good story to unfold.) Anything that has the IMDB rating above 7.5 is something that I would love to see. I watch even 7.0 movies. On rare occasions I can watch 6.5ers. In the ages before the Internet I have actually watched hundreds of movies without any discrimination. Honestly, the number of movies I’ve watched during last five years might go beyond any sense. If I would compare this to anything, it would be probably that song “So What” by Metallica:

I’ve watched this, I’ve watched that…

I even watched all the parts of Friday 13th when I was a teenager. I will not mention TV series here, for you are going to have a hard time trying to stop me from speaking extensively about House MD or Dexter or True Blood or Breaking Bad and so on. Oh, don’t get me started! (Or, perhaps, shall I write some notes on those some other time?) I am a cinematographic hedonist. I don’t think I am the worst-case scenario of a movie junkie, I’m sure there are many people who regularly watch movies that have rating below 6.5. Who am I to judge them?

What attracts me in the cinematographic art is states and perspectives experience. What I discovered (as, I believe, many other people) is that a work of art is usually a response to a state experienced by the artist, a perspective that he or she is desperate to frame into a painting. Especially great movies by being a work of art are able to show everyone who is open to receiving the transmission some fleeting aspect of universal experience, some unknown corner of consciousness, some experiential continuum that is ready to unfold before you on the screen and enfold you into it by transforming you into a true experiential participant of this very occasion. One of the best masters of dialectical art in cinematography seems to be my favorite David Lynch. When I say dialectical, I mean that kind of art that involves you as a participant of the masterpiece; and the overall viewers’ response is something that helps to make the art consummate. For instance, when I watched Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE in a movie theater for the first time, I had the sense that everyone who is watching it now is the participant of the mystery unfolding…

So during the last few months I’ve watched some pretty good movies that I didn’t write about. But here is a movie that I don’t want to leave unmentioned. Dorian Gray is the title, and it is an Oliver Parker’s film based on a beautiful book by Oscar Wilde. To be succinct, I think the movie tells the Dorian Gray story the perfect way; and I doubt that it could’ve been told better in terms of a movie at this point in history. It is a huge and timely slap on the face for the folks who are fond of the impulse-gratifying life style and instant-coffee spiritual materialism. It is a story about a Soul trapped exclusively in the sensorimotor world of prerational senses and bodily feelings and flesh by somehow innocently trusting and embodying the rationally formulated worldview of sensual hedonism. (Isn’t it true that our minds can rationalize any invented worldview with some sense of reason; and then trust it; and then make others believe it too?) And, surely, it is a story of maturation and liberation. For blessed are we that it is our flesh that decays and not the soul, even though it can lose itself in reflections and shadows casted by apparitions seen in the mirrors of the Spirit’s Great Play. And eventually, I believe, the Soul will always have a chance for redemption.