Sepulchral frost

Sepulchral Frost

The gravestone’s coldness dissects streams of wind.

In solitude’s transparency a sepulchral rainfall bursts.

And on the headstone of my last resort

An inscription shines, hidden by withered leafs.

Six feet under the ground: it lies, consumed by worms,

Covered with loose, airy earth, with eyelids eaten away:

My corpse, forsaken organic matter,

That ceased to act as a living embodiment of mind-body unity;

That is simply a rotten mass feasted by Nature,

Out of which my corpse emerged some years ago,

While still being alive, hurrying to live, spurting towards joys

And sorrows of yet another illusion called the life path

Of an isolated personality that grows and develops under the blue sky,

The moon and the stars that shine with an elusive mystery,

The mystery which is so easy to miss in the face of the enchanted

Vibrating web of meanings that we weave as we dwell in our collective dreaming.

In my heart, ever since the moment of my birth, there was this sepulchral frost,

And behind the left shoulder, near my ear, I felt someone’s breathing,

And someone’s whisper pontificated to me that, while being alive,

Somewhere there, very near, right in my Heart

I’ve never been born. And my hour has struck but nothing changed:

All these years were dreamt by me when my body was already enthralled

By this cadaveric freeze. Another day on the planet Earth,

In the Milky Way galaxy, on the outskirts of this universe

Was lived by me. In vain or not in vain, that is the question of no significance

On the back of the monumental triumph of kosmic void

And her unstoppable life, in contrast to which I am only

A weak shimmering of a body shell swept away by a blink of Eternity.

Let the memory of me as of an unnoted sparkle remain

In the great sentient archives of the undying Kosmos.

And one day when the right time comes the good I’ve done here and now

Will grow into a gigantic wave, humongous sea of Goodness

Which will destroy all ignorance and bring eternal peace and joy—

At least for a moment. And I will cry for all the cursed and all the blessed.

April 27, 2010 

(translated from Russian)

Reconnecting with the spiritual roots of the Western civilization

This is it!

Peter Kingsley speaks about the same profound connection with the Ancient Greeks’ vision for our Western civilization that I have been experiencing for the past couple of years. We can call it the ultimate resonance with the intentionality of the Past that created our Now and is a source for forming our future.

I couldn’t avoid the understanding all our Western civilization is really a dream of the great Ancient visionaries, not only of pre-Socratic mystics but also of the great spiritual leaders. I experience profound (trans)personal connection with some of the thinkers from the past and from the present.

The words of Plato and Plotinus speak directly to my Heart. The similar connection I have experienced with the gigantic personalities of Vasily Nalimov, Vladimir Bekhterev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. If you really think about it, every manifestation from the past has never gone anywhere. The sentience is as alive as ever; and the individual suffering must be released into the freedom of the vast expanse.

It’s not just manifestation of impersonal Unity, it’s also manifestation of quite a (trans)personal intentionality, very unique self-sense of a visionary passion that we must ponder about.

Reconnection with our own cultural roots is a must.

A comment I wrote to my friend JF as a response to this interview:

I can’t believe I found another living person who resonates with the deeper truths about the European spiritual lineage that I discovered this and last year. When I embrace the contemporary world with my awareness, I couldn’t escape the understanding that the entire Judeo-Christian civilization that existed for the last two thousand years was in fact a direct product of the great mystics’ powerful visions and of all-transcending and all-including intentionality of Christ’s personality, which in turn emerged from the background highly influenced by Platonic non-duality, Egyptian mysticism, and Eastern contemplation.

By the way, this vision is almost exactly the vibratory level that Vasily Nalimov referred to in his works, when he spoke about and embodied the profound resonance with the geniuses of the past, the past which is our memory to be re-lived.

And here I wonder how this relates to Russia and the great Eurasian conglomerate of cultures; how this dissociation from the roots contributes to the poor condition of the state and its people; and how the profound meaning can be found in the fact that there’s so much suffering, that so many people, they were so radically sacrificed and put six feet under into the abyss of unbeing, while they’re actually so vital, so alive, and so crying for our help.

I couldn’t stop myself from recalling Alexander Vertinsky’s song: “Я не знаю зачем и кому это нужно, кто послал их на смерть недрожавшей рукой, только так беспощадно, так зло и ненужно окунули их в вечный покой.” [“I don't know what for, or who needed it, who sent them to death with an untrembling hand, but so ruthlessly, so evilly and so needlessly they were put to eternal peace.”] It is not a coincidence that Vasily Nalimov quoted this song in his major works when he wrote about the Karmic tragedy of that peoples in Russia suffered.

Why? What for? What is the ultimate meaning? WHAT WILL JUSTIFY ALL THESE DEATHS, MURDERED CHILDREN, MOTHERS, AND FATHERS, BROKEN HOPES AND UNENDING SUFFERING?

The spectrum of reading

While pondering about books and how to read them I remembered one episode.

On my first or second year at University one professor asked the auditorium whether anybody knew the name of the author of Moby-Dick. He said he’d give the highest grade for the semester to the student who’d say the name. All one hundred something students went silent. I read Moby-Dick and had two impulses: first was to earn an easy grade; second was: meh! I don’t need that kind of charity, passing the semester exam would be piece of cake anyway. Finally, one girl pronounced Herman Melville’s name. For the professor it was an amusement to showcase how stupid and ignorant the younger generation of students were.

The meaning of Melville’s multifaceted book unfolds greater and greater with each year of my recalling its oceans and passions. But to return to the question that originated this memory: I really don’t know what would be the wisest way to read books that stream into my life incessantly. Should I take notes, highlight phrases and paragraphs, or simply read in a flow, letting my unconscious mind soak in all things missed by my conscious mind?

Taking notes seems a time-consuming work, especially if I simply roam around the literature without any specific topic of investigation (although I usually highlight everything related to mind, states of consciousness, existential meaning of life, transpersonal realms, etc.). If I don’t save the notes to computer sooner or later they get lost.

However, every book’s text is a landscape to be traversed and carefully explored, sometimes pioneered. Notes and highlight can really be helpful if you want to access the knowledge right away. At times being able to find the quotation I needed by searching the tag system in my Zotero notes has been helpful. Taking notes from the important books now and categorizing them in a database seems like an investment into the future.

On the other hand, some of the most profound book knowledge that I have learned seems to be the one I learned passionately through spontaneous reading with an open mind (a beginner’s mind) and a broad intention. The naive reading, so to say. The flow of books would enter my life, stay there a little bit, leave a mark or a scratch or a signature, and then go away. Some years later it would re-emerge in a huge bulk of meanings constellations. That’s probably a Romantic way of looking at reading.

But no matter what, even more influential were the texts I translated myself. These texts I digested with all my sentient being. As always, it seems everything’s really scalable and we can adapt many styles to read and use many tools to enhance our reading. Perhaps, there’s a spectrum of reading?