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)

Happy New Year!

Beautiful moment, do not pass away!

This magic moment
So different and so new
Was like any other
Until I met you
And then it happened
It took me by surprise
I knew that you felt it too
I could see it by the look in your eyes...
— "This magic moment" by Lou Reed 

This fleeting moment of the few seconds when you encounter a particular person for the first time is evasive. And yet such a moment seems to convey much more information on the potentials of your relationship with that person than we used to think. In fact, it seems likely that the first moment you encounter a person is the most telling (and precious) one, given the unconscious way we follow through most of our social life. I would argue that it might be a source for holographic representation (proconstruction and prognosis, to be more precise) of that person and his or her current & hidden potentials (and dangers), at least in terms of the multilevel space that you share with the individual. And, luckily enough, the potentials of the first encounter can be unleashed in enhanced states of consciousness through certain kinds of integrated awareness training, which makes this notion a very useful and powerful tool in communication.

Two months ago I stumbled upon a book that supported my longterm intuition that in many cases the power of the first impression, the moment of first seeing the face of the other, looking into her or his eyes, hearing the voice, touching the skin provided all the necessary information so as to predict the generalized trajectory of the relationship with that individual. The book I'm speaking about is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; and it is quite a short account that explores different aspects of rapid cognition, "the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye." One might agree or disagree with certain interpretations that are given by the author, but for me the book was a treasure of anecdotal and experimental evidence for finally letting myself into a more conscious applying of this fleeting (holographic and dialectic) rapid cognition. In my opinion, this is a kind of intuition one is definitely advised to exercise and find practical application in everyday life.

And, of course, there are some dangers of misinterpreting culturally- and biologically-conditioned biases for genuine rapid cognition that provides accurate first impressions. The moment of authentic encounter, which seems to require being in stillness for accessing it, is very fleeting; and the conditioned reflexes are quick to jump in. Moreover, the way we ordinarily interact with each other tends to belong to a very limited band of the spectrum of consciousness that we have access to; instead of multidimensional communication we are usually confined to a very narrow kind of everyday awareness that reduces the quality of our intersubjective modes of being indefinitely. The less we are aware of the communication that we are open to, the more it is that we talk to mannequins instead of people; and the easier it is for (conscious and unconscious) tricksters to manipulate us into situations we would normally avoid being involved with.

In my own experience, I found that one of the common and widespread traps in everyday living that activates our unconscious reactivity (rather than responsibility) seems to be psychodynamic transferential & countertransferential communication loops. Freud fairly believed that unsolved transferences seem to be the phenomenon that permeates all human relationships; and sometimes a relationship among people can be limited to that ancient and dusty transferential/countertransferential struggle. It is important to train awareness of transferential relationships in one's own life so as to therapeutically resolve them and bring forth more mature and integrated modes of being.

By the way, in the very first paragraph of this post I used the term holographic as a metaphor in order to evoke a certain attitude of perceiving the world as vast integrated networks of interconnected and dynamically-unfolding occasions (and perspectives on those occasions as well). Another useful metaphor for the potential of the holographic immediacy is the notion of the Indra's net, which is described by Francis Harold Cook as following:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring. (Cook F. H., 1977)

 Image created by Charles Gunn of the Technische Universität Berlin. It is a still from the movie Not Knot!, published by A K Peters Ltd. (Source)

Interestingly enough, the perspective on the moment of encounter to be a source of multidimensional potentials that can be tapped into in enhanced modes of being and awareness seems to be that of a dialectic, if nondual, perspective on the nature of the Kosmos as it is, which is reflected in the kosmology of Ancient Greeks. Aleksei Losev, who becomes one of my favorite philosophers to quote, in his philosophical study (dated 1927) of the ancient views on the Kosmos and their relationship to the contemporary science describes the first basic foundation of a dialectic formulation in the antique kosmology:

First basic foundation. The Kosmos is indivisible, i. e. it has a becoming, or continually changing, intensity of itself as of a oneness of some kind. <...> The first basic foundation of the antique Kosmos maintains that, however much you divide the Kosmos, the smallest part you would get could be in turn divided into as many parts as one wishes. If the Kosmos, taken as a whole, consists of the infinite amount of parts, then any part of it also consists of the infinite amount of parts, and in this regard the entire Kosmos and any part of it are absolutely identical. <...> This means that the Kosmos is both divisible, for any parts of it are possible to exist, and indivisible, for in every part of it the Kosmos is manifested in its entirety, and, again, one could divide it as much as one wishes. (Losev A. F. Antichniy kosmos i sovremennaya nauka [Ancient Kosmos and the contemporary science], 1927)

I find that this paragraph functions as a very solid formulation to illustrate how the realities in question may be grounded in a dialectical perspective on the Kosmos. I would note that it might be important to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to at least partially ensure the validity and reliability of both theoretical and empirical accounts; and, also, the feeling of resonance with some of the greatest minds in the history of mankind (such as the greatest of Greeks) is inspiring.

The Kosmos experienced is the Kosmos experiencing

In the cartography of my experience there is one that I treasure much. What I speak about is an experience of the Kosmos—at least that is so in my interpretation. It should be noted right away that in contrast to cosmos, the term Kosmos describes not just the physical world, or the physiosphere, but rather the entire universe of phenomena, which includes physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere, and pneumasphere.

For Ancient Greeks, at least for some of those, who were savvy enough to leave a philosophical legacy, the fabric of the Kosmos was that of objects in all those realms: physical realities (of the physiosphere), biological realities (of the biosphere), mental realities (of the noosphere), and spiritual realities (of the pneumasphere). Greeks maintained that there was nothing outside the Kosmos; and the entire world of sensibilia, intelligibilia, and transcendelia in the broadest sense of those terms was something that is inherent to it. A. F. Losev, a brilliant Russian dialectical philosopher, has spent almost the entire 20th century on studying and interpreting the ancient kosmology; and in his own words:

So, there is nothing besides the Kosmos? Indeed. Then the Kosmos depends only on itself? Yes, it does. Then it is liberated? Sure, it is. No one has created it, no one has saved it, no one has been watching it. <...> If everything exists only in the Kosmos and there is nothing besides it, if it expresses itself, and if how it expresses itself is the Absolute, then it is not simply the Kosmos, but... a creation of art. In terms of the entire aesthetics of Antiquity, the Kosmos is the best, the most consummate creation of art. (Losev A. F. "Dvenadsat' tezisov ob antichnoy kulture [Twelve theses on antique culture]." Studencheskiy meridian, 1983, N9-10. [Note: This paragraph is translated by me; the academic translation is accessible here.])

It is hard for me to describe the Kosmic consciousness in terms of experiences and states. These words are somewhat deceitful in how they convey the phenomenon, as if you were the subject experiencing the object (the Kosmos), while this entire subject-experiencing-object schema exists in the space which is the face of the Kosmos itself. 

It is awareness of the oneness with the entire manifested universe that is aware of you at this moment; and not the opposite, for the moment it is the opposite, the opposite transfigures. You are the object of this awareness; and the moment you become aware of it you realize an ever-present condition of being what you truly are, infinite, joyful, and encompassing Kosmic consciousness. What follows is the experience of understanding that, if paraphrasing Meister Eckhart, the Kosmos is closer to me than I am to myself. I am nothing but a spark in the vortex of the living memory of that which is always already closer to me than my fleeting identity will ever be.

And here, in the very heart of the Kosmos, which is the very heart of yourself, everything vibrates with love, passion, and devotion.