I highly reccomend Richard Tarnas, 'The Passion of the Western Mind' as a concise and inspiring work on how humanity came to its current crisis point and why this has been important.  

    'The best intellectual history of the West in one volume I have ever seen.  No other    such overview provides, in equal compass, as clear and cogent a survey.  Its scholarship is impeccable.'' Huston Smith, author of The Worlds Religions.

''...a complete guide to Western civilisation and the philosophical ideas that have changed our world view...Richard Tarnas describes profound philosophical concepts simply, but without simplifying them.'' (back cover)

This single book has probably taught me more about philosophy and the history of ideas than a whole book-shelf of individual publications.

Alien Lovers?

Fairy Tales as the Media of Profound Truths

Just heard some new music from The Great Bear (Mr. Bear) this afternoon and it inspired me to be daft.

It’s about this bull frog who thinks he’s really cool croaking to his beat in the swamp part of town.  Lets call him a musician frog for the purpose of the story.  He’s not too ugly  - for a frog but his head is full of tunes and he’s so into his art that he hardly looks up these days.  Has no time for love right now because he’s an artist right?  So he’s minding his own business and hopping along the swamp whistling a song in a froglish sort of way when something makes him stop and look up and what he sees changes his life forever, like when Dante saw Beatrice and she became for him the face of the divine,  or when the face of Helen of Troy launched all those ships  and caused normally quite sensible men to go to war for her love .  He has what you call in human language an aesthetic arrest.  This is the moment when you see such beauty and perfection that it arrests you at the deepest level of your being and you instantly fall in love with the object that is in front of your eyes.  What our frog has seen is the princess to whom he will now spend his life coaxing into kissing him.

Well she’s the beauty in the eye of the beholder who is our frog and she is a pure virgin and what she represents symbolically is his soul.  The only way to win the virgin who is his soul is to become pure just like her.  And so with this image of truth and beauty now imprinted upon his brow he sets off to win her love.  Only she has the power to turn him into a prince and she does this at the end of the story when he has proved himself to be worthy of her, which involves much tribulation and more than a bit of suffering. 

The minute she touches his lips with hers the magic happens and this is real magic – none of your rabbits and tophats or hocus-pocus.  No, this is the magic that turns us whores down here into the highest of the highest and we will even become fools for her recognition.  It is called the one true love and the frog and the princess are the only ones who know all about it and what’s involved.  What the princess does is to lead the frogs’ soul on an upwards journey towards his true self.

On a mundane level, that is, an everyday level, it is the search for the divine within each other.

I have just shown you that behind the soppiest fairy tales lies the most profound of truths if you dig a little below the surface.  Anyway they live happily ever after of course., which is a reference to eternal and immortal life that can be yours too one day.....maybe talk about that another time......

The Power of Amor and the Engagment of the Heart

When my heart is not engaged in my decisions I am not operating from my centre of inner knowing.  When I ignore my heart, my ego takes over my  judgements about the world and the life of everything on our planet.  The less I use my heart the more armoured  and dark it becomes until eventually no light can reach it.  When I need light I have to depend on the false light that illuminates the external world.  When I open my heart I create amor  and the lotus blossom unfolds its  petals towards the inner sun, which is the true light of the world. The armour surrounding the heart is a defence.  It is a firewall against  injury to the ego, which is the most fragile outer shell of the persona, the sense of self, narcissism, vanity, pride or the opinion of self – self with a lower case ‘s’.

Higher human values are centred around the heart.  The heart becomes the focus-point around which all other aspects of the system revolve, transit and eclipse.  Armour is not bad in itself.  When it is made use of by the heart it becomes the sacred face of the ‘’warrior who fights with a loving heart.’’  Arjuna in the Gita.  Armour and amor are engaged as one and united in battle for the purpose of defending the highest of human values.  This is the meaning of the sacred, the holy.  Armour  without amor  is a profanity and will only defend itself, the ego, its vain opinion of itself for it is afraid of blame and is in denial of its own guilt.   Armour and Amor  united will rise up together in passion and die in each others arms if necessary for their head is the Godhead.  This is serpent in ecstasis with serpent, dying in the ultimate spiritual rapture for God instead of in base excruciating bodily agony for ego.  This is the difference between the fearless attitude of the warrior towards death and fearful attitude of the ego towards death. One accepts and confronts death and the other flees and hides from death. One is sacred and the other is profane.  Do you see the difference between heaven and hell?  Each state being at opposite ends of the same spectrum.  White contains all the colours, black absorbs all the colours but until the two are united in light and shade you can never see the rainbow. 

The Mesmeric and Alluring Presence of the Box in the Corner of the Room

The reference point for all knowing is the individual consciousness. Consciousness is the inner satellite navigation system of the mind. Mind is not located in the brain. Mind is here, now and everywhere altogether at once. There is no external reference point that can be said to be reliable. All points external to this inner knowing are landmarks for map-reading and course plotting. The external world is the spectacle, the map that is not the territory.

Every human being is a magnetic conduit for experiential knowledge. When we are distracted by the spectacle we are magnetised away from intuitive, feeling nature and therefore the navigation system becomes useless. The driver of the vehicle is steered towards the theme park, a Disneyland – instead of to the destination that was originally intended. Advertising technology is powerfully magnetic, its aim is to amuse and entertain, to mesmerise the driver, to occupy the driver’s seat and engage the steering wheel for it’s own purpose. The properties of the magnet are;

‘‘to exert an attracting or compelling influence upon’’ [the object]. [dictionary-reference.com]

‘’exposure to a magnetic field causes the molecules to align themselves with the field, producing their own net field, so that the object as a whole becomes magnetized.’’ [dictionary-reference.com]