from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Monday, 24 June 2013

...for today...

'We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.'
~ Alan Watts
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous28 June 2013 at 11:21

    Miriam:
    Thinking about time leads me as always to TSEliot. At Little Gidding (magical day) with Graham Fawcett and 14 of us (thanks to you, Roselle, that we were there) we spent some time considering indifference (see part III, 4th line):
    'There are three conditions which often look alike
    Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
    Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
    From self and from things and to persons; and, growing between them,
    indifference
    Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
    Being between two lives – unflowering, between
    The live and the dead nettle.'
    One of those really difficult passages, I find, which stays with me for ever to be chewed as I walk the paths round here. I've begun to see this indifference as part of Eliot's whole idea which – with Redemption and other things – shapes and contains the 4 Q'tets: that of the balancing of life's opposites by a central stability, as in the still centre of the turning world and the present in relation to past and future. In this context I don't think indifference means couldn't-care-less (which is, I think, anything but indifferent!), but the lofty distance sort of indifference of the wise arbiter, free of judgement, able to step back, take in the whole picture but keep steady as well. Holding the balance, in other words.
    Sorry – thinking on the hoof, as always and not very coherent I fear.
    What d'you think?
    Thinking about it like this is both calming and reassuring, evoking those words: 'All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

    ReplyDelete
  2. roselle28 June 2013 at 12:01

    Miriam, thank you yet again.

    And that's one of the passages I also mull over frequently - and I think I agree with you: although he uses the idea under the label of 'indifference' I always remember it as really an advocation (is that a word??) for the Middle Way of Buddhism, and the state of balance of the circle containing the yin and the yang, as well as the 'third thing' which reconciles the pairs of opposites in esoteric thinking as well as in the Celtic triskele. Am so glad you reflect on this as I do; and I really like what you say here:

    'I've begun to see this indifference as part of Eliot's whole idea which – with Redemption and other things – shapes and contains the 4 Q'tets: that of the balancing of life's opposites by a central stability, as in the still centre of the turning world and the present in relation to past and future.'

    Lovely. Thanks. Great to have this dialogue. Rx

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Blog Archive