THE LAWS OF INTEGRATION

To never allow life to dissect you is to risk never being put together just right. Integration thrives upon fleeting yet profound moments of disintegration. For what desires Unity must first allow fragmentation to assert its form and force so that Psyche, the Master Sculptor, may bring to fruition the realization of the Self it seeks to substantiate, the personage it envisages within the realm of Divine Projections.

TEMPUS ET AESTU (TIME & TIDE)

     Time weighs so heavily upon the mortal soul, cannot be transcended. But this is just it! It need not be transcended, just dwelt fully within. And God said "Just know that I AM." For this is the immutable, omnipresent essence infusing all life with hylozoic, quantum consciousness. Consciousness is not only the ground of all being, but is being, is life itself, and is even perhaps the light of the "dark matter" which lies microcosmically at the Source of All That Is. I am alive. I am conscious that I am thinking, feeling, experiencing right now. Cogito ergo sum, indeed. The problem with our current cultural and societal paradigm and milieu is not with thinking but with a fluidity & integration of both thinking and feeling. In other words, the problem with most of this human existence is with not only with becoming, but most significantly with just being. We so easily end up becoming humans doing rather than humans being.

     In continuum, although the embrace of our freedom does create angst in the face of the weighty responsibility that it entails, it is also at the very soul of our greatest triumphs and ecstasies. And in the end, it is the key to our Ultimate Transcendence. Yet we ask: Can this state of consciousness be maintained whilst the task of survival remains ever so achingly imminent? But what we so often miss out on is that here is where the synthesis of "Survival vs. Thrivance" comes to its most beneficent fruition within the soul of every human entity. For we all must continually weigh the costs of this life of paradox, much like that ancient, mythical Sumerian jackal-headed imago called Anubis was assigned the task of determining every individual's eternal fate by the weighing of each human heart. Yet, the moral of this myth was that it was only those souls that weighed in the lightest-not the heaviest-that were granted entrance into heavenly realms. Yet in all truth, while we are in these current human incarnations, we will be required to keep weighing in, and very heavily indeed.

     Moreover, most of what our current cultural milieu teaches us is quite toxic to the human spirit and mind. The truth underlying all things, natural and supra-natural is that we, as all else, are always evolving whether we blind ourselves to it or not, whether we resist it or not. And personally, I find this underlying reverse of so-called entropy to be quite comforting. Yet I do not think that we blind ourselves to this assurance of orderly perfection inherent within the design of all things out fear of the evolving but oftentimes in fear of the dissolving.  To clarify, all change of any kind is experienced by us as a loss-and indeed, perhaps change is loss. And we must then be faced with the Dantean task of grieving these losses and releasing them. But we must accomplish this for ourselves if we are to be brought to a gradual spiritual fruition and maturation, as this aspect of our experience is as much a part of our existential purpose-if it is not even more so. And, to coin a phrase, this can be called our metaphysical biology, if you will.

     In addition, even Darwin himself was very sentiently aware of the great numinosity and mystery behind all of nature's design, although he is often presumed, as many scientific-minded are, as being either a-spiritual or even anti-spiritual. Yet we all intuit that all just is as it was created to unfold and express itself. And indeed, as many ponder, perhaps Heaven and Hell are states of being, or consciousness, and evil is merely that force which seeks to blind us to this Truth and to convince us to resist our truest essence, which is wholeness, goodness, freedom of being-ness and love. Integration is key. We desperately cling to empty idols & fruitlessly search for a Saviour, completely forgetting that we are already saved. We are, in this very moment, free and loved by a Source unconditional and indestructible. And even though taking this all into ourselves feels overwhelming at times and we constrict to it, even then we remain whole and completely loved. In the beginning, God saw His creation and saw that it was good. And, so it was after and still continues to be. The rest is left up to us, inasfar as we are the co-creators of consciousness and thus, of many worlds. For although the power which works in us through God, if we are choosing to live in truth and love, is far more dynamic and vast than our finite human intellects can fathom, this is the very function and definition of "faith."

     In closing, we must let go, to hold on, surrendering ourselves, no matter how frightening, to a source more powerful than ourselves. We need containment. We need protection from our destructive potential as human beings. But our God is a God who does not see our worth as being strictly contingent upon either our "saintly" virtue or our turpitude. He is eternal, constant, ever faithful and ever eminent. For He, the One we cannot even fully fathom, cannot be anything else. It is we who are limited. Yet whatever we believe our higher power to be, belief is at the macrocosmic and microcosmic core of all things brought into being. Mind-stuff over matter. Mind-stuff as matter. We are not there yet, but we are, as a species gradually unfolding in our evolution and beginning how to see and how to think and how to live. Yet, at the same time, we just are and God's unconditional grace is sufficent for us. For there really is no such thing as "self-improvement", merely "self-actualization" or realization. This human experience is, in and of itself, a process of unfolding. Sometimes a blooming thing is hesitant in reaching towards full sustenance and light, yet when it finally allows for its truest nature to take course, is brought to fruition beyond anything it could ever dream.

PHILOSOPHICAL PARTHENOGENESIS (Penned in early 20's)

Personality is the offspring the parthenogenesis of the soul. Parthenogenesis is the production of offspring from unfertilized eggs. Hence, when the human Soul is unfertilized or barren, meaning that it is unfulfilled or longing, individuated personality becomes a product of that soul separation from the Whole. For we oftentimes feel the need to fill the void of our lack of deeper, truer connection with other human souls as coming from the source of one universally experienced spiritual being. Therefore, a sort of philosophical/existential parthenogenesis occurs, and thus is born, from this barren egg, The Separate Self, the miracle progeny of the Disunified Essence.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION

Hoc est enim corpus meum.
I take of it and eat, every day.
It giveth me sustenance yet taketh away.
It granteth me Life yet plaques me with Death.
It is distinctly reflective of an individual entity,
yet also masks the true, unified Essence lying beneath it.

And so we all live our lives in subversive defiance
of the things which try to deny us what we know to be true
vs. that which we must believe to be true.
For who is to know of Transcendence,
as the very pursuit of it further entrenches and tethers us
with even more inertial forces than ever before
once we make the choice to alight from the infirm ground
of Mediocrity and Apathy.
Yet still, we must work for it, nonetheless.

But perhaps we are just miseducated.
Perhaps we have for too long been conditioned to see it all wrong.
Perhaps we should be seeking Transcendence within the gradual ascension itself
and not in some envisaged place of lofty finality and rest.
Transcendence has been and is being obtained within every precious moment
we find ourselves either bound or freed in on this earth,
in these human incarnations.
It just all takes place within the human Soul, a subtly forging phenomenon.
Ding-an-sich, the thing-in-itself as synonymous with noumenon.

Yes, Transcendence is being achieved every day.
Life is Beauty, take of it and eat and Beauty ye will be.
For Life is whatever we mean it to become.
It is all complete, all whole and yet still, amenable to our will.
This is the Body of our Salvation or our Damnation:
Life and Conscious Choice.
Take of them and eat yet be ever so selective and discreet,
and ye shall find nourishment and sustenance beyond all fleshly yearning and necessity.

BY ANY OTHER NAME (Penned in 20's)

He had to fall
to see the fallen.
His senses reeled,
and wind whipped and rain ripped
through an infinite field
where the fruits of man's labour and toil
hung high,
high low,
some yes,
some no-
yet all-neither friend nor foe.

He sensed the earth subtly twitch and turn
beneath his feet,
and for once wondered where
Heaven and Hell would meet
upon the dawning of the realization
that the Answer bore more weight than the question.
And he wondered how such gravitas had ever
been transcended by mortalkind
to alight upon any solution
by all who had held on and by those who still remained.

A celestial entity
in mortal's clothing
having a name-Cassiel-
by which to be called,
the only thing linking him to it all-
yet, the only thing in the way,
the missing link.

THE HONORABLE FAITH PRESIDING (Penned in my early twenties)

Shall Eternity be thicker than Time-
Why must we feel so betrayed?
Day by day the not quite moot,
Maternity/Paternity suit-
The Plaintiff-the materially evidenced abundantly presented-
The Defendant-the circumstantial theoreticals underrepresented.

Yet now the dire disunity of The Jury-
Faced with a higher impugnity-
The Verdict is in-no need for further fury-
The case is dismissed,
Gavel and wood colliding,
At the hand of the honorable Faith presiding.

A RIDDLE FOR THE SOUL

This is a riddle:
At first I scream.
Then I am reduced to a whisper.
Soon I bear but the faint echo of that whisper.
Furthermore, as you do not heed my call, I am reduced to the faintest echo of the faintest echo of a whisper, wrapping you in a warm, luxurious, satin sanguinity.

What am I in my three phases?
1.The conscience amour-propre.
2.The concscience vagabond.
3.The conscience lost...

TACHYON DREAM: ODE TO ALBERT (Penned in late twenties)

Stars appear to continue to burn brightly long after they have given of their last supernovae gasps.
Yet soon, even their light will leave our eyes,
to be replaced by new uncertain certainties,
as we try our damndest to reach superluminosity so that we might someday
catch up with it all.
Yet we will merely continue to fall pitifully by the wayside every time,
mere remnants of more lost momentum born from that search for the illusory Then, and When-
whose real name is "Never" for there is only "Now."
Now. The sweet loaf of Life to be spit from the lukewarm mouths of babes,
leaving only bitter crumbs of status quo dough to collapse into themselves
in seemingly infinite singularity and implosive concentricity,
until yet another hungry hand plunges into the teeming Void with such psuedo-scientific dexterity.

Yet now the Void is merely left rippling,
having been incited of that trusty old phenomenon of interference,
where the answers all lie hidden in proofs-universal & solipsistic.
So, we leave it all neglectfully propagating in isolation-
isolating with propagation-
to the quantum selection of where one is standing,
and how fast one is going,
and in what direction,
and why...ad infinitum...ad nauseum.

Perhaps only in our physical deaths will we feel the sweet, synchronous embrace of Time & Being.
Perhaps only then will we know the secret dance of each and every particle,
macrocosmic, microcosmic and beyond...
Death-this seemingly detrimental determination which we regard with so much Fear & Trembling-
there is only Freedom and true Life in it.

For now:
"These are my molecules, take of them and do whatever it is You do,
Oh Great Creator of Cosmos & Consciousness.
I donate body, mind and spirit to Science.
The Science of the search for the proof that can be seen only after it is no longer needed.
And then, the Light shall be unceasing."

DREAMCULT: ODE TO THE WORLD (Penned in my twenties)

Doubt is your religion.
Faith is merely your alibi.
You removed my heart to see if I had a soul.
You removed my larynx to see if I had a voice.
You tormented my mind to see if I could clearly perceive.
You burned and tweaked my flesh to see if I had a response to touch.
You severed my feet to see if I could fly.
You severed my hands to see just how much I had to give.
You removed my reproductive organs to see if I indeed had the powers of creation.
You plucked out mine eyes to see if I would recognize Truth.
You pulled all of my teeth to acquaint yourself with my bite.
You pulled each nail, one by one, to see if I could still hang on.
You stole my beauty to see just how much allure I really had.
You broke my bones to see if I did have it all together.
You drew my blood to see just what life force really animated me.
You ripped out my intestines to see if I had any true guts.
You removed my liver to expose me to your toxins.
You clipped my urinal tract and my bowels just to see how well I could hold it all in.
You severed all of my muscles to really test my coordination.
You removed both of my kidneys to test my endurance.
You severed my spinal cord to really get me movin'.
You beheaded me to see just how much I could really "lose my head."
And after all of this, you still knew not Whose breath truly sustains me.
Amen.

PAINT ROOFS BLACK, LET MOON SHINE (Penned in my twenties)

Perhaps if it is dark enough,
they won't see us here.

And how I long to tell them that we will all face the inevitable wrath
of our collective and individual sins,
without all of this hiding.

We used to have the company of our shadows
which lept and danced about the house
waltzing in perfect time to the symphonic cacophany
of our Fear.

Yet when at last we were forced to look-
the Cause of all of these epic struggles-
our shadows hung so pallid and so low.

For truly all wars are incited first from within
the compounds of every mortal human Soul-
from implosion to explosion,
a continually perverse reverse nuclear chain reaction
of Shame & Blame.

Yet silence and inertia only worsen the creeping agony
which clenches us further-
deeper into the Darkness,
which keeps us so, dead alive.

And oh, yes, how we are so conspicuously hidden-
but hidden from whom and from what?

And at last when our bodies are strong
and our minds and spirits no longer broken
and beyond waging, can we busy ourselves
with the incongruent, coarse and tedious tasks
of Mourning & Conciliation,
leaving us in the end with only the thought:
if only as many lives got to be fully lived as deaths died
in the name of "preservation"-
preservation of self,
preservation of country,
preservation of liberty,
preservation of family, honour, dignity...
then perhaps we would all finally come to know and grasp
the higher logic and purpose of all things-
the living to die, instead of all this
dying to live.

QUANTUM IV

Father forgive us, for we haven't yet recovered from the last fall.
There is a point where Hope & Exhultation
converge to a cruelly fixed and sharp point-
only to find their meeting place upon
the gothic architecture of all existential Despair, Ambivalence & Anguish.

And then Evil entered into the world,
and Good became something to kill for-
the hands of neither Warrior nor Martyr coming clean.

Father, forgive us, for we haven't yet recovered from that fall.
We confesseth ye with our mouth and Yea! We are saved!
But must we endure every moment as though we were damned?

We wish to no longer bear the weight of this faltering-
the shock of this trembling.

Nihilo sanctum estne?
Where is our Soul?
Where has it gone?

We are open vessels.
We only pray that the wrong spirit does not enter into us.
Fighting it has come to naught.

Must we lie with the Devil to bear the seeds of our own redemption?
Which came into being first-Heaven or Hell?
Or is there only The Void,
still teeming with infinite possibilities?

REVELATION I (Penned in early 20's)

Swaggering before the shrine,
Of the mortal subjective mind,
The gods come to know remorse,
For if only these humans would have been fashioned with no sight of mind,
Perhaps would they then,
Just begin trusting in,
The obsolescence of Sin,
Take gayly for granted, proof of The Divine.

THE LUCIDITY OF THE SOUL'S EYE

Just for once to throw caution to the wind,
to let the heart beat at its own true pace-
rumbling, thundering and allegro.

Just for once to cut myself open at the core,
letting the blood run out to every sea
and the Mind beyond all so-called reasonable bounds,
tamed not even by the snares I know to be lying in ravenous wait
within Fear's vast wilderness,
which clings with gripping, merciless tenacity
to the Achilles' heel of the Spirit.

If only Virtue and Joy could reign equally commensurate
to Fear and Despair, then perhaps would the human heart know
how to stay upon its truest path,
and the mortal human Soul could finally meet its noblest task and Cause,
that intangible, elusive thing that keeps it tied and bound to the earth,
while also taunting with promises of Transcendence.

Yet, this is just it-the secret:
Transcendence can only be attained in being, right here, right now.

THE DEVOLUTION (Penned in early 20's)

I walk with the manic pace of modernization,
footsteps thumping the cool Earth
in time to the flickering, hurried heat of the hell-bent Heart.
A crowd of festivity seekers weaves this way and that,
a mercurial mass of "I"-onized energy,
all becoming one amalgam of Form and Matter
not yet made realized by the Master Sculptor's hand,
as they wrestle with the Ultimate Question:
"Oh, how to live as one and One?"

Doomsday sayers exalt themselves upon rusted trashcan barrels,
providing ample opportunity for strict Unity,
as they hand out Salvation & Damnation in one heaping helping,
letting all whom, excluding themselves have sinned,
cast away their own stones of fire and brim.

The streets become a fatal sea of discarded Bible tracts,
blotted with tiny smudges of blood-
the papercuts of overcoercion to rebellion-
"Here is my blood, take of it and lick,"
the formulaic laws of Mortalkind's encumbrace,
a cup ever runneth over.

A young mother strains to the cumbersome gravity of Son & Self,
as she tries to defy her own Youth,
twisting and fidgeting in her own skin to pick up her boy who,
sensing Mother's anxiety through the telepathic tendencies of Mother & Child,
now reaches out a tiny hand, which is creased and lined already
with such Willful Dependence,
to seek out her warm, nourishing breast,
latching onto the cycle of redundant Instinct in a world
pulsating and aching from the perversions of Infancy-
the all-too-early sodomization of those things better left unknown,
morphed into Death's heyday at the first wailing breath.

I am still and silent as I ponder those who ravage themselves
with the ill-paradox of over-population, trial & tribulation,
as they bring life after death after life after death
into this new-old world only to find themselves submitting-
only to find themselves becoming the Scapegoats of all Dire Digression,
as their children grow up/down/every which way that is loose-
and they look on in abject terror,
as all the while, Fate stands by with a shit-eating grin.

THE DHARMA BUM'S PRAYER (Originally published in Nuthouse, 2001)

Oh great Brahma, Vishnu & Siva,
When I remember,
Help me to forget,
And when I am moved to do,
Remind me, to sit.........

Oooooooommmmmmmm.....;-)P

THE EXPEDIENT INGREDIENT

In 1886,
Coca-Cola had the "fix",
To cure all ills,
In the absence of pills,
The secret ingredient,
'Twas quite expedient,
Offered up by the coca plant,
Much better than Gregorian chant,
Ensuring a steady demand,
And many a tremoring hand,
When the last drop was gone,
They all soon filed to Al-Anon,
A communal "high" not to be missed,
Better than a Coca-Cola in the fist,
Resulting in a steady sales plummet,
And a swell new jingle if you could hum it,
For now it was stronger than ever,
A brain tonic for any soporific weather,
The new "secret" ingredient,
Ever more expedient,
To keep working minds alert & keen,
Why the "real thing" now boasted of Caffeine!

THE GAMBLE: An Epigram (Penned in twenties)

Our Virtue defines us
More than our Vice
Except in a World that counts
Only Odd Dice.

NIGHT CLOTH: A Haiku (Penned in early twenties)

Crushed velvety sky
Lofty cloth of the smooth Eve
Suits my soul just right.

TEETER-TOTTER: A MODERN DAY HAIKU (Penned in early twenties)

Teeter-totter politics
In cahoots ethics-
Who's down, must come up.

THE TAMING OF INERTIA (Penned in early twenties)

Why must we shoot popcorn kernels at the moon,
when we know that Salvation is truly
a slow taming of Inertia
by an inside force?
For what is at rest remains so only
through our own will to disempowerment.
And this is so, too, when formulating loneliness,
and the insurmountable gravity we are all irredeemably encumbered by.
Yet still, we seek a kindred galaxy,
when we are all truly lone stars.
And when we come to grips with this solipsistic certainty we cry out-
Shall Eternity be thicker than Time, why must I feel so betrayed?
For when there is no tangible seed with which to fertilize the soul,
a sort of metaphysical parthenogenesis occurs,
and thus is born from this barren egg, the separate Self,
a miracle offspring of the disunified Essence.

Yet even knowing of the fragility of the time-space continuum
of mortal human existence,
which many name Fate,
we neglect it and it soons abandons us,
as our lives are possessed by the laws of Life's inconsistent equations,
all nontheless continuing on a 360 degree axis,
for what goes around and comes around must continually meet at a moot point.

Thus, the synthesis of Realism & Idealism again fails to come to fathomable fruition,
as the Mind passively perceives while the Spirit
and its vehicle, the Body, dynamically & kinesthetically fail to respond,
the eradication of mere premonition coming continually to naught.

For only when the taming of inertia from within begins,
can we be brought to full revolution & evolution,
so the grieving of the loss of any and all former incarnations
may, in due finity be found,
and the loss of our grief, also no longer lamented, find common ground.

And the Laws Of Nature,
and the Philosophical Physics of the Mortal Experiment
may allow the human organism to undergo Gradualism of another kind,
as old traits no longer self-preservatory
are phased out day by day,
by the inimitable laws of Spirit Evolution-
that which will defy all Rhyme & Reason
as it proves someday, beyond the lurking shadows
of any Doubt, that eventually, what goes up, cannot come down.

-Art by Patrick McEvoy "Miss Universe" at http://www.fantasygallery.net/