I awoke this morning hearing a voice saying:
"Beware of the warrior Many Tongues whose mind is cluttered with things and he walks the earth in confusion, deep in his fear of the Great Spirit Emptiness, for he knows that without Emptiness there would be no-thing."
I lay there a trying to remember the dream and the events that led up to that voice, and trying to visualize the face, but it wouldn't come back to me. But I could still remember the phrase and the sound of the voice, so I reached for my leather bound journal on the nearby night stand, fumbled around for the pen, and I managed to write it down without losing the memory of it. It's sometimes very hard for me to write down phrases I hear in dreams, they just vanish when I try.
The thoughts and feelings from that dream hung about me like a sheer gray curtain, as I got up and began my morning. I made my coffee, turned on the computer, and sat back for a moment, looked at the headlines on a news page, but I was not really reading them.
It seemed like a koan. "Without Emptiness there would be no-thing." Just enough of a pause between the "no" and the "thing" to seem like two words, but said to sound like "nothing."
Thoughts of the meaning of infinite and spirit crossed through my mind, like old memories, for I'd thought such thoughts many times. Yet somehow this dream phrase seemed freshly related. The age old corporeal problem, the spirit world and the ever emergence of things surrounded by space, or nothing, which ancient philosophers hypothesized to be composed of something, and now modern philosophers, in the form of physicists are imagining it to be something as well. But if infinity is unmeasurable, is there ultimately a something? Maybe the "great spirit" is no more than that which makes thought possible.
And people have made up places where they can revere this seemingly amazing possibility, like the sense of awe some express after smoking some weed and then looking at an ordinary, everyday object as if for the first time, dragged forth on a long, thin line...
4 comments:
Ren wrote....
[quote]I awoke this morning hearing a voice saying:
"Beware of the warrior Many Tongues whose mind is cluttered with things and he walks the earth in confusion, deep in his fear of the Great Spirit Emptiness, for he knows that without Emptiness there would be no-thing."[/quote]
This passage has been on my mind since reading it the other day. I take such epiphanies seriously--especially from a dream. My theory, stolen from PBS lecturer [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Dyer"]Wayne W. Dyer[/url], is that such dreams are really the creative right brain working subconsciously on some problem or some urgent issue. I have new respect for the concept of the "subconscious" since you posted that documentary entitled [url="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151&q=&hl=en"]"Century of the Self"[/url] on Freudian psychoanalysis [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays"]Edward Bernays[/url]. This is the most dramatic reversal in my belief system in years and still having difficulty grasping its implications. And just the day before I stumbled onto your passage above I discovered a book by Stanford brain scientists, Jill Bolte Taylor, entitled [url="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html"]"Stroke of Insight."[/url] She experienced a stroke on the left side of her brain leaving only the right brain functioning. This resulted is a complete change in her personality and perspective on Life.
So the work of the left brain is to "assemble" our thoughts and beliefs into a comprehensible and articulated form. After analyzing our verbal and nonverbal thoughts, it ends in a highly processed and concise koan or Haiku. But, like a valid deductive argument no new information is created, just a re-expression of information already known. I recognize some of the many topics we discussed over the years in the dream passage: the nature of propaganda, theories of consciousness, and critical analysis of society.
If I may be so bold to offer my interpretation of the Warrior dream. I believe multiple interpretation are possible. The Warrior is the propagandist: the propagandist in world media, in society and in our own engineered assumptions about the world. He is a Warrior against individual Freedom and self-actualization. The many Tongues are the various propaganda techniques and the universal nature of propaganda in all societies to construct a social reality and establish hegemony--the chains of conformity for Mind and Spirit. Reason is suppressed and replaced by dependence, contradiction, and control. The only anecdote to propaganda is individual Self Knowledge that emerges from Consciousness.
But what is Consciousness? We may only be able to say what Consciousness in not. In spite of all the inculcation by modern psychology, Consciousness in not a Thing. The Existentialist say Consciousness in "No-thing." It is not an Object nor thing but is the formulator of objects of experience and perception. Sartre's philosophical work [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness"]"Being and Nothingness"[/url] he defines Consciousness a "Nothingness" in juxtaposition to the world of objects. Consciousness is "Being-for-itself" (indefinable and changing), but objects are "Being-in-itself" (definable and static). Capitalist society obsessed with commodity production reduces Human Being to an object because then Humans can be rightly treated as objects: no inherent value, a means to ends only, no intrinsic Rights or inherent privileges--in short, a labor slave. The Great Spirit of Emptiness is Human Self Consciousness from which we construct a world of objects, values, and meaning. Consciousness, or nothingness, is the dialectical opposite of Objectivity.
Self Consciousness is what the Warrior fears. Consciousness is a disease. From Consciousness comes freedom, meaning, independence, creativity, and uncertainty. And so the battle of the Warrior is to wage war against Self Conscious awareness by constructing an ontology of a false situation.
Carl Jung wrote:
Resistance to the organized mass can be affected only by the man who is well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.'
--Carl Jung, [url="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451217322?ie=UTF8&tag=photographyme-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0735712506"]The Undiscovered Self[/url], [p. 60]
Len Hart (aka [url="http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/search/label/Jung"]The Existentialist Cowboy[/url]) has written a powerful essay on Carl Jung's concern of Mass Society overpowering the individual and self-knowledge as the only force that could resist the dehumanizing ideology of modern collectivist society whether it is the collectivism of fascism or of the marketplace. Please see his short, but powerful discussion of Carl Jung, [url="http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/search/label/Jung"]"Jung: Resisting the 'New World Order."[/url](Wayne W. Dyer was a student of and knew Carl Jung).
[img]http://bp2.blogger.com/_9jbG-c2Ned4/SF16XTBqA2I/AAAAAAAABDM/hbKXbphzKMY/s320/gypsy.jpg[/img]
Hart added this picture to his essay and I printed and framed it. Here is how I interpret it:
The nomadic musician sleeps happily amidst the worldly dangers of Nature and Society. Consciousness transforms fear by creative acts of self knowledge into forces of resistance and freedom.
Antifascist
Thanks, Anti, terrific response, I really value it. You are connecting on many levels with what I've been working on lately.
I'm pretty sure it's about propaganda, and propaganda on the internet message boards, especially. That would tie into the "warrior" notion. And it's what I'm engaging in, so why wouldn't it be that...?
Ren
Good Morning!!! ren-awritersblog.blogspot.com is one of the most excellent resourceful websites of its kind. I take advantage of reading it every day. ren-awritersblog.blogspot.com rocks!
The most strange and amusing images and pictures online.
Chit unconscious
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