The Cosmic Perspective

Isolation is necessary for picking up the signal, sometimes...

I don’t like making absolute statements. I know that I only have my own perspective. This morning, I stumbled upon the latest post from Maria Popova that came out yesterday and began reading it. It seems very much to be synchronistic with my own thinking of the moment - a louder and louder admonition coming up out of the Pleroma to think about all life. Here’s a passage to whet our appetites for more:

Unlike his contemporaries, Humboldt saw nature not as an obstacle for “Man” to conquer but as the magnificent superorganism of which human nature is a fractal.

Unlike other naturalists, who collected isolated specimens and sought to classify the living world into neat taxonomies, he was collecting and connecting ideas to “establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation” — a view of nature as a system that paved the way for everything from the Gaia hypothesis of biology to the unified field theory of physics to the concept of ecology.

Unlike other explorers, he disdained the view of non-European peoples as savages who needed to be civilized and saw them rather as sages with much older cultural and folkloric traditions, complex, fascinating, and full of lore about the natural world.

Published in French in 1810, Vues des Cordillères — a record of his time in the Cordilleras, the extensive mountain ranges of Latin America where he had invented the modern concept of nature as a web of relations — was Humboldt’s most lavish book. Amid the scrumptious engravings of mountains, volcanos, and archeological artifacts is a series of strange, scintillating fragments from ancient Incan and Aztec pictorial hieroglyphics, full of faces and bodies, affect and action.

With that thought, that nature is a web of relations, I am taken to a passage within my latest post, Shyness Sets In:

“We are dependent on so many other species also. I think of this as I eat my blend of seeds, wheat germ, oat bran and Kefir this morning; the cows that produced the cultured milk, for example. Every bite depends on all these different creatures that live within the milk as well as the plants that produced the seeds, the germ, and the bran….and then there are all those of our species involved in getting those things from where they grew to my bowl. I’ve sweetened it with a bit of maple syrup. See where I am going?

If we were all more mindful of the Web of Life, we would do better than when we simply go through life robotically without thinking about how all of these things interrelate.”

I’m listening now to a documentary on Terence McKenna again. My life has been enriched by wandering among these thinkers. Now by the click of a link in Popova’s May 5 essay, I find myself reading another essay centered on neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s thought:

“The human experience of pain and suffering has been responsible for extraordinary creativity, focused and obsessive, responsible for inventing all kinds of instruments capable of countering the negative feelings that initiated the creative cycle.

[…]

Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity.”

This leads me back to Upasni Maharaj’s discourse on his most important mantra: Be As It May:

I’ll leave it to the reader to listen to this short video introduction to the thinking of this exceptional human being who passed from the scene of mortal life in 1941.

In the meantime, I have moved on from the comments of Damasio into those of Lou Andreas-Salomé to Rainer Maria Rilke:

While you are perpetually feeling sick and miserable you are also perpetually finding expressions for that experience, and those expressions, in the distinctive form you give them, would be quite impossible unless somewhere inside you there is a flowing together, an experiencing in unison, of what you feel as so torn into one impulse fleeing outward and another burrowing inward, with only an empty, self-deserted middle space between them. Those words with which you articulate this condition, and that passage, for example, about the anemone — they are nothing if not works, works accomplished, the coming about of deepest unities in you!

A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs, certainly; but if it arose out of that despair, the despair of not being capable of just such poetic syntheses, there’d be a contradiction, don’t you think? To your consciousness of yourself it appears that way, your consciousness finds itself on the side of what is being blocked, and therefore is not party to those moments which show again and again that you are not so lacking throughout in unity as you feel and think “yourself” to be; you suffer yourself as a person blocked, and that piece of happiness which is lodged in this situation remains hidden from you, withheld, even though all its requirements are inside you and express themselves; for one cannot write about the anemone the way you do without some store of happiness (which is just not fully working its way into consciousness!)

Again, credit here goes to Maria Popova for her article “Lou Andreas-Salomé, the First Woman Psychoanalyst, on Depression and Creativity in Letters to Rilke.”

In making this dive, we’ve gone back to May 12, 2016. Such is the nature of cultural memory. We dive down into the suffering of those who have been here before and appropriate it for ourselves. We are not alone, even when we are alone. Even if we were the last people on the planet, we’d still have this legacy left to us by those who have gone before us. We pile experience upon experiences. Now I’m going back to Emerson’s Essay on Compensation:

In general, nearly all of Emerson’s works inform my own life. I pour over them often.

We are all part and parcel of the nature from which we have arisen. We are brief flashes on the surface of eternity. While we have breath in the body, we have an opportunity to serve as conscious tools of the cosmos. We should all be that, conscious tools of the universe. So I do all I can to amplify that signal through to anyone willing to pick up what I’m laying down and I hope many will. So far, we have over 800 subscribers, 22 of which have seen fit to pay for access to the archives as well as to follow along as my thinking develops. I’m grateful to all of you who might read this and hope that you will comment, message me, or simply amplify this signal through the noise so that it might be read by others. That is the greatest service we can do for one another here on Substack.

Onward!

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