Aphorism 18

There are, relative to the 8 billion humans, an extremely small number of humans that define, control, and direct the human outward.  This small number of human beings continue to feed and perpetuate an inherited momentum from which they themselves gain unfathomable wealth, power and influence.  Through this process that has repeated itself from generation to generation, the few with wealth and power have defined and set the course of the human outward.

Unfortunately, these few men that feed and perpetuate the momentum from one generation to the next devote all focus and energy to the human outward and have lost sight of both their human inward and the non-human outward.  As such, the gap between the human inward/non-human outward relative to the human outward increases generation after generation.  

Man is drifting farther and farther out to sea in a vessel with limited provisions and no inward compass.  One day he will meet the unforgiving and absolute power of the non-human outward.  Only then will he recall his human inward, but it will be just a distant memory and will be of no use to him as the non-human outward terminates the failed experiment and recycles bone, flesh, the extraordinary thumb and relatively large brain for the next experiment.

 

Sweet Misery

Thank you White Spark for this music…it is perfect.

Clouds

Life From The Lifeless

Spirits and illusions have died,
The naked mind lives
In the beauty of inanimate things.

Flowers wither, grass fades, trees wilt,
The forest is burnt;
The rock is not burnt.

The deer starve, the winter birds
Die on their twigs and lie
In the blue dawns in the snow.

Men suffer want and become
Curiously ignoble; as prosperity
Made them curiously vile.

But look how noble the world is,
The lonely-flowing waters, the secret-
Keeping stones, the flowing sky.

By Robinson Jeffers

Soaring Hawk

Between Storms

Piece Three

(Context of quote on picture…Hurt Hawks)

Robinson Jeffers is a poet I discovered in my twenties.  His poetry is tough, hard, philosophical, and he takes on the big issues that I struggled with as a young man in my late teens and twenties…and still do today in the first half of my 40’s.  He wrote much of his works while living in Carmel…a place I know well…I have frequently observed and admired the same natural beauty he alludes to in his poetry.  Here is a generic biography of Jeffers….(Background on Robinson Jeffers), but the core philosophical connection I share with this very intelligent and artistic man can be summarized by the below paragraph taken from the above link….

Jeffers coined the phrase inhumanism, the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the “astonishing beauty of things.” Jeffers articulated that inhumanism symbolized humans’ inability to “uncenter” themselves.  In “The Double Axe,” Jeffers explicitly described inhumanism as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the trans-human magnificence… This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist… It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy… it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.”

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Theory Of Truth

(Reference to The Women at Point Sur)
I stand near Soberanes Creek, on the knoll over the sea, west of
the road. I remember
This is the very place where Arthur Barclay, a priest in revolt,
proposed three questions to himself:
First, is there a God and of what nature? Second, whether there’s
anything after we die but worm’s meat?
Third, how should men live? Large time-worn questions no
doubt; yet he touched his answers, they are not unattainable;
But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity.

How
many minds have worn these questions; old coins
Rubbed faceless, dateless. The most have despaired and accepted
doctrine; the greatest have achieved answers, but always
With aching strands of insanity in them.
I think of Lao-tze; and the dear beauty of the Jew whom they
crucified but he lived, he was greater than Rome;
And godless Buddha under the boh-tree, straining through his
mind the delusions and miseries of human life.

Why does insanity always twist the great answers?
Because only
tormented persons want truth.
Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and
women, not truth. Only if the mind
Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:
then it hates its life-cage and seeks further,
And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private
agony that made the search
Muddles the finding.
Here was a man who envied the chiefs of
the provinces of China their power and pride,
And envied Confucius his fame for wisdom. Tortured by hardly
conscious envy he hunted the truth of things,
Caught it, and stained it through with his private impurity. He
praised inaction, silence, vacancy: why?
Because the princes and officers were full of business, and wise
Confucius of words.

Here was a man who was born a bastard, and among the people
That more than any in the world valued race-purity, chastity, the
prophetic splendors of the race of David.
Oh intolerable wound, dimly perceived. Too loving to curse his
mother, desert-driven, devil-haunted,
The beautiful young poet found truth in the desert, but found also
Fantastic solution of hopeless anguish. The carpenter was not his
father? Because God was his father,
Not a man sinning, but the pure holiness and power of God.
His personal anguish and insane solution
Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years are one vast poem
drunk with the wine of his blood.

And here was another Saviour, a prince in India,
A man who loved and pitied with such intense comprehension of
pain that he was willing to annihilate
Nature and the earth and stars, life and mankind, to annul the
suffering. He also sought and found truth,
And mixed it with his private impurity, the pity, the denials.
Then
search for truth is foredoomed and frustrate?
Only stained fragments?

Until the mind has turned its love from
itself and man, from parts to the whole. 

Robinson Jeffers