while listening to Ganesh Baba on my iPod...
Some notes and thoughts, October 12, 2008
Some editing and additions, December 4, 2010
We must become more familiar with the essence and structure of consciousness, because it is out of consciousness we come and to consciousness we return. Ganesh Baba, “The Rochester Raps,” recorded by Ira Landgarten, 1981.The cosmos is created out of consciousness vibrating at different frequencies, visible to our limited senses as a fractal world created from rainbows and scales:
The eight broad categories, matter, energy, space, time, life, mind, intelligence and consciousness, all operate within the human psyche, but the physical body operates only in the first three dimensions: matter, energy and space. The fourth dimension, time, we can barely conceive; it is like a baby moving around in the womb trying to understand the outside world. GB
Intelligence = Divine Wisdom, Sophia,
BuddhiThe subtle world creates the material world. As Swami Armitananda once said, "It is obvious that mind controls matter every time you lift your arm," and science has long shown that the material world disassembles as our understanding of it becomes subtler and subtler.
We misunderstand the subtler worlds when the mind claims greater wisdom than it has, and it sees exactly the opposite of what is. The infinite fractal world of scales and rainbows is reduced to limited patterns conditioned by experience. Consciousness appears to flip and become its opposite: Mercury, in flight between worlds.
The möbius twist.
Thoughts, inhabitants of the world beyond space and time, take on a life of their own whenever they get the chance. Potential archetypes, progenitors of the world in which we live, arise with every word we say, with every intention, with every mood, with every thought we have (conceive: give birth to, create), whether conscious or unconscious. Some thoughts, conceived in the unconscious, take on the dark aspect of things not understood; and others, born in the light of consciousness, bring wisdom and understanding.
We fear what we don't understand - and we project our fear outward onto others and into the future.
Jung knew. The darkness is coming into the light now, willy-nilly. GB
How relevant this is now - during the darkest days of the year, as we near the Winter Solstice. In fact, these are the darkest days of darkest times in my lifetime, in most of our lives, if not in the life of our civilization, and possibly our planet.
The quality of each individual's consciousness, whether receptive or resistant, high or low, subtle or dense, with which we receive and respond to the darkness determines our experience. Our experience, in turn, creates the lens through which we focus our consciousness.
The focusing mechanism of the lens of experience is attention. We can choose what we pay attention to, what we shed the light of consciousness on.
Life,
Darkness Slipped In
Written and illustrated by Ella Burfoot
Kingfisher, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6209-6
Daisy is playing when Darkness slips into her bedroom. He tries to be sneaky but she sees him anyway - and she’s not frightened in the least, even when he takes over the whole room. She just flips on the lamp, grabs him by the arm, and they dance up a storm! Darkness then comes every night to play and spend time with Daisy, until they both get sleepy and it’s time for bed.
This tale reminded me of a more light-hearted Switch on the Night - the personification of darkness and reassurance that there’s nothing to be afraid of. The illustrations have great personality, and the contrast between the stark black of Darkness and simple yet colourful Daisy is fun to look at. This would be a good book for a little one just overcoming his/her nervousness about the dark.
Switch On The Night
Written by Ray Bradbury
Pictures by Leo and Diane Dillon
Umbrella Books, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-80486-4
I'm back from Paperback Horror for today, because I wanted to share this very special book with you guys. It deals with one of my favourite things - the Dark. There was a time (long ago) when I really didn't like the dark. It was too mysterious, too silent, too...well, dark.
In Switch On The Night, Bradbury introduces us to a little boy who doesn't like the dark. He likes lanterns and lamps and torches and tapers - every implement you can think of that produces light. One night while his father is away on a business trip and his mother goes to bed early, he
Bad news: Technical difficulties prevented me from recording Friday night’s Calvin Baker/Colson Whitehead discussion on Branding and Freedom in the Market Economy.
It’s a shame, too, because the authors spoke so intelligently, and with such warmth — they’re friends, as it happens — that we didn’t lose a single audience member over the course of the evening.
I’ve tried to jot down some highlights over the past few days. Unfortunately, I tailored my questions partly to what the authors said, so I can’t remember exactly how things unfolded. And I don’t like to reconstruct other people’s words from memory.
The only complete artifact I have is my introduction — a sad substitute for the actual conversation, I know. I’ll post it here after the jump, with a wish for better recording mojo next time.
Thanks for coming out tonight. I’m excited to be hosting a discussion of two excellent novels between two incredibly talented writers, under the rubric of “Branding and Freedom in the Market Economy.”
Before we begin, I’d like to say a few words about my reasons for choosing this topic.
Some years ago, set loose upon the world with a B.A. in English, weary of working in bookstores, and unsure what to do with myself, I blundered into law school. There, outside the warm bosom of the liberal arts department, I was amazed to discover a breed of person who, like my father, believed the Market Was All — who hung on every word of law and economics types like Judge Richard Posner (who was at one time considered a top contender for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court).
For those of you who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of reading Posner, I’ll quote from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, who has dubbed him the “Human Pentium Processor.” “Posner,” she says, “published his seminal Economic Analysis of Law, shining the light of cost-benefit analysis into every dark corner of the law, from antitrust to racial discrimination to — of course — sex. An essay on rape reads almost like a parody of the substitution of economic for moral reasoning. (’[A]llowing rape would lead to heavy expenditures on protecting women, as well as expenditures on overcoming those protections. The expenditures would be offsetting, and to that extent socially wasted.’)”
A section from Calvin Baker’s Dominion calls to mind this kind of reasoning. A boy born free is abducted, and as his kidnapper prepares him for the auction block, he asks the boy how much he thinks he is worth.
“I don’t know,” Bastian answered. “I ain’t never been for sale and don’t imagine how you can put a price on a person, though I know some people do.”
“On the contrary,” the man answered, directing him toward a pail of water to wash in. “It is no people who do, but the market. People ain’t smart enough. But the market is brilliant, and it can price anything — that horse, you, me, the pail — it makes no difference; the market will tell you exactly what everything is worth and will not lie or cheat you….”
Of course Posner and his acolytes have an unsually strong faith in the power of the market to assign things their proper value.
On the far other side of the fence are theorists like Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, an attack on brands. I was emailing with a friend, the scholar and writer Amitava Kumar, about her book recently, and he said, “My only problem with folks like Klein is that despite my agreement with everything they say I can’t abide their purity. I think as writers we should at least acknowledge the deeply, even inescapably contradictory nature of our existence.
I agree with Kumar. We can denounce market forces — and logos and brands — all we want. We can agree that we’d be better off without them. But we live in a market-driven world. So what does this way of life mean for us? What kind of fairness is possible within it?
I don’t have an answer to this question, and I don’t have any particular axe to grind here. I don’t want to linger in the realm of theory. My hope is that, by focusing on Whitehead’s and Baker’s stories, on the ideas and characters within them, we’ll be able to look at these questions in a slightly different way.
Colson Whitehead has written three novels and a collection of essays. His latest effort, Apex Hides the Hurt, is a new-millennium story that shares some themes with Baker’s book. A branding expert who invented a catchy name — Apex — for shoddy multicultural band-aids ends up loathing himself when the product becomes a success. Now he’s taken on what may be his last assignment: renaming a town founded by freedmen. The book is a fascinating inquiry into truth, identity, and the use of language in the market economy.
Calvin Baker is also the author of three novels, including, most recently, Dominion, in which a freed slave named Jasper Merian buys the only land white people will sell him — untamed, haunted land — and fights off a ghost, Ould Lowe, to build a plantation he can pass along to his children. In a sense I’m stretching the concept of “branding and freedom in the market economy” to its limits by discussing Baker’s book under that rubric, but in another sense that is exactly what his book is about. What kind of freedom is available to a man once he is no longer someone’s property? What will he call his new home, and what is the relevance of the name he chooses? In Dominion, Baker draws on our most ancient myths, his diction is nearly Biblical, and he gives us an epic that’s as relevant to our time as to the Pre-Revolutionary era in which it’s set.
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