“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, September 4, 2014

I SURRENDER




For ages I've been wanting to make a t-shirt with that on it and a female deity such as Tara on the back. I like the threatening (for some) non-cynicism ("new aginess" or "kitschy") of this image. Tara has eyes everywhere, like on her hands. She comes from a tear on the face of the deity of compassion.

I miss my 1988 t-shirt that got so torn up I had to chuck it. It was a picture of Krishna inscribed thusly:

PARADISE
DESIGNED IN HEAVEN FOR USE ON EARTH

But in the meantime, this is like the best ever meditation instruction (below). First Björk's lyrics and the way she delivers them. The feeling of it. Then there's the fact that as you listen this huge shimmering Indian lake of humid sound starts to emerge behind the voice, followed by a Fauré-like choir descending from the sky.

It's like how you visualize, for real. It's an emotion, visualizing is. It's not filling in little details. It's like what Husserl says about intentional objects. They are just there--you see a green car, you don't make one out of lots of little pixels. Or atoms for that matter if you are OOO.

Everything about it is physical.

New York City: see it. Right? You don't have to build it up starting with the streets, adding some buildings, the layout etc. If you've been there or better yet lived there, it's a feeling, yes?

And that's linked to the best instruction ever, which is the lyric undo. There's this term in Dzogchen, it's call “mental non-doing.” Or non-meditation. (It's a bit nicer than Laurelle's non- with apologies to the “non-Buddhists.”)

Look, someone had almost the same idea!




1 comment:

amanda vox said...

right!?
I was really into björk while in university in são paulo. the year I took sanskrit and was reading lots of buddhist (and other) texts that song struck me just like that.
she´s got many songs that talk about gentleness, generosity, one can´t not like björk, but ´undo` is a gem.