Nervous Energy

The place that Solomon made to worship in Called the far Mosque, is not built of earth Of water and stone, but of intention and wisdom And mystical conversations and compassionate action.

Every part of it is intelligence and responsive To every other. The carpet bows to the broom. The door knocker and the door swing together like musicians. The heart sanctuary does exist, but it can’t be described. Why try!

Solomon goes there every morning and gives guidance with words. With musical harmonies and in actions, which are the deepest teachings. A prince is just A conceit until he does something with generosity.

Rumi hits our ten pound bag filled with nervous energy when he shares his thoughts with us. Science is just discovering what Rumi understood eight centuries ago: Thoughts creates and influence matter. A church or mosque is not just stone or brick; it is a composite creation of thoughts.

Thoughts and beliefs create places and we develop a story around those thoughts. Intention and wisdom fill the cracks in the mortar, and appreciation dresses the interior with the action of consciousness.

Worship is a form of awareness. It should not turn into idolization. There is nothing to worship outside of the self. The environment and everything in it is an extension of the self. Everything material extends outward from our consciousness. Physical reality is just one form of reality. We value it because we focus on it. We choose this reality to physically feel the action within our experiences.

Consciousness Seeds

Poetry seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms, which it provokes in us.

Alfred Edward Housman, the classical scholar and poet, was born in Worcestershire, England. Housman was the main character in the 1997 Tom Stoppard play, The Invention of Love. Housman wrote an early 1900s collection of poetry called, A Shropshire Lad. A wall hanging was created for A Shropshire lad, and it now hangs in St. Laurence Church in Ludlow, England.

Poetry floats above our beliefs structure, and it creates a cloud of thoughts that showers our objective world with subjective hail. The hail melts and our belief system floods with new roots. Those roots move to the rhythm of our consciousness. We feel the need to explore these roots, even though we have a hard time accepting them.

Poetry defies the collective conforming creature in us and shakes us awake. Every poem drenches us in the knowledge of nothing, but the pureness of our own freedom. The freedom to perceive and interpret it in an individual way.

We recognize poetry by its consciousness symptoms. Poems are consciousness seeds that dwell outside the rigid walls of our beliefs. They wait for a crack to appear in that guarded wall, and then they fill it with awareness.

You Are An Eye

Since you have perceived the dust of forms, Perceive the wind that moves them; Since you have perceived the foam, Perceive the ocean of Creative Energy.

Come; perceive it, for in you Insight is all that matters; The rest is just fat and flesh, A weft and warp of bones and muscle.

Your fat never increased the lights in candles; Your flesh never became roast meat For someone drunk with spiritual wine. Dissolve this whole body of yours in vision:

Pass into sight, pass into sight, pass into sight! One sight perceives only two yards ahead; Another sight has beheld the two worlds And the face of the King.

Between these two Is an incalculable difference: Seek the remedy of vision, And God best knows that which is hidden.

Rumi, the 13th century mystic and poet, was actually born in Afghanistan in 1207. He lived most of his life in Konya which is in southern Turkey. Rumi uses 13th century language to describe 21st century concepts. He understood the power that rests within us. We can use our inner senses to experience physical life once we become aware of them.

Silence

A bird delegation came to Solomon complaining, “Why is it you never criticize the nightingale?”

Because my way, the nightingale explained For Solomon is different. Mid-March to mid-June I sing. The other nine months, while you continue chirping, I’m silent.

Rumi, the master mystic and poet, wrote those words over seven hundred years ago. At first glance the story is hard to understand, but given a little focused attention the meaning is clear. Appreciation is the key to happiness, and a positive outlook on life is the door that leads to heaven on earth. Our idle chatter is the noise that blocks the ego from hearing the mind, but silence is the sound of our aware consciousness.

LOVE

Love one another, but make not a bond of Love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone, As the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Stand together yet not too near together. For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

The words of Khalil Gibran, the 20th century artist, writer and poet, frames love in poetic verse, and it dances through the soul. Love is the energy of life and the impetus for being. We are filled with it yet we always seek it. We run from it, but it always finds us. We hide it, but it always frees itself. Love is the bark on a tree; the rose next to a thorn, and the calf that drinks its mother's milk. Love is all there is when there is no fear.

More Of A Genius

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghost-like we glide through nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no super-fluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. All that our Genius were a little more of a Genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1838 essay, Experience churns the mighty mixture of unconscious thoughts within us and we discover a taste for the unknown, the undiscovered and the untamed portion of the self. Our life is never threatened, but our perception of it dangles on the precipice of our distorted beliefs. Life is a series of endless experiences that cross the boundaries of our objective knowing and bury themselves in the shroud of death.

We invest and impart tangible things in physical life and those things melt away in the creativity of death. We wallow in that creativity and blossom within the super-fluity of our eternal life. We are the genius than creates more of a genius. We are the genius that frolics and lingers through all lifetimes.

The Universal Beauty Of Socially Correct Politics

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1844 essay, The Over-soul. Emerson, the Unitarian minister and leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century, is a well-known figure in American History. Emerson had and expressed bisexual tendencies while he attended Harvard, but he didn’t act on them. Emerson was not the only famous man or woman to express, but keep secret, a same-sex love. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton; Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed; Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt and Emily Dickinson have been credited with some sort homosexual or lesbian activity during their lifetimes. But their sexual preferences were wrapped in silence because of the laws and beliefs of the times.

The list of famous gay American’s would fill a chapter in our book of history. Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rudolph Valentino, Charles Laughton, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Janis Joplin and Joan Jett are just a few names in that chapter. Each one has contributed a particle or a part to the foundation of America History. We praise their accomplishments, and our lives have been enriched by their creativity. Most of them would have enjoyed the freedom of self-expression and same-gender marriage, but none of them received that freedom.

The history of Egypt, Greece, Italy, France and Britain is filled with contribution from gay citizens. All of them contributed to the political whole in some way, and the whole thrived because of them. King Richard the lion-hearted, Philip II, Beethoven and Shakespeare are on their country’s gay list. Donatello, Michelangelo and Leonardo Di Vinci also made their nation’s list. The opportunity to partake in an open marriage was accepted in some of those countries. Individual contributions to the political and social whole were enhanced because of that acceptance.

The recent ruling by the Supreme Court changes the nature of freedom for gay couples in America. These individuals may be able to live as a whole within the diversity that exists in our political machine without castration. They may be able to express the deep power that exists within this new freedom, and bring a touch of unity to the divisions, parts and particles that condemn the freedom to choose a specific partner.

When we look back, we see our history covered in sexual secrecy and matrimonial entrapment. The Supreme Court ruling brings that secrecy and entrapment to the forefront of our thoughts. Our social and political beliefs are changing. We are beginning to appreciate and accept personal unity within political diversity. We are writing a new history. A history filled with the universal beauty of socially correct politics.