Shrinking the ego out of existence,

Witnessing the Dark Night of the Soul,

Understanding the meaning of true humility,

Allocating to the the ego its proper role,

 

This is the goal of zen meditation,

The monastic existence, the end of desire,

Exactly as Siddartha suggested,

Following the 8 fold path is required.

 

 

NBS

Victoria Estates

3-13-19

 

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Raging waters rising,

 

Swirling, climbing,

Not subject to gravity,

Rising towards the heavens.

The artist released like a 

Glider, soaring,

Creating, inspiring,

Floating down to Earth.

Painting, poetry, architecture,

Sculpture, film making,

Like Christo’s fence,

New art project,

Banners in Central Park,

Symphony of beauty,

Imitating God.

 

NBS

Victoria Estates

3-2-19

The elevation of the soul

Reaches dizzying heights in rock and roll –

Stairway to heaven, journey home –

Bathing in ecstasy, spirits roam.

Spiritual energy flows,

Vibrates in rhythm, head to toes.

The power center rises up,

Balloons floating to the top.

Groundless liberation is achieved-

Angels in the clouds, souls relieved

From the entombment of the mind,

The doorway to infinity to find,

To channel the music of the spheres,

Mozart, Dylan and their peers,

The dance of Siva to return,

The purusha, inner flame, to burn.

 

NBS

ART2

9-25-18

16:55

The triathlete slips into a higher gear.

The Maui landscape floats by,

The island in the ocean

That feeds the human species,

While we dump into it our trash.

The race is on:

Will we destroy our planetary environment, or

Will we become responsible global managers first?

Will we burn up all the fossil fuel needed

To choke the air and heat the globe, or

Will we learn to conserve and share our earth’s bounty?

Will we grow a larger awareness of the damage we are doing and

How to fix it, or

Will we bludgeon each other through old tribal hatreds.

Can we grow up and stop destroying our ecosystems, or

Will we drown in our own pollution?

Can we become planetary citizens, or

Will we retreat into racist xenophobes,

Hiding in separatist enclaves.

Icebergs melt while islands of plastic trash float in the oceans.

Environmental organizations struggle to preserve threatened species.

War plagues the world, while disease and famine kill millions.

The United Nations seeks international cooperation.

Fires burn, drought sizzles, hurricanes destroy.

Trees are planted, protesters protect rain forests.

Chemicals poison water supplies,

Water conservation moves forward.

The Paris treaty is signed by all countries.

The biggest polluter withdraws.

This is a race! Can we change how the world operates in order to save ourselves,

Or will we destroy it first?

Can Love, Wisdom, and Courage

Overcome fear, greed, and selfishness?

There is yet hope.

NBS

Prescott, AZ

8-3-2018

The mind enters heaven slowly.

Einstein and relativity,

Tesla and AC Power,

The abstract and imaginative,

Picasso.  Mondrian. Pollack.

Slips gently into an ethereal world,

Formless, shapeless, infinite.

 

The body touches the earth.

Feels warm, wet, soil.

Tastes, touches, smells

The incontinent old goat,

The guts of a squid,

Nails and screws,

Tacks and hammers,

Drivetrains,

Steel bridges,

Tools, structures,

Products,

Rock.

 

I gaze into her eyes,

Longing hidden in that sweet smile.

Is it love or passion?

I see that if I want to be whole,

I must feel everything:

My world,

Her energy,

My strength,

All of it.

NBS

6-27-18; Victorian Estates

 

Ah, my poor America,

The circus has come to town,

Elephants and bareback riders,

But this time It’s the evil clown.

Russian bears assault the crowds,

Guns are fired frequently,

Victims lying on the ground,

Backroom deals made secretly.

 

Our friends from far away are chastised

While our enemies are invited in.

Thieves and robbers have been turned loose,

Pickpockets amid fraud and abuse.

The ringmaster cracks his whip, and

Dancing girls appear,

Though this time they are prostitutes,

Blackmail, extortion, fear.

 

Our only hope is the old bulldog,

Patriotic to a fault,

Backed by the Media, Courts, and Congress,

To bring this madness to a halt.

 

NBS  6-11-18 

Prescott Valley

 

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions is Judaism. Religious Jews are still waiting for the coming of a prophesied ‘messiah’, a savior of the Jewish people. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah. They believe that he will return in a Second Coming. Moslems, the third and youngest of the religions that came from the descendants of Abraham, believe that Muhammad was the last prophet of God, but that Jesus will return one day to save the earth. A Messiah or a Son of God is expected to return to save the world. Unfortunately, these three religions all believes that each is the only true faith.

Buddhism arose from Hinduism some 2,500 years ago in India. Hindus believe that there have been many Buddhas. While the Buddhist religion itself was founded around Siddhartha Gautama, ‘the Buddha”, in Hinduism one expects more Buddhas to come. Perhaps one could emerge in the anti-religious Communist society of China, or elsewhere in Asia.

The world’s major religions have been at each other’s throats off and on for millennia as each at one point or another has been used to spread empires. Christianity led the spread  of European empires to Africa, North and South America, Asia and Australia.  Islam spread with the first caliphates after Muhammad to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and even to Spain where it languished for centuries.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims have fought each other for many centuries. The Crusades, the pogroms, the Inquisitions and Jihads go on today as we see violence in the Middle East,  anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe and the United States, Buddhists fighting Muslims in Myanmar, Hindus against Muslims in Kashmir, the ancient rivalry between Hindus and Sikhs, Islamic extremists  in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, and more.

Communism, the anti-religion, was spread by revolution in Asia, Russia, and Cuba. Belief systems help empires to spread because they provide a common belief system for its members, and they bring together disparate ethnic groups into internally cohesive societies and armies. They give what the 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun called ‘Asabiyya’, the cooperative tendencies of social groups, a kind of team mentality.

Will Isis establish a single caliphate and unite all Muslims? At the moment it does not look probable. The Muslim world is largely divided into Sunnis and Shiites, different groups descended along two lines of Muhammad’s lineage:  the Sunnis following Muhammad’s intellectual lineage, his advisor Abu Bakr, while the Shiites follow Muhammad’s cousin and his son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. As a result, these two groups have fought each other for centuries and are now fighting over control of Islamic nations, sometimes even bombing each other’s mosques, often during prayer.

In order for Isis to achieve its goal of a new caliphate, it must stop the fighting between Shiites and Sunnis.  This seems very difficult to bring about. If it could happen though, the different strains of Islam could perhaps unite and bloodshed between Muslims would stop. The major nations  centered now in this fight are Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran.

Christianity has its own schisms. How many would-be self-described reincarnations of Jesus have there been? By one count there are no less than 36 over the last three centuries. The return of a legitimate descendant of Jesus, whether in the abstract sense or as a literal descendant, if accepted by Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant sects, could perhaps unite Christianity.  The Jewish Messiah, a holy leader and a descendant of David and Solomon, was prophesied to unite the Jewish peoples. The Jews are a much smaller population of course, and Judaism is limited in its growth by its requirement that one must be born or married into Judaism, but the principle of the messiah, the holy uniting leader, is the same. Another Buddha could be expected by Hindus as historically inevitable, someone who would bring peace and harmony to society.

There are those who believe that the emergence of a prophet with spiritual powers is brought about by the awakening of the spiritual energy center said to lie at the base of the spinal column and known in India as kundalini. Kundalini is  described as wrapped around the base of the spine three and a half times, thus giving it the appearance of a serpent. The term kundalini comes from the Sanskrit word for ‘coiled’. When this spiritual center is activated spiritual energy is said to rise up to the brain as if it had wings. Thus in the Mayan cosmology is found the god Quetzalcoatl, a serpent with feathers, the dragon of Mexico and Central America, prophesied to return one day.

In China the dragon is also a symbol of heaven. While the Bible tends to portray dragons as evil figures, the New Testament has many references to spiritual rebirth that sound very much like the awakening of kundalini. Kundalini is the modern symbol of medicine, the snake(s) with wings on the caduceus, the healing staff. In ancient Egypt it was the serpent of wisdom. When a person experiences this awakening, the mind is said to enlarge and spiritual powers to develop.

The human race has grown beyond the simple confines of mythical polytheism, of superstitions and human sacrifices, into a modern world.  This growth has its benefits and its perils. Can the human race develop a species-wide asabiyya? Can we mature to our potential to manage our planet without destroying it? Can we become one people?

In theory, yes. We could transcend the wars, prejudices, and inter-tribal hatreds of the past and present. We could trade cooperatively and not overpopulate our planet. We could reduce our destructive impact on our soil, our bodies of water, and our polluted air, but it is the religions that now fundamentally divide us.

Can kundalini activation bring saviors to heal our planet, leaders with modern knowledge and scientific understanding, but who also embody the spiritual side of life? This is a tall order. Muslims believe that Muhammad was the last prophet and that there cannot be another, though they also believe in the return of Jesus at a cataclysmic time when he saves the world.

Hindus and Buddhists can simply accept that another Buddha will come. All these prophecies are really the same. It seems that the religions of the world would accept holy leaders if those leaders come in the garb and ethnic identity that the world’s cultures recognize and are familiar with. But could one person or a group save this world with its overpopulation, resource depletion, global warming, and islands of plastic floating in the oceans? Like I said, it’s a tall order.

 

Angels with invisible wings,

Energy vibrations,

Delicately pulsating,

Propagating waves of

Invisible light,

Stimulating life.

NBS

4-21-18

Art2

Global Warming is a term I think we should stick to. The Earth is not cooling, it is warming. The euphemism, “climate change”, makes a general watering down of the grave crisis we are headed toward. I am 63 years old, so I will probably not be alive to see the worst of this crisis hit.

A recent study published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the rate of dry land ice melt is increasing.  The prediction is that by the end of this century the oceans will have risen about 2 feet, though that is a conservative estimate that does not take into account sudden events like a sudden, massive movement of glaciers into the ocean, or some other event. We could see three or more feet of ocean rise by 2100.

What I concern myself with are the other effects of global warming that are less straightforward to measure and may have catastrophic impacts on life on Earth. The full palette of effects can be quite striking. I include the acidification of the ocean, the warming of the atmosphere and ocean surface, the disappearance of polar ice, the increase in hurricane/typhoon intensity and frequency, the large-scale change in weather patterns that result in floods, droughts, and heatwaves, and more.

We need studies on these kinds of events so that we don’t hear any more uncertainty in discussions of last summer’s hurricanes, for example. While carbon fuel industry spokespeople disseminate false science and manufactured doubts about scientific assessments of the effects of global warming, we delay analyzing these real weather effects. The nonsensical strikes at real science serve only the agenda of those companies that fear a reduction in profits.

Through political representatives they dilute political will and reduce attention.  This is the equivalent of Nero hiding the flames while Rome burns. It is only the UNited States now that plays at the pretense that everything is fine.    Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Ozymandias my friend,

Did you not see it coming in the end?

Your works destroyed over millennia.

Floods bury your kingdom with sand and mud.

Wind, dust, and sun,

Wear down your monuments, your run

Long since done.

Empires come and go with the tide,

Pilfered treasures, genocide,

Wars, plagues, famine pushing you aside.

How temporary is our reign

O’er this dry and sandy plain,

Our visages disappearing in the rain.

For Paul

 

As I pondered the temporary nature of life, I remembered the poem Ozymandias by Shelley. It is a favorite of mine from long ago. The above poem came to me. After I wrote it I looked up Ozymandias online. Turns out this year is the bicentennial of its publication in 1818. Paul would have appreciated that as a publisher. He laughed loudly and with gusto. He loved life and will be remembered fondly by all who knew him.