June 21, 2013

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                A Letter to My Grandson and to Myself

                                                                                                     

                       You wanted to know of the "Agnostos" - Greek for the "Unknown"

   If or when you achieve that total and absolute cessation of the thought process, (it will be very brief)… you might become extremely frightened with the sensation of being completely and totally alone within this entire panoply you think you see played out above... in that celestial firmament overwhelming your senses… you, the only living entity… this pinprick of brilliant light centered on your forehead just above your eyes… and your “alter-ego” god-light… up there beside you in this parallel universe of quint-trillion light-points flowing beyond infinity…. Every one of your sensibilities will cease to function for the briefest of moments… If you make it, you will be terrified with the magnitude of what you will have achieved… Your ‘absolute nothingness’ will scare the hell out of you… This is what you wanted to experience… to “feel”… absolute and total fear… ( not “think afraid” but “feel afraid”)… there is a difference… You will have discarded every thought, every truth, every falsehood, every desire…every “why this” and “why that”… every reason for living… for being “alive”… Sylvia Plath couldn’t handle it and she killed herself… but like many others, she used the crutch of drugs to get there and that doesn’t count… It must be pure ”you” and only “you”… with no fake hypocritical or supernatural help… And when you come back, all your senses will have been re-tuned (like a bad piano suddenly sounding Steinway)… You will ”know” your children when you hold them…”know” your wife when you make love to her… “know“ the agony of your mother as she birthed you… “sense” every human, animal and inanimate contact so much more intimately… and on those mundane occasions throughout the rest of your long life… hopefully you will find another quiet moment to revisit that brief encounter with “the Agnostos” when you are “down”… and hopefully there will be a few more of those moments… but you will remember that incredible first contact with your “trueness”… your ”real” "unself"… and flow unafraid with the inevitable tides of the boredom of life... As for the other, the “me”… the one that studied with Vithaldas who taught a form of Yoga called Hatha… Poses the body assumes and holds for long periods named after animals and other objects… Lion pose… Snake… Bird… Bridge… Half-Moon, etc…  They are simply exercises… in preparation for the meditative posture of the Lotus which he taught you but for some reason never practiced the meditation himself because spiritually he was still a child… but you, you have realized those brief moments of “nothingness” a very few times in your 87 years… mostly on your island on a moonless night when you really “felt, sensed, understood” the enormity of space and how insignificant you were relative to it… and it did terrify…

  When you were twenty and had your first “encounter” you became so frightened that you lost it for a few weeks and was hospitalized… Some of it had to do with experiences you suffered almost 70 years ago and a lot of kids suffer today in that miserable medieval land and after they come home… But it was cathartic and now when you are “down” especially now that the time you have left is meager, you still manage to float up there occasionally and are “re-tuned” for a few brief seconds… That’s all that matters… those few brief seconds when your mind stops its incessant badgering and questioning and you become really “YOU”… out there among the enormity of it all… all those countless myriads of universal pin-pricks of light which, with a few close-by exceptions… you and every human being who has ever lived on this planet since Donald Johanson’s “Lucy” birthed her baby more than ten thousand years ago and stood up on that rock in the Abyssinian savanna, no human being living or dead, NEVER EVER has seen that magnificent “fire which severs day from night”… as most of Shakespeare’s vision of light years of celestial sky-fire hasn’t reached us yet and will probably never reach our dying planet...

                   That's the “Agnostos” my boy… That is the “Dread of The Unknown”…

   

   

   

   

   

  • 2:28 pm
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