Living Stone

Comment

Comment by Lance Michael Foster on February 14, 2010 at 5:33pm

ok. It's good to know I am wrong in this. It gives me hope.

Comment by Ron Krumpos on February 14, 2010 at 4:47pm

I disagree with your earlier comment. The mystics I've met were very practical people: a Nobel physicist, the President of India, a member of the Knesset, a police inspector, a bank chairman, even the religious leaders and scholars. They all say that matter is never separate from spirit. Also, there have been indigenous mystics across the world who were neither shamans nor medicine men.

Comment by Lance Michael Foster on February 14, 2010 at 2:35pm

I am stone. Matter. Earth. I live. It's not to say I am not also DNA, or am not star dust. Because stone and earth is also star dust (aka Sagan's "star stuff"). It's just that's the level of metaphor I am working with :-)
I am water. We are mostly made up of water. Water is life. The "ni" the water of one's life is seen in the mist of breath in the cold.
I shape wind. I hold the wind inside as my breath. My body is a container, it shapes the wind inside. And the wind outside blows around my body like a sail, and the concavities, the crevices, the convexities of my body shape the external wind too, including its passage in and out of the container that is my body.
I am a fragment of sun, that fragment stored in plants in photosynthesis, transmitted to animals, and which I devour in order to live and which powers my body. Plus the fact the earth and the sun share origins as well, the conservation of energy and matter toward ultimate dissolution.
Not to mention I was working with the hermetic ideas of the four (earth, air, water, fire) with the addition of the fifth (spirit).

It was also a distinctly subterranean/underworld meditation for me, that both in body (we rot and return to the earth) and in native traditions of the underworld as the place of the dead (sheol, hades, the mounds/barrows) rather than the skyworld (heaven, the milky way). I have been in several natural caverns, Lewis and Clark (MT) and Carlsbad (NM), and I thought of being lost and buried alive in those places too.

Comment by Lance Michael Foster on February 14, 2010 at 2:25pm

Yes, one can certainly take the approach that there are layers upon layers all the way to the Unknowable, the Ultimate Source, the Ain Soph.

But we natives are a practical people. We have our mystics and shamans and medicines who go to places the rest of us do not (at least not in life). The rest of us see mystery in the everyday. We don't separate "spirit" from "matter" like the gnostics, the Manicheans and the rest.

It's like mixing the colors yellow (theoretically separate "spirit") and blue (theortetically separate "matter") as paint. You get green (existence) paint...but you can't then divide green paint and come up with pure yellow paint and pure blue paint again. Existence is one, indivisible. It's just our perception that divides.

Comment by Ron Krumpos on February 14, 2010 at 1:56pm

(in counterpoint to, but not in disagreement)

Not the stone, not the water, not the wind, nor the sun. No-thing-ness.

Not the 4.5 billion years of Earth nor the 13.7 billion years of this Universe. Eternal and infinite.

Life's breath is in the silence which all should hear, in the darkness which all should see.

Some may call it spirit, soul, kami, vital essence, or life force yet it has no name and no form.

It is immanent in the stone and above it, beneath it, encompassing it, and transcending it.

It is that which is and forever will be. We all live in it, but are seldom aware of it.