on the body

The body is the fundamental surface of experience. Consciousness, woven from the tapestral sinews which hold the skeleton in tensegrity, is the tip of the iceberg, and is in strange-looped interdependence with the body.

It is in the felt sensation of embodiment which our primary evidence of our existence lies. Thus the body is the vessel of the mind; body precedes but is consubstantial with mind.

In wise touch, touch aimed at understanding and soothing the body, in palpating and massaging its tissues, the wisdom of one body can be imparted unto another.

Our first experience of this transference occurs before birth, when our zygote is fertilized and implanted and begins to take up nourishment from the uterine wall of the parent upon contact.

From there, touch continues to define our existence, its primacy as the main medium of human to human contact fundamental by virtue of this opening ritual of our materiality. There is a fundamentally nourishing character to intersubjectively aligned touch that succeeds the first parental contact of zygotic binding.

A handshake concretizing a new acquaintanceship. A hug while shedding tears at a funeral. A kiss binding the flickering quanta of mutual attraction into the certainty of two bodies meeting. Touch is the touchstone of social ritual, more than spoken word.

Touch is perhaps the most relieving mode of contact with another, because it pierces our skull locked haze with reminder of our existence, however impermanent, in this very moment, right now.

To touch another with wisdom and compassion and loving kindness is to very directly transfer what can be simply put as energy to them. To touch another with curiosity and perceptiveness of their anatomy, to palpate and transform their tension into relaxation, is in my eyes the purest form of therapy accessible in this existence.

The somatic is the realm of the emotional; the mental is merely the realm of the linguistic. It is the felt sense of emotion in the body which guides the unfolding of our lives more than the machinations of the mind.

The interdependent interplay of body and mind is not a calculating affair, but an improvised dance, a choreography of an ancient character which binds our immaterial souls to our material existence, allowing the contents to shape the vessel and the vessel to shape the contents in one go.

To intervene in this system, to intercept its signals and reconfigure the harmony of another’s body through wise, compassionate, loving-kind touch, is to give a profound bioenergetic gift.

To serve the tensegrity and easeful embodiment of another is a profound form of benevolence and is fundamentally reciprocal.

Just as water finds its level, bioenergetic harmony is achieved when a practitioner and a client embark on a journey into the depths of stillness. Both return from this odyssey changed, brought into alignment at the interface of hand and skin. 

Δ

Change is the fundament of perception. Mapping difference through time is the mode of functioning our senses and analytical faculties operate in. The braided delta of mind is a braid of braided deltas, each a river carrying in its waters silt which is deposited, fanning out across the delta in fractal structures which constantly change and coevolve.

We notice not the trees nor the forest but instead the motion of their branches in the wind against the epochal theater of the sky which is itself moving.

It is the shadow of the Earth that reveals night. By day the brightness of the sun obscures our cosmic consciousness, binding the denizens of the planet to its surface in their optically cued choreography. Day is for doing, night is for dreaming.

The tide rises and falls day and night carrying with it flotsam and jetsam, the latent effluvia of illuminated experience, the water’s lapping against the blank shore binding their quantic spectra to known quantities arranged in new configurations which are mined systematically by the scavengers of the shore. Night is subject to the theatrics of reconstitution.

The change from day to night reveals the constancy of deep time. The crepuscular shadow of the Earth reveals its rainbow of truth, welcoming and bidding farewell to the stars day and night after day and night. The speckled void reflects back a secret.

Consciousness glows in the cryptic night of cosmic background light. Brain encased by skull rests not in darkness but in translucency, photonic percolation forming a luminous field only you can see.

The paradox of perception’s gestaltic constancy is that only change moves the needle, only flux transfers potential.

A satellite perspective of the river delta of the Lena river, Russia. Image: LANDSAT

the carry

Those other times are contiguous with this one. Time never broke its stride. Circling around itself in cathedralic spirals time coheres and decoheres all of being into every life that has ever been and every life that will ever be lived. It is all one beneath the surface of words and wisdom.

To experience this present is to digest the rhythm of eternity. To stand on a rocky shore to witness it being carved from stone by pure flow. Time is a plasma, which expands to fill the space carved out by all of Being. 

The fundament spins and the minutiae flicker in and out of existence, and the dance goes on. Satori. Revelation of what has been and will be and was and is all at once, refracted through a different lens, focused through a different aperture, through uncountable eyes and ears and hearts and minds.

Deep time stops for no one, and starts for no one. It simply is, was, and will be from and to perpetuity.

The partygoers stand in its catoptric vestibule, some waiting, some mourning, and most importantly some rejoicing, yearning for the next note to be revealed, and carrying the choreography, which has come all this way from circular beginnings, still further into the next once it has reverberated. They twitch and careen, surrendering some of themselves to gravity and fighting its pull with the rest.

The forest and the rave are simultaneous. The nigh-silent whispers of the winter night’s wind grace the trees miles away as the machine heartbeat pounds, its unambiguous signal coursing through the nervous systems of the partygoers, a carrier wave impelling them towards transcendence. 

The future they’ve never imagined unfolds before their eyes, illustrated by forms emerging from the darkness, the choreography of what is to be defined in the negative space of the next breath, the next step, the next wave, the void that pulls their bodies into new shapes by way of Newton’s third, that constellates their joints into configurations eternal and novel simultaneously. The past is engulfed by the roiling present, and the partygoers have the pleasure of architecting this unfolding, this unfurling. The present is held in tension like the surface of a pool of mercury, the harmonics of all materiality harmonizing and resonating on its viscous yet immediately responsive interface, running and rippling with ease but resisting the ablutions of all but the densest souls.

Scribes and jesters circumnavigate the court, and the undefined formalities unfold with the rhythmicity of the sea, each denizen a witness, each yapper and orator elaborating a cosmic interlocution. 

Every now and then a rogue wave coalesces, a bore tide passes through, and the denizens of this temporal coastline are impelled by the high water onto new shores. Some of these creatures will find they are equipped to survive outside the water, charting courses into the beyond that others may follow one day, and the majority, grateful for gravity’s graceful return, find their next aspiration between crests.

Subwooferic oscillation conjured by the technomantic clergy holding space for eternity carves cymatics of constructive interference into the surface of the collective consciousness, the signal reverberating up and down the entwined strange loops iterating across the brick dancefloor. 

All of eternity expands and contracts with gaseous reciprocity, revealing between its unknowable bounds the infinite in glimpses, notes, and flashes of light. Resonant rhythms writhe and recalcitrance is remanded to the ruminators. Dancefloor as altar, decks and soundboard as deis, one learns about sin and virtue likewise in the church of flesh.

the encounter

Two seekers sit in a living room, and an egregore is upon them. The air is open and the lighting is warm. It is evening.

The seekers are fasted, and begin to share a bottle of wine to help the braiding of their experiences.

They sit in awe of an object, a totem, a site of ritual.

The totem is part of a ritual of consciousness. It covers the face of the bearer, and adapts their eyes to see a world of focused light only they can see like that of the esoterically luminescent neurons of their brain. It adapts to their corneal, vitreous, and retinal optics, and reveals with a world of light channeled through two optical passages a simulacrum of the one the bearer is already in, with forms resembling the architecture of their thoughts allowing them to navigate an extended sensory reality replete with binocular vision and binaural sound. 

This totem occasions an experience of cognitive and sensory entrainment which is quite pleasant, but tunnel-like. It will eventually not be tunnel like. To bear the totem is to enter an infinite tunnel, in theory, in practice it is to enter the world the bearer already knows, with the contents of their mind hovering before them. Such magic exists in the seekers’ context. 

The seekers warm themselves up with stories collected from across the surface of their planet, stories reminding them of the boundlessness of their beings and their consubstantiation with the fabric of all Being. They recollect their elaborate dances with gravity, in which the rhythms of deep time revealed themselves to their effluvial descendents, who buzz much more rapidly. 

Their sensory fields rendered malleable, plastic, by their libations and fasting, they are primed for, if nothing else, the novelty of the totem’s glow. 

The officiant dons the totem and begins to move his body in a curious way to the initiate. His choreography begins to involve ovular motions. He moves to invoke the totem for the initiate’s use. 

He moves his hands as if pinching and pulling spacetime itself. She is struck by a puzzle.

This first encounter strikes an intrigued chord in the initiate, and she stirs for the revelation of its mysterious interior.

The initiate presents an offering to the officiant for display through the totem, preparing after an imagetic seduction of the officiant’s narrative faculties a single selection, a single memory.

The officiant accepts the offering, and is simulacraically transported to Badwater Basin of Death Valley, the lowest point on the North American continent, at two in the morning three years prior, where the initiate sat beside her mirrorless camera for the better part of an hour taking images of the core of the galaxy while her road trip companions slept in 107 degree heat.

The officiant smiles.

The officiant detaches from the totem and hands it to the initiate, holding it carefully out of a lineagetically transmitted reverie.

She smiles and dons the totem, ready to bear witness.

Just like that the dance of minds is over. Their movement about the offering has brought them to the level of equals. Their reverie flattens their hierarchy upon contact with the totem. 

 A field of blue glows before her eyes. There is an optical shift – and a tactile one – and the blue glow grows clearer. 

She finds the structures of a familiar mode of consciousness, one no doubt architected by teams of those who fall neatly into the category of wizards, who have divined light from matter in lineage since long before the concepts of light and matter first fell upon humanity.

A temporal shift begins, time pools in new ways, a new cognitive choreography coalesces.

She finds her thoughts mirrored in the lightforms conjured by the totem. A dance unfolds between her and the totem, a dance of accommodation. The optical characteristics of the totem have, after all, shifted to meet her eyes, just as her retinas have produced dyes to compensate for the bright light of the totem and to shift the hue white, and the muscles of her eyes and irises flexed and relaxed saccadically to focus the totem’s light.

Inside meets outside and outside meets inside. Thus the cosmic dance is carried.

The initiate sees her memories reflected on the surface of the totem for the next hours. She watches memories condensed by others using the totem and adjacent artifacts and weeps.

One seeker then said to the other for seven hours straight, “look at this,” as she beheld the totem, but she was not always talking about their totem. One seeker said to the other for seven hours straight, “I see” but he was not always talking about their totem. But make no mistake, they were there on occasion of their totem.

Awash in her encounter with her memories mediated by totem, the seeker collects her things and moves to part for the night, as morning comes. Fled is the night, does she wake or sleep?

subglacial consciousness

In other times you’ve been all of the greats. You’ve been all of the leasts too. You’ve been old and young at the same time forever.

In this time, you are, more specifically, a stream, with a little overlap with a child whose fascination was you.

She saw you like perhaps no other had. She saw you for the truths your freestone waters carried, saw universes in the slightly silted sunbeams lighting the soft white underbellies of the creek chubs gold as they darted over the aureus bed of the stream.

She would in her walks by you discover that she was alive, that she was here now, that consciousness too was here, in you and her likewise, observer and observed in reciprocity.

She would immerse herself in your waters and dream of your waterfalls. She would find herself by your flow when she was lost in the swamp you terminated into behind her house when she was alone and her boots got wet and it was getting dark and she hadn’t done her homework yet and it was dinner soon. 

She would find in your icy winter shores and in the way you absorbed the snowflakes into darkness by the glow of the mall and airport off the blizzard clouds of her winter childhood a secret you couldn’t keep to yourself, a secret you never bothered to hide. 

She would discover that time is a supercritical fluid which condenses into all of Being with every successive breath and heartbeat and firing of the electron transport chain, that the dialectical tension between inhalation and exhalation carved an echoic truth in its tidal rhythmicity, that from her perspective flow and thus change is the truth.

The biogenic magnetites in her brain aligned themselves to the cardinality of your south to north flow, and she traversed the world one step at a time in line with your banks.

Whenever her world turned upside down she came to you. In fact it often would, and you were always there.

Your dappled surface carried her sorrows and worries away, your denizens illustrated her archetypes. You became the world within the world to her.

One summer she found a lead weight in the shallow riffle and an aged net just below your long pool beneath the cataract cut into the berm that once carried an electric trolley over your waters. 

She wondered what fishing you was like when you once might have held brook trout, before the warming came and the highway and before it was never dark save for the stars anymore. What the world looked like when you were but a rivulet, when the ice scraped your basin into the hills on its way to the sea.

The choreography of your becoming lent its epochal momentum to hers. Your shores an altar, your forested banks a multifoliate cathedral in which the ritual of her embodiment unfolded.

She once dug out a small spring on your shores, carving over hours one snowy evening with a shovel a basin among roots where the waters of a long slope trickled through the rocks and soil, percolating with a musicality never heard, a rhythm never revealed, that is until she picked up the shovel.

She found on your banks the truth of herself in the midst of all being. She traversed many a strange loop of pondering on your sloped bank, and basked after hopping the rocks beneath the cataract picking berries one summer afternoon when she was ten after vacation and the world glowed anew as the coming evening’s light fell through the trees and the smell of the forest and your flowing waters rang familiar on her nose and she ate your wild salmonberries.

She cries as she writes, and the water molecules of her tears will one day again wind up in your current, and the sun will rise, just as the stars will rise, and the moon and the planets for that matter, and all of Being will glint off your waters in her mind, all of eternity will flow through your freestone course. 

And you were but one.