We may properly ask what use the mind might be to our general and extended
personal lives. We have already discussed those ends wherein the thought itself is the
value, in such experiences as illumination or the joy of beauty; we have also mentioned that
thought might be considered as directing the rearrangement of the body, posture and
motion. We may now enlarge our investigation of ends and means.
One formulation is the following: How can our general thesis, or point of view, of
the priority of subjective experience, be a proper foundation for understanding life wherein
we must not only feel and think but act and do? More explicitly: How can the objective
subjective provide a foundation for, or even be compatible with, life in a world in which, at
least as we commonly know it, we must interact with external sources of power, be they
social, material or mystical, and interact in such a way that preserves our physical,
emotional and spiritual well being. If our thought led us into destructive action, such as
jumping off a roof in pretended abeyance of gravity or committing a crime in defiance of
right and law, then something has gone wrong. Furthermore, our thought should not only
avoid negative guidance, but we would also expect it, at least in clarifying reality and
dissipating the fog of metaphysical unreality, to either directly guide or at least light our
path of living.
To begin with simplicities, there is nothing properly derived from the premise of the
objective subjective which would lead us to jump off a roof in defiance of gravity. We have
never claimed that subjective experience is structureless; some of that structure which, at
least in the common technological world civilization of this social present, involves several
levels of understanding which would naturally disavow such an act. Gravity and the
unpleasantness of high speed contact with hard objects is part of our common subjective
experience of life; the priority of subjective experience is more reason to obey than to
disobey such knowledge; furthermore, the philosophic, experimental and mathematical
thought which has provided successive theories of gravity from Aristotle through the
present has been a mind set of associated thoughts part of and coordinated with subjective
experience; mind sets which give us more complicated reasons to avoid the irrational leap
and never rationally induce us to try it.
We each have a right to our own being because we are being. Our living experience
is us, is the world of each one of us, a whole world, the whole world. The value of each
individual is the all. Possessing our own being we are free to create our own joy. Even if
each of us is a collection of connections, a protuberance of the all, so is everyone else. In the
mutual connection of all, none is prior to the self in authority, but only, if it is granted by
the self, in love.
I love order. I have sought order all of my life, mostly. Order takes up less room in
the mind than otherwise; if things are stacked neatly then one has only to notice the stack
and perhaps a representative sample of the things stacked, not all of the things. Besides,
things take up less three dimensional room when they are neatly stacked, towels, for
instance, or papers. Garden junk at the end of autumn takes up less space and less
attention if it is all raked into one pile instead of left standing or lying where it dried; it is
even more convenient, and good for the garden, to burn it, which is unfortunately illegal in
this very orderly city. Loving order, I have pushed order, at least mental order, as far as it
will go, or at least as far as I have been able to make it go; I have watched ordered
structures of thought break down, first at their endwise extensions trying to go to far, then
the disintegration creeps inward, like fire on a very old log, until the structured form
dissolves implosivly.
But then, out of the fallow of random, fleeting, and sometimes contradictory
thoughts, a new order appears, first as small spring sprouts barely showing above ground,
then rising into consciousness and taking shape, growing into full form, flowering and
taking fruit. It has been so for me, even unto the flowering conception of the all, the
glittering paths into expanded truth which are unveiled by the understanding of how the all
in union proceeds from our direct personal encounter with being as unitary awareness.
It will be much harder, perhaps beyond my personal cognizance, to show the
detailed correlations between those discoveries or enlargements of understanding which we
have called objective subjective, awareness, thought, unitary awareness and all and explicit
procedures to use these knowings to increase or refine spiritual, emotional and psychic well
being; I should attempt the beginning of such a discourse but the inordinate depth and
complexity of reality intrudes, a personal shyness depending upon recognition of the
absolute and proper right, as central to being, of the individual awareness; perhaps such
simplicities of the good appear more easily when one resides further from the metaphysical
firelight, for, although still in the cave, we have been able to turn our eyes from the
shadows on the wall to stare, if still half blindly, into the dancing figures of the flame which
then transform into water wherein the mind is immersed
in the waters of the present so warmly abiding while facing the challenge of being here now with relished abandonment of inhibition and decay
in the sweet flux of words softly flowing within the current engagement swiftly dissolving
into a forest of startled mockingbirds playing shadow dances in the well woven windows of darkness
into bright reality and crystal clear January morning of fences breathing upwards and modest grasses wearing white wedding cloaks of frosted air
in things as they are although they are not things and they are not are and they may be many or one
in what we call being as if being were a state of being and as if there were a container called being to be in
within language writing itself as if my hand and pen were its hand and pen
in unclouded perception experienced as if it were some signal from a mysterious world beyond
in direct experience
in full contact reality where the groggy present fills all the interstices of muscular mind
in a misty resonance of dim light and fog whirled surfaces of frog laughter swallowing silence
in a hot shower meditating upon the pre Pharaonic settlements sunbaked in the red land
in all
in knowing
in awareness
in unitary awareness
in thought
in thought forms breeding
in thought held truly close to the chest
within a philosophic fountain of such true and plural entendre
into a whirl of words scattered like ducks before the rushing laughing barking dog of truth
in prismatic sentences of nuanced light reflected from refracting mind
into blue sky glowing deeper than sapphire fire keeping safe the temple of infinity
in blood warmed welcome and hot crackling fires gleaming and streaming before the night
in dark waters roaring
in lightless foam pressed up against the back meridian of time
in here
in now
into this body this space this present mind
in no derived conclusion entranced by self embalmment
into spectacles of winter sunlight warming branches bare and black birds flying
into this very this that is this as language sneaks upon our bare approaches filled
with a rocking motion to and forth, to and fro, to and still upstream we go
Frederick Joseph Staley