Winter Poems 2010

 

Reposting these by request, I am including a new one here, as well.
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In Winter
snowflake galaxies whirl above the frozen pond
white sparks stream from my old coal shovel
standing straight up against the wind
I see light everywhere
photon embers of the big bang
fill the sky to the edge of the sun

from another universe
a dark form
a deer on the ridge
looks into my eyes

we share a breath of air
in that cool moment
we know what it is
to be alive

bowing our heads
we bend forward
into the drift
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Cold spirits
If spirits roam
In small spaces
Between slow burning suns
And the inexorable slide of gravity
They see our bodies
living breathing steam
Freezing white in solid air
As if our souls hung there

Getting gasoline
Out cold in orange-yellow bays
Great bright stalls, greasy ice
Where we stand
Shocked in the knowledge
Of our predicament

Driven to wander
Risking everything
Going home
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End of the World

On my way home I pass a man.

He stands on the roadside with a sign.

“The wisest man in the world.”

White hair, standing there,

he looks harmless enough.

I’m curious. I stop,

roll down the window,

and feel the cold.

“Where you headed?” I say.
“I’m headed to the world’s end.

Looks like I found it.”

“I don’t think so. This is the middle of Pennsylvania.

It’s not the end of anything, much less the world.”
“Well, if you let me go along with you for a while, I’ll show you.

I’ll get out then.”
“I have about 30 miles to where I’m going.

I’m not going out of my way.”

“No problem,” he says.
He gets in, shoves the sign in the back seat.

We drive on.
“Your sign says you’re the wisest man in the world. Is that so?”

“Sure am.”
“OK. What’s it all about, then?”

“It’s the middle of winter. That means we are all dead. And we won’t wake up until spring. We die all the time but we don’t notice it because we all die at the same time,” he says.

“Do we all wake up at the same time then, too?”

“In a way we do. But that’s just a figure of speech.”

I’m thinking my passenger is clever, but he’s not the wisest man in the world.

“That’s it.” he says. “Don’t think another thought. I’m getting out right here.”

I bring my car to a stop. There’s nothing on either side but an old cornfield. He gets out and walks up a slight rise through snow and corn stubs. As he reaches the crest and descends, he seems to disappear.
Just before that he drops a small piece of paper.

I have some time.

I pull over, park, and follow his frozen footsteps.

At the top of the hill I find a folded note.

He is gone.

Back home now.

I bury his sign

and read the note:

I am old and I will die

It is time to come clean.
I woke up at an early age.

I lived a normal life.

So that you believe me

when I reveal all.

I will do that now.
It is not comforting to know

Hearing this will not set you free.

Freedom is not for us in this life.

We cannot be other than we are.

We pass our time with useless things

As if we live forever.

It is our bodies doing this.
Our minds know very well we die.

But our bodies refuse to hear of it.

Our bodies desire the useless things.

We go about our days in service to these dumb limbs

Serving them endless amounts of what they desire

But does not sustain them

Making them as comfortable as possible, as they demand it

Because they refuse to accept they will die.

Our brilliant minds are filled with petty annoyance.

That’s our lazy bodies talking

Constantly forcing us to confront ourselves in mirrors

So we can see the damage we’re doing.

And while we know love is the answer,

We are faced with the hard fact

We can only be loved to the degree we love ourselves.
And we do not love ourselves.

We are our bodies.

And because they are such stupid brutes

They are utterly unlovable.

I am good looking enough to know looks are worth nothing

And wealthy enough to have figured out it has no value.

I am intelligent and know I can never be smart enough.

I see far enough to see an end.

Waking up is like this.

Once it is yours you see right through it.

And you know

Like everything else

It is nothing at all.

The secret of life is life.

We all possess it for a while.

The world ends.

It is time to say

When.

We know it then.

We were already dead.

 

Words and image by Tullio DeSantis
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New World Views: Consciousness is Matter; Matter is Consciousness

 

“The stream of human knowledge is impartially heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm.” -Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1930)
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This all-enveloping sensation of feeling, perceiving, experiencing is second-nature to us. We do not see it; but we employ it to see. We cannot comprehend it but it is the essence of our comprehension. And what it is can often appear an unfathomable and endless mystery. We may refer to it as our awareness of the world and we may also refer to it as the world itself. They are not separate. Consciousness is matter and matter is consciousness. What we are, after all is conscious matter.
This is everywhere apparent. At the scale of the microcosm, the act of observation creates the pattern of waves and particles defining the subatomic realm. Awareness is intimately bound up in the very tangible results of scientific measurement. Observation is required to collapse the wave-function of infinite possibility and create definable and measurable matter and energy. The vacuum of intergalactic space is a froth of virtual particles, which comprise what we once believed, was pure non-existence. We now know that in the cosmos at large something issues from nothing on a continuous basis.
The world we have created from natural and synthetic materials is the concrete manifestation of our thought and our will. These are qualities of mind that find their way through matter and energy to become, by brute application of the force of muscle and machine, our technological landscape. This is another way that mind and matter are one.
The cultural matrix which surrounds us is a realization of our imaginations, fantasy-lives, dream worlds, and our collective nightmares. We communicate with each other by means of information, sound, and image. These are reflections of our mental experience. Media extend our nervous systems in measurable pulsations of electromagnetic energy. This is not metaphor. This is how it is.
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Image: “Matter and Mind” by Tullio DeSantis, ink drawing, brain and galaxy images, 2010
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New Paradigms: The Unified Field and a Conscious Universe

“There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.”- Albert Einstein
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Old ways of seeing the world no longer make sense of the world. Fortunately, as this occurs, new ways of seeing the world come into being. This happens on a regular basis and in many frames of reference because it is essentially a reflection of how the processes of life and learning take place.
Living is a process of ordering, a patterning process. Life is an evolving chaotic system that creates coherence in the world. The need for novel experience is balanced with the need for predictability – this is how learning takes place. Evolving systems need new information – they need to be in a state of openness to the environment. They also need reliable knowledge and repetition, in order to survive from moment to moment in a landscape of constant change. These opposing forces are in dynamic equilibrium in healthy living systems – one acts to close the system, while the other acts to keep it open.
Revolutions in science occur because models that were once integrative, elegant, useful, and inspiring become limiting, stultifying, and counterproductive to the process of discovery. Radically illuminating ways of thinking that open up new frontiers of knowledge and understanding eventually subsume competing models and become dogma. At some point, these long-standing systems of knowledge – information-processing systems – begin to transmit more noise than significant signals.

The new paradigms of human knowledge that are ascendant in our era require re-envisioning the entire edifice of our lives and our relationship to the universe. Crucial aspects of this new vision involve seeing the connectedness between apparently separate entities and experiences; that is, to see objects, events, and processes as inseparable aspects of a unified field.
It is time for us to see that our existence within the cosmos is an infallible signal that it is alive and intelligent – in other words, consciousness is an essential and integral component of the universe.

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Image: “Consciousness and Cosmos” by Tullio DeSantis, ink drawing, 2010

First Video: “Magnetic Movie” – Imaging and imagining magnetic field phenomena

Second Video: “The Unified Field” – Deepak Chopra explains the unified field paradigm

This is all in your mind

 

 

“Reality is an illusion, although a very persistent one.” – Albert Einstein

“This fleeting world is like a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, a dream.” – The Buddha
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I am the mind and eyes of the universe. I arise spontaneously from nothingness and – as pure consciousness – I generate matter, energy, space, and time. I am present here and now.
Every particle of my being participates in a vast interconnected network, which includes every other particle in the universe. Created in the same instant, the matter and energy of the cosmos remain ineluctably entangled throughout eternity. A singular unified field of forces – from the strong nuclear force to electromagnetism and gravity – resonates in harmony within the subatomic realm and reaches out through the vast and ineffable dark matter and energy of intergalactic space.
I am aware of these realms and realities at the same time as I inhabit and participate in the illusory life of a separate self among others.
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We refashion thoughts into language, language into mathematics, mathematics into science, science into technology, and technology into civilization. We recreate our dreams and emotions in poetry and art, and our poetry and art are transmuted via media. Our awareness becomes belief and our belief, religion. In these ways, we create our environment and it channels our experience. Because we are entrained by our experiences, this self-programming ultimately limits our perception.
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There are neither individual things nor separate events. There is only a seamless continuum. We are one super-organism of life. Each of us is a particular instance of the single indivisible, unified field. Our separation is an illusion generated by the very frames of reference defining our particular points of view. These frames of reference form an infinite succession of instances, moments, and events – an indivisible matrix of information and experience.
We are the universe evolving through the infinite and eternal present, navigating a multitude of past and future states. Our reality is the product of our collective imagination. The world is filled with the content of our minds because the world is our mind. We are all and everything, here, now, and all at once. You…are IT!

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Image: “This is all in your mind” by Tullio DeSantis, ink drawing with digital fractal images, 2010.
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