Turn On the Lights

Hello dear friends near and far,

Seto (White) Machindranath is a form of Avalokithesvara, the Buddha of Compassion. Behind the scenes, the deity’s statue gets a tune up at its home in the Janabahal Temple, believed to date from the 10th Century. During the Jana Baha Dyah Jatra Festival, the statue is placed in a chariot and paraded through Kathmandu. This has been going on for centuries, long before electric light. The inner statue itself shines white light.

A monk fixes the lightbulb on the sacred Seto (White) Machindranath statue.

This photo by Steve Burger¹ showed up for me just in time today. I’m ready to make this newsletter setup work a bit better, put some light on the deity, give more energy to the imaginal that sustains and restores the ideals embedded within us. Something higher than the density of matter. As the optimist said while digging through the muddy manure, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”

Let’s start with good lighting, something to help shine a spotlight on beauty, or complexity, or meaning. And if there isn’t much to go on, look deeper. Get smaller and see more details (right down to the little triangles of the elements) or sweep out very wide for a full overview that brings it all into a beautiful magnitude of force and feeling. That’s all very well in writing, but what about reality? Well, we have a say in that, too.

When I was sending this newsletter out from my imaginary cottage of Moy Mell, my daily life had a little more magic in it, a bit more resonance from the natural world and a kind of faery-web expanded over the everyday. Somehow these fantastic ideas expanded to become a sort of overlay on the mundane, and they were nurturing. Then when I shifted that locative writing pinpoint to the Liminal Shamcher Institute, my world-view shifted there as well, along with its ever-expanding overlay. And to tell you the truth, it is still very much there. I’d imagined that I returned to do private study, and in this parallel place I shuffle around certain ideas and explore ways of being. Each liminal location evokes and brings out an entirely new world, and this overlay or spotlight brings into focus new unseen aspects of the figures in our lives, since we have used imagination to shift the ground.

Studies at the Liminal Shamcher Institute

When I was a kid I discovered the doorways into all the different lives and worldviews that books could bring. I vowed to read all the books in the library starting from A. What is education but the expansion of this ability of the human being to project and receive greater aspects of life than one small life can possibly hold?

It helps, you see, to have a place, or a platform, or a containing akasha or structure that can handle all the expansion of being that creative activity stirs up. If that thread is lost, then matter begins to matter just a little too much. Digging is pointless when the pony is nowhere to be found. It might as well have been a unicorn. Imaginary, right? Harsh lighting makes for a bad photograph and “shows life as it really is”. But does it? Even if we are appalled, shocked, fearful or inspired to righteous anger, catharsis brings us up to be present, here and now. For when facing emptiness, it is apathy, not the void, that is to be overcome. The reality of life is always meaningful, intense, awakening.

Through high imagination, we weave a shimmering veil over the all-void. Not because it should not be seen but because it can be so very beautiful.

In my book, Attars, I referred to this:

It was the union of all this - the emptiness and nothingness united with hope and fear - that created this magical poetic reality. A far richer reality than those in the city could ever dream of. The shifting sands covering everything and then uncovering again. The brilliant stars beaming down. The waxing and waning of the moon. And the sea always bringing itself in waves to sacrifice at the shore, then returning only to sacrifice again and again.

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Dream synopsis: I dreamed that my mother went to a market stand, and bought me a Life Magazine that I’d wanted. She handed it to me so happily, and I was so grateful. When I woke up, I realized this dream’s simple and profound communication: she gave me LIFE.

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Thanks for stopping by :) Till next week!

1. Steve’s shop, Manana Imports, always takes him travelling