What famous philosopher/poet wrote the immortal lines? Was it Ralph Waldo Emerson? or Thoreau? Maybe Shakespeare? or John Keats??..”Truth is beauty; beauty, truth. That is all ye know, and all ye need to know…” or words to that effect. Pardon my bad memory, I may not recall the author, but the lines have always stayed with me since youth, as expressions of some mystic reality beyond the apparent, the obvious meaning.
Volume 1 of Mother of Light: The Book of Fire, The Bardo is the tale of a life that covers vast expanses of human consciousness and experience – the distances traversed, driven by an insatiable hunger; ” hard-fought”, is what I would call it. One of the many themes explored is of a life-and-death struggle against a state of demonic possession: I can’t delve into this aspect in a brief forum such as a blog, but I will say that the experience was an education – one without an endpoint – in the depths and inflections of human suffering, not only in the body, the personality, but of the soul, itself. I was locked in hand-to-hand combat with the powers of doom, the loss of which battle would not only be catastrophic in the moment, but for the future, as well.
When I reflect back on the siege, cycle upon cycle, I am contemplating the thread that pulled me onward throught impenetrable darkness; it was a chord that seemed wrapped around my being, unbreakable by any force. I realize this rope was bound to beauty; in fact, The Bardo is nothing, if not an examination of the power of living, spiritual truth, in its manifestation as beauty, and the cultivation and intensification of this luminosity to vanquish the shadow. As the years crawled, one on the heels of another, and my endurance flagged, I pulled ever deeper from the universal wellsprings to create focal points of the gorgeous that would keep open those pathways to Transcendent Truth: perfumes, incense, music, anything and everything that would resonate the higher octaves of Light.
Because this is the thing…” the beauty, truth.” If I had to make a single, pivotal statement about the reason (if one needs a reason) to pursue the spirit, it is because that ineffable is the birthplace, the cause, and the essence of all beauty. And the dark, at its root and in all manifestations, is ugly. There is no more certain highway to the Divine than to follow the spiral stairways leading you from beauty, on to ever greater beatitude. Just remember not to be satisfied with the mirror-reflections of the glory in the physical; they are there in service, to lead you on to their source, no to stand in for it. You have to remember to be reminded of. And to set out in hot pursuit.
That’s all for now, folks….Junipur, over and out