It was mid-afternoon,
still and bland.
The sunlight clear,
the day's tasks lay undone.
And then, a small rustle turned huge
as a parliament blew in,
filling
the big-leaf maples in my backyard.
They swept in and suddenly
the trees were heavy with black bodies,
swaying and flapping their wings
they yelled and cackled.
They were a great wind,
swirling up from somewhere,
forcing my attention to them.
I could not understand their dialogue.
I don't know what matter of great import
was being debated, but the arguments
flew back and forth with a fury.
I could only imagine what political maneuvers
were in play, what family houses
held
their honor on the line,
what epic crow
poem
was being enacted before my eyes.
Then they were gone.
A few stragglers
came through
over the next hour,
but they were too late
for the main event and
for the most part no one paid them much attention.
Showing posts with label Falling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Falling. Show all posts
Friday, June 15, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
2 of Pentacles
In martial arts we are taught that being tense slows us down. When we force stillness upon ourselves, we hold our bodies in place by pushing inward from all directions. Isometric. It takes a lot of work to do this bit of nothing, and it slows down your response time. Any time you decide to move in one direction, you must first relax everything that's pushing you elsewhere. But if you start relaxed, you can immediately move in any direction quickly, as needed.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
How To Form Gold Out Of Baser Metals
You want to know how to make gold out of other metals? It’s simple and we already know how to do it.
Blow up a star.
The first stars started out as clouds of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very simple atom, just a proton orbited by an electron. It is the most basic physical expression of yin and yang, of Binah and Chokmah. Clouds of this stuff were floating around in the dim afterburn of the Big Bang. When enough of these atoms collected, gravity took over and the atoms began to fall. At first, there were many directions to fall in, but eventually the forces of complexity sorted things out and a single center was found.
The hydrogen atoms fell faster and faster toward that center until they were going so fast they started to smash into other. Now realize, every atom has a defensive shield called the Weak Nuclear Force that normally operates to keep out protons and electrons from other atoms. But when atoms go fast enough, they overpower this force, crash through the defensive shield and achieve fusion. This fusion of hydrogen atoms is the most basic recipe for light.
This first recipe in the life of a star calls for four Hydrogen atoms. There are several steps involved. First you have to make Deuterium. Smash two Hydrogen atoms together to get a Deuterium atom, a neutrino, and two gamma ray photons. Let the neutrino and the photons escape. When you have two Deuteriums, smash those together to get a Helium atom and a bunch of energy. That energy is light and heat. It shoots out from the star and may eventually land in your eye when you look up at the sky. When this starts happening, we say a star is born.
Now, in order to make something out of Helium, you have to achieve much greater speeds than you did with Hydrogen. So at first, the Helium just falls to the center in darkness. But eventually, it too starts going fast enough to overcome its defensive shields and when Helium smashes into itself at the heart of a star it makes Carbon and Oxygen and Nitrogen, Sulphur and Magnesium, Calcium and Titanium. The recipes for these elements are more complex, but this is how the air you breathe was made as was the calcium in your milk.
These transformations produce a lot of energy that keeps the star from collapsing entirely. The star depends on this energy not just so it can shine in your sky, but also for its structure. The energy released by element creation escapes toward the surface of the star keeping it expanded through convection like a pot of boiling water. Stars are constantly boiling over into themselves.
Over the course of a star’s lifetime, it will repeat this basic motif, creating new, more complex elements out of simpler ones and using the released energy to fuel itself until it gets to Iron. Iron stops the chain. For whatever reason, if you want to make new elements by smashing iron atoms together, you have to add energy. So there is our star, going along happily producing new building blocks of existence and wham, suddenly, it cannot go any further.
When Iron starts to collect at the center, the star begins to lose its source of energy. The flame under the pot is turned off and the star begins to settle in on itself. What happens next depends on how big the star is. A small star will just collapse becoming a very dense Brown Dwarf. But a bigger star will do something else, and here’s where it gets personal. When a big enough star gets to the Iron stage, it too begins to collapse, but being so massive, the collapse reaches epic speeds and ignites a supernova.
These conflagrations of stars release so much energy that they can be seen on Earth. The Crab Nebula was formed this way and even though it’s 6500 light years away, Chinese astronomers saw the explosion in 1054AD. These explosions - and frankly I don’t know if you can still call them “explosions” when they are this big - are so massive that they smash atoms together with abandon, and in the process produce all the heavier elements on the periodic table, including all of the other metals of the Alchemists: lead, tin, copper, mercury, silver and - you guessed it - gold.*
And because we have all these heavy elements here on Earth, we know that our solar system is at least second generation. Earth was formed out of the remains of a supernova. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all the heavier elements only a supernova can make. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be here.
We are made of stars. And not just any stars, we are made of stars that transformed themselves, at least a small part of themselves, into gold. We have that history encoded in the physical fabric of our being. Not just in our cells or our DNA, but in the atoms that make those cells and that DNA. When Alchemists talk about transforming metals into gold, they are remembering the past lives of their own bodies.
*For those of you keeping track, the only planetary metal not made in a supernova is iron. Turns out, Iron is a gateway metal.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory).
Blow up a star.
The first stars started out as clouds of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very simple atom, just a proton orbited by an electron. It is the most basic physical expression of yin and yang, of Binah and Chokmah. Clouds of this stuff were floating around in the dim afterburn of the Big Bang. When enough of these atoms collected, gravity took over and the atoms began to fall. At first, there were many directions to fall in, but eventually the forces of complexity sorted things out and a single center was found.
The hydrogen atoms fell faster and faster toward that center until they were going so fast they started to smash into other. Now realize, every atom has a defensive shield called the Weak Nuclear Force that normally operates to keep out protons and electrons from other atoms. But when atoms go fast enough, they overpower this force, crash through the defensive shield and achieve fusion. This fusion of hydrogen atoms is the most basic recipe for light.
This first recipe in the life of a star calls for four Hydrogen atoms. There are several steps involved. First you have to make Deuterium. Smash two Hydrogen atoms together to get a Deuterium atom, a neutrino, and two gamma ray photons. Let the neutrino and the photons escape. When you have two Deuteriums, smash those together to get a Helium atom and a bunch of energy. That energy is light and heat. It shoots out from the star and may eventually land in your eye when you look up at the sky. When this starts happening, we say a star is born.
Now, in order to make something out of Helium, you have to achieve much greater speeds than you did with Hydrogen. So at first, the Helium just falls to the center in darkness. But eventually, it too starts going fast enough to overcome its defensive shields and when Helium smashes into itself at the heart of a star it makes Carbon and Oxygen and Nitrogen, Sulphur and Magnesium, Calcium and Titanium. The recipes for these elements are more complex, but this is how the air you breathe was made as was the calcium in your milk.
These transformations produce a lot of energy that keeps the star from collapsing entirely. The star depends on this energy not just so it can shine in your sky, but also for its structure. The energy released by element creation escapes toward the surface of the star keeping it expanded through convection like a pot of boiling water. Stars are constantly boiling over into themselves.
Over the course of a star’s lifetime, it will repeat this basic motif, creating new, more complex elements out of simpler ones and using the released energy to fuel itself until it gets to Iron. Iron stops the chain. For whatever reason, if you want to make new elements by smashing iron atoms together, you have to add energy. So there is our star, going along happily producing new building blocks of existence and wham, suddenly, it cannot go any further.
When Iron starts to collect at the center, the star begins to lose its source of energy. The flame under the pot is turned off and the star begins to settle in on itself. What happens next depends on how big the star is. A small star will just collapse becoming a very dense Brown Dwarf. But a bigger star will do something else, and here’s where it gets personal. When a big enough star gets to the Iron stage, it too begins to collapse, but being so massive, the collapse reaches epic speeds and ignites a supernova.
Supernova.
These conflagrations of stars release so much energy that they can be seen on Earth. The Crab Nebula was formed this way and even though it’s 6500 light years away, Chinese astronomers saw the explosion in 1054AD. These explosions - and frankly I don’t know if you can still call them “explosions” when they are this big - are so massive that they smash atoms together with abandon, and in the process produce all the heavier elements on the periodic table, including all of the other metals of the Alchemists: lead, tin, copper, mercury, silver and - you guessed it - gold.*
And because we have all these heavy elements here on Earth, we know that our solar system is at least second generation. Earth was formed out of the remains of a supernova. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all the heavier elements only a supernova can make. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be here.
We are made of stars. And not just any stars, we are made of stars that transformed themselves, at least a small part of themselves, into gold. We have that history encoded in the physical fabric of our being. Not just in our cells or our DNA, but in the atoms that make those cells and that DNA. When Alchemists talk about transforming metals into gold, they are remembering the past lives of their own bodies.
*For those of you keeping track, the only planetary metal not made in a supernova is iron. Turns out, Iron is a gateway metal.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory).
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Evolution for Mystics
If you look at the miniscule amount of DNA that differs between chimps and humans, the part that has changed the most since our species went their separate ways is that which codes the development of neural structures in the human brain. The hominid family of species - the Erectii, the Ergasters, the Neaderthales, the Rhodesienses, and our very own little clan, Sapiens Sapiens (which as far as I can tell translates as: I know! I know!) - embarked on a little evolutionary experiment about 6 million years ago. That was when hominids and chimps went their separate ways and today the biggest difference between our species lies in the development of the frontal lobe.
Scientists have shown that the frontal lobe governs the conscious control of emotion, abstract thought, the appreciation of humor, the awareness of past and future time, and the ability to imagine the mental processes of other beings. The frontal lobe allows us to wax nostalgic about what might have been and use the subjunctive past perfect to communicate that nostalgia to our friends - “If I had gone to New York that summer, I would have been able to shed my mediocre suburban existence and write that gritty novel about struggling artists and rent control!” - then laugh about the whole thing and write the novel anyway.
If you read the literature on the frontal lobe in neuroscience texts, you’ll hear a lot about how this lobe makes humans unique and extra-super special among living things. In other words, the frontal lobe contains the current wunderkind abilities that we are using to console ourselves for being so separate from the rest of creation. In fact, it’s the abilities of the frontal lobe that allow us to imagine we are separate in the first place.
In Jewish and Christian myth, this process is described as a fall from grace. The feeling of separateness is understood as being kicked out of a garden. Because they ate the apple of knowledge, Adam and Eve now have to work for a living. And that’s an interesting way of looking at things because we wouldn’t be slaving in the fields all day if we couldn’t plan for the future in the first place.
But more often in creation myths, we find that the development of frontal lobe abilities is seen as a way humans have been gifted to talk with the gods. In Greek myth, we have Prometheus coming down from Olympus bringing fire and foresight. Sure, Zeus was angry, until the laws of ritual sacrifice were laid out and a means of relating to the gods was established for humans. In Chinese myth, Nuwa created humans because she wanted someone to talk to.
These creation myths are a certain kind of description of something that is biologically real. (Which is not the same thing as saying that myths aren’t true. All myths are perfectly true. They just aren’t centered in Malkuth. Myths interact with the biological in some way that mystics come to understand and devout atheists continue to deny.) When we started developing the neural structures in the frontal lobe, we hominids starting going where no one had gone before: deep into our own personal existences.
For some reason, our species embarked on a path that has brought us a lot of interesting times. Knowledge has certainly brought us some wonderful things, but the level or horribleness we’ve been able to achieve has led us to rationalize our evolution as a break with the divine. We came up with the Golden Rule and the Inquisition. Martin Luther King and his assassination. We can now build a fire to cook our food and burn our witches. Our ability to gather and retain knowledge sets us apart, and in that separateness we can do amazing and horrific things because now we can imagine that the person lying next to us is not actually having our experience, but their own, and we can’t ever know exactly what that is. Sure, we can always talk to them and try to learn something about it, but they could lie, or not want to talk and then what’ll we do?
Welcome to divinity.
[What's your favorite creation myth?]
Scientists have shown that the frontal lobe governs the conscious control of emotion, abstract thought, the appreciation of humor, the awareness of past and future time, and the ability to imagine the mental processes of other beings. The frontal lobe allows us to wax nostalgic about what might have been and use the subjunctive past perfect to communicate that nostalgia to our friends - “If I had gone to New York that summer, I would have been able to shed my mediocre suburban existence and write that gritty novel about struggling artists and rent control!” - then laugh about the whole thing and write the novel anyway.
If you read the literature on the frontal lobe in neuroscience texts, you’ll hear a lot about how this lobe makes humans unique and extra-super special among living things. In other words, the frontal lobe contains the current wunderkind abilities that we are using to console ourselves for being so separate from the rest of creation. In fact, it’s the abilities of the frontal lobe that allow us to imagine we are separate in the first place.
In Jewish and Christian myth, this process is described as a fall from grace. The feeling of separateness is understood as being kicked out of a garden. Because they ate the apple of knowledge, Adam and Eve now have to work for a living. And that’s an interesting way of looking at things because we wouldn’t be slaving in the fields all day if we couldn’t plan for the future in the first place.
But more often in creation myths, we find that the development of frontal lobe abilities is seen as a way humans have been gifted to talk with the gods. In Greek myth, we have Prometheus coming down from Olympus bringing fire and foresight. Sure, Zeus was angry, until the laws of ritual sacrifice were laid out and a means of relating to the gods was established for humans. In Chinese myth, Nuwa created humans because she wanted someone to talk to.
These creation myths are a certain kind of description of something that is biologically real. (Which is not the same thing as saying that myths aren’t true. All myths are perfectly true. They just aren’t centered in Malkuth. Myths interact with the biological in some way that mystics come to understand and devout atheists continue to deny.) When we started developing the neural structures in the frontal lobe, we hominids starting going where no one had gone before: deep into our own personal existences.
For some reason, our species embarked on a path that has brought us a lot of interesting times. Knowledge has certainly brought us some wonderful things, but the level or horribleness we’ve been able to achieve has led us to rationalize our evolution as a break with the divine. We came up with the Golden Rule and the Inquisition. Martin Luther King and his assassination. We can now build a fire to cook our food and burn our witches. Our ability to gather and retain knowledge sets us apart, and in that separateness we can do amazing and horrific things because now we can imagine that the person lying next to us is not actually having our experience, but their own, and we can’t ever know exactly what that is. Sure, we can always talk to them and try to learn something about it, but they could lie, or not want to talk and then what’ll we do?
Welcome to divinity.
[What's your favorite creation myth?]
Thursday, January 29, 2009
What Fell?
This is one story about how the universe was born.
There is a school of thought in Qabalistic circles that the Tree of Life originally had just four sepira. It was perfect. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Nothing died. Nothing loved.
And that was just too unbearable. So we cracked it open, dropped the bottom out of the whole shebang and came up with the universe. All sorts of things happening now.
What was the sound of the Tree falling at the beginning of time? It was the sound of a billion billion particles of light bursting out of a singular point of possibility. Duh.
We call the stuff that fell furthest “matter” and some people believe that's all that's left of the Big Bang. These materialists can't tell you why the Big Bang happened nor anything about what happened right before, but they will think you are awfully silly if you think there's more to the universe than this far-flung stuff.
Other people believe that this far-flung stuff is eeeevil. Flesh is evil, sex is evil, eating is evil. They call the distance we've fallen a sin and work to flee towards the center by leaving all this shit behind.
But every bit of stuff, no matter where it landed, was once part of perfection. So what really fell? G*d (whatever that is.) We did this. We the people, and the animals, the plants, the minerals. Thoughts had a hand as did hunger, beauty and sorrow.
The story goes that the journey back to the perfect source is actually amazing. We can't always tell because we're too caught up in it. And it's not really a journey back because we are what we came from and by journeying we are changed. But whatever...
The stuff that fell furthest is the stuff that has the longest journey. It's the stuff that believed in the plan the most, leaped off the cliff with the greatest trust and the biggest YEEHAW! Let's get this incarnation party started! They say that's why Malkuth, the lowliest sepira, the kingdom of Earth, looks up at Kether, the Crown, and blows kisses.
That's the story, anyway.
There is a school of thought in Qabalistic circles that the Tree of Life originally had just four sepira. It was perfect. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Nothing died. Nothing loved.
And that was just too unbearable. So we cracked it open, dropped the bottom out of the whole shebang and came up with the universe. All sorts of things happening now.
What was the sound of the Tree falling at the beginning of time? It was the sound of a billion billion particles of light bursting out of a singular point of possibility. Duh.
We call the stuff that fell furthest “matter” and some people believe that's all that's left of the Big Bang. These materialists can't tell you why the Big Bang happened nor anything about what happened right before, but they will think you are awfully silly if you think there's more to the universe than this far-flung stuff.
Other people believe that this far-flung stuff is eeeevil. Flesh is evil, sex is evil, eating is evil. They call the distance we've fallen a sin and work to flee towards the center by leaving all this shit behind.
But every bit of stuff, no matter where it landed, was once part of perfection. So what really fell? G*d (whatever that is.) We did this. We the people, and the animals, the plants, the minerals. Thoughts had a hand as did hunger, beauty and sorrow.
The story goes that the journey back to the perfect source is actually amazing. We can't always tell because we're too caught up in it. And it's not really a journey back because we are what we came from and by journeying we are changed. But whatever...
The stuff that fell furthest is the stuff that has the longest journey. It's the stuff that believed in the plan the most, leaped off the cliff with the greatest trust and the biggest YEEHAW! Let's get this incarnation party started! They say that's why Malkuth, the lowliest sepira, the kingdom of Earth, looks up at Kether, the Crown, and blows kisses.
That's the story, anyway.
