Friday, April 24, 2020

The Void Does Not Exist



Upon the hills are the black towers of nameless mystery, of horror and of fear. All prejudice, all superstition, dead tradition and ancestral loathing, all combine to darken her face before the eyes of men. It needs unconquerable courage to begin to tread this path. Here is a weird, deceptive life.   Such light as there may be is deadlier than darkness, and the silence is wounded by the howling of wild beasts.

A.Crowley
Book of Thoth, Atu 18

                                                     I

                                        Somewhere In The Mind

The wounded moon emanates
Her cold confusion
Over an empty, echoing plaza;
Echoes that distort the dimensions of this time, this place,
Echoes emanating solely from footsteps in your mind
That weave their way in isolation through the dark mystery
Of  life.
You walk on
Inside this plaza overflowing like a glass with the night sky.
.
Quarantined inside your mind,
In the throes of a world crisis
Deep inside the night                              alone
Many strange twists of
Deeply rooted  fictions
Echo within the corners of                   the mind,
Echo in a wilderness                              of reason,
Echo in a confrontation with
All the grotesque masks
Worn over                                       the abyss of ages,
Echo in a phantasmagoria of ancient terrors
Around a bonfire of madness
Wrought with flames of psychomachia
As the weight of centuries
And all of their fractures                       
Resonate in the uranean exteriors
Of cathedral domes
Ascending in the apotheosis of a twisted, mythical sky.

All these fractures and distortions
That echo in the rows of
Enormous plutonian banks
Towering in wealth and menace,  resonating with war and ruin
As the saturnian weight of centuries
Echoes in the arcane lexicon                        
Of an architecture from millennia past that resonates still
While you stand distracted for a moment
Before fine balustrades
Of a long veranda beside dream palazzi
Contemplating the names of the details of the architecture:
Rare nomenclature reflected in your thoughts
Like the moon in a rain plash.

You look upward from this world into the sky
And find  Her lurking  directly above,              resonating brightly.
You dwell in the wound of the moon,
In the tender ache of time and form,
Dwell in a series of reflections
Between appearance and reality,
Dwell in a mere lexicon that resonates in your thoughts.
You are lost among the stars and planets in a dream.

The void does not exist.

                                                     II

                                       The Chess Players In The Plaza

The skeleton 
Of the abstract of the spirit 
Rattles as you walk.

The plaza unfolds like a rose in winds of mystery.
Before your eyes a template of hidden phenomena arises,
That which the superficies of the mind veils,
The pure math of divine architecture
Existing on another plane.

The perceived forms of the eternal world
Are those which are constantly perceived in this one,

You swoon at the complexity of the divine  sorcery
That swirls around existence  
In so many deeply embedded patterns of psyche, 
So many strange conditions.
You plumb the depths of all the distortions
That twist within and around you.
With every step you seem to dive down deeper inside this plaza
There is an history and a culture here completely over your head,
Filled with chaos and beauty.
It places demands on your attention from a time so distant.
That you fitfully oblige
To the point of schizophrenic hallucination.
The lines of the architecture becomes tensile, skeletal
At this late hour.
The ghost of outlines in the moonlit plaza
Subsume your mind
As your footsteps are the only sound heard, echoing
With despair for self and world.
Feeling a sudden strike of blood, holding your breath
You seem to swim,          as you dodge a mirror of rain pool,
Past  reflective stars beside colonnades of light
Sitting in long, etheric rows of tables
Playing chess, slowly
Plotting their next move in the waters of space.

The void does not exist.

Suspended in unfathomable noesis, glowing brightly,
Here  the snowy-headed masters of the heavens
Ply their strenuous exercises of super reason.
Equally matched, thinking countless moves ahead.
They pick up a pawn and
Move you.  

The void does not exist.  

And here the stars sit, retired or vagrant,
Playing game after game of chess in the heavens
They plot their next move of all
Beside the great renaissance merchant houses
Of Venus.
 And the last stars before they fade,
When the sparrows begin to flute,
Move in a brilliant end game of chess.
Night requests a draw.   Dawn accedes.

You drown in the adept play of  the stars.
This is how the true masters perform,
Setting up brilliant decoys and
Inconceivable sacrifices
Made to eliminate the guarding piece
Of the self-clinging ego.   Checkmate.

The void does not exist.

                                                     III

                                        Seafarers in the Clouds

Dazed, you look upward into the starry sky
“All things have the nature of a magical creation”,
said the Awakened One
Patterns in the subtle physical account for all manner of
Conditions in the physical.
Breath is a subtle manifestation of space.
You enter a state of non-thinking
And the space between two thoughts.
Monkey mind is bodhicitta
You ponder these things on this long, misty chaotic night
In which seafarers heave their nets and lines in the clouds,
Fishing for you.
Your thoughts become tangled like the lines of the seafarers
In the storm of cosmic mind.
Language no longer suffices but it won’t go away.
It only tangles like fishing lines in a storm:
What the hooks are caught on not even the 10,000 sages can say.
Still looking upward, still dazed.
The moon is a time bomb in the sky.  
You are the fuse.  You tick away.  
Some day you will explode in the heavens.

Above you, you watch as those toilers in the seas of clouds
Toss the jeweled net into the ocean of roads.
Heaven and earth are captured in the shining mesh
Of One Mind.
You gaze into the vastness of stars
That plot your moves.

The void does not exist.

                                               IV

                                 Key To The Moon

You reach into a pocket of your mind
And pull out the key to the moon
You insert it in the moon inside your heart
And turn the key
And a huge door is ignited open
As music is playing loudly
From orchestras inside lunar ballrooms.
You are surrounded by a festive scene of
Devas, nagas, yaksas, gandharvas, asuras,
Garudas, kimnaras,  mahoragas and countless bodhisatvas
And other celestial beings.
Who celebrate your buddhahood

But at just that moment the moon sets
And is gone like a dream.
You watch her disappear, bearing her wound
Of illusion.
But the music plays on in your mind.
Dawn forever awaits at the cliffs
Of lunar seas that pound the aethers
In which you swim in the dawn of eyes.
The void does not exist. 

                                                IV

You pick up a tarot deck and contemplate the esoteric meanings of Key 18.
This is the key that opens the mysteries of The Moon,
The Corporeal Intelligence.
The Great Work is the Transformation of the Body!
This work is the ultimate aim of alchemy
And its demands are a nearly super-human magnum opus.

You enter the archetype of The Moon
As the symbols play their magic upon your mind.
You understand that the body can undergo a vast transformation
And that the Moon Key and its many symbols
Facilitate this transformation as they explain how
Somatic consciousness
Arises out of the primordial sea of mind-stuff guided by
Superconscious forces of evolution
That sublimate matter  in order to improve vehicles
For their progress along the Path.
You are stunned by the magnitude of it all.

The void does not exist.  

You enter the scene of the card
And find you are a crayfish crawling
Scorpionically out of the seas of primal mind
Headed down a long, moonlit path
That leads to the mountains of understanding and wisdom
As you navigate between the art of the dog
And the nature of the wolf, seeking balance
Between what should properly remain wild
And what is properly brought to art
You find the way to the mountains blocked
By towers of civilization
Still there is a moonlit path that undulates between them
Leading to completion.

You contemplate the divinatory meaning of the card
And find that The Moon is a card of illusion and deception,
And therefore often suggests a time when something is not as it
Appears to be.
Perhaps a misunderstanding on your part, or a truth you cannot
Admit to yourself.
 A Difficult period, one of Insecurity, Mental confusion,
Deception, Hidden things, and Fear. 

 You read Crowley on the subject.

This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating. Not the benign, solar intoxication of Dionysus, but the dreadful madness of pernicious drugs; this is a drunkenness of sense, after the mind has been abolished by the venom of this Moon. This is that which is written of Abraham in the Book of the Beginning: “An horror of great darkness came upon him.” One is reminded of the mental echo of subconscious realization, of that supreme iniquity which mystics have constantly celebrated in their accounts of the Dark Night of the Soul. But the best men, the true men, do not consider the matter in such terms at all. Whatever horrors may afflict the soul, whatever abominations may excite the loathing of the heart, whatever terrors may assail the mind, the answer is the same at every stage: “How splendid is the Adventure!”

You realize you’ve been moving through this key
All night and all these many nights like this one.
But here you understand the stars guide your evolution
And that it is in solitude that one meets
The Hermit
On the Mountain of Completion,
Only in isolation that one passes through the abominable towers of The Moon

Here alone you pull off your own mask to reveal
For a  moment
The Vast Countenance
To entertain the void
And the battle is won
For now. Yet

The void does not exist.

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Greetings, My name is Jon Landon. I am a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. I I can write everything from Poetry to Technical Writing, I am a UC Berkeley Alumni ('88)