Happy Thanksgiving.  I’ve really been enjoying all the activity on this website.  For many months, Jack has been urging us to use this vehicle to share our explorations, and now it is happening.  Speaking of vehicles, in recent posts and comments between Thieub and Karin, the issue was raised of what the healthy role of self can be in our lives.  How about as our vehicle in the world, which shouldn’t be the driver?  Haywood quotes Joseph Campbell.  Another famous quote of Joseph Campbell’s is  to “Follow Your Bliss.”  Perhaps that is a way of advising us to use joy as our guide, to know whether Being or Self is in at the wheel.  ” The Wound and the Bow”? That’s the title of a book about how coping with our weaknesses can provide us with a special strength.  Actually I was thinking of Jack’s analogy,  describing the difficulty of observing the self (like an archer who cannot shoot himself).  How about loosing the arrow straight overhead, watching it reach the high point, flips over, then comes flying back down to its starting point.  Not to belabor an incidental analogy, but could we do that in our observation of ourselves.  Would it give us a wider perspective to be both the self and the arrow of insight, launched outside of our own narrow preoccupations, looking back ?  I’ve experienced how our habitation in time can feel like that: if we can look at this moment from the perspective of who we have been or who we hope to be in the future, this can break the shackles of being in the prison of a single moment of linear time.  –Michael
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Thanks Michael, great to read the analogy of the arrow from one who is named after the archangel warrior with the sword for cutting through the illusion of excistence.
I share your observation about linear time and the feel of limitation and suffering that is in it. Is there a way out by learning more about our perceptions?
May I add a Sonnet of Giordano Bruno a dominican priest, who was burned at the stake for herecy on february 17, 1600. His crime was the claim that the earth was circulating around the sun and set within a heaven of infinite vastness. His knowledge then is part of our technological knowledge today. His tools were his heart and mind. He was condemned by the concepts of knowledge of his time empowered by the church.
“Against Love’s blows I built a strong redoubt;
When his assaults struck, countless, everywhere,
Pounding my heart within its diamond lair–
Still, over his my own desires won out.
At last (as was the heavens’ plan throughout)
I chanced one day upon a holy pair
Of lights, and through my own lights, then and there
They found an entry to my heart laid out.
Toward me then a double arrow sailed,
Shot by a hand that held a warrior’s rage
Who’d fought for thirty years and always failed.
But now he’d marked the spot and pressed the siege;
Planting his trophy right where he prevailed,
And forced my wayward wings into his cage.
On a more solemn stage
The angers of my sweetest enemy
Will never cease to strike my heart, and me.”
Reading this I was struck by the double arrow that Giordano is using here for restraining his desires his playfullness with the perspective of I and the warrior and the link to this weeks work on duality.