#vitalism

[oh-rose-thou-art-sick]

"Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits."

A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guatarri

[chiharukihara]

CERTAIN OWL 2023

oil on canvas 1000×803㎜/F40

Chiharu KIHARA

[tides-of-truth]

When "what is life?" became "who am I?"

Matriarchy & Patriarchy

The arcane words related to breath across languages & cultures are rooted in a tacit understanding of the question "what is life?".

The life principle is associated with the feminine / with Shakti.

The apparent different words for "what is life?", have grown on branches on a tree from an ancient common seed - - from the same underground soil / the deep unconscious / the underworld.

The myth of Persephone is about picking flowers & fruits in the upperworld but having accepted & received seeds in the underworld. On one level the myth is about the turn of the wheel of the seasons / the circle of LIFE, but read in another way it is about receiving knowledge in the underworld that allows the upperworld to flourish. 'Something' is drawn up from the underworld to flourish in the upperworld.

The cycle of LIFE is a much deeper reality & mystery / occult knowledge to be experientially remembered.

Arcane, primeval knowledge is always handed to the underworld journeyer to be brought to the living. Like Inanna you can't enter the underworld clothed with a body. Like Ramana Maharishi demonstrated, we either sit the body down or we lie down, so as to die to the upperworld / the land of the living & we sink down into what we are- on the currents of prana / the life force / the Serpent of the Deep / that takes us deep into the stream of life itself or the Self, we drift to the centre of what we are.

In the Eastern tradition a mantra

may be given that rides on the

tides of the breath to the center, the fountainhead of LIFE.

Understanding has evolved from the notion of vital breath, to eternal Soul, supreme Spirit, the Self or consciousness but are but different pointers to a reality that is so vast, that no single word can fully contain it. The words are seeds that inwardly grow into true knowledge through experiencing their meaning directly.

The mysteries of old facilitated the experience of true knowledge.

[magdalene-spirit]

The mother matrix & patriarchy

Invasion, colonisation & extraction is both psychological & biological / organic / bodily.

The modern worldview tore through reality to divide it in two halves: spirit & matter; mind & body; either man or woman etc.

This is the schism, schizoid split, disconnection, distancing 8 separation that has sent western civilization on a path & trajectory of collapse.

Patriarchy is an invasive / parasitic belief system that invades the mind & body of humans. It is a belief system of 'othering' & isolating things into categories, drawing boundaries, borders & demarcations around things, from land to nations, things are not encamped.

Psyche & nature interpenetrate / is co-existent.

Nature / the physical / is suffused with spirit & soul.

Nature / environment is the inverse / the image of the spirit & soul / the Self.

The environment IS my Self. Is the mirror, the surface in which I behold my Reality.

Unity consciousness is spectral, it sees all the gradations of the in-between. The in-between can't be cut away & thrown into a bin.

The in-between is home to variations/variety & the other.

Nothing can be dissected out.

The web is the extended matrix of perception & awareness, propagating, transmitting, transducing & signalling communication instantly between one point & everywhere else in the web. The web is necessary for eco / equilibrium, maintaining the delicate parameters that sustains life itself.

The spectral in-between, is a delicately infolded & alive tissue-web-substance / filamentous strands of green elemental colloidal sap / highways of communication.

One plant is not separate or isolated from another.

One human is not separate from another human. Interconnection / exchange occurs on all levels of spirit, soul, mind & body.

[dimity-lawn]

[athousandgateaux]

What do you expect those who don’t know the dangers of life to know of the dangers of the spirit? To argue the case for spirit is a sign of great ignorance, just as to make a case for life is a sign of great disequilibrium. For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won’t collapse. And what about the man who cannot praise either life or the spirit?

Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, pg. 13

[astranemus]

Perhaps it would be useful, now and then, to consider the large, collective migrations of various creatures as active expressions of the earth itself. To consider them as slow gestures of a living geology, improvisational experiments that gradually stabilized into habits now necessary to the ongoing metabolism of the sphere. For truly: are not these cyclical pilgrimages — these huge, creaturely hegiras — also pulsations within the broad Body of earth? Are they not ways that divergent places or ecosystems communicate with one another, trading vital qualities essential to their continued flourishing?

Think again of the salmon, this gift born of the rocky gravels and melting glaciers, nurtured by colossal cedars and by tumbled trunks decked with ferns, fungi, and moss, an aquatic, muscled energy strengthening itself in the mossed and forested mountains until it’s ready to be released into the broad ocean. Pouring seaward, it adds itself to that voluminous cauldron of currents spiraling in huge gyres, shaded by algal blooms and charged by faint glissandos of whale song… Until, grown large with the sea’s abundance, this ocean-infused life flows back up the rivers and tributaries and spreads out into the wooded valleys, gifting the hollows and the needled highlands with new minerals and nutrients, feeding bears and osprey and eagles, ensuring that the glinting gift will be reborn afresh from a lump of luminous eggs stashed beneath a layer of pebbles.

This circulation, this systole and diastole, is one of the surest signs that this earth is alive — a rhythmic pulse of silvery, glacier-fed brilliance pouring through various arteries into the wide body of the ocean, circulating and growing there, only to return by various veins to the beating heart of the forest, gravid with new life.

David Abram, "Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet: Some Reflections" in Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing