Tiffany Dawn Smith: 09/27/22

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Currently reading

This was a quick 1-day read. I like Mantak Chia and his work on transmuting energies. Some Perennialist thinkers posit that in this era, seeking transcendence isn't enough due to how dense our corporeal existences are, that we must also learn how to harness and transmute certain energies into something higher as part of our journey, that we must be active and not just contemplative. I've started adding the Inner Smile technique to my daily practice and I actually find it exhausting. Maybe my chi is weak, or maybe I don't yet have control over it... I feel such an intense globe of golden light in the center of my forehead, then I move it all around my head and down into my neck and by the time I reach my heart and lungs area, I'm exhausted and having a hard time keeping the "inner smile" "light" together and potent. Another potential issue is I've been doing this late in the evenings when I'm probably quite tired. Maybe incorporating it sometime during the day would be more ideal. Mantak recommends upon waking...

And then just to keep with following that golden thread that beckons me onward and upward with such persistency, I'm back into Evola, this time delving into alchemy and the Hermetic philosophy which I must say I become more and more intrigued with the more I'm able to learn and 'get.' It's the feeling of a whole new world awaiting you, you can see it off in the distance and sense how it will be, you know it's in your future, you're just not there yet.

“Nonadaptation” by Czeslaw Milosz

"I was not made to live anywhere except in paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries
For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.
I have not loved a woman with my five senses.
I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.
And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and a propitiatory song."

"On Urge to Withdraw" by Naida Muslic

"The withdrawal from the world - into forests as a mad mystic who plays lute to birds and visits the towns only to scandalise and scare people who were too adapted to the world and its ways, seemed the only way to exit the wheel of samsara. I felt aged - like I've already seen it all, had hundreds of children and husbands and wives, like I've been a criminal, a priest, a queen, a prostitute, and there was nothing left for me to be anymore. All the roles seemed too familiar and already explored and lived. It wasn't nihilism that was behind the urge to withdraw - it was inability to see any evidence of my belief that there had to be more to life than dying with a stomach more full than you started with."