Against the Dead World: An Essay on Meaning, Myth, and the Crime of Taking the Map for the Living Land

We were not born into a dead world. We were born into a living stream of meaning, and only later taught to mistake its shadow for reality. The world handed to us by scientism is neat and measurable, but at once an utterly lifeless picture framed so tightly that the pulse of Being can no longer be felt within it. And yet we are asked to live there, to love there, to find meaning there.

This essay is a refusal. A refusal to take the model for the living, the map for the land, the shadow for the flame. It is an invitation to reclaim what was never lost but merely loaned out, the living flow of meaning itself, from which all pictures borrow their meanings and by which alone anything is ever real. … More Against the Dead World: An Essay on Meaning, Myth, and the Crime of Taking the Map for the Living Land

World as Veil: When presence itself becomes the concealment

I speak to you, my comrade, of a state that’s veiled to you from time immemorial; but I must speak carefully or else my words can veil you even further, and that’s not due to the influence of the words but of how you are conditioned to receive and comprehend them. Before I proceed, I … More World as Veil: When presence itself becomes the concealment

La Fretta dell’Essere: L’uomo e il miraggio del “Là”

What is man as a phenomenon? Is he a being that’s hasting toward non-being, a ghostly figure that has projected all the being he has and he can’t tolerate into and beyond a non-being horizon? Nay. Man is nothing in haste. Man is the very hasting of Being; he is hasting itself and not a being in haste. That’s why he’s always torn, torn in between here and there, for he can’t get that there out of his stupid head. He is as horizontally stretched between the opposite poles of embodiment and self-abandonment as he is vertically stretched between heaven and hell. He is everywhere and everywhen but here and now. He is a lunatic chasing shadows of himself.   … More La Fretta dell’Essere: L’uomo e il miraggio del “Là”

The Letter That Kills, the Song That Heals: When Reality Is Buried Alive in Much Intellectual Chatter

We must forget and unsee all that we know and all that we think. We must surrender who we think we are in order to see who we truly are. We must surrender what we think reality is in order to see it for what it truly is. And repetition itself can help us: to repeatedly put the headsets aside, to return again and again to the plain, unadorned real, even when it feels empty or dull. That emptiness and dullness and boredom is the withdrawal symptom of a lifelong addiction to conceptualization and repetitive thinking. Stay with that emptiness long enough and one day vision clears. But for that, all borrowed images must die. All the stories of philosophers, theologians, and scientists must vanish for the true sun to rise before our eyes. All our ideas of truth and reality must die for the One to appear. … More The Letter That Kills, the Song That Heals: When Reality Is Buried Alive in Much Intellectual Chatter

When God Plays

What you call hell is you taking this all too seriously, and heaven is your full presence in the play; they are not realities but your perspective on what is! So, drop all this metaphysics; instead, make merry and enjoy the play.  … More When God Plays

The Dance of Names

Everything and everyone is here; the names make them seem far away What’s gone, too, is here; we just call it “gone” and think it “gone.” What’s to come, has always been; we just call it “not yet” and think its name. Near and far, here and there, now and then: these are Its names, … More The Dance of Names