Whirled Without End

'Taste and see that the Lord is good.' ~Psalm 34:8

By conceptualizing the whirled, I armor myself from the terrifying and beautiful onslaught of suchness. Generalizations and ideologies protect me from the bright wounded fallenness of what Is.

So I impose a concept of order onto the chaos of quiddity, instead of enduring unimaginable random Self-radiance. By thinking about the world instead of tasting it, I veil myself in the gray mail armor of mind, protecting me from the uniqueness of the raindrop.

The choice is I or eye. But the eye is too fiery to endure. So 'I' hide behind a shadow of thought, a shield of names. My political and religious I-deas act as filters to keep out the vertigo of beauty, the unspeakable green disorder of the world. Note how our psychiatric/pharmaceutical empire labels everything beyond our comfort zone as a 'disorder,' drugging us into orderly ordinary conduct. Castrated sheep are orderly. Mown grass is ordinary.

I am afraid of unfiltered reality. I am afraid that I might live, not a world of sheep, but frolicsome randy goats, impossible to herd. I live in fear of disorder, fear of the uncertainty that lies at the heart of physics, where quarks and nutrinos flash from the void through no known equation but the principle of uncertainty.

I want to dwell in safety, and never get dizzy. My mind doesn't want the awful sparkle of an actual world; it wants to tell a story of perfect justice and equality, of God's certain commandments, of idyllic Vedic culture and Ayurvedic nutrition, a smoothie that will cleanse me of my sins!

But Kali abhors the pure. She loves the ruthless beauty of chaos. Spurning straight lines, parallels, and right angles, Earth ever undulates in curves, never asymptotes. She is not edgy, but edgeless. Definition dissolves into sacred ambiguity, subject into object. The fierce truth of Psalm 38: 'Taste and see that the Lord is good.'

The Hebrew 'ta'am' means 'taste and perceive directly.' 'The Lord' means the ineluctable hence unpronounceable divine Being, known by un-knowing, beyond the mediation of thought. No I-dea.

I don't think, therefor I Am.

When I taste the world directly, I see that the Lord is 'good,' 'tova.' 'Tova' in Hebrew is no mere moral concept, but the absolute ecstasy of which each particle of the cosmos is a vibration. The 'good' is not some perfect order beyond this whirling mess: it is the wilderness of bliss at the heart of every atom. This dangerous poem in Psalm 34, 'Taste and see that the Lord is good,' really means: Refuse to name the creatures and just taste them. Taste the whirled. Taste the wine of original chaos in every perception, even if it gives you vertigo.

If I am an honest man, I no longer live in the parallel creation of my thoughts, my description of things. I live in things themselves. Thought perishes like a candle in the dawn of wild awareness. No need to plunge into a jungle or agonize to the mountain top. Just opening my eye is the adventure.

Shimmering in the space outside all concepts, the terrible holy earth invites me, through the fragrance of her petaled bee-humming touch, to step beyond this veil of mind, into the nakedness of God. Selah.