Gerald Dillenbeck | + Follow Poet |
Parallelismus Membrorum | + Fav Poem | Comment | Email | Print |

Sacred Conversations

Gregory Bateson: 
Pathology is a relatively easy thing to discuss,
health is very difficult.

Laotse:
Pathology provokes a dysfunctional concern for attention,
organic health invokes a functional nonconcern
unless you have switched our cooperative evolution thrival
for your personal competitive revolution for survival.

Bateson:
...the sacred is difficult to talk about,
because the sacred is peculiarly related to the healthy.

Laotse:
Sacrilege of anthropocentric profanity is difficult to confront
so long as sacred Gaian ecological synergy 
continues to unfold abundantly healthy
democratically wealthy
ergodic energy systems.

Bateson, on the history of Western religious culture:
The proposition for which they were burning each other was, 
on one hand, 'the bread is the body,' 
and on the other, 'the bread stands for the body.'
...this whole argument is one of fundamental importance
when related to the whole of the nature of the sacred
and to human nature....
the richest use of the word 'sacred'
is that use which will say that what matters
is the combination of the two,
getting the two together
[panentheism].

Laotse:
When is feisty body-bread v divine-wine
not yet feeling a pathological stomachache?
When is yeasty bread and wine
not predicting a resonantly healthy bodymind?

Bateson:
Because it doesn't make any prose sense,
the material of dream and poetry has to be more
or less
secret from the prose part of the mind.
It's this secrecy,
this obscuration,
that the Protestant thinks is wrong,
and a psychoanalyst,
I suppose,
wouldn't approve of either.
But that secrecy, you see,
is a protecting of parts of the whole process or mechanism,
to see that the parts don't neutralize each other.


Laotse with Jaynes:
Because it doesn't make any LeftBrain 
Either Yang Or Yin dualistically oppositional 
non-paradoxical orthodoxically logical sense
AND
RightBrain Both Yang And Yin nondualistically appositional 
non-prosaic sacred mystery 
of organically interdependent healthy history
Sexsensory re-membered
re-ligioned
re-woven
re-vived in love-life musing dreams 
and polyphonic poetry 
and sacred ecological positive co-relationships

Bateson:
What are you going to do about the use of the sacred?
There is a very strong tendency in occidental cultures,
and increasingly in oriental cultures,
to misuse the sacred.
You see,
you've got something nice [healthy],
central to your civilization,
which bonds together all sorts of values connected with love,
hate,
pain,
joy, and the rest,
a fantastic bridging synthesis,
a way to make life make a certain sort of [re-ligious] sense.
And the next thing is that people use that sacred bridge
in order to sell things....
We can be influenced, it seems,
by any confidence trickster,
who by his appeals
makes cheap that which should not be made cheap.

Laotse:
How are you going to invest in/divest of these organically sacred 
ecosystemically panentheistic relationships?
We have pronoia appositions polyculturing beauty 
and paranoid oppositions monoculturing ugly,
kind and not kind,
in anthropocentric colonization
as in EarthCentric creolization,
bonding together all economic capitalist wealth 
monotheistically autocratic disvalues 
within all ecologically healthy
polytheistically democratic 
positive co-relational values
our empathic trusts with our ecopolitical distrusts and immunities.

Those who would reduce organically panentheistic Earth
to what can be anthropocentrically bought and sold,
cheapen that robust polyculturing climax
which could OtherWise become even more densely
wildly
indigenously resonant,
resiliently rich.

Bateson:
...while it may be fairly easy to recognize moments 
at which everything goes wrong,
it is a great deal more difficult
to recognize the magic of the moments that come right;
and to contrive those moments
is always more or less impossible....
to make human relations prosper is exceedingly difficult.

Laotse:
Recognizing moments at which everything goes wrong
as tipping points,
time to win and win appositionally depolarize
win v lose 0-sum risks of mono-protagonist 
ir-religiously paranoid anger management
into opportunities of and for more panentheistic
re-ligious pronoia love re-development,
to consistently
predictably
normatively
climatically invite faithfulness toward co-empathic 
de-polarizing
democratizing
creolizing panentheistic trust.

Bateson:
We are [monotheistically] arrogant about what we might know tomorrow,
but humble because we know [feel] so little today.

Laotse:
We are Yang-overflowing about what we may know of Yintegrity's potential tomorrow,
co-arising Yang v Yin
ego's neurosystemic organic humility
within Yang+Yin-ecosystemic sacred 
SunFather enlightening
EarthMother empowering
win/win panentheistic tranquility.

Copyright © Gerald Dillenbeck | Year Posted 2016

Please Login to post a comment