November | 2017 | The Poesie of Igor Goldkind

Mysticism: The Phenomenology of Truth

Science makes no philosophical claim to ‘Truth’ but instead provides useful approximations based on its ongoing peer-review methodology. What is reliable information by way of science is the result of similar enough results from replicated experiments that are strictly controlled and abide by the parameters established by a long succession of scientists. Their hand-me-down story is called epistemology.

In the end, all it tells us is that under such and such of circumstances, it is most likely that these results will be achieved regardless of who you are or where you are as long as you abide by the parameters of the experiment. This consistency of results is what allows us to make engineering choices based on scientific ‘truths’.

When people say they believe in scientific ‘fact’, they usually mean engineering applications of the science. No one bothers to question the science behind the combustion engine as long as their car runs reliably.

But the key phrase here is ‘approximations of truth’. More absolute truths, the understanding of ourselves and the objects in themselves requires a different kind of perspective outside of the scientific framework; one that takes the observer and the point of observation into account in the observation.

This involves a separate methodology as structured as scientific methods but with different aims and thus different kinds of conclusions. The overlooked discipline is that of Phenomenology, coined by the mathematical genius turned philosopher and teacher of the great Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl.

Husserl believed that our understanding of phenomena was completely based on our disposition towards the apperception (or the incorporation of our perceptions into our existing body of knowledge i.e. our understanding of the perception). Although a mathematician, this view of truth being determined by the perception of the observer as much as the thing-in-itself which can never be truly perceived apart from its set of traits and characteristics is a natural extension of Kant’s Idealism, for which Time and Space are far from objective physical phenomena and more akin to categories of perception. In effect, shared psychological states of awareness.

This is precisely where Phenomenology collides with post-Modernism, Einsteinian physics (Relativity) and Freudian mapping of the unconscious (everything that we don’t know or did know but forgot).

This post-modern relativism owes a great deal to the mystical and alchemic traditions to which it shares a common ancestry with science. Science, after all, derived from mystical and alchemic experimentations by mainly monks who upon separating from the spiritualism of the Church, (thanks to that first and great secular martyr, Giordano Bruno), continued their quest for god’s Truth.

Mysticism (unlike Spiritualism), is not superstitious; rather it engages with the world in pursuit of solving mysteries unknown and unsolvable by science. Mysticism poses questions science would never bother to ask and then attempts to answer them. Metaphysical questions such as ‘Who am I’ outside of my name and a social construct? Why am I here and who really lies behind the many masks upon mask that I wear and why do I wear them in the first place?

Psychoanalysis and Psychology at their best are not sciences at all, they are merely enquiries into the nature of the mind (although the current bias towards quantifiable conclusions might make one think otherwise). They are a result of mystical enquiries into the nature of the mind and how it shapes our most intimate and fundamental perceptions of the world we live in; the space in time we briefly occupy before dying. Medicine is yet another example of a supposed science that in fact is based on a field of knowledge that predates scientific methodology.

Nor is mathematics strictly speaking a science and yet it is by far more predictive of the unknown and unexperienced than science could ever hope to be.

I feel that this is a very relevant issue in the face of the current data-fixation of human experience as well as the current bias of valuing quantifiable truths over qualifiable ones. Just because you can count something accurately doesn’t mean you understand it better.

The truth is never in the data as such, it’s in the interpretation of the data, as long as you’re smart enough to factor in the interpreter.

I’ll take a breath now;
And recall who I am.

November 29, 2017 | Categories: Meditations, Uncategorized | Tags: Mysticism, science, Truth | 1 Comment

3 New Poems: Your Soul; Mysterious Hands; Pray for Money

mystical-experience-1

Your Soul

So who is this Soul that you sing of?
The silent, invisible witness
Who counts the leaves off of trees
instead of gathering them?
Then raking them into a funerary circle,
Into a giant pile, your better self can fall from,
Or jump into?
Up to your eyeballs,
Up to your own little crown of thorns. 559235_429780530417814_1780624763_n

Mysterious Hands

The world is not a mystery, children.
It is an enigma waiting to solved
Or a safe that awaits its own combination.
A puzzle patiently poised for its pieces to coincide
With your hands.
The question is not who made the world we exist in
The question is who made your hands?

Prayer

I can no longer afford my own vices. 5718636537_f504c250b9_b
Is this g/d’s way of saving me?
Mysteriously?
If so, then more salvation and
Less mystery is all I can say.
Lead me to more fortune and less poverty, g/d.
So that I can pave my own way.

Oh what a beautiful morning,
Oh what a glorious day,
I’ve got a wonderful fee-ling,
That Donald is going away!

November 26, 2017 | Categories: new poetry | 2 Comments

Paris is the City of Light

Read This: Paris is the City of Light

November 23, 2017 | Categories: art, digital insurgency, Mindfulness, new poetry, poetry, Poetry as therapy, spoken word | Tags: literature, Nostalgia, Paris, Poem, poetry, sex, The City of Light | Leave a comment

Insomniac Awareness

Read this next & Comment Insomniac Awareness

November 23, 2017 | Categories: new poetry | Leave a comment

Death and His Brothers in My Garden Again.

Read: Death and His Brothers in My Garden Again.

November 23, 2017 | Categories: new poetry | Leave a comment

Paris is the City of Light

Paris is the City of Light

Spotted by puddles of darkness &
Forever burning lights.
Who at first, allured us,
Then wouldn’t allow us to leave her side.
Though she may be so much older than you or I,
She was, after all my life is recalled,
My greatest lover, ever.
Please remember Paris with fond tenderness
And fire.

November 23, 2017 | Categories: new poetry | Tags: darkness, love, lover, Paris, poetry, Truth | 1 Comment

Essay on Everyday Zen

The only way to explain Zen is by describing the sleepy mind. The sleepy mind describes a tree in terms of attributes and data: the number of leaves, the leaf shape, the number of branches, thickness of the trunk, the colour of bark. Which birds make use of the tree etc.

All these observable and measurable attributes are assembled as data by the sleepy mind and voila! the sleepy mind thinks it knows what a tree is. The sleepy mind can give arguments with citations about the validity of its data. The sleepy mind works well with other sleepy minds.

And the sleepy mind isn’t totally wrong, the data it compiles in reference to ‘tree’ are all real and quantifiable features of the tree. But no matter how exact or comprehensive, the data is not the tree nor even the experience of the tree.

The awoken mind merely says “Look, a tree”, and points. Because there is no data that conveys the experience of that tree in the moment of your apprehension. The awoken mind, sees the leaves, the branches, the colour of the bark, the thickness of the trunk, which birds fly in and out of the tree as much and as well as the sleepy mind does.

But the awoken mind also sees that the spaces between the leaves are part of the tree. The negative space surrounding the tree. The unseen roots spread beneath the ground are part of the tree. The sunlight reflecting off the green of the leaves are part of the tree. The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; and then quite simply sees the tree for a tree, not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.

First, there is a tree.

Then there is no tree.

Then there is a tree. (With apologies to Donavon)

I think this is the closest I can come to describing the Zen disposition. I say disposition because too much is made of practice and the philosophy of Zen when all are merely aids to assist in the unravelling of illusion and self-deception. Zen is not an acquisition of skills, rituals, garments or ideology; instead, Zen is relinquishment. It’s a reminder to keep paying attention. Not acquiring but letting go: unravelling, stripping away layers of calloused skin, leaving your baggage behind and not looking back over your shoulder. In the words of the bard:

“My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step”.

Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.

We are all distracted by anxieties and worries about money, about jobs, about partners and children. We fear that we don’t have enough or that someone might take away what we do have. This persisting distraction is manufactured by the powerful in the society we live in to keep us consuming, acquiescent and very sleepy! It doesn’t matter if you meditate or not; if you read poetry or not; if you drink tea or practice martial arts or not. It doesn’t matter how you get there or what you wear; just that you wake up and experience the miracle of persistent and unwavering creation.

The truth of your life lies outside the boundaries of your identity, your concerns, your preferences, your joys and your sorrows. To step outside is merely to leave those things that amount to nothing behind. Enlightenment is a perpetual relinquishment of obstructing of layers not an acquiring of a state of mind.

Awareness is larger than the body.

The universe is created, then destroyed then resurrected millions of times a second, faster than you can blink; an ongoing vibration of creation.

So try to keep your eyes wide open.

I’ll leave you with the words of the Nobel Prize laureate:

“Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves

The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

– With ultimate Compassion, Igor Goldkind, 2017

Please feel free to share and copy this.

I’m just trying to reach anyone who might need to understand this.

November 23, 2017 | Categories: art, Emptyness, Existentialism, Igor Goldkind, Meditations, mental health, Mindfulness, Self-Therapy | Tags: awakening, illusions, philosophy, Reality, Truth, Zen | Leave a comment

Insomniac Awareness

Recent rewrite. When I first wrote and posted it, no one seemed to know what I meant by it. But now it’s becoming a favoured read aloud piece:

Insomniac Awareness

We who are hiding in our second bedrooms,
Licking the silver from the backs of our screens,
Are living in a different time zone
Of Insomniac Awareness.

Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four or more
Lives are lived and lost each night.
In our rooms, by ourselves
Sitting precariously on the edge of our beds.

This is our legacy
The lasting perpetuity of our sensory species:
The glow that contests the light that once shone from our eyes,
Right up to the surface of our understanding.

What is not yet known.
Or what was known and long since forgotten.
Dances across the screen you stare into.
Tripping over your coded memories; in Real Time.

Who are you reading this? No automatic alt text available. Do you know
What perturbs your sleep-walk into the night?
Or are you merely waiting for the screen to pull you through?

Into your own quiet world,
Where things that count never change.
And no one is dreaming you but your mother,
Who has left you now for another child.

November 17, 2017 | Categories: Americana, art, beat, digital insurgency, Emptyness, Existentialism, literature, mental health, new poetry, poetry, Poetry as therapy, spoken word, story-telling | Tags: digital anarchy, digital insurgency, New Poetry, poetry | 1 Comment

Death is in My Garden Again.

Death and his brothers are in my garden again.
Moving my plants around.
They tend to the growth quite delicately
Careful to not reap the harvest until the plants mature
And begin to lose their hair.

Death and his brother are in my garden again,
Whispering to each other as they pull away the weeds.
Poting and repotting each plant as it grows
Making sure the roots are clear of regrets and debris
So that in the end, it’s life can be cut short more easily.

Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder.
A woman whom he woes with words of love?
As much as death can love any living thing, at all.
He gathers my plants into a beautiful bouquet
Of lost souls and freshly cut lives.
To gift to she who holds him near; squeezing his dead heart in one hand,

My faltering flowers in the other.

November 15, 2017 | Categories: death, Emptyness, Existentialism, Igor Goldkind, literature, Mindfulness, new poetry, poetry, Poetry as therapy, spoken word | 1 Comment

Image

For Devin Kelley: Who finally escaped his madness & his pain.

There is No Escape

None of us gets paroled
From the prison cells, we lock ourselves into.
So that we all can fit together inside
This jigsaw life that we lead.
Which of course, eventually blows apart. We are merely the fragments of ourselves awaiting reassembly.

Each moment of thought is but a small drop in time.
Every piece fits the next piece.
Although we may try to avoid
The murmurs of our own thoughts.
It is our hearts that yawn and awaken slowly
From their long winter night’s sleep.

You and I are mere mortals,

Who dreamt of a life without end.
We are the ones who made up immortality and notoriety.
For the sake of seeking sweet comforts and sad joys.
And this is the story we tell ourselves

Whilst slumping back to our cells.