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[ by Charles Cameron — not by revolution but by centering ]
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If I might shift the angle from which the current conversation views the world situation — rather than looking for revolution or evolution, might we not hope for transfiguration, theosis?

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For what it’s worth, I’m under the impression that the translucence of the world can also be found in the Bezels of Wisdom of Ibn Arabi, in the Mountains and Rivers sutra of Dogen, in The Centuries of Thomas Traherne —

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.

To many of us it seems as though the world is speeding up. The notion is a hopeless paradox — and yet the acceleration itself is both evident and excessive. Both the acceleration and the paradox are solved only in contemplation..

[ by Charles Cameron — from a burial to Buddhism, just a skip and a jump away ]
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A sweet visual DoubleQuote I ran across today —

'Lovers of Valdaro'
Neolithic bodies of a man & a woman locked in an eternal embrace.
6,000 years old burialhttps://t.co/esSOkX6OdP #Italy pic.twitter.com/dSmSqIGEbY

— Ticia Verveer (@ticiaverveer) February 25, 2017

— shows on the right, the Lovers of Valdaro — a matched pair of skeletons of which Time wrote in 2011:

For 6,000 years, two young lovers have been locked in an eternal embrace, hidden from the eyes of the world. This past weekend, the Lovers of Valdaro — named for the little village near Mantua, in northern Italy, where they were first discovered — were seen by the public for the first time.

On the left, you have an artist’s representation of how they might have been embraced in death.

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All of which reminds me of Buddhist meditation on death, and of the dancing skeleton couple known collectively as Citipati:

By Wonderlane – https://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/3172647615/in/photostream/, CC BY 2.0, Link

Wiki tells us:

Citipati is a protector deity or supernatural being in Tibetan Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism of India. It is formed of two skeletal deities, one male and the other female, both dancing wildly with their limbs intertwined inside a halo of flames representing change. The Citipati is said to be one of the seventy-five forms of Mahakala. Their symbol is meant to represent both the eternal dance of death as well as perfect awareness. They are invoked as ‘wrathful deities’, benevolent protectors or fierce beings of demonic appearance. The dance of the Citipati is commemorated twice annually in Tibet.

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Considering two together as one is a recurring interest of mine, see also my posts on duel and duet — themselves a great pairing or dual — in Duel in slow time and more prosaically, Numbers by the numbers: two.

Also: Of dualities, contradictions and the nonduality.

[ by Charles Cameron — Netanyahu, Trump, and their interchangeable ambassadorships? — also fake news and truth ]
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Two versions of two serpents biting each others’ tails to form a loop

On the left, we have a western, alchemical version of the two-serpent ourobouros, and on the right an “Infinite Wealth Sacred Buang Nak Bat Amulet” from Thailand. The accompanying text on the Billionmore Rare Thai Buddhist amulets and Talismans site reads:

Naga is the great snake of wealth in Buddhist belief when two Naga connect into a circle, it means wealth will never end..

That’s right, infinite wealth is yours for only $26.90.

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In today’s New Yorker, we see the same secondary form of the ouroboros: two serpents, biting each others’ tails, to form a loop:

In recent years, ascendant political currents in America and Israel had already begun to merge. We have now reached the point where envoys from one country to the other could almost switch places: the Israeli Ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, who grew up in Florida, could just as easily be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, while Donald Trump’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, David Friedman, who has intimate ties to the Israeli settler movement, would make a fine Ambassador in Washington for the pro-settler government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

As you may know, I’m generally disinclined to support one side in a conflict when it appears to me that conflict itself is the basic conundrum we should be examining. Accordingly, it’s the form here — the two serpents, the two ambassadorships working together as an integrated system, that I’d call your attention to.

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While we’re on the subject of twin serpents…

Sometime back in the last century I suggested the utility of a Tarot-like pack of cards showing the great archetypal images that have populated the imaginations of so many cuotures across the globe and centuries.

Thus both the caduceus of western medicine and the kundalini of eastern yoga show twinned serpents spiraling up a central pole – and if Linus Pauling had seen that double serpent image when he was chasing the structure of DNA, he might have spent less time on the triple and more time on the double helix, and beaten Crick and Watson to the punch.

Left, an image of the kundalini; right, the caduceus or rod of Aesculapius — see also the two linked wikipedia pages for a flaw in this portion of my argument

A similar case can be made for Kekule’s realization that the form of the benzene molecule was a ring, supposedly triggered by a reverie of the ouroboros or serpent biting it’s tail.

diagram of ouroboros and benzene molecule from ChemDoodle

It’s worth noting, however, that this appears to be an old wives’ tale, perhaps fashioned by Kekule himself, as detailed by JH Wotiz and S Rudofsky in Kekulé’s dream: Fact or fiction?” Chemistry in Britain, 20, 720–723 (1954).

Now, are the debunking stories better stories than their respective archetypal insight stories? And what’s the truth in story, in any case? In the psyche, story and fact are both story, tiny molecular weavings of the imagination.

And how does this tie in with “news” — fake and true?

[ by Charles Cameron — or should that be Uber über alles?]
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Forget billboards — motorists now have ads buzzing a few feet above their windshields — MIT Technology Review

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There is an endless variety of possible starting points for a critique of oneself and the world. One might start from:

the message in a fortune cookie

whatever one’s parents imparted

whatever one rejected of what they imparted

Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates

a return to the Green Line

Palestine from the river to the sea

the sweet humility of the Magnificat

the fierce doctrine of Original Sin

the Cloud of Unknowing

the uncontaminated Unity of Godhead

the Buddha’s Noble Truth of suffering

the shining suchness of the Tathagata

something Karl Marx said, or Darwin

a tall tale from Chuang-Tzu

Lao Tzu’s unspeakable truth, unmappable path..

or the way someone reacted when one trod on their foot in the subway

Myself, I tend to go from either:

the Bene Gesserit adage, Fear is the mind-killer

or its obverse in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Yoga is the cessation of waves in the mind.

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Which brings me to advertising.

Yoga is the cessation of waves in the mind.

Advertising is the paid attempt to capture my attention regardless of my wishes in the matter.

In terms of the Yoga Sutras‘s goal of an unruffled mind, advertising attempts to stir up trouble — not in Syria or Afghanistan, or even in my kitchen, but within my consciousness.

And I’m not alone in detesting this invasive behavior. “Nearly 90% of people watching timeshifted shows fast-forward the ads,” the Guardian reported in a piece titled TV advertising skipped by 86% of viewers, and while Victoria may have a secret ingredient which makes her ads memorable — I’m referring here, of course, to a recent Nobel Prizewinner — most ads are simply irritants.

The benefit of advertising, to those whom it speaks, is that it acts as a road-sign to what we may want. It’s adverse effect is to clutter up our lives with road-signs to irrelevant and possibly offensive destinations. Apples don’t need little stickers on them proclaiming “apples by the Creator” but a discreet mention of “All purpose disinfecting cleaner by Bright Green” was quite helpful to me the other day, as I was wandering the aisles of Safeway in search of a brand they no longer carry..

And yes. Advertising drives sales drives manufacturing drives employment drives a roof over the head for many who might otherwise find themselves in the rain. Granted.

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But here come the mosquitoes.

The image at the head of this post comes from an article titled Uber’s Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic.

The unfortunate drivers in traffic jams in Mexico City are close to ground zero of an epidemic; Beelzebub, remember, is Lord of the Flies.

[ by Charles Cameron — a knockout triple DoubleQuote from Maidu country ]
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This:

reminds me of this:

but also of this:

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In fact, we have three potential DoubleQuotes here:

the stytlized figures in Neil Leifer‘s celebrated photo of Muhammad Ali evokes the stylized figures of Jeff King‘s sandpainting for the Navaho war ceremonial Where the Two Came to Their Father.

Jeff King‘s Navaho sandpaintings in turn easily summon memories of their Tibetan Buddhist equivalents, shown here in a photo of the Drepung Loseling monks.

And the symmetries of the overhead shot of Ali and that of the Drepung monks forms yet a third pair.

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Muhammad Ali at one point wanted “his people” to return to Africa, away from the deadly white man, and no doubt it has occurred to some Navajo from time to time to wish the white man would return to Europe — while Puebloans may on occasions have wished the Navajo had remained with their Athabaskan kin in Canada..

But then, I’m Scots by heritage, British by subsequent conquest, and have invaded the United States myself in person, with a view to finding what American poet Gary Snyder calls “a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at” here in California.

In what I understand to have been Nisenan Maidu country.