● A hunch had got me toying with the internet, and I found this:
In the Bible, Isaiah 43:1, God says:
"I have called you by your name; you are mine."
Maybe this could be seen in parallel to "Love calls you by your name".
(Some say that God is Love...)
The incongruous places are necessary in order for love (to try) to catch us off-guard.
If we were more open-minded, maybe it could reach us the normal way.
The non-existing no-man's-land is a kind of heliport for a fifth dimension, after three spatial dimensions and passing time. It is a second dimension of time, at right angles to the dimension of passing time, as it were; and it is commonly named "eternity". And just as "breadth" uses up zero "length" or "height", eternity "uses up" zero passing time.
And of course in reality, dimensions are not mutually exclusive. A thing can easily have length and breadth and height at the same time. In reality, "eternity" is everywhere in our ordinary daily life.
In reality, love calls us by our name all the time — but only rarely does it find the incongruous corkscrew to unplug our ears...
● The fingernails, especially of the plucking hand, can be an important factor for a guitar player become a singer-songwriter in order to seduce women.
The women in your scrapbook
whom you still praise and blame,
you say they chained you to your fingernails
and you climb the halls of fame.
Some use artificial fingernails:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificia ... ical_usage
●
Now for the main subject of this post:
vlcoats wrote: I do have a question though about what you said here
Jean Fournell wrote:
The impermanence of the centaur.
What does that mean? I know equines through history have allowed man to be transient and therefore not permanent, but I am sure that you are talking about something else.
Yes Vickie, I am. What I said is:
Jean Fournell wrote: ... with horses this human characteristic shows.
Because horses can't complain.
Now the clasp of this union
who fastens it tight?
Who snaps it asunder
the very next night
Some say the rider
Some say the mare
The impermanence of the centaur.
(And yet, for 6000 years horses were a precondition for the development that turned out to be ours...)
In the "Ballad of the Absent Mare", this is preceded by
And they turn as one
and they head for the plain
No need for the whip
Ah, no need for the rein
The impermanence of this centaur, of this "as one" ("Who snaps it [= the clasp of this union] asunder / the very next night")
on the surface level refers to a) our urge to dominate others (sentient as well as non-sentient beings). This urge is a major part of our human psyche and pops up whenever it will ("Some say the rider").
And it refers to b) the fact that horses don't have two options (flight and, if it is too late, fight for survival), but only one option: flight.
(Donkeys can fight, which allows them to "stand their ground", and so can dogs, cats, cows, chicken, humans...)
Therefore horses are lost (killed) if they miss the moment to run; and so they sometimes react in a fashion that's surprisingly different from what we'd expect ("Some say the mare").
The image of the centaur is the idea of oneness with the horse, when for mysterious reasons the above two difficulties are absent ("Now the clasp of this union / who fastens it tight?") — or at least reduced to such a point that they are not too much of a nuisance anymore.
But of course there is a lot more to the whole thing than this surface level. These last 6000 years since the domestication of horse and donkey have brought about the wheel, metalwork, writing, towns, and quite a few more inventions — the basics of Afro-Eurasian culture (the American and Australian cultures developed without the horse and without the wheel).
The underlying question of oneness with the horse, oneness with Nature, oneness with God is a pretty important spiritual question:
In the Ox-herding version quoted in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Bulls, the eighth picture is the Empty Circle, the circle around Yin and Yang, transcending both of them like the 24-hour day transcends night and day. If this circle is empty now, it becomes pure (and purely theoretical), like the 24-hour day without day and night in it.
Purity and theory have something dreadfully incomplete about them.
Their hall-mark is self-reflexivity, sainthood, being judge and party at the same time. Depending on the individual case, this might be a very salutary illusion — but an illusion.
The tenth Ox-herding picture, in the same version, on the contrary shows a ragged, dusty beggar, using no magic (It's over now, the water and the wine — "Treaty") who has returned to society's vanity fair, his empty hands full of gifts. Right into the world of duality; a bodhisattva, or messiah.
(The most famous among them, Jesus, is considered as fully enlightened (God), and yet incarnate as a helpless baby, in practice needing very impure diapers.)
There is no self-reflexivity left here. The bodhisattva is nothing. Not without the others.
Or as Eihei Dogen (1200-1253) has it:
To practice seated meditation (zazen) is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be certified by all existences in the cosmos.
As long as we feel "as one" with the horse (or with the world, or with God), as long as we think "this is the centaur" (or "this is the mystic union"), we are in the world of illusion. When we are really one with the horse, there is nobody left to think such stuff.
It's not that we are not allowed to be both judge and party (as would be the case in a legal context) — here we cannot, it's technically impossible: in order to be able to say "this is one", there must be the observer and the observed, as Krishnamurti would put it. And that makes it two of them.
When there is a centaur, I'm not aware of it, and therefore it's incomplete.
When I become aware of it, we are two, and it's not a centaur anymore.
Impermanence.
That's why it's only others that can certify us, and it's only we that can certify others.
(If I didn't have your love / To make it real)
The name for this is "interdependence".
The question deals with the dialectics of dvaita and advaita (duality and non-duality; or dualism and non-dualism):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvaita_Vedanta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
(No need to read all those things...)
This is the stuff Leonard Cohen studied with Ramesh Balsekar.
There is, and must be, an oscillation one-two-one-two...
We can't block the world in either state, however much we'd like to:
We find ourselves on different sides
Of a line that nobody drew
That's not necessarily two different persons on two different sides — it may well be one person in two different states.
Duality and non-duality are like Yin and Yang: mutually exclusive and yet one inside the other.
And since all this stuff is desperately complicated, and becomes ever more complicated the more we think about it (the world of illusion — going on and on and on):
"just let it go by"
●
A basic human question, and a poor attempt of mine at answering.
Thanks for asking.