The changing winds in my native Bay Area have caused me to take notice of the moment lately. A gust of cold or warm air curves it's way to my chest, and I look up to the sky. The buzzing of endless tasks and changing places cease and their memories fold into little cartoon episodes of newsprint in my pocket. I feel within and talk not TO someone, not even to myself, I just speak."I'm alive." ... "There is so much out there." ...
The moment is happening...and it continues to happen...how long I can stick with it...it gets more interesting...and more...more so...my hands, the ground, the cracks in the cement stone planter benches...and I am thinking...using words...they have meaning...they are sounds but not even yet, only in my head...I have a head...a life...and here I am...not talking directly with my words...as no one is talking with words directly to me...but I'm listening...and I feel...click in to the moment again...and it is rising...so much bigger than me...and it is talking to me...with things so much bigger than words...with the very fabric...with the.........what is this?.... but I don't bother with that...only respect...and lean my awareness forward...
I used to have moments sort of like this quite often in my early 20s. I called them "fringe moments," moments when I felt as if I was sitting on the edge of awareness, existence, all the things that made up perception, and that I could see that there was a unfathomably huge thing just right there. Death, I guess it was, or what we call death in our quotidian minds, the everything else, and I knew so much that I wasn't dead. I felt appreciative that I was alive, that I was privy to this viewpoint, that I was even a part of all the grand, laborious design that made up everything that I was and was around me. Even in the small details of my immediate field of vision, it was all a reference to the endless complexity, vastness and magical dynamism that is always present, ever-present, even more than the present could ever be.
But it is all the present. "The ever-expanding present" as I recall reading in channelled books of different sources. Pleidian information I suppose, but the idea that I even considered words printed on a paper page to be vital living lightning streaks of a cosmic source speaks to the frame of mind that I was in those days. I'm still there in many ways, though my appearance and behavior has changed. That's why it was so notable to have a fringe experience again, recalled to my attention by changing gusts of chilly winds.
I identified the feeling of that moment with a term I remember from another personally sacred text from my budding adulthood. The word is Drala and it was introduced to me by Chogyam Trungpa in the book Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior. It is a curiosity at the freshness of experience, the idea that anything dirty can be made clean again, it is the elemental force, as it moves through everything with an active character. Trungpa was a Tibetan Buddhist, and his descriptions, for me, blew away any idea of a stale and boring "Zen" concept of stillness and stable perfection. It, along with his elaboration on "the path of the warrior," bridged the gap between my concepts of Zen and Jedi warriors using "the force" on tv screens and in my childhood playgrounds.
Here is a quote on the Drala principle by Bill Scheffel from The Western Mountain Project (http://westernmountain.org/dralaprinciple.html)
"In the drala teachings, each of the senses is considered an “unlimited field of perception” in which there are sights, sounds and feelings “we have never experienced before” – no one has ever experienced! Each sense moment, if we are present for it, is a gate into the elemental wisdom of the world, even a cold sip of coffee could ignite the experience of Yeats: “While on the shop and street I gazed / My body of a sudden blazed.” Every perception is a pure perception; from the feel of a meager pebble stuck in our shoe to the meow of a house cat. Through this kind of perception we discover that we live in a vast, singular and unexplored world."
I like that this randomly-searched-for quote used a W.B. Yeats poem to illustrate the author's point:) A small synchronicity if you check my second-to-last blogpost. Another quick synchronicity from the drala quote is something I did not include, which is an illustration of the author's friend walking out among the snow, hills and trees. She had a "fringe experience" out among the natural wonder, and she realized there was something she felt inclined and even responsible for observing and following. She felt drala all around. The synchronistic aspect of this is that when I first penned the word "crystacular," I was writing in my journal about a pristine vista I had seen in a dream, a view down upon a snow-covered village from the side of a surrounding hill, complete with snow-touched pine trees and sparkling white snow crystals from all around. In a word, I called it crystacular, crystal-clear and spectacular, a natural hologram of dralic magic and aesthetic beauty hinting at eternity.
I share all this with you for the small personal reasons most people wax philosophical and autobiographical on blogs all over the net, but for not small reasons only. I am, post by post, expanding on an aesthetic theory that I have reached over the years which I call Crystacular. It is aesthetic, but I seek to take aesthetics out the cloistered walls of the lab, to include all the natural and time-less phenomena in which we live. There are so many things to consider in this world, but, as I was reminded by the wind, and as I have found articulated by Bill Scheffel...
"We have failed to see our first responsibility to the world is an aesthetic one."
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