Solarpunk Mysticism...
Solarpunk art and music.
Solarpunk imagineering and publishing.
And now solarpunk mysticism?
Solarpunk-anything is an up-hill hike: a hope-filled climb: a movement in speculative fiction, art, fasion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question "what does a sustainable and regenerative civilization look like, and how can we get there". Also, deep in the working vision of "solarpunk", is the necessity of a "solarpunk mysticism"...
Religions are one big-too-often-ugly-mess! Used by too many sneaky individuals and groups to get some small quarter of privilege and power, religions have become the particular haven of mad-hatters all topping their noggins with some symbol or other of "I got it! And, most likely, you don't!" The difference between a street-corner preacher in America assuring every passer-by that if they don't claim Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior then hell is their eternal destiny, and that of the Taliban or terrorist who just up and shoots you to send you to hell today -- instead of "God" sending you tomorrow: it is a difference only of degree: they both represent the hidden essence of religion: love is really just a bad joke on us. And a joke without end... how do you like that?
And yet... and yet... There has always been -- and there continues to be -- an underground collective of spiritual adventurers: contemplatives everywhere, and activists invisible... sort of like Yeshua the Peasant-Worker-Poet of Nazareth: do you think fame of any sort would have gotten attached to his name if not for the mad-hatters who saw an opportunity and went with it? Paul stole (?) a few mystic hymns, wrote a convenient backstory of visions and elections, and a new religion was born that suddenly transformed the transformer from a wine-maker (perhaps at his own wedding) and story-teller (who preferred the company of prostitutes and sinners to that of the going-thing of local mad-hatters) into Christ the Judge: who would dutifully save -- if you professed the right thinking required by the new mad-hatters. And, wah-lah, Cosmic had a new definition and revelation -- even if only resurrected from nearly identical earlier stories... And yet the people still prayed...
Sitting in the silence, the people prayed and tried to remember: sacred is as sacred does: do unto others as you would have them do unto you: rEvolution in every way is possible! "I see you. I care that you are breathing. Tell me how you suffer. I will help you carry your burdens even as you help with mine. I will not harm you." This is not religion, rather, this is Universal Wisdom (and Simple Humanity): simple! Clear! The Way... Solarpunk mysticism loose upon the world: sneaky with a different kind of sneak than that of the mad-hatters: this is prayer: "I am You, You are Me, and We are All Together: One"... this is the contemplative silence extending from womb to vagina to penis to orgasm to hands in mutual aid to home to family to neighbors to economy to a human structure to power to solidarity to reverence for Earth to abiding in peace, justice, and harmony for the children, for every child, looking at least seven generations into the future... This is the space holding the abiding presence of the Tao, of the Cosmic Mystery, of Yeshua, of the Buddha...
Who else is in this "underground collective" of solarpunk mysticism? Certainly Rumi... a mad-hatter himself at one point in time: cut loose by a dervish crazed with the rock and roll possibilities of Spirit Unleashed from our dominator paradigm... Weeks and then months of a mystic-drunkenness, and the New Man who emerged from the Sufi Womb was something-someone entirely different: a Lover set free to manifest Only One / One Love... And when the Crazed Dervish flew into the Abyss of One again, the Lover who was Rumi became the Moon to his Sun and through poetry reflected the ease of surrender and delight of remembrance: "We were created by Love, for Love, to become Love" (as Simone Weil would summarize the solarpunk-insight centuries later)... This is the collective that includes -- is actually led by the millions of women who have been (and are still) oppressed, exploited, and killed by the mad-hatters (now for thousands of years) -- and people such as Sappho, Socrates, Siddhartha, Pythagoras, Lao Tzu, Plotinus, Mary called the Magdalene, Hildegard, Francis and Clare, Hafiz, Mirabai, Bruno, Teresa of Avila, Dante, Spinoza, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman, Black Elk, John Muir, Ramakrishna, Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs, Simone Weil, Gandhi, Arne Naess, Abraham Heschel, King, Merton, Alan Watts, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Bede Griffiths, John Trudell, Ram Dass... and continuing with folks like Riane Eisler, Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Evo Morales, Arundhati Roy, Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, bell hooks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Naomi Klein, Adam Bucko, and Winona LaDuke, ... and certainly millions of others, and, well, you get the point: there really are no limitations to the possibilities of Love Unleashed...
Solarpunk mysticism is deep grunge: and perhaps you thought (if you thought about grunge at all) it was all about deviants in Seattle and maybe Santa Cruz and a wild rock and roll. But it isn't bohemian clothing, flannel layered shirts, holes in one's jeans, and a scream in the darkness (although that could be very helpful!): it is, instead, a thing of the soul: leaves turn brown to completely rot: and the rot is the very life of the soil: and one might just as well say "the very life of the soul". Solarpunk mysticism... deep grunge... it is all that rips open our every wound and lets it bleed: it is all that cracks and finally breaks open our hearts to leak out all over the place: it is Yeshua kneeling and scratching with a stick onto the barren earth the previously unmentionable sins of all the men who intended to stone a woman to death: supposedly for adultery, but perhaps for the simple temerity of practicing her sexual freedom: perhaps she had been touched by Love-Out-Of-Bounds (the Real Big Bang of the Universe): and perhaps, too, she was already a secret follower of the Way of the Master: a solarpunk soul whose Love had already healed her... "Kneeling and scratching onto the barren earth": the Way of Yeshua is exactly that: nothing very big and certainly nothing that requires the "services" of a mad-hatter... Do any of us need permission to Love? To write a poem? To become a living poem? To compose a song? To make our life a song? To cook a big pot of soup for the hungry and to simply share without expecting anything in return? To make soil? To build healthy habitats for humans and every creature? Oh, some will think so and try to corner your heart with restrictions and impositions... Some will even outlaw the giving away of your own sandwich to someone who is hungry: so what is one to do?
Functionaries and mad-hatters alike are only as smart as their next pay-off: so out-think them and then out-organize them! This has always been true -- why should it be any different for you? If big business says they don't want your music, what do you do? Do you stop singing? Are you really going to obey someone's crap? If big religion says you were born in sin and are probably destined for hell -- unless you sign up and pay-up -- what do you do? Well, of course you bless them as you walk out the door! If big-right says "No" to LGBT equality, to climate responsibility, women's rights, science education, genuine history and multi-cultural studies, and instead offers the wicked blessing of greed, oppression, and exploitation, what do you do? Not vote? Play dead? Drink a six-pack? Fuck it all? Or do you fight like hell for all the living and for the future? Solarpunk mysticism is the activated conscience and consciousness that refuses every excuse for either laziness or cowardice: we are here! We are here! We are here! And so we stand!
Here's the next big thing about solarpunk mysticism: not one teeny iota of it is about you! So we are invited to go from "I am the center of my Universe" to Walt Whitman's "I contain multitudes". In other words, while this is not at all about you -- as in your single "I" -- it is all-together about being so thoroughly broken open and apart that your heart now has room enough for everyone: when you are only about you, there isn't enough room in your heart for anyone but you: you fill up to overflowing every possible space... but when that "person" ceases to exist, once again wah-lah, "I am You, You are Me, and We are All Together: One": in becoming "the last place, you become, gracefully, a Magical Mystery Container for Everyone: solarpunk mysticism is the living experience of the at-one-ment: not as an historical event of some distant past, but as the essential continuing dynamism that is the very nature of Being and the Universe... "Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone." (Tomas Transtromer). The secret is to figure out how to throw open your door all the way... and then to not close it again...
So now we really begin: how to throw open the door to your expanding heart and consciousness -- and to not close it again? Perhaps a useful analogy would be sex: it is likely that most people go from masturbation to fucking: it is also likely that few people thereafter entertain any thought about going from fucking to ecstatic oneness (not to be confused with orgasm)... A necessary by-product of the Sacred Pleasure of intercourse is reproduction: vital for the perpetuation of the species: but intercourse is really so much more: it is an invitation to the next phase of human evolution: the dissolving of the little "I" and the merging of that which remains "of us" with the One Love -- or -- Quantum Consciousness... sort of like the caterpillar entering the cocoon: as the caterpillar dissolves into mush, "imaginal cells" trigger a wondrous transformation: caterpillar mush becomes a butterfly (but only after the caterpillar accepts the annihilation of its little "I")... On the evolutionary ladder, a human being is likely a tad bit higher than that of a caterpillar: but this is the thing we are meant to notice: if that little being can be transformed from caterpillar-to-mush-to-butterfly, what might we be transformed into? This question only takes us to the edge of Sacred Imagination... By means of Sacred Pleasure, we are meant to entertain the Magical-Mystery of Oneness: this is our foot in the door...
Once upon a time, there was a monk who was exceedingly faithful in his daily prayers, in his every monastic assignment, in his recitation of the Divine Office, in his transformation of his little cell into a Divine Womb... and yet, after years and years, he still remained "on the outside-looking-in"... Summoning his courage along with his doubts, he went to the cell of his old -- exceedingly old -- Father Abbot. He was graciously welcomed by Father Abbot. To him he said, "Father, for years I have kept our Rule, I have said my prayers, I have attended to the Divine Office, and never with the slightest complaint have I succeeded in all of my assignments and my chores: I feel as lost as on the day that I arrived. Father, what else must I do?" Father Abbot looked serenely upon his beloved "younger brother" and felt great pity for him, so he slowly stood, stretched out his arms toward the ceiling of his cell, opened his hands, and said, "Why not be changed into Fire?" This is the decision to enter the Room of Our Requirement... and to stay... Contemplative prayer is the heart and soul of accessing the full mystery of solarpunk mysticism: sure, by now you feed the hungry and organize for justice, you are tender with your children and with all children, you are advancing into a life-style of increasing harmlessness, you revere the mystery of Sacred Pleasure and practice sincerely... and you meditate, dig deep into soil-soul and regeneration, practice yoga, and kriya daily: So, "What else must I do?"
Yeshua-Tao--Buddha: the Mystic Master of Invention: solarpunk mysticism all the way down into the volcanic core of atoms afire: "You are to love the One with all your mind, with all your heart, and with all your strength: and every single fucking one of your brothers and sisters as your very Self!" Right there. Fire is finally free to rage: to burn you and everything and everyone to a crisp. The burn of Love's hand is Yeshua-Tao-Buddha, too, aflame: in Your Sacred Heart: in Your one, incredibly, beautiful, precious life: by the Living Flame of Love issuing forth from Your burning hands and heart: You are continuing and containing the Christed-Buddha- Event-In-The-Face-Before-You-Were-Born: You are the rEvolution, You are the Transformation: You are the New Woman-Man who was born expressly to redeem the world by Your Love, by Your holy holy, Love without limits and without end: for in You, everyone will finally receive the blessing and justice of "Welcome Home!": and with it even tattooed on Your heart... Your very blood will carry the tattoo of Quantum Consciousness!
Solarpunk Mysticism.
Indie Grace.
New Monasticism.
Whatever you want to call it.
But one thing is certain: through and through, this is the Swinging Door to the Kingdom of Heaven within and without: the Promised Land already exists in the solarpunk imagination: now, we make it happen!
Solarpunk imagineering and publishing.
And now solarpunk mysticism?
Solarpunk-anything is an up-hill hike: a hope-filled climb: a movement in speculative fiction, art, fasion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question "what does a sustainable and regenerative civilization look like, and how can we get there". Also, deep in the working vision of "solarpunk", is the necessity of a "solarpunk mysticism"...
Religions are one big-too-often-ugly-mess! Used by too many sneaky individuals and groups to get some small quarter of privilege and power, religions have become the particular haven of mad-hatters all topping their noggins with some symbol or other of "I got it! And, most likely, you don't!" The difference between a street-corner preacher in America assuring every passer-by that if they don't claim Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior then hell is their eternal destiny, and that of the Taliban or terrorist who just up and shoots you to send you to hell today -- instead of "God" sending you tomorrow: it is a difference only of degree: they both represent the hidden essence of religion: love is really just a bad joke on us. And a joke without end... how do you like that?
And yet... and yet... There has always been -- and there continues to be -- an underground collective of spiritual adventurers: contemplatives everywhere, and activists invisible... sort of like Yeshua the Peasant-Worker-Poet of Nazareth: do you think fame of any sort would have gotten attached to his name if not for the mad-hatters who saw an opportunity and went with it? Paul stole (?) a few mystic hymns, wrote a convenient backstory of visions and elections, and a new religion was born that suddenly transformed the transformer from a wine-maker (perhaps at his own wedding) and story-teller (who preferred the company of prostitutes and sinners to that of the going-thing of local mad-hatters) into Christ the Judge: who would dutifully save -- if you professed the right thinking required by the new mad-hatters. And, wah-lah, Cosmic had a new definition and revelation -- even if only resurrected from nearly identical earlier stories... And yet the people still prayed...
Sitting in the silence, the people prayed and tried to remember: sacred is as sacred does: do unto others as you would have them do unto you: rEvolution in every way is possible! "I see you. I care that you are breathing. Tell me how you suffer. I will help you carry your burdens even as you help with mine. I will not harm you." This is not religion, rather, this is Universal Wisdom (and Simple Humanity): simple! Clear! The Way... Solarpunk mysticism loose upon the world: sneaky with a different kind of sneak than that of the mad-hatters: this is prayer: "I am You, You are Me, and We are All Together: One"... this is the contemplative silence extending from womb to vagina to penis to orgasm to hands in mutual aid to home to family to neighbors to economy to a human structure to power to solidarity to reverence for Earth to abiding in peace, justice, and harmony for the children, for every child, looking at least seven generations into the future... This is the space holding the abiding presence of the Tao, of the Cosmic Mystery, of Yeshua, of the Buddha...
Who else is in this "underground collective" of solarpunk mysticism? Certainly Rumi... a mad-hatter himself at one point in time: cut loose by a dervish crazed with the rock and roll possibilities of Spirit Unleashed from our dominator paradigm... Weeks and then months of a mystic-drunkenness, and the New Man who emerged from the Sufi Womb was something-someone entirely different: a Lover set free to manifest Only One / One Love... And when the Crazed Dervish flew into the Abyss of One again, the Lover who was Rumi became the Moon to his Sun and through poetry reflected the ease of surrender and delight of remembrance: "We were created by Love, for Love, to become Love" (as Simone Weil would summarize the solarpunk-insight centuries later)... This is the collective that includes -- is actually led by the millions of women who have been (and are still) oppressed, exploited, and killed by the mad-hatters (now for thousands of years) -- and people such as Sappho, Socrates, Siddhartha, Pythagoras, Lao Tzu, Plotinus, Mary called the Magdalene, Hildegard, Francis and Clare, Hafiz, Mirabai, Bruno, Teresa of Avila, Dante, Spinoza, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman, Black Elk, John Muir, Ramakrishna, Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs, Simone Weil, Gandhi, Arne Naess, Abraham Heschel, King, Merton, Alan Watts, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Bede Griffiths, John Trudell, Ram Dass... and continuing with folks like Riane Eisler, Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Evo Morales, Arundhati Roy, Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, bell hooks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Naomi Klein, Adam Bucko, and Winona LaDuke, ... and certainly millions of others, and, well, you get the point: there really are no limitations to the possibilities of Love Unleashed...
Solarpunk mysticism is deep grunge: and perhaps you thought (if you thought about grunge at all) it was all about deviants in Seattle and maybe Santa Cruz and a wild rock and roll. But it isn't bohemian clothing, flannel layered shirts, holes in one's jeans, and a scream in the darkness (although that could be very helpful!): it is, instead, a thing of the soul: leaves turn brown to completely rot: and the rot is the very life of the soil: and one might just as well say "the very life of the soul". Solarpunk mysticism... deep grunge... it is all that rips open our every wound and lets it bleed: it is all that cracks and finally breaks open our hearts to leak out all over the place: it is Yeshua kneeling and scratching with a stick onto the barren earth the previously unmentionable sins of all the men who intended to stone a woman to death: supposedly for adultery, but perhaps for the simple temerity of practicing her sexual freedom: perhaps she had been touched by Love-Out-Of-Bounds (the Real Big Bang of the Universe): and perhaps, too, she was already a secret follower of the Way of the Master: a solarpunk soul whose Love had already healed her... "Kneeling and scratching onto the barren earth": the Way of Yeshua is exactly that: nothing very big and certainly nothing that requires the "services" of a mad-hatter... Do any of us need permission to Love? To write a poem? To become a living poem? To compose a song? To make our life a song? To cook a big pot of soup for the hungry and to simply share without expecting anything in return? To make soil? To build healthy habitats for humans and every creature? Oh, some will think so and try to corner your heart with restrictions and impositions... Some will even outlaw the giving away of your own sandwich to someone who is hungry: so what is one to do?
Functionaries and mad-hatters alike are only as smart as their next pay-off: so out-think them and then out-organize them! This has always been true -- why should it be any different for you? If big business says they don't want your music, what do you do? Do you stop singing? Are you really going to obey someone's crap? If big religion says you were born in sin and are probably destined for hell -- unless you sign up and pay-up -- what do you do? Well, of course you bless them as you walk out the door! If big-right says "No" to LGBT equality, to climate responsibility, women's rights, science education, genuine history and multi-cultural studies, and instead offers the wicked blessing of greed, oppression, and exploitation, what do you do? Not vote? Play dead? Drink a six-pack? Fuck it all? Or do you fight like hell for all the living and for the future? Solarpunk mysticism is the activated conscience and consciousness that refuses every excuse for either laziness or cowardice: we are here! We are here! We are here! And so we stand!
Here's the next big thing about solarpunk mysticism: not one teeny iota of it is about you! So we are invited to go from "I am the center of my Universe" to Walt Whitman's "I contain multitudes". In other words, while this is not at all about you -- as in your single "I" -- it is all-together about being so thoroughly broken open and apart that your heart now has room enough for everyone: when you are only about you, there isn't enough room in your heart for anyone but you: you fill up to overflowing every possible space... but when that "person" ceases to exist, once again wah-lah, "I am You, You are Me, and We are All Together: One": in becoming "the last place, you become, gracefully, a Magical Mystery Container for Everyone: solarpunk mysticism is the living experience of the at-one-ment: not as an historical event of some distant past, but as the essential continuing dynamism that is the very nature of Being and the Universe... "Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone." (Tomas Transtromer). The secret is to figure out how to throw open your door all the way... and then to not close it again...
So now we really begin: how to throw open the door to your expanding heart and consciousness -- and to not close it again? Perhaps a useful analogy would be sex: it is likely that most people go from masturbation to fucking: it is also likely that few people thereafter entertain any thought about going from fucking to ecstatic oneness (not to be confused with orgasm)... A necessary by-product of the Sacred Pleasure of intercourse is reproduction: vital for the perpetuation of the species: but intercourse is really so much more: it is an invitation to the next phase of human evolution: the dissolving of the little "I" and the merging of that which remains "of us" with the One Love -- or -- Quantum Consciousness... sort of like the caterpillar entering the cocoon: as the caterpillar dissolves into mush, "imaginal cells" trigger a wondrous transformation: caterpillar mush becomes a butterfly (but only after the caterpillar accepts the annihilation of its little "I")... On the evolutionary ladder, a human being is likely a tad bit higher than that of a caterpillar: but this is the thing we are meant to notice: if that little being can be transformed from caterpillar-to-mush-to-butterfly, what might we be transformed into? This question only takes us to the edge of Sacred Imagination... By means of Sacred Pleasure, we are meant to entertain the Magical-Mystery of Oneness: this is our foot in the door...
Once upon a time, there was a monk who was exceedingly faithful in his daily prayers, in his every monastic assignment, in his recitation of the Divine Office, in his transformation of his little cell into a Divine Womb... and yet, after years and years, he still remained "on the outside-looking-in"... Summoning his courage along with his doubts, he went to the cell of his old -- exceedingly old -- Father Abbot. He was graciously welcomed by Father Abbot. To him he said, "Father, for years I have kept our Rule, I have said my prayers, I have attended to the Divine Office, and never with the slightest complaint have I succeeded in all of my assignments and my chores: I feel as lost as on the day that I arrived. Father, what else must I do?" Father Abbot looked serenely upon his beloved "younger brother" and felt great pity for him, so he slowly stood, stretched out his arms toward the ceiling of his cell, opened his hands, and said, "Why not be changed into Fire?" This is the decision to enter the Room of Our Requirement... and to stay... Contemplative prayer is the heart and soul of accessing the full mystery of solarpunk mysticism: sure, by now you feed the hungry and organize for justice, you are tender with your children and with all children, you are advancing into a life-style of increasing harmlessness, you revere the mystery of Sacred Pleasure and practice sincerely... and you meditate, dig deep into soil-soul and regeneration, practice yoga, and kriya daily: So, "What else must I do?"
Yeshua-Tao--Buddha: the Mystic Master of Invention: solarpunk mysticism all the way down into the volcanic core of atoms afire: "You are to love the One with all your mind, with all your heart, and with all your strength: and every single fucking one of your brothers and sisters as your very Self!" Right there. Fire is finally free to rage: to burn you and everything and everyone to a crisp. The burn of Love's hand is Yeshua-Tao-Buddha, too, aflame: in Your Sacred Heart: in Your one, incredibly, beautiful, precious life: by the Living Flame of Love issuing forth from Your burning hands and heart: You are continuing and containing the Christed-Buddha- Event-In-The-Face-Before-You-Were-Born: You are the rEvolution, You are the Transformation: You are the New Woman-Man who was born expressly to redeem the world by Your Love, by Your holy holy, Love without limits and without end: for in You, everyone will finally receive the blessing and justice of "Welcome Home!": and with it even tattooed on Your heart... Your very blood will carry the tattoo of Quantum Consciousness!
Solarpunk Mysticism.
Indie Grace.
New Monasticism.
Whatever you want to call it.
But one thing is certain: through and through, this is the Swinging Door to the Kingdom of Heaven within and without: the Promised Land already exists in the solarpunk imagination: now, we make it happen!
Solarpunkers from the 1960's... Cesar Chavez and Robert F. Kennedy and Friends