The Widening Gyre and Points South.

Yeat’s poem is prophetic because it deals with eternal verities as they express themselves in the human experience. Things go out of balance because of the drive of desire to manufacture circumstances that allow us to exercise our ambitions and appetites. Look at the world around you and you can see what I mean. Of course it does little good to talk about this because comprehending it is an interference in the “I did it MY WAY.” scheme of things. People get angry about that. They will kill to protect it. Spiritual texts are full of examples by way of analogy, whether or not they happened as described originally.

Real balance occurs when your internal fire burns at a consistent level. You can get there through certain practices; if that’s where you want to go. You can get there by a life-shaking lesson. You can get there by the grace of God, although this often seems to adhere to certain laws regarding previous conduct. You can get there by aspiration but that can be a more difficult route as aspiration can perform as a bellows. Unqualified Love would necessarily need to evolve out of the passion.

We live with our smaller bodies inside a larger body. In our smaller bodies we have locations that mirror external locations in the larger body. Specific passions have large centers where they are exercised. Every city has an area where certain things go on. These days such events aren’t so localized. People do what they want wherever they are. They want to be ‘free’ you see. They’ve been told everything is okay if you don’t hurt anyone else. It’s even okay if you hurt someone else if they ask you to and you don’t do it in the park or on the sidewalk. Not much is said about whether it is okay if you hurt yourself, or whether when you hurt yourself you are hurting others.

In America there are cities where specific behavior is more generally permitted than in other places; Las Vegas comes to mind, as does New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale and San Francisco. The reason these things are permitted there is either because it set itself up for the revenue such behavior provides or because it was but specifically for that purpose. For those experiencing the high ride of a particular lifetime, these locations can provide a bewildering collection of possibilities for enjoyment of a sort. For those who are not experiencing the high ride at this time, well, they’re working their way there.

When things go out of balance, as they certainly will, due to the propensity I mentioned earlier, certain conditions begin to materialize. There is a strange myopia that attends this imbalance that militates against it being perceived. The more the imbalance expands, the greater the myopia becomes. Other reasons for events are given because, after all, we are not about to compromise our ambitions or our appetites.

I liken this condition of myopia to the progressive stages of an alcoholic’s denial. In the beginning stages of alcoholism there comes a night or an afternoon where one finds themselves doing, or having done something surprisingly out of character. It is dismissed as an anomaly. Eventually it becomes a routine occurrence and then something new, something that never happened before happens… and it too becomes routine. You can think of it as like the water swirling in a toilet bowl. At the beginning of the flush the water is at the top of the bowl and then it descends ever downward until it disappears down the drain.

All through this process the alcoholic sees forces other than the act of drinking as being responsible. If it weren’t that these things were happening the alcoholic wouldn’t even be drinking; so he tells himself and so he tells you. This can be extended into the lifestyles of those who increase their flesh barrier through food out of the fear of the vulnerability of Love. It happens in one way or another in every pattern of excess. Rationalization and justification become an art-form in the dark realms of human cunning. The Imagination is made a whore to the exercise of the appetites in the mind and following, in the body.

The simple procedure of casting out thought as it arrives in your mind can have a great benefit on ones control of insane behavior but then; where does that leave you? That’s no fun. You can think of fun as conditioned taste buds. Processed food manufacturers understand ‘conditioned taste buds’ very well. It takes about two weeks to recondition your taste buds and varying degrees of time to recondition other taste buds; but who has that kind of time?

As is usually the case with me I am talking all around something and expecting you to gather my point by walking through the landscape. Actually, I can’t do it any other way, any other way winds up looking like preaching or admonishing or… something.

This imbalance is getting very wide. It is stretching like a rubber band will and there are a lot of lessons in the physics of rubber band behavior which you can investigate on your own. One of the things that happens with imbalance is that your reflection in the mirror of nature becomes increasingly distorted; like a funhouse mirror. Events in nature and in nations are mirroring the distress of the collective mind. In politics the reaction is to attempt to exercise greater control over life and you get some of what you’ve got right now. In Nature the reaction is to throw-up. All of this is an outworking of a fundamental law in the universe which always strives for balance. Take a walk outside one night and looks at the heavens; if you can see them. That’s no so easy in a lot of places these days.

It really is something the way the hurricane took out such a large portion of America’s domestic oil production. It is very ironic when you think about the war in Iraq whose real intention was control of one of the largest oil reserves. Somebody in the life drama department has a real sense of humor.

The interesting thing is that everyone in the path of the hurricane had ample warning. Oh, rationalizations are given about how many people were too poor to leave. I do imagine I would have found a way myself. It makes me think of Nazi Germany where another hurricane formed. You could see this hurricane forming far, far off. There was much, much more time to analyze the situation but… people stayed. They stayed for all kinds of reasons, all of them having to do with material concerns aided and abetted by the fears that always attend such concerns. It is very interesting how we can now see very similar features forming but, as Frank Zappa noted, “they said it couldn’t happen here.”

The good news is that balance will be restored. The bad news is the process by which balance gets restored. Even worse news is the idea that anything that got tossed in the operation should be rebuilt to the same specifications only with more and better enhancements. It’s a kind of act of defiance like, “You can’t keep me down.”

I had a dear friend, now dead. While he was dying I stayed with him and got to watch some strange behavior. My friend was dying of AIDS and after awhile it affected his throat and his ability to swallow. He had stopped smoking- though that wasn’t a feature in his acquisition of the disease or its permutations. He had a hole cut in his throat so that he could breathe and he lost his ability to speak. He began to smoke through the hole in his throat and to insist on eating big gummy pizzas because; dammit, if he couldn’t live the way he wanted to he didn’t want to live at all. Surely he would have died anyway but that’s not the point of the example.

Today you see all sorts of explanations for everything that happens. None of these explanations address the causal root; they all address the symptoms and how to get around changing in a positive manner. I insist on my right to get drunk and I have faith that science will create a pill to neutralize the aftermath of the day after; maybe even give me control of my behavior when I’m out of control. So you might say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” And you might say, “Unfortunately it does.”