June 2011
Rites of Passage 2011
Please, please. I want to go to Burning Man. This is the ONLY time I will ever ask to be in such heat and direct sunlight.
The story is told of how the first settlers of our city arrived in the Black Rock Desert. Drawing a line in the ground at the edge of the playa, they were told that once they crossed this line, Everything will be different. Holding hands, they stepped across it. When present day participants arrive at Burning Man, they’re met by Greeters. Newcomers are invited to ring a bell and roll about in the dust. On the sixth day of the event, participants encircle Burning Man to witness its destruction. Here, for the very first time, an entire community regards itself. People do this with the reassurance that another Man, an always slightly different Man, will rise anew. At the end of the event, thousands silently surround a temple dedicated to that strangest and most fearful change of all: the loss of loved ones and our ultimate departure from the world. From first to last, Burning Man has always been a rite of passage.
“Sex is about surrendering to our body’s natural instincts to move and be what it wants in the perfect moment. Our body wants to be in the now. We want to lose our minds and gain our senses. Sex is also about surrendering to our body’s spiritual instincts, to not move and to be what it is in this Holy Moment. And sexuality is a key. It is a doorway to he higher realms of transcendent consciousness.”
—Barbara Harris Whitfield (Spiritual Awakenings)
“In Jungian theory, it is ONLY those who are able to INTEGRATE the opposite-sex psychology into their own self-identity, who can then proceed into the higher (Self and God-Self) phases of self-development; all the rest of the ‘gender-polarized’ populace are left behind to marry, divorce and remarry their own potential indefinitely until they finally learn that what they are looking for is essentially WITHIN THEMSELVES.”
—http://www.spirit-alembic.com/ishvara.html (via sex-death-rebirth)
“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.”
—Octavio Paz
“I want no secrets of soul-states, nothing ineffable; I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
