It seems to me that the truths of reason depend on the truths of sensation.  The most interesting part is that the truths of emotion occupy the space between, intimately linked to "self", always mediating reality.

The relationship between reason and sensation is empirical.  But the emotional part [always] disrupts the empirical  equation.  There's no "pure" relationship between sensory data and reason; there is a systems relationship that ipseity and cognition depend on.

Whatever else it is, the emotional part is connected deeply to symbolism and to narrative; it's the part that's driven to arrange isolated perceptions in facts, isolated facts into story, story into role, role into consensus (creating an emotionally invested social grouping), and consensus into "reality."  The emotional part is connected to identity, forms perimeters of reference in which reason operates.

The emotional part is itself contained by sensation.  Logically, sensation is purely biological.  Meditation and energy work suggest that sensation is a pulse pervading all things, that it gives rise to the instruments of its perception, perhaps that it forms those instruments.  (Various forms of body-centered and body-centering meditation focus on the locus of "pure" sensation; I find the Empedocles-derived method of Peter Kingsley to be the easiest and probably one of the clearest, minimalist  and pretty much devoid of all excess religious and cultural baggage).

It seems that the emotional part is deeply connected to meaning, perceives and constructs the most important truths, and is the seat of the soul.  Sensation may be the soul-stuff itself.

I like this addition to my Holy Charts and Graphs.  It's elegant.  It's a kidney.  Or an embryo?

I've enjoyed a breakthrough this past year into graphical simplicity, and have been able to put some of my personal Work into very compressed tools, like the "7 Star Alignment" in the archives.  That's what I mean by "elegant".  I think this  is connected to my geometric/"pythagorean" dreams.  A few terms and placements and lines here, and I'm able to encode a whole "loaded" cosmology that must have become more alive in my awareness, less purely conceptual than before.  Holy Charts and Graphs, so long as there's a conceptual and contradictory variety of them, are good things--I think  they work much better for me in terms of contemplation and sacred ideation than discourse or reading now does, and represent a distillation of past intellectual practices.  I guess they are personal mandalas, and that the Truth for others can be resonant and not particular.

The few necessary terms are: God (Spirit-Matter-Spirit-Matter...), Nothing, Imagination, Personae, Time, Evolution, Mind and Leap.  The unnamed thing is the Gate of Whimsy back of the Serpent's head, and the vertical bumps suggest intrusions of "God" into the super-imaginational abyss of personae.  The Leap is the inevitable leap of the Pontifex-Bodhisattva that you find yourself in the midst of--a prismatic story arc, an ark and Ark.  And this, then, is the Barque of Heaven:
 
EDIT: The scaled-down and all-pencil version looked fine on my Mac and home screen, but looks horrid on the machine at work, so here's a more legible version.  That's a wee star where the "Leap" arrow re-enters "God".  Full size is parked here.

It amazes me how compressed and "tight" my metaphysics turns out to be... all this distillation, etc. finally gives life to alchemical symbols and metaphors.




 

 I can see that some of my work with God Malek Ta'us is involving conscious synthesis of things in my background.  He seems to be an Eros principle and a Master archetypal key.  And he's quite a housecleaner and attention focuser.  Or maybe I mean energy focuser.  Or maybe those are always the same.

My work often looks confusing to others, or haphazard and erratic.  It doesn't feel that way--it's a work of constant synthesis and movement, of no rest.  Things that are real are sloppy and idiosyncratic, it seems to me--things like Life and God and biology--and so I don't buck sloppiness or idiosyncratic methods.  

( More behind the cut... )