Rainbow

It is significant how many of the great jnanis or followers of the path of rational inquiry have also been devotees of forms of divinity and the teachers in their lineage. Was it a formal irony that one who had realised the impersonal, nirguna, formless absolute should adopt such worship? The answer that this was done to encourage the bhaktas or devotees is I think a mistaken view. I look rather to that primal experience which Schleiermacher has termed piety, a kind of heart felt immediacy of life before it is fragmented into concepts. That lugubrious philosophical undifferentiated aesthetic continuum sulks before:


My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold'

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

This is the face or primary register you put on your work. Woodworkers will recognize that metaphor from the preparing of a board or stick. First a face, true out of wynd, then width/edge then thickness. The face that you put on your work as you emerge from your absorption will, to mix the metaphor, be that of your chosen form of divinity. It will suffuse like a full spectrum 4 quadrants rainbow. Thank you Ken.