What The Fire Said: The Active Side of Infinity

What The Fire Said

What The Fire Said is the portal for my own art and writing. It is necessarily a work in progress, and you are welcome to return anytime to see what has been added here.

In my header you will see both contemporary calibration dials and centuries-old symbols used in the practice of alchemy. My art tends to operate at the interface between such extremes: between our shared distant past and an unknown far future, between the realities of history and the at-times greater realities that lie over the threshold in the world of myth. At these extremes science and magic, myth and history turn into each other, become indistinguishable from each other – as in the far future they well might. ~ Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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What The Fire Said by David Bergen a.k.a. Hawkwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License covering all written and visual material at: http://whatthefiresaid.blogspot.nl/.

These personally created artworks remain the property of the © David Bergen Studio. The terms of my above Creative Commons License allow for re-posting of these works on the express condition that they remain unaltered (that is: with my embedded © credit attached) and that the context is non-commercial. Please respect my art.

Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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Ownership of any copyrighted material appearing either as visual, written or audio files on this weblog, remains with the holders of the original copyright, and no further claim to such material by the author of this site is intended, and need not be inferred. It is believed that the limited use of any web resolution images for the purposes of identification and critical commentary qualifies as fair use.

Copyright of any material credited to Hawkwood remains with the author. The registered creative commons license below permits further use and distribution of Hawkwood's work subject to the three conditions: (1) The user attributes the work to 'Hawkwood', (2) The context is non-commercial, (3) The work remains unaltered. A link back to this weblog is appreciated.

"Do you know that at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use this eternity, if you so desire?"

What did don Juan actually mean by his mysterious statement? Castanada admits to being baffled (he usually does!). My own idea, my personal interpretation of his statement, is that 'eternity' here refers to being able to perceive beyond the limitations of time as we experience it in our everyday world. This is the past-present-future experience of time which occupies our every moment.

But to move beyond this 'linear' view of time we must take the step into 'eternity'. Eternity is not a different kind of time: it is beyond time. It is an eternal 'now', where past, present, and future occupy the same moment. Because of this factor, this 'jumbling together' of our familiar sequence of time, I would describe this experience as 'granular'. Think of a lot of grains of sand, each one laid out in a single row, one after the other. That row of tiny grains is our experience of past-present-future time. Now think of those grains all mixed together in a jar. Past, present and future now become meaningless. That is 'granular' time - the omnipresence of the eternal 'now'.

This 'eternity' is also mythic time. Myths do not exist in some distant past. They are real now - and they go on being real because they exist in eternity. And, as don Juan implies, we can use this eternity to gain many insights: both into the everyday reality which we take for granted, and into the infinities that wait beyond.

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