Words of Power: August 2015

Friday, August 28, 2015

Words of Power: 10th Anniversary Edition

Frida Kahlo -El Sol y la Vida, trans. "Sun and Life" (1947)

I launched Words of Power in August 2005, so this month marks the site's tenth anniversary.

To celebrate the milestone, I have added eleven new posts to my ongoing narrative. (These eleven posts are backdated, so that they appear in their correct chronological order.)

Five of them are more "Epiphanies," initially published via my Instagram feed:

The other six new posts constitute a series of brief excerpts from the work of great woman writers and philosophers. This series was initially posted via my Facebook page. It furthers the exploration I shared in Notes on the Ascendancy of the Feminine in Psyche (Human and Divine), a talk I included in my tenth book, Planetary Emergency/Personal Emergence: Path of An Evolutionary (2014). In that talk, I featured the life and work of nine great woman mystics and nine great woman artists and photographers. This continuing concentration seeks to contribute to the supplanting of history with herstory for the collective healing and transformation of our species:

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Epiphanies (Samhain 2014 - Summer Solstice 2015)

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Simone de Beauvoir: "... And Truth Rewarded Me."

Charlie Phillips - Grave Stone of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

Henri Cartier-Bresson – Simone de Beauvoir (Paris, 1945)

From the writings of the bold, brilliant Simone de Beauvoir --

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.” (The Blood of Others, 1946)

“In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men ... It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.” (Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947)

“The present enshrines the past—and in the past all history has been made by men.” (The Second Sex, 1949)

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (The Second Sex, 1949)

“It was said that I refused to grant any value to the maternal instinct and to love. This was not so. I simply asked that women should experience them truthfully and freely, whereas they often use them as excuses and take refuge in them, only to find themselves imprisoned in that refuge when those emotions have dried up in their hearts. I was accused of preaching sexual promiscuity; but at no point did I ever advise anyone to sleep with just anyone at just any time; my opinion on this subject is that all choices, agreements and refusals should be made independently of institutions, conventions and motives of self-aggrandizement; if the reasons for it are not of the same order as the act itself, then the only result can be lies, distortions and mutilations.” (Force of Circumstances Vol. III, 1963)

“Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. 'Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me,' are the words I have read in letters from women of all ages and all walks of life. If my book has helped women, it is because it expressed them, and they in their turn gave it its truth ...” (Force of Circumstances Vol. III, 1963)

“Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.” (The Coming of Age, 1970)

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.” (All Said and Done, 1972)

"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation." (Quoted in Bisexual Characters in Film: From Anaïs to Zee, 1997)

In the early 1950s, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir visited the writer Nelson Algren in Chicago. During that visit, Algren's friend, the photographer Art Shay, took some candid photos of de Beauvoir.

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)

Sunday, August 23, 2015

The Wave

San Francisco, August 2015

The wave rises. You close your eyes. It crashes in upon you. After few hours, another wave rises. The interlude is rarely as long as a day, and never as long as a week. After the wave breaks, an utterance is demanded. From deep within. However articulate that utterance is, it is still no more than a gasp or a howl. And yet, all the joy of all the beings is held in that gasp, like a great strand of kelp, and it wraps itself around all the suffering of all the beings, and the two great strands of kelp undulate in a sacred dance of awakening and arousal. Until the surf is all out again, and it is time for another wave to come crashing in. Invariably, this one too is infused with the joys and sorrows of all beings everywhere. And yes, invariably, as it crashes over you, another utterance imperative arises. So you speak it all out loud, again and again, and each time it is wholly new and yet the same as it has always been. You feel every grain of sand the wave carries with it. Yes, you feel every sand grain and you hear every sand grain's story, all at once -- as if from the inside out.

This is how it is. The far shore is behind you.

-- Richard Power

#strangerinastrangeland #notruthoutsidethegatesofeden #troubadourskilledbeforetheyreachBombay #passionofthepoet #pathlesspath #pearlofgreatprice #wildmagic #savagebeauty #tavernofruin #lifeofayogi #greatgoddess #sakti #siva #songofsongs #tantrikaknows

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Susan Sontag: "In Place of A Hermeneutics, We Need An Erotics of Art."

Susan Sontag Photo Credit: Annie Liebovitz

Brilliant insights from the writings of Susan Sontag:

“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”

“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art." (Against Interpretation, 1966)

"To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’" (Against Interpretation, 1966)

"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable." (Against Interpretation, 1966)

"In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." (Against Interpretation, 1966)

"If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there." (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)

"The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game." (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)

"Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another". (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)

"To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom ... Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom." (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up."

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

Monday, August 17, 2015

Nocturnal Intelligence

San Francisco, August 2015

Disguised as a statue, this nocturnal intelligence braves the sunlight. Moon after moon, season after season. Abiding, enduring, ceaselessly vigilant. Motionless, on a steel ledge. Ignored, unheard, unrecognized. In a teeming metropolis, on a lost world. When the Wild Goddess returns, this nocturnal intelligence will spread its strong black wings and glide over the torn up streets. To feast on small creatures of truth and beauty emerging from the long hidden soil of the soul.

#shamanicpower #shadow #psyche #soma #strangerinastrangeland #lifeofayogi #passionofthepoet #savagebeauty #tavernofruin #troubadourskilledbeforetheyreachBombay #notruthoutsidethegatesofeden #tantrikaknows #Gaia #greatgoddess

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

About Richard Power

Richard Power is a writer, speaker and yoga teacher. He offers workshops, classes and private instruction in yoga and meditation. He is the author of 14 books, most important are Wyrds of Power: New Languagee for A New Reality (2017), I, the Dragon: Chronicles of An Epic Life Among the Humans (2018), and Secret Engine of the World: Further Notes on Primal Reality, Gaian Politics & the Arc of Human Evolution (2021). For more information on all of Power's other books, visit his author's page on Amazon.com.

For much of his life, Power worked in the fields of security and intelligence. He delivered briefings and led training in forty countries, and was an adviser to governments and corporations. His views have been featured in interviews on CNN, PBS, NPR and the BBC, and quoted in mainstream news media, including Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters and Associated Press.

This blog explores new language for the truths of the ancient future, and reflects insights into Vajrayana Buddha Dharma, Kashmir Shiva-Sakti philosophy, Hatha and Tantra Yoga, the Shamanic path, and other aspects of the world's collective mystical heritage. It also offers commentary on art, music, literature, human rights, sustainability, independent journalism, economic justice and the Climate Crisis.