The Holy Is What’s Really Real

Daffodils

They’re commonplace, lovers’ eyes,
And take us deep where rhythms rise
To sanity, a holy place,
Re-syncing hearts to true surprise.

Odd theories claim the human race
Has selfish eyes and lacks all grace.
Such idols have no depth to see
Beyond the surface of a face.

But everywhere there’s mystery
Much deeper than it needs to be
And deeper than a smallish brain
Since love does not move mindlessly.

Those in love should not complain.
The Lover’s backing all love’s pain
And joy as every lover tries
To hold what’s real without the lies.

 

Linked to Poets United hosted by Susan asking the question “What is holiness?”
Linked to dVerse Open Link Night hosted by Grace.
Linked to NaPoWriMo2017 Day Twenty.
Photo: “Daffodils” by the author

Author: Frank Hubeny

I enjoy walking, poetry and short prose as well as taking pictures with my phone.

113 thoughts on “The Holy Is What’s Really Real”

    1. Thank you! I like listening to poetry even if I’m reading it at the same time. Also making that audio was my last check as to whether this poem was finished or not. If it didn’t make sense when I heard it, it needed more work.

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    1. Thank you! I am glad you noticed the synchronous hearts. I think our hearts conform to different rhythms and we should pattern those rhythms on the healthier ones.

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  15. Lyrical. Thy name is Frank. The reading gives so much more to the poem. And you read it beautifully. Reading out loud is essential but so many of us avoid this. They rhythm was forward in motion, but it was also gently assertive. Lovely poem, Frank and you brought the written words to life.

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    1. Thanks, Jane. I am planning to memorize some of my shorter poems to use for open mics at poetry meetings we have locally. The memorization is not usually required, but I thought I would experiment with performance as well. I am glad you liked the way this reading sounded.

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  32. Philosophy under the guise of a poem — I enjoy these styles.
    My reply:

    The heart may hold many “theories” in a complex mix such that both selfish views and magic views can be very similar depending on the hearts that hold them.

    The desire for mystery can be as perverse as the desire for simplicity when love is left out and lies are used to inspire.
    ___________
    Interestingly, reading through the comments, your readers heard “love” and all their comments became about how wonderful your poem is, but I heard your harsh criticisms and soapboxing for a better view. Do you think they heard your message?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I’m glad you picked up on the philosophizing, Sabio, and that you are willing to challenge it. Also I like the distinction you made between “selfish views” and “magic views”. It it like the distinction between “bullish views” and “bearish views” based on market social mood. I agree with Robert Prechter’s socionomic theory as the way we advance as a species along a spiral path. I am more bearish or I have more holistic or “magical” views. There should be people with my perspective if his theory is right. This does not mean that bullish or mechanistic views are useless. They just need a correction.

      I see this correction going on for a few decades or longer having started around 2000. Then we can make renewed progress. We need to recover respect for our subjectivity (or love) after centuries of advances with objective based technology.

      It is hard to know what people understand when they read something. I don’t understand this myself. The original motivation came from a prompt: What is holiness? My conclusion: Holiness is what is really real. I don’t see anything wrong with that conclusion.

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      1. @ Frank

        I think people’s minds are much more complex and contradictory than perhaps you do. But I am not sure. I don’t dichotomize the world — ’tis too complex and mysterious for that. I do not romanticize the world either — ’tis too complex and contrary for that. So magic vs selfish; bullish vs bearish; mechanistic vs holy or any such taxonomy of people seems to me a temptation worth avoiding. Just as two engines may have identical parts, it is how they are connected and relate that make the output of the engines very, very different. We all contain contrary, conflict, competing engines, dependent on feedback from all those around us — tis a system nightmare or a magical wonder, depending on the moment’s view.

        I also think the myth of progress (“advancing as a species”) is pernicious. As you know, there is much out there on that controversy.

        18th century, simple mechanistic views are the strawmen of those in fear of what dispelled myths may mean for them, or perhaps rightly so. But I know no scientisists who hold such simplistic, dry, dull view which ignore relationships and the hidden which is what makes the whole always much, much greater than the parts.

        Ah, concerning the “Prompt” on holiness, I didn’t see that — I came here from Open Link Night. But for me “Holy”, “Love”, “God”, “Freedom” are all highly manipulative words that work best in echo chambers — I love stuff writings where these need not be spoke, but the mere story stirs the deeper concept (if any) the author is trying to get across. So, “Holiness” is a myth, and trying to define it like it is a real thing is already a mistake, in my view. It is almost like trying to define “Success” with out know what game the people are playing, especially if they are bouncing between different games.

        BTW, have read or heard about the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”?
        Oh, and BTW2 — you have a great reading voice!

        Thank you for your reply

        Liked by 1 person

      2. I haven’t seen Haram’s book “Sapiens”. It is not in the local libraries, but I will keep it in mind as a potential book to look at. I am glad you liked the audio.

        The apparent dualism between magic and selfish or bearish and bullish is fluid. It is not one or the other. It is a model to describe social mood, and social mood changes. So, I agree with you that the world cannot be dichotomized and the human mind is too “complex and mysterious” for that. Besides it is the change between these that is more interesting.

        The advancing as a species idea, however, I think is real. I don’t mean that we will biologically evolve into some new species. Our species has the potential to remain more or less as it is for the next hundreds of millions of years or longer. This would be a “punctuated equilibria” approach to Darwinian evolution. The advance I am thinking of will be more with our minds or spirits. (I don’t know how to differentiate these two concepts at the moment.)

        I do agree with you that words such as “love”, “God”, “holy” or “freedom” can be used for manipulation. We have to avoid that. However, I don’t think holiness is a myth. It is not a “thing”. That’s true, but it is nonetheless real and so it is worth discussing as a reality. Electromagnetic fields are not things either, but they are real. We can see their effects. They can also do damage and we have to protect ourselves against the damage they cause. The same would be true with holiness. It affects us. If it did not, we would not be able to be manipulated by using this concept. We have to protect ourselves from such manipulation which means taking seriously the reality of holiness.

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      3. Frank,

        Evolution, a dumb process, changes offspring in many ways, and for various reasons (fitness, accident …) some of those changes survive and prosper better than others. But it is not an “advancing” : there is no ladder we are climbing or top of a tree, as old evolution images falsely showed. “Mind” is no more of an advance than wings, ability to survive off sulfur or others, it is just one of many. But you have a romantic idea of mind, spirit and holy — all part of your monism, if I am correct. So, since your “holy” can not be disproven — you have no test for it, we could call it anything, no discussion can proceed from that.

        But it inspires you. And I contend than non-monist, non-pantheist, nontheist and even materialistic views (though they are rare) could mix with other ideas to supply the same richness of mind and hope that you feel you have.

        Yes, “holiness” is your favorite word of manipulation, and you don’t think it is. That is the specialness of manipulation words, believers feel theirs are in a class alone.

        Just my opinion

        Liked by 1 person

      4. BTW, Frank, I trust by “punctuated Evolution”, you are thinking simply of sudden burst (for which we have possible DNA suspects), you did not imagine “God” or “Holiness” flicking his/its finger and pushing humans into an ability to commune with it/him/her (through mind) and thus advancing us beyond the other dumb creatures.

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      5. Punctuated equilibria is a Darwinian evolutionary theory, perhaps contrasted with neo-Darwinism. See Niles Eldredge’s “Eternal ephemera : adaptation and the origin of species from the nineteenth century through punctuated equilibria and beyond” (2015) for a survey of the idea. He and Stephen Jay Gould promoted it in the later part of the 20th century. See Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos” for a criticism of neo-Darwinism.

        Biological evolution looks to me like it has been advancing based on the paleontology record. I don’t think that advance can be explained by chance any more than I think markets perform random walks. There is something holistic guiding it. However, biologically, I think our species could be a climax species for Earth, but it doesn’t have to be.

        I am interested in tests of the positions I take. One test would be whether Prechter’s Elliott Wave model prediction of a fifth wave market top actually occurs. This would provide evidence that his model of a holistic, spiraling cultural evolution for our species is a metric measuring something real, although none of these models will completely describe reality.

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      6. Yes, I know well the old Gould-Dawkins debates on the issue of punctuated equilibrium, and I remember evolution-friendly Christians jumping on the punctuation position claiming their god added the punctuation. And I see you feel something is guiding evolution too. If you and those Christians are right, then whatever god/higher power is guiding must be a cruel being, in my opinion.

        Liked by 1 person

      7. I don’t know what various religious groups have to say about these issues and I have no particular one to promote. It makes sense to me that various religious groups would find these holistic scientific models attractive. I see nothing wrong with that.

        As far as cruelty goes, one could ask if mystics or gurus or holy people or believers find this higher power to be cruel or not. Clearly most of them don’t. Their various religious beliefs have “personalized” models of the reality these holistic theories model in non-personal terms. Their models of reality explicitly add love and subjectivity because they model how human beings “relate” to this reality not simply how human beings can build a technology on top of it.

        As a generic panentheist, I am sympathetic to that personalisation. I tried to emphasize that in the poem when I referenced the “Lover” with a capital “L”. I did not say “Yahweh” or “Jesus” or “Allah” or “Saraswati” or “Guan Yin” or whatever other name is available because the poem is not restricted to any particular religion.

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      8. @ Frank

        “Holistic” is also one of those manipulative, loaded words, btw. I think the reasons why are obvious. It is like “holy”, “sacred” and even “scientific” — it is meant to sanctify and put out of reach of criticism. Being a former homeopath and oriental medical practitioner, I know the attraction of such terms.

        A controlling, all-powerful force/god/matrix/spirit who can control (or tinker with, or guide) evolution and allow all the suffering we see is a classic problem among believers of all sorts, of course – personal or non-personal.

        But, I get your intellectual approach to this. We differ. This exchange was because you were preaching and proclaiming in your poem. Others did not apparently detect it or care — which is a problem with poetry in general, I guess.

        Liked by 1 person

      9. I don’t mind your criticism, Sabio. I am glad you are expressing your position.

        There is an intellectual difference between mechanistic and holistic approaches to reality even before one adds any religious model on top of that. The mechanistic model needs to be reductionistic so that the model is not dependent on anything believed to be conscious. (Some interpretations of quantum physics would say that is no longer possible.) The mechanistic approach then relies on chance when it can’t explain something. The holistic model is not fussy about any metaphysics. If there is a non-chance pattern in the data, it tries to build a technology on top of that even if that implies a non-reductionistic explanation. When the mechanistic model gives up, such as economics saying that the markets are a random walk, that is where the holistic model, such as socionomics using Elliott Waves, takes over. Which technology works best is all that matters because at this level it is not personal.

        The reason this causes so much trouble is that if holistic models work as a technology, it implies there is something wrong with the mechanistic models and their underlying anti-consciousness metaphysics. That is where religious groups come in. Religious groups are all about relationship with reality which assumes some pro-consciousness metaphysics.

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        1. Frank, you used “holistic” even when I pointed out the problem. I guess you don’t see it rhetorical use. OK, then let me rephrase with packaging: “There is an intellectual difference between evidence base knowledge systems and whoo-whooo-I-love-the-fuzzy-warm stuff systems.” Or “Any system that does not posits a universal-mind controlling the evolution of humans and source of happiness and love, is not holistic but is mechanistic and reductionist and therefore wrong.”

          Perhaps you can see the rhetoric now.

          Anyway, models which ignores unknowns, are not ready to question assumptions and not open to testing or being overthrown, are undesirable systems. Many keep these systems because they protect their interests, be they people in white lab coats, people in shaman costumes or people in holy robes. I would hope we agree on that.

          But I think your persisting to split the world into holistic vs mechanistic systems or people is a false dichotomy which hides agendas all sides.

          Liked by 1 person

      10. I think it is worth keeping the holistic vs mechanistic dichotomy in front of us. For example, consider trading the financial markets. The people involved in this activity do not care about metaphysics one way or the other. The mechanistic trading platforms are trend following momentum systems. The holistic trading systems use Elliott Waves. It is really a question of which one works better during severe market turns. This is why a predicted coming top will potentially show the superiority of one of these systems over the other. The mechanistic approach believes in chance (random walks). The holistic socionomist believes in a spiraling evolution marked out with Elliott Waves. There is no “whoo-whooo-I-love-the-fuzzy-warm stuff” in either of these systems.

        However, I think your concern is with people you disagree with metaphysically who come from certain religious or spiritual traditions. The holistic perspective of these people would not be motivated by technology. They are not trying to make money in the market or build an AI system to terraform Mars or analyze the paleontology record. They are concerned with finding the best way to live given their existential reality. I hear your message to them, indeed all of us, as being one of despair and angst with God being cruel if there even is a God. Am I misinterpreting your position?

        You accuse these people of engaging in “rhetoric” and of having “models which ignores unknowns, are not ready to question assumptions and not open to testing or being overthrown”. Are you not aware that they could say the same thing about your positions? Are you not aware that your statements can also be described as “rhetoric”? I am sure that you believe what you are saying, but that doesn’t make what you are saying true.

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  37. Common eYes
    Common Love
    ComMon BeinG
    hUmaN LovE..:)

    OtHeR thaN
    thaT Hi Frank..
    Hope you are eNjoYinG
    SpRinG FloWers thATwHo oNly DancE and SinG LoVe..:)

    i’Ve been TrYinG to write Facebook Statuses
    LatELy thaT fiT iN A New formaT
    oF BiG PRinT FredKu2..

    So.. sure..
    Thanks for the
    iNspiRaTioN too.. mY FriEnD..;)

    Liked by 1 person

  38. Haha.. interestingly..
    Fall 60F Temps in FL..
    Today.. And OBTW..
    Enjoyed your
    Conversation
    With Sabio..
    Never had
    One
    With him..
    As Poetic Comments
    Were among those not
    Allowed to his taste…
    Hmm.. Without a little
    Holy MaGiC iN
    Life.. iT iS
    Rather stale..
    And just anoThER
    Side of existence..
    i for one FeeL..
    WHole alWays
    From Separation
    SenSinG all as
    One.. even
    More than
    A FeeLinG
    As ‘they’ say..
    Sad A Separation
    iN A Word as WHoly..:)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I enjoy the conversations I have with Sabio although they are different from most other comments here. Ultimately, there is no separation. I see myself in his views. It is good to feel whole!

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      1. As ‘they’ say..
        Namaste.. to
        exclude no one no
        thing and include nothing
        iN A MiX of everYthing is Bliss..
        iF
        one
        Can and
        WiLL FeeL iT..
        With DarKneSS
        And Pain as
        Path
        to
        Eventual
        LiGht OnE Can
        And WiLL FeeL anD
        SeNSe to Better Understand NoW
        HoLy as wHOle CaN and WiLL Be..:)

        Freedom
        aS Whole..

        No Pun
        intended..
        juST FuN
        For NoW@LeASt..;)

        But with all seriousness.. Castes
        from where even Namaste
        coMes From iN Hindu way..
        CaN and WiLL
        be2
        A
        dARKesT
        oF aLL liGht..
        iN LiFE Archetype..
        And sure as Nature..
        when that happens
        usuAlly an ‘Aghori Trickster’
        coMes to set the Castes Free.. sMiLes
        mY FriEnD.. LiVe.. trULY LiVe WHoLY
        LonG enough and iT beCoMes more than
        clear thaT aLL oF eXistence at core is Meaning and Purpose..
        Holy
        and
        Sacred
        NaturAlly
        Follows as uS..
        iN A Humble Lead too..:)

        Liked by 1 person

      1. Thank you for the reply Frank!
        I am glad to know that the flowers are from Chicago.
        I was in Chicago last year for the Book Expo America.
        I love the country, the people, the flowers 🌺 the food 🥘

        Liked by 1 person

  45. I think that love has as many definitions as there are people willing to express them. But, I also agree that without that spiritual connection all those definitions fall short of the mark. I also applaud you for reading the piece aloud. I’ve considered it, but lack the know how, and choose to remain ignorant. I really like the photo. Would you mind if I played with it a bit? I use a kaleidoscope app and find the results very interesting.

    Elizabeth

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    1. I purchased a microphone (audio-technica ATR2100-USB) and pop shield and and use the free Audacity software to make the recordings. I only adjust the normalize effect. You have my permission to use this photo. Thanks, Elizabeth!

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  46. I used to have a microphone for my computer, but when I moved almost 3 years ago, I seem to have lost a few things, that being one of them. I live alone, so the noise level isn’t a problem. I keep promising myself that I’ll get a headset one of these days, but just haven’t done that yet. I did put the images up on FB, if you click on the first image, it turns into a slide show. I really like what happened. Hope you do as well,

    Elizabeth

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  47. Yes, I checked them out. Very similar. I used to make pen and ink line weave drawings and later used them to make templates I could color in India Ink. it’s a really good active meditation process. But, now I have hundreds of them and won’t live long enough to do all of them. We do get carried away at times. I’m all about finding new and different ways of expressing self. Thanks for the conversation,

    Elizabeth

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