Comment below: **
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > When it comes to forming a fantasy relationship: it's not hard! > > I remember practicing puja in my hotel room -- bottom half naked. I > was rounding, and I would get up and do a puja and wouldn't bother > getting dressed. Then, at some point, I just couldn't be naked in > front of Guru Dev any more. My symbol got too real for me to ignore. > **snip** Edg, have to say that you are a real treat to read. Really. And Thanks for that. But I just wanted to riff on the above. I was an artist for a lot of my life, in and out of the movement and I've always talked with friends, other visual artists, about how extraordinary and sacred the Image really is. The discovery of how a graven or charcoal-drawn image suddenly became Alive(!) in awareness; Became the Thing Itself -- Wow, how amazing and spectacular is That! It's got all the great features of mysticism and worship rolled up into one. I've read speculation that the caves in Southern France like Lascaux or Alta Mira in Spain (and others in Germany, too, I believe) were originally where the youths of the tribe were taken for their personal revelation and ritual binding to the social, tribal, and religious life. The idea is that the young initiates would be brought and guided down into the caves, in darkness, and then at some point, lamps of fat and grease would illuminate the markings. And even if you imagine that as a person's first experience of Image, it's hard to comprehend just how awe-inspiring that would have to be. Your story (above) is very cool. How the image became real after a while, in a way it wasn't before. How consciousness got stimulated by repeated applications of attention and then the inanimate becomes animate; Attention/consciousness/awareness "creates" life. Marek
