Deluge

I feel we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior. At this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we are passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got.

Cohen understands that this flood, or as I say here “deluge”, begins within soul reality and begins to manifest (leak) as the appearances of the world. It begins as a breakdown in the centuries-long habit of thought that we could call the inner/outer disjunction. I have explored this breakdown for thirty years under various names, particularly that of the “end of the world” by which I mean the end of a habitual structure of thought that gives rise to current stable appearances.

This leakage, now well underway as the Liquefaction of the Real, is apparent to ordinary observation. I have been long fascinated by this phenomenon occurring as the threshold between the fluid reality of soul and the solid reality of the given appearances of our time. I have explored the experience of this threshold for thirty years, during the course of which I have written many essays and books concerning the contours of this complex soul phenomenon. The significance of the threshold for humanity lies in the crucial choices that become available to those individuals who participate in the phenomenon.

The following video is a short poem on this question.