Thoughts On The Macranthrope Poem by Denis Mair

(After an illness, this is the first semi-poetic thing I've written, so bear with me.)

Caught up in the trip and stomp and whirl of life's multi-tiered dance, we hardly get around to noticing......all of this is an inner vista of the Macranthrope's body----the HUMAN that includes all humans.

Anything we do that is worthy of the Great One's body expands it. Any unworthy acts will delay the time until we can fully occupy it.

On one hand, our unworthy acts will delay the time when we can fully abide in the Great One's body. On the other hand, there was never a time when we didn't abide in the Great One's body.

Once on an airplane from Delhi to Bengaluru, I saw two men punching each other with their fists. A Swiss man in a neighboring row stood up and tried to break up the brawl, saying, 'Gentlemen, who's the GENTLEMAN here! ' He was talking about the Great One.

Each person's sighs and smiles are born of his own limited sorrow and joy, but eventually they will carry his heaviest load of concern for others; they will launch his highest kite of hopes for others' well-being.

When I think about life-writ-large in the cosmos, I like to give it a human face. I don't visualize an oil painting of the alchemist St. Germain, with his enameled aura and neon eyes. I think about the leathery face of Tolund man, steeped for ages in the tannins of an Irish bog; I think of the Tarim mummy's dessicated repose, kept intact in a grave of sand; I think about the determined cast of Oetzi's features, ferried through time under a Tyrolean glacier. Natural settings conspired with will and character to shape a countenance, thus creating these icons of human essence.

Only someone who could feel the power of animal personae from within could ever conceive of the dragon---- the composite totem animal that first arose from the subconscious of Macranthropus, the Cosmic Man.

The Macranthrope looms in my mind's eye as the extended body of life in the cosmos. Along with humans, the Macranthrope includes our brother and sister creatures....so many animals and plants...because each human is built upon a chassis shared witth other creatures. Our brain-stem and hind-brain know the world of lizards; our mid-brain and lateral cortices stir with mammalian emotions; our frontal cortex has the capacity for reflecting and dreaming that is ours alone.

Because these parts of us resonate with our brother and sister creatures, we know ourselves and our place in the creation. We need to think about the whole range of creatures to complete the chain of being and see the world complete The Macranthrope has different levels of subjectivity, corresponding to the layers of its body. The layers are not just corporeal envelopes: they extend far into supposedly 'inanimate' substrates of the natural world, into the quantum well, and even into the matrix of transcendental numbers. When life wakes up and reaches as far as it can, those are the parts of itself that it touches.

Within the bract of a vast flower, there is an involution which manifests an assembly of seekers, gathered around a source of wisdom, like the Buddha's followers at Mt. Grdhrakuta: that is a daydream of the Cosmic Man. There is an involution that manifests a soul-shaking flash of energy: that too is an inner vista of the Cosmic Man. The sum of involutions meet at the base of that vast flower, and from its tight inward whorl, multitudinous petals are forever unfolding.

The bract of the Macranthrope's body has outer petals that are already fixed in form. There is a kind of subjectivity that is suited to our local bodily layers and concerns. In the inner part of the bract, the whorl is tight and every point is still far away from what it will become. The whorl's center is a nurturing, formative source; at the same time it arranges for us to taste other levels of subjectivity. It endows us with a wiring pattern, a bract of connectivity, wherein the brain's drives, emotions and pleasures converge. It weaves these things together with our somatic awareness, imparting a declivity to the stream bed of thought, channeling our pleasure-seeking volition and letting us to experience raptures and orgasms. Thus we can get a taste of the blissful flux of energy, belonging to the inner layers, where the Macranthrope draws from his own well. We are supposed to be conversant with that kind of awareness, even though we cannot be at home in it.

Why was the human brain wired with different systems: the noradrenergic pathways to deal with attention, stress and cognition; the endorphin synapses for relief; the endocannabinoid receptors for saliency; the glutamatergic pathways to solidify learning and memory; the dopaminergic pathways to provide rewards. Why are rewards given----not just when we obtain the object of desire, but on the steps leading to it? Anticipation has its own rewards. Why were we born with the tendency to seek closeness, and the ability to feel pleasure when giving comfort? Why were we made with the capacity to feel pain and fear separation? Why is there beauty in the eye of the beholder? There had to be built-in valuations to help us adjust to all we encountered. How could all the valuations and sensations and memories be coordinated? The capability to form work-spaces is built into the brain, yet the wiring is flexible enough to improvise work-spaces as we take on new tasks.

All that wiring had to be done by a limited number of genes. The growth of layers and nodes was guided by massively distributed processing in gene control networks; it is instructed by chemical signals among embryonic cells as they grew and shaped each other. This is not the same kind of intelligence that rides upon brain waves. At the embryonic stage, a good part of the brain's wiring was done by INTELLIGENT LEAVENING, and that happened when the bread was already in the oven. Believe it or not, the Macranthrope is not only the oven, but also the leavening AND the eater of bread.

In the summer of 1996 I took part in a 55-day meditation retreat at the Man-Heaven Institute in Puli, Taiwan. During one of my most memorable meditations, I began to feel connected to a huge body extending in all directions around me. I was aware that the body was composed of shimmering light. Each shimmer was a spark that flashed for a few moments, then went away. I was aware that there were chain-like connections among the sparks, and that some sparks were triggered by the flashing of other sparks. So many sparks of light were flashing intermittently that the overall extended body appeared to remain constant. An understanding of the nature of the sparks was bestowed upon me. Each spark was an act of love, arising from a specific relationship. Yet on a grand scale, the constant shimmer of sparks assumed the form of a divine body. I realized that if GOD IS LOVE, then I was seeing the metaphysical body of a divine being. Or maybe I was seeing its emanation body that comes to our realm to uplift us; or maybe I was seeing its reward body that receives the bliss that accrues in the act of Creation. At any rate, the image of that body stayed with me and has become a beacon that is both behind me and ahead of me in time. This is why I choose to invoke the body of Cosmic Man.