​Good Vibrations
​
Roland Faber, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Pythagorus, and Whitehead:
prospects for ​living with compassion in a vibrating world
​


"a vibration between hearts, in modes of truths that cannot
be expressed except in the language of the heart."
                                                                               
​                                                  - Roland Faber

"show me the prison, show me the jail, show me the
alley, show me the drunkard, there but for fortune go you or I."

                                                            - Joan Baez, Phil Ochs

​Seeking the Sprit in everything is seeking its inner life,
vibrating with the Spirit— like two instruments that
are close enough to pick up each other’s vibration.

                                                   -  Roland Faber
​

If, as the book of Genesis suggests, there is a Spirit vibrating over the face of the deep, would it not be good if our hearts, too, vibrated with one another, with compassion, so that the Spirit might be more deeply materialized on earth as it is in heaven?  And would it not be good if we ourselves knew, within the depths of our hearts, that we are "one" with one another, and they are "one" with us, even as we are also "other" to them, and they to us, because each person is unique and precious. Let whatever oneness we speak of be multi-colored, sonically diverse, differentiated, and variegated. Let it include dissonance as well as consonance, novelty as well as order. Is this not the harmony what we seek: a polyphonic and evolving togetherness that includes just a bit of crankiness, even as it is also gentle and loving? Roland Faber in his way, and Joan Baez in hers, point us in this direction. .And, oh yes, Whitehead and Pythagorus can help, too.

- Jay McDaniel, August 17, 2021
Show me the prison, show me the jail
Show me the prisoner, whose life has gone stale
And I'll show you a young man
With so many reasons why
And there but for fortune, go you or I......mm, mm

Show me the alley, show me the train
Show me the hobo, who sleeps out in the rain
And I'll show you a young man
With so many reasons why
And there but for fortune, go you or I, mm, mm

​​Show me the whiskey, stains on the floor
Show me the drunkard, as he stumbles out the door
And I'll show you a young man
With so many reasons why
And there but for fortune go you or I, mmm, mm

Show me the country, where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings, once so tall
And I'll show you a young land
With so many reasons why
And there but for fortune go you and I, you and I.

- song written by Phil Ochs


​THE COSMIC SPIRIT: Awakenings at the Heart
of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse

​by Roland Faber , Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon
​

Picture
​Catherine Keller writes: “Let yourself read a few random lines of The Cosmic Spirit —and already its flames and its flows reverberate through you. The genius of this multiversal poet opens in you an endless multiplicity of the world it wraps you back into, renewed for the earthiest of becomings now, the broadest of spaces always.” 

She is right.  If you read random lines, or better, random paragraphs, you will find your mind stretched, heart widened, and commitments deepened.  Roland Faber is one of the most important religious thinkers in the world today.  Indeed, few if any are as well read, as sensitive to the needs of our times, and as inclusive in their visions.  His writing is notoriously difficult to understand, yet breathtakingly wise in every paragraph. 

This page includes some of those paragraphs.  Complementary to this page are other that I've done on him, sharing other paragraphs from the remarkable book.  The others deal with such topics at desert spirituality, ocean spirituality, polyphylia, and what he calls "the little flame in all things."  This page is an extension of the latter theme, focussing on the way that flames in the heart, our hearts and those of others, can resonate.

Vibrations

​In The Cosmic Spirit Roland Faber invites us to imagine that the kinds of realities by which we are surrounded and of which we may consist are, in his words, "events instead of substances, processes instead of particles, vibrations instead of fixed grids."  I am reminded of a documentary I saw years ago where a Buddhist monk gently explained that "the whole world is a mass of vibrations" and that nothing is really solid. 
 ​
Faber agrees and encourages us to live in a way whereby our own hearts are sensitive to the vibrations of other hearts.  In moments when we live this way we become, as it were, bodies of resonance,  We become the love to which we are always called, inwardly, by the Spirit at the heart of creation. 

​For Faber this love certainly has a cosmic side.  We are inwardly beckoned to feel a sense of sympathy, of kinship, with the All of creation: the galaxies and planets, the stars and solar systems, the oceans and deserts, the plants and animals.  But we are also called to feel a sense of kinship with the small, the otherwise forgotten and excluded, the forsaken and forgotten, the "each" within the all: the prisoners, the hobos, the drunkards, the victims of war.  We are called to be bodies of resonance. And, of course, to act accordingly: that is, to live in ways that are gentle and just, simple and loving.  Below I offer selections from The Cosmic Spirit which point in this direction. ​


​Good Vibrations 

​
excerpts from The Cosmic Spirit
​
Pythagorus and Whitehead:​ Beauty as the Meaning of Existence

In the Pythagorean view, all beings are proportions of vibrations, like those of the harmonies played on instruments, but in cosmic dimensions of planets, star systems, and all other potential magnitudes of cosmic music. All beings are related by the internal feeling of these vibrations to contribute to a composition directed at beauty. This is concomitant with an important insight: that the meaning of existence is beauty, that is, that it is fulfilled in itself and its harmonic and harmonious relations to everything else. A. N. Whitehead has summarized this poetic view by declaring that, if the infinite process of the universe tends toward anything, it is not any state of fulfillment but the realization of beauty. In this view, the universe is directed toward itself, its own process, that is, at (the development, unfolding, and evolution of) its internality, where it must “listen” to and “articulate” its own potential pleroma of life—always anew in ever new harmonies and intensities.

​​- Roland Faber
Resonating with the Minute, the Minor, the Excluded, the Small​

The Small Flame in Everything draws us into the realm of the small and large. As a matter of magnitudes, we realize that the Spirit is not only in everything, but everything is in the Spirit, placed in it as its all-embracing space. It is the encounter of the heart of things, of that which matters when everything else is said and done. It evokes the images of life as fire, of life under fire, of the burning sentiment of life, the ineradicable thirst for life, and what this means for seeking the Spirit in all things, small and large, important and negligible, found and lost, picked up and thrown away. The Spirit of the All makes its appearance in the minute, the minor, the excluded, the undiscovered, the small voice. Here, the irreplaceable voice of God’s Self, the vox ipsissima divina, manifests through the heart of our Self in the form of a vibration between hearts, in modes of truths that cannot be expressed except in the language of the heart. The spirit seeker who follows this path will want to become minor to become everything. This path stands for a theopoetic emptying—as is suggested by the invoked images and gestures of the self-emptying Reality (sunyata) in Mahayana Buddhism, but also by the christological hymn in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:6–11), one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of the texts of the New Testament

​​- Roland Faber
Matter is Spiritual

Matter is spiritual; materia is the birth that the mater gives to life. It is the Mother Earth and the cosmic Matrix of becoming-Spirit. It is nothing fixed, as we might think if we were (still) limited by old categorizations imagining matter in terms of inert things or particles, operating like billiard balls in a universe of collisions. Rather, as newer physics has recognized, we live in a universe of touch, between forces, energetic potentials, and forms of fields that coalesce, that relate, that communicate, that mutually influence one another, become, or move into each other. We live in a universe where “things” are clouds of activities and potentials, of events and processes, of energies in exchange of characteristics. Everything moves, relates, is present in one another in dynamic ways. The spiritual connotations of this universe are endless, of course. But the one important connotation, at this point, is this: the cosmic Spirit indicates the vividness of these movements and exchanges, of these mutual ways of being immanent to one another beyond any abstract characterization in isolation, be it that of “matter” and “mind,” “form” and “content,” or “activity” and “potentiality.”

- Roland Faber
A Meditation: Becoming the Vibration You Are
​'​
Settle in your silent space . . . Hear in your mind a tone, arbitrarily generate it and listen to it persisting, without any change . . . Try not to drift from its awareness; try to avoid any self-assertion . . . You are only this listening; you are this tone . . . Now, slow the tone down . . . until you can hear the vibration . . . . . . Hold on to the tone; don’t lose it; don’t let it fade away . . . Hear its vibration as a wave, as a rocking chair, a heartbeat . . . . . . Hear in the vibrating tone the complete universe . . . . . . Slow the tone down until you hear the vibrating tone as a harmony of all beings vibrat[1]ing . . . . . . Slow down further . . . and further . . . Now you vibrate without time . . . like light vibrating only in the present . . . . . . Slow down further . . . and enter time . . . . . . Become the vibration that you are . .

​- Roland Faber
Becoming a Body of Resonance

Seeking the Sprit in everything is seeking its inner life, vibrating with the Spirit— like two instruments that are close enough to pick up each other’s vibration. It is like becoming a body of resonance that synchronizes with a world fine-tuned in the cosmic Spirit of life. In the Spirit of life, we become spiritual beings. Not that we ever were without “it”—life or Spirit. We always were spiritual beings, even before we noticed it. Nothing is without “it.” The Spirit hovers like an eagle, effortless and still in the wind of our Self, or moves like the wind over the waters of our inner being, churning up vivid patterns of foam and contours where surface and depth meet like the waves of the ocean and the air into which they pierce their forms. This is the cosmic Spirit in the image of the initia[1]tion of creation as it appears in the book of Genesis (1:2): the mysterious ruah Elohim, the divine Spirit that is just there, placeless, before the act of creation, 

​​- Roland Faber​
​To Touch and Be Touched by All Life
 
The Spirit of life impacts by touch. Seeking life, seeking the Spirit of life, is seek[1]ing to touch and be touched by all life, whether ours, others’ or that of this world: of the beauty of nature, of the relief of the thirst or the release of the imprisoned—much like Jesus wanted us to seek the Spirit of Life, of resurrection, of a new life, of offering life to others, in our touch of the excluded (Matthew 25). Seeking the Sprit in everything is seeking its inner life, vibrating with the Spirit— like two instruments that are close enough to pick up each other’s vibration. It is like becoming a body of resonance that synchronizes with a world fine-tuned in the cosmic Spirit of life. In the Spirit of life, we become spiritual beings. Not that we ever were without “it”—life or Spirit. We always were spiritual beings, even before we noticed it. Nothing is without “it.”

- Roland Faber
Music as Vibration
​​
Music is the vibration of patterns in events. Think of music as an aesthetic in[1]tegration of the elements of vibrations, of its magnitudes, rhythms, and harmonics, as well as of diverse overlapping fields of vibrations, such as language, mathemat[1]ics, matter, immanent structure, and the poetic transcendence. Language is a physi[1]cal vibration, a phonetic production of vibrations, but also of words and sentences, symbols and grammars, whole spoken and written manifestations that exhibit the characteristics of vibrational reality, of patterned nexuses of processes of synthesis Fata Morgana 199 and disintegration, empathy and self-transcendence. Mathematics is a language of the land of connections, propositions, implications, and multiplicities in diverse fields of relationality. Music is an aesthetic integration of matter, mathematics, and language, adding a dimension of immediacy of perception, ideal and real expedience of the tran[1]scendence of all limited spaces of matter, language, and mathematics, that is unique among the arts. Music is the art of vibration and, in this sense, a spiritual gate to the mystical insight into the vibrational nature of the cosmos and the Spirit of the cosmos that vibrates over its waters, its chaosmos.

- Roland Faber


More on Roland Faber
​ in Open Horizons
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Addendum: The Beach Boys
​

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