Poiein

I've been traveling back in time to India lately.  I've also been trying to remember what it was like living in a tent in the snow in Utah and Arizona, and hitchhiking to Las Vegas.  Sometimes I take my time machine back to all of my smiling students in Japan, and remember the greatest show I've ever experienced in my life.  It's helping me remember the lessons from the journey so I can tell a story that helps people love life.

 If we were to take Hinduism as a whole—

its vast literature, its complicated rituals,

its sprawling folkways, its opulent art—

and compress it into a single affirmation,

we would find it saying:

You can have what you want.

- Huston Smith
The World's Religions

 There is something called mythopoesis.
These are parts of all the great religions of the world.
The poetic aspect is extremely important to me,
because poetry is what gives meaning to existence.
Not fact and figures and charts, but poetry.

Poetry is essentially
a really sophisticated way
of experiencing the world.

And it is much more than mere words and stories.

Poetry is to the human condition
what the telescope and the microscope are to the scientist.

-excerpted from V.V. Raman interview

Einstein's God

V.V. Raman is an Indian Professor of Mathematics at RPI

The constructive and creative “metatheologian” must be something much more than a museum curator or accomplished academic drudge.  He must be a poet, not just a versifier, but a master of images—a parabolist, allegorist, analogist, and imaginator.  He must be the poet in the primordial sense of the word poiesis, poiein—to make-do, to create.  Only with this kind of imaginative handling will the myths fructify one another.

But things do not fructify one another by mere juxtaposition; they have to be woven together in some kind of active relationship.  -  Alan Watts, The Art of Godmanship

Soon a human will be wondering about the mystery of the world and perhaps hoping for something more from experience.  Maybe they will want something deeper, or stranger, or holier, or more creative, or more intense than what they are currently experiencing of the infinite dreams of the one poem.  Whoever they are, when they see the story in the store, I hope they pick it up and immediately get excited, turning page after page, and then start looking around the world they live in and realizing with wide eyes that the world has so much more to offer you when you turn on your imagination and awed gratitude toward the poetic gifts of creation.