The First & Second Births

Giotto's vision of St. Francis
ascending into heaven:

The first birth is into gravity.

The second birth is out of gravity, into Antigravity.

For gravity is of the flesh,

but Antigravity is of the spirit.

Make More Room on Your Plateau

You gain spiritual power

by understanding and accepting
the tenets of Antigravity,
but gaining spiritual power
entails grave responsibilities,
and you must work harder
than ever before to maintain
your center and help others
to rise to the same plateau,
to enjoy the same new vistas,
that you have yourself reached.

This is the very reason why
religious teachers have always
stressed the importance of
a disciplined approach
to spiritual striving.

These teachers tell us that
feeling a new lightness in your life,
a sense that you've risen
above your habitual problems,
is not enough, for your sense
of transcendence may be more
the result of the inflation of your ego
than your soul's connection to
the great truths of the spirit,
and inflated egos exist mainly
to become deflated egos.

We all know about adolescent-
type personalities who float away
into their own private worlds because
they have little or no regard for others.


But Antigravity is about
the kind of transcendence
that never fails to keep
the interests of
other people
in mind.

To put it in a more graphic way:


If you're floating because
you've got a big head, a big ego,
then you shouldn't be floating.

If you're up, up and away
because your hard work
has raised you high
above the others, then
by all means float on!

Upward to Imagination

With some help from the sword
of young David, the head of
Goliath prepares to surrender
to the force of gravity
(as painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City):


We like stories that have suspense.
Such stories keep us suspended,
up in the air, eager to hear more.
Such stories free us
from gravity,
allowing us to float
up into the realm
of the imagination,
where all things
are possible,
up there
in the
air.

Barack Obama, Antigravitarian

 

Barack Obama, it's safe to say, is
America's first Antigravitational president.

What a perfect moment for such a man to appear.
After being weighed down for
eight years by gross misgovernment,
we need all the lift that Obama can give us!

 

The Lazarus Effect

It's very fine to speak
triumphantly of Antigravity,
yet the question of death,
(you may want to point out)
still looms like an open grave
at our feet, emitting dank vapors
and muffled shrieks of terror.
No darkness could possibly
be more mystifying, or
more vexatious.

Still, there is consolation
in ten thousand images
that show the power of death,
great as it is, being overcome
by the greater power of life.

So don't be afraid.
Rest in the good hope
that you will escape
the gravity of whatever
confronts you as you lie
on your deathbed.
If my hunch
(which echoes a huge
majority of human opinion)
is correct, then death is the
greatest Antigravitational
phenomenon of all.

"The Death of the Good Old Man" by William Blake

Gravity's Crueler Cuts

 

Here are some lines from
Robert Frost's poem, "Provide, Provide!"

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Think gravity's not your enemy,
that your fate's different from Frost's Abishag?

Then consider another example of fallen pride,
Brigitte Bardot before and after
an extra fifty years of gravity:

And then there's an old guy
named Arnold Schwarzenegger,
who was once as tall and muscled
as Conan the Barbarian:


Sad to say, even his carefully colored
hair can't completely hide the ravages of time.

Which is not to neglect the fact that
some younger people are also feeling
gravity's less smiling aspects:


As for finding a throne or
making the whole stock exchange
your own--forget about it!
In the long haul, the only answer
to the assaults of gravity is to cultivate
a soul, preferably an eternal one.
In short, embrace the Antigravitational
solution for all its worth.
Because, like it or not, that's what
life is really all about.

 

Out of the Dust

 

Over the course of
our lives, which tend
to grow longer with
each passing decade,
the great existential
problem for most of us
is not mental anguish
but the phenomenon of
physical pain, which can
overtake us on any day of
our lives and make us feel
as though we should never
have been born.

This recognition
is not a joyous one,
but its does demand
our attention.

Soon or later
the body betrays
the Spirit within it.
That is why it's so vital
to develop Antigravitational
capacity, to rise out of the dust
that the body is slowly becoming, and
to find a new home for our hearts and minds
in a cosmos that God has been building
(we hope) to host us for eternity.

 

Ghost Story

 

Space, time, and gravity will all fall away--
it matters not how deeply trapped
we are in them today.

The English war poet Wilfred Owen
shortly before his death in late 1918

While Wilfred Owen was serving in the trenches as a Royal Army infantry officer during World War I--and simultaneously winning great fame as a young war poet--his brother Harold became a naval officer. Harold was aboard a Royal Navy ship in the Atlantic off Africa when he heard in November of 1918 that the war had come to an end, but at first he found no relief in the good news: "It bothered me that I could not, to myself, account for my restless unease. I felt horribly flat."

He quickly recovered his spirits, however: "I stared out over the incredibly blue expanse of glittering sea, and perhaps something in the limitless stretch of water and sky affected me. I realized with a surge of happiness that the war had not broken my own family. My brother Wilfred must be all right now; he was safe, and so was I."

Wilfred Owen may well have been safe, but the place that provided him with safety was no longer a part of the reality that the living share from minute to minute and day to day. Shortly before the war ended, he had been killed by the Germans at the front, a fact that did not, apparently, stop his spirit from traveling through the ether to visit Harold Owen on his ship.

Harold carefully recorded his experience of ghostly visitation:

"I had gone down to my cabin to write some letters. I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside. I felt shock run through me with appalling force. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all limbs stiff and slow to respond. Looking at him I spoke quietly, 'Wilfred, how did you get here?'"

For there Wilfred was, sitting in his brother's chair at his brother's desk in his brother's shipboard cabin. Harold Owen recounted the scene with such detail and clarity that it seems impossible to dismiss it as a dream:

"He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile.

"I felt no fear--I had not when I first drew my door curtain aside and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin . . .

"I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. I felt another power in senseless, absolute loss. I knew with certainty that Wilfred was dead."

Harold wasn't able to confirm the paranormal perception that his brother had been killed until days later when his ship arrived in England. But dead? Isn't "dead" a rather strange word to use in this context? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Wilfred Owen had slipped the bonds of flesh and gravity and found the freedom to move through time and space at will, rushing along the spiritual pathways of his compassion to bring a message of conquest over death to those whom he loved best?

 

The Lift of Love

 

Cupid is a kind of angel,
though an angel that's more
closely associated with the world
and the flesh than those fully fledged
creatures who descend to us from above.

This little fellow's lower status
is suggested by the stubbiness
of his wings and the fact that
he never seems to stray far
from the affairs of our lower anatomy.

Nevertheless, it would be hard
to exaggerate his importance.
Archangels like Michael and Gabriel
help guide the destiny of us all
by fighting wars in heaven
and announcing earthshaking events,
but it is Cupid who keeps
the human race going.

And in the experience of most of us,
there's no Antigravitational force that lifts
the human heart as high and as fast as the kind
of love that is intensified by the inclusion
of a powerful sexual component.

Cupid rules because
love validates life,
and if you have no love
your life remains unvalidated.

 

The Love That Is Not Love

 
The love that is full of light is the hope and glory of the world. It is the love that comes freighted with gravity and egotism that is destructive, the love that is no real love, the love in the name of which endless crimes have been committed.

Henry Fuseli, "The Nightmare," 1781

 

Sunrise with Om

 
When the power of Antigravity is enclosed in a single sound, that sound is symbolized by this Sanskrit letter-word:

There is a special chanting pronunciation for this word, a deep and drawn-out drone that can be represented, if a little ridiculously, by this string of letters in English: Ahhhooohhmmm.

People who repeat this sound correctly or learn to chant mantras in which "Om" holds a central place are well on the way to rising to the highest
realm of spiritual experience.

Om is, in short, a proven gravity-buster, for it was the sound that hummed through the primordial universe before gravity came into being and everything was still light.
 

Riding the Winds

 

While previous civilizations

rode the winds in their imaginations . . .

(Leonardo's sketch for a flying machine, around 1490)

. . . we ride the winds in reality.


But that doesn't mean that we're allowed
to shut down our imaginations.
No, now more than ever,
we need to experience
the pleasures of mental flight.

Henry Fuseli, "Ariel," around 1805

 

Don't Worry About the Darkness

 
The very remarkable filmmaker
David Lynch in his book entitled
Catching the Big Fish:
Meditation, Consciousness, & Creativity :

"Negativity is like darkness. So what is darkness? You look at darkness, and you see that it's really nothing: It's the absence of something. You turn on the light, and darkness goes.

"But sunlight, for instance, doesn't get rid of negativity. It gets rid of darkness, but not negativity. So what light can you turn on that removes negativity the way sunlight removes darkness? It's the light of pure consciousness, of the Self--the light of unity.

"Don't fight the darkness. Don't even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light and the darkness goes. Turn up that light of pure consciousness: Negativity goes.

"Now you say, 'That sounds so sweet.' It sounds too sweet. But it's a real thing."
 

The Return of the Repressed

 

Antigravity is
the return of the repressed
in an age of materialism:
"It will flame out," will flame out.

In spite of the heavy spirit
of the age in which we find ourselves,
Antigravity isn't particularly
shy about manifesting itself.
Strike a match,
you will see the heat rise.

Remember:
The power of Antigravity dwells
in your heart and mind like
fire dwells in a match.
All you must do
is strike it,
and the dark
chill of an impersonal
world will be driven far away.

Remember also:
Once you have kindled
this fire, you must be quick
to share it with others,
lest the flame die while
still being born.

Fire from Heaven

Lines from "God's Grandeur"
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil . . .
Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil . . .

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

With Wings or Without?

From the beginnings of civilization and back into prehistory, divine beings were often depicted with wings to show that, like the birds, they were creatures of the sky who observed humans from on high and could hide and frolic among the clouds. Their wings also allowed them to move rapidly from place to place, which explains why one devotee could experience their divine presence at one location and another devotee, far away, could apprehend the same divinity only a short time later.

However, in the Western tradition God's powers are seen to be so overwhelmingly great that he defies gravity at will, as dramatized on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Michelangelo fresco known as "The Creation of the Sun and Moon." Our Father, according to this vision, is definitely in heaven, but he needs no bird-like appendages to keep him there; wings are for lesser beings like angels, not the Lord of the Universe. Obviously, this article of faith has evolved far beyond the one that likened the gods to glorified eagles.

The absolute difference between human beings who are earthbound and a transcendent God who floats about in ultra-reality at will is a reminder that we should cultivate humility. Michelangelo's magnificently famous "Creation of Adam," also on the ceiling of the Sistine, may reveal the Creator and his human creation as approximately the same size, but there's no question about which one claims immortality, keeps celestial companions, and possesses the life-giving touch--and which is an utterly dependent creature without clothing, shelter, full consciousness, or, as yet, a single companion.
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A Change in Your Day

A little Antigravity can
make a great change in your day.

What's Wrong with Gravity?

Do you think it's strange to diss gravity,
to make it the villain of a universal melodrama?
Do you wonder what could be wrong with the
gravitational glue that holds the universe together?
If so, you haven't considered black holes.

Blacks holes are the perfect symbols of everything that denies us life and freedom because their gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from their overwhelmingly massive interiors. All things that approach them, even entire galaxies, are sucked into oblivion, into an extinction beyond the darkness of death. They provide the best example of why we are and ought to be Antigravitarians.

Black holes are far and away the most formidable and frightening things in the universe. They are the ultimate in death imagery, and they represent the unfathomable disaster that occurs when gravity goes unchecked by Antigravity, which is the force that holds the universe in balance and allows us to live and not die.

Closer to home (which is to say, our home planet), gravity erodes and eventually destroys entire civilizations. While the 19th-century painting of the destruction of Sodom (below) by the English artist John Martin makes the end of an ancient city look like the work of a nuclear holocaust, the actual historic process that reduces entire civilizations to stark stones and dust and ashes is gradual yet still phantasmagorical, and the ultimate result of decadence and defeat is dramatized around the world by the presence of splendid but desolate ruins where there were once thriving metropolises.

Jerash, Jordan (Photo by Robert Teague)

These are the ruins of a Roman city
that once flaunted its high roofs at the sky.
Thus the power of gravity,
of which we need to be aware,
of which we need to beware.
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Lighten & Rise

 
If you ever need proof of humanity's distrust of gravity, consider the billions of dollars that Americans spend annually on weight-reduction products.

We use terms like "beer belly," but the real force that presses down on the extra weight that we carry around from consuming beer or comfort food or sweets or whatever is gravity.


Losing weight is not just a matter of making ourselves more attractive. "Slenderizing," becoming slender, is a mass cult, and reveals the central human desire to lighten and rise. Fat may help us float when we're swimming, but the ocean that we'd really like to be more comfortable in is the ocean of air.

Think of all the young athletes and dancers you've seen whose feet have kissed the earth goodbye, whose lithe bodies rise in long, lovely arcs. Yeah, to float like that, to lose enough weight to float like that. Yeah, look homeward, angels.

The rest of us just have to suck it up!

 

On the Fly

Eternity is Antigravitational.

The opposite of eternity is time & space,
which is ruled by gravity and can only
express eternity in fits & starts.

Anything that possesses eternity
possesses Antigravity and has
a tendency to rise up & float away.

You must catch it on the fly!

Uplift at the Corners

We strike another mortal blow

against gravity every time we lift

the corners of our mouth in a smile.

Admiring the World

When down under gravity,
consider these uplifting quotations:

"Stand up straight. Admire the world."
--John Cheever

"Keep a green tree in your heart and
perhaps a singing bird will nest in it."
--Chinese proverb

"Self-pity is not box-office."
Hollywood proverb

"We have no right to have no hope,

because if we have no hope,
there is no hope."
--Jacques Monot

"Noble deeds and hot baths are
the best cures for depression."
--Dodie Smith

"True serenity comes
after knowledge of pain."
--Marya Mannes

"Anything awful makes me laugh.
I misbehaved once at a funeral."
--Charles Lamb

"No life that breathes with human breath
has ever truly longed for death."
--Lord Tennyson

"Surviving meant being born over and over."
--Erica Jong

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
--Tom Robbins

What Antigravity Is & Is Not

Antigravity is a mystery,

but it is not mysticism.

For unlike the revelations
that are accorded to mystics,
Antigravity can readily be
conveyed in words and images,
all sorts of words and images.

Antigravity is able to continue

one of the world's greatest traditions
because the Word still dwells
among us and lifts us up in spite
of our dismal materialism.

The promise of this blog is that it can raise us into a realm of spirit that we haven't glimpsed in a very long time (perhaps not since childhood), for Antigravity is neither a fantasy nor an illusion.

Its light and hope possess more reality than the earth beneath our feet, and though we may be tempted to believe that magic has escaped from the world, humanity can radiate the supernatural and the beautiful as much now as ever before, and with a little effort on our part we can rise above gravity--even if our efforts are confined to reading the words on this screen and absorbing the lessons of the images presented here.

Antigravity Live

Premise One:

There is an illness
that runs riot around the world,
breaking hearts & ravishing lives
as it goes, & that illness is
what we call depression.

Premise Two:

Depression is caused by
what we may term "emotional
gravity," which is the kind
of gravity that this blog
chiefly sets out to disperse
& dispel, so that we may
once again live & breathe
without the weight of the world
sitting crushingly on our shoulders,
so that we may once again
breathe as freely as we were
meant to breathe.

Premise Three:

Darkness is dispelled as
the lights come up & a voice says:

Whatever it is that you deeply believe in,
here is something new to energize your faith,
something new to lift you up above the dread
of your days and unite you with your true self.
Announcing the slow, sweet and continuing
revelation of the mystery that dwells
in the name and reality of Antigravity.

A mystery, then. And that is good,
because mysteries intrigue.
But how do you get the hang of this mystery?

Just one thing, really, is required:
You have to keep coming back,
back here, back to this blog.