The Mission is Emission

Haiku thought for this Friday: the mission is to be emission, gnostic flareup from the sun and source, carrier of light for a billion years and miles into worlds otherwise dark, cold and barren. Wisdom is the highest and best use of consciousness. Wisdom, as poet Charles Olson taught me, isn't content as such; it isn't the rules Moses wrote on tablets of clay. It is the tablet's highest and best use as registry of insight; it is, in certain extreme cases, the return of the tablet to dust to serve as irrefutable proof that the insight will always re-emerge. The dark night of the soul is, as Japanese haiku-master Basho depicted, a cloud-covered moon that brings rest to fixated eyes and to minds locked in themselves. Here's how St. John of the Cross put it in "Dark Night of the Soul":

The deep suffering of the soul in the night of sense comes not so much from the aridity she must endure but from this growing suspicion that she has lost her way. She thinks that all spiritual blessing is over and that God has abandoned her. She finds neither support nor delight in holy things. Growing weary, she struggles in vain to practice the tricks that used to yield results, applying her faculties to some object of meditation in hopes of finding satisfaction. She thinks that if she is making a conscious effort to do this and still feels nothing, then she must be accomplishing nothing. Nevertheless, she perseveres, plagued by reluctance and fatigue. In truth, though unaware, the soul has been basking in spaciousness and quietude, free from the manipulations of her faculties.--Mirabai Starr, translator, "Dark Night of the Soul," Riverhead Books, 2002, page 67