Daniel June: "Saint" Part One

Daniel June, age 29; philosopher, mystic, contemplative writer. Some of this , from TETRAMATRIX, has the melodic rhapsody and tone of Kierkegaardian inwardness. Some passages are poetic, with an airiness and quasi-auto-eroticism akin to the young Samuel Menashe. In scan, rhythm and cadence, parts are like an ode to Wittgenstein.


"Reader, my love is for you! Draw close; your lips blossom like a rose. . . "

Saint The Saint is he who feels. And since the heart is what feels, and specifically, the hormones and fluids the heart pumps, the heart is the soul, the salted sea, as again the brain with his waves is moved by salted electrolytes, a dual ocean of blood and nerve. The saint is the blood. He is a connoisseur of emotions, disdaining mere pleasures, which he associates with the body. He is concerned with the voluptuousness of guilt, perhaps, or the what mysteries lie inwards. Ascetics are heart based—mystical experiences matter most. Mysticism is his epistemology; what matters most is what feels deepest or highest (the terms in no way negate each other). Thus we have the priest, the mother, the passive. Why passive? Of all the impulses, the heart is the most difficult to will. I can will myself to do kindness, to do work, to think of any topic, to say any conceivable truth or lie—but I cannot force myself to feel it. Or so it seems.

Heart is habit as much as the others. Though initially instinctual, it learns from human assumptions as much as any other habit. One must merely learn the love handles to control the heart.

What is ethical for the saint? Emerson wrote “Nothing is at last sacred but the the integrity of my own mind,” in distinction to the church and Bible—but he spoke more of intuition then mind proper. The opposite feeling “my heart and mind are fully evil” mean exactly the same thing. It means this: my heart, right or wrong, is my central project. What is right for a mystic is what is moral, what feels right—the terms “conscience” and “temptation” take supernatural flavor here, and in fact, the supernatural is derived from the oceanic nature of the heart, and can have no reality or external existence apart from it.

A saint is entirely passive. If he acts in the world, this is obedience. Whatever the case, he is introverted, and desires to escape the world.

But lest we religionize this type too much, let us broaden the category. The saint is the mystic, the romantic, the faithful. A drug user is essentially of this category—he is concerned with mystical experiences of the more accessible kind.

The saint is history based, is interested in reexperiencing his own memories, and studying the mystical experiences of others (as recorded in Bibles and Scriptures.) It is not a study of the universal, per se, but of the nonrepeatable, and thus of constantly novel experiences. The great mystical ages were ages of myth and protoreligions (religions without the theology), as in the Hebrew Bible, and before that, the mythos of every known people of the world. Or as the baby begins: focused on the humming blur, and murmuring “dada.”

The saint desires. He is voluptuous, and uses this libido either to scourge himself with guilt, to unify with God in a sexual metaphor, or to fall in love with a woman. What he wants most from the earth is intimacy. Compassion is his standard of goodness, but more so is sanctity.

The Saint submits to his heart, let’s the passion overwhelm him, and submits to an external agent—God, Spirit, fasting. . .

Nirvana, whatever—merley as proxy, as an external symbol of while which acts as a stronger will than his own only because it is external and therefore nonvolitional. God is akin to the bed of nails here.

The Submission to the act of God the externalizing, omnipoting of God, is only a gesture of weakining the mind’s will in order to let the heart flow more freely. The heart evokes God, masquarades as God, puts Faith in God only in order to bind reason, to remove limitations. The feeling of infinity, eternality, or, in a word, limitlessness, is the natural feeling of the heart when the heart is not held in the hands of reason. Reason is always the limited, the defined, the tool, the handlable. But to fully enjoy a passion you must not control it, for God will die in your hand, the cherub falls ill, you are left with a passive rather than a passionate heart.

Few people realize how temporary, how fragile God is, how he may easily be killed off, and so the theologians must define him, logize him, make him a mental reality, when God is absurd, unreasonable, illogical, impossible—is not even in the dimension of assumptions, of logical experience at all, but is only felt, felt in a way that the word God is a poor mean thing, felt in such an exstasy that all we can say is I AM HE. This the mystic knows, and if he is wise, he will keep to himself. Poets advertise. Poets live by whoring their private joys. A poet is a sold out mystic.

The traditional saints, monks, ascetics, and that sort the world over hide away in monestaries, in private cells, and block all temptation. These are the weakest of the saints, and should not be respected more than men who know their limitaitions. The greatest Saints live among men, but invisible, never to make a sermon or offern any advise, but by merely presense and power of quiet gesture, perfect a city and makit it holy. Such men do not dress different, nor would you ever be able to describe such a saint as to typify him and point him out. He sees you directly, but when you see him you see something holy within yourself, and forget about him altogether.

The fake holy men are “a people set apart” with shaven head, wooden bowl, flaccid penis, distinctive diet, sacred books, inherited distinctions – believe none of it. The Great sacred man does not come upon the herald of a prophet, for his will is God, and God cares never to announce himself. You speak to this man and recognize the eternity of his eyes, the inevitiabilty of everything he does, and yet you never think to quote some book or tradition. He is like the angel that took the form of a wounded mouse upon your doorstep, but instead of bringing forth your care, he baits you to dare.

The ideal value is th idea’s value as mere object of contemplation. The true value of it is the contemplating that it allows.

The Saint who uses his mind is femine in that he sorts the inner. The hero who uses his words to explain his actions is the male who sorts the outer. Thus, a woman fantasizes stories, but a man only fantasizes images.

Whereas the saint is informed through the mystical, the philosopher is informed through the rational. He is not concerned with morals, but principles. He is not interested in the past, but in the eternal. He is the man of thought.

Thought is reified feeling. From the body and the needs we experience, and through active reasoning, we categorize experience into definitions. The philosopher knows the supreme joy of defining, of controlling concepts. For the philosopher is more active than the mystic. The philosopher doubts, active, whereas the mystic feels, passive. He is active minded, specific, and defined by what he believes and knows, not, as the mystic, by his attitude per se.

From the world he seeks education. His final concern is truth. He too is an introvert, and wishes to achieve truth rather then to apply it. And, being an introvert like the saint, he is concerned with self discipline, rather than power.

Logic is his tool for doubting—half his mind. He is ratiocreative, able to synthesize systems and definitions, and also to test them with doubts.

Reader, my love is for you—draw close! You lips blossom like a rose.

The mundus mundi, the world that is my heart, evokes a world to intensify my heart. When I’m in a mood, the whole world conspires to intensify that mood. Rude customers materialize when you are having a bad day to begin with.

The language of the Saint is music; the philosopher math and diagram, the poet poetry, and the hero technology.

The saint says “the way that can be named is not the eternal way,” or “any God you call God is not the true God.” Let’s explore this diagrammatically.

Music intensifies and stabalizes feelings: indeed, the saint will always praise “peace of mind, sabbath of soul” as the greatest good: for him it is. He is akin to the hero who dances, only the saint dances not at all, would rather sit and pray, sit and breath. A Saint presupposed one who is the “greatest of sinners”—an anarchic heart. As it is said: the greater the beginning chaos, the greater the final order.

All music we hear, comphrehend, and assume becomes part of the one song of our soul. Everything we hear is harmonized into the one song. This song is in the pattern of our brain waves, in the ebb and flow of our hormones, in the thumping of our heart and the bellowing of our lungs. And below the music is the womb of chaos – a creative void held sacred by the real and universal madness in all men.

The poet is most sainlty when he emphasizes music: metre, rhythm, pitch, volume, vowal length, tone – babes and odes get this.

Dionysus is a poet – Plato no. The Trageydians, the Diathryambics, were possible because there thrived manic, intoxicated, God-filled sex priests under the love and inspiration of Dionysus. Dionysus is twice born, and yet stands for the unity of life, the melding of opposites. There may be love plagues from Venus in her Venereal disease, and sun-plagues from Apollo for the transgression of borders, but there is no Dionysian plague. Even Hermes, who transgresses borders does not deny that the borders exist. Dionysus alone could melt borders.

I wish men would listen to their words when they wrote, and imagine their nouns when they mapped them. Indulge your senses. Walk enveloped in mind, like Neo in the Matrix – hallucinate! Layer the world in intepretations. You must see the metaphors around you, put them there, and you must metaphorize always.

My own writing is a threefold braid: power, play, mania. Or again: fury, wit, and crazy. When I start to lack one of these – when I lose my sense of humor – I come to regret my moods. When I yet have it, I am always safe.

Perhaps I lack only the godlen four: long, patient, balanced, and meticulous scolarship.

Psychotic eyes are when the metaphor mind replaces the emperical eyes.





The undersong is the language of our feelings and it is tied to, based on, corresponding with, the cycles of hormones into our blood stream and brain. The rhythm of our life is based on heart (soul) and breath (spirit) and the mingling there-between. These are literal, as in the actualy oxygen and adrenaline in our blood, and they are metaphorical, as in the breath of life and vigor that will eternally embed in our matter.

Speech ultimtely is the domain of the poet, and to a lesser extent the philosopher. A saint doesn’t think in words, and if he hears the word of God, it is only when he reasons and rationalizes nothing tat all, but let’s an assumption come directly into the heart of music.

The memories are akin to the feelings in that they are primary and direct, or so it seems, wheras thinking and saying are akin to assumptions.

The metaphor mind is a mind that dips between images, tied only by definitional/emotional similarity behind one interpretation of their image. There is a game I play with my friends, and I call it the simile game: one person lists two objects, at random, or even at odds, but never with an answer in mind, and challenges the other person to discover a clever correspondance. There is no point system to this game, and the only way to win is to impress yourself and the challenger:

How is a refrigerator like a baby?

Both contain milk.

How is a raven like a writing desk?

Both have inky feathers.

How is a square like street sign?

A street sign is so you don’t have to ask-where you are.

When an assumption becomes a habit, a derective, it must pass through the bottom of the ocean as a bubble of heaven, and achieve the scent of the ocean, the heart. The sublimation of a memory into assumption is heaven, a heaven that must again pass through the hell of heart to arrive at the heaven of mind.

In the stream of consciousness, habit is the pull of assumptions into the mind; mood is the summon of certain assumptions.

Only those who have not seen God have faith in him. And having seen God and greater things, the philosopher doesn’t bow.

Music intensifies and stabalizes a mood. It emphasizes it but also takes away the pain by the calm of purity. Hope is too painful because it becomes fear and back. Thus music is a normalizer.

The experience of the saint is the experience of the Mystic. It must be prepared for by cleanliness – and in this Nietzsche is among our best examples of a mystic. Before you meditate, clean, organize, structure and structurate.

The mystical experience is set apart because it is

Private – you feel it inwards, usually when alone, and alone in nature.

Important – you feel it is an absolutely relavent experience which you should again leave yourself open to, and interpret.

Certain – the mystical feeling itself is made out of a sense of great certainty. Since God in his deepest and most positive sense is nothing more than a name for Importance, this certainty is a power of importance.

Ineffible – the experience is deep and supports no dogma whatsoever. It cannot be spoken. The poetry and dogmas that arise from it are merely the filling of dry ditches that you dug from your studies before.

Mysticism is a mental illness, and mental illness cause and allow the oppurtunity for mental imbalance. When the mind is adjusting its assumptions in a daily way, we laugh or cry, the customer emotions of transition; when the mind is adusting its assumptions in a profound way, we feel arrested in epiphany.

Our studies, our speculations, our immersion in religious dogmas are the digging of ditches, dry and painful. The mystical puncture is to break into the the Musical Under of the heart, which again touches the Mythic of the memories – in other words, it is the broaching of a new river from the sun stream of needs. The feeling of strong certainty pours into the ditches, and crystallizes their shores. But you must descend into the primary music, you must touch primary experience of immediate memory. This is the mystic, and the saint knows this art best.