solar orbit #1 rat haus reality,
ratical branch

completes its
first revolution
around SOL

solar orbit #2



for this special time-buoy, the ratitor's corner and this "first revolution complete" message are different parts of the same whole. here, after considering a deeper meaning for what is labeled "coe-ink-keh-dink," the nuts-and-bolts of current works-in-progress throughout ratical are listed. the ratitor's corner gives wider play to an some of the intuitive and instinctual ways of seeing that have been manifesting more of late.


to me, it has been astonishing to learn of late that people are actually finding their way to ratical. yes of course "if you build it they will come" has some basis in fact -- even if what one builds is tawdry, destructive, or actually leathal. but that this place would garner any appreciable traffic . . . it's simply something i never expected wood manifest without significant "hustling" from mosa and me.

and then, with the bumpy year its been, devoting time to growing and attending to things here has not been at all as prodigious as had been hoped. nevertheless, it has been very clear these physical "accidents" have in fact been great gifts illuminating anew the fundamental understanding of time's own measure. the physcial costs of working on these machines can also completely become "runaway". such "taking time" pre-empted my "priorities" by this world i exist in, enabling me to give up the mind's inclination to perhaps drive the body off a cliff without first checking to see if this is acceptable . . .

in each of the three "bumps" i received -- especially the third one -- i found the common associations people identify with concepts such as "luck" and "coe-ink-keh-dink" to be utterly inadequate in illuminating and apprehending the deeper significance and meaning of what i had been experiencing.

again, i find a passage in van der Post's biography of Jung to be especially salient with regard to non-rational perception of the symmetry of the universe acting upon us in a myriad of ways.

Coincidences have never been idle for me, instinctively, but as meaningful as I was to find they were to Jung. I have always had a hunch that they are a manifestation of a law of life of which we are inadequately aware and which in terms of our short life are unfortunately incapable of total definition, and yet however partial the meaning we can extract from them, we ignore it, I believe, at our peril. For as well as promoting some cosmic law, coincidences, I suspect, are some sort of indication to what extent the evolution of our lives is obedient or not obedient to the symmetry of the universe.

Coincidence is nothing if not an expression of a symmetry of meaning, and that symmetry of meaning, I felt that night, had demanded not only that we should have been to the heart of Africa I loved at a similar moment in time but also that fire should have been my first introduction to the world of his mind and his nature.

Also, my experience of Africa and above all what it evokes in human imagination have been the source of almost all that has concerned my imagination. I have walked through vast areas, from the Cape of Good Hope to the baroque mountains and deeply wooded valleys of Ethiopia, and travelled in other ways through yet more of it. I thought that if I came near to knowing and understanding anything, it was Africa and its peoples. Yet I was finding as we talked that Jung, although he had not walked literally so far and wide as I had done, understood African aboriginal patterns of life even better than I and, if anything, revered them more. The whole tone of his speech became warmer and more animated and his turn of expression more poetic and almost lyrical when he spoke about it. He had always, as I came to call it, a special "African" voice.

Although there were moments when I felt a little abashed that a Swiss, however eminent, should know my native continent quintessentially better than I did, any possibility of resentment was cancelled by the confirmation and support he gave to my own intuitions and feelings about it and their wider significance for the life of our time. It would warm me like wine to hear him too imply that the balance between the primitive and the civilised, the Jacob and Esau of which I have spoken, had never been honourably struck, and that a great deal of the troubles of modern man came from the fact that he himself had a deep, warm, caring, trusting, instinctive, primitive self from which he had not only allowed himself to be divorced but had gone on to despise and repress with a deadly ruthlessness.

--Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, pp. 47-48

on a level far deeper than just intellectual, i know it is true that each of us is born with a "deep, warm, caring, trusting, instinctive, primitive self". i go back to what mosa wrote as her lead-in to Howard Fast's The First Men:

Do reading certain stories show us something new or rather awaken us to something we've known all along? At the age of 14, i knew we all are born knowing infinitely more than we do after a few years of immersion in post-industrial, non-community-based culture. Reading The First Men that same year, reaffirmed this and showed a glimpse of how we might be able to tap into and use our innate wisdom. There's an African proverb: "It takes a village to raise a child." Howard Fast may not have been aware of this piece of wisdom when he wrote his story but he knew it none the less. There are many communities raising children with skills that might be labeled "supernatural." They were raised in a circle of love, objectivity, and wisdom only available to those who know that people are members of that community which includes all life.

learning anew to see the unitary movement of everything in universe is perhaps a "reason" "why" we find ourselves "here". this much i know for certain: we are nourished by and require stories and story telling every bit as much as the food and drink we take in to sustain our human overcoats. i know this more deeply than ever before after reading and immediately re-reading A Story Like The Wind and it's sequel, A Far Off Place earlier this year. not since my late teens when i read Tolkein's Lord Of The Rings trilogy, have i been as affected by a story. but while that trilogy was fantastical with elements of the human experience wrapped up within it, this pair is fundamentally tied to contemporary events and immensely relevant to this point in human "its'story".

TESTAMENT
"Thou knowest that I sit waiting for the moon to turn back, that I may listen to all the people's stories . . . For I am here--in a great city--I do not obtain stories-- . . . I do merely listen, watching for a story which I want to hear; that it may float into my ear . . . I will go to sit at my home that I may listen, turn my ears backwards to the heels of my feet on which I wait, so that I can feel that a story is in the wind."

Introduction

I BEGIN with the extract from a statement made by a Bushman convict a hundred years ago, which appears as my Testament on the page opposite because it shows that he was sick even more for stories than for home or people. One of a doomed fragment of the first people of Africa, he had been sentenced to work on the breakwater in Table Bay which, at that time in the Cape of Good Hope, was considered the heaviest punishment for crime, short of death. He had been sentenced thus because when hungry he had taken a sheep from the flock of a man of a race who had stolen all his own people's great land.

The statement from which this extract is taken is for me one of the most tragic and significant utterances to come out of my native country, but I have given only this much because it is enough to show, as nothing else I have encountered in the literature of the world, how the living spirit needs the story for its survival and renewal. It was this universal consideration which made me take up the story that follows.

--Laurens van der Post, A Story Like The Wind, pp. viii-ix.

it is this need of stories by the living spirit, for its survial and renewal, that has intuitively been a primary driving force within to make ratical be a place where people can drink at the well of stories to enliven and nurture our inner yearnings to evoke and re-manifest our deep, warm, caring, trusting, instinctive, primitive selves. there's a great deal of fragmentation and division in the world. self-deception is one of the hottest things going on the planet today. finding re-connection with being once more, so we can swap the exchange we've made for having instead of being seems to offer great promise in responding creatively to this state of life that calls for another way of living.

To me it was simply that the older I got, the more and more I felt that we had lost, there was a bushman in everybody, and we'd lost contact with that side of ourselves. And we must learn again from the bushman. Trying to find out what is that side about.

I thought how strange it was that people were digging up old ruins -- excavating -- archaeologists, to find out what archaic man was like, and here he was walking about in our midst. Why didn't we ask him? That really is at the back of it: was the fact that the bushman personified an aspect of natural man which we all have, but which we've increasingly lost contact and which has impoverished us and endangered us.

And when I spoke to Jung about it he said this is not an extravagent thought at all. He said every human being has a 2 million year-old man within himself. And if he loses contact with that 2 million year-old self he loses his real roots. So this question of the way, of why modern man is in search of his soul and has lost his religious roots, had a lot to do with the interest in the bushman.

Because I found that this naked little man in the desert, who owned nothing, I used to say that the difference between him and us was that he is and that we have. But we no longer are. We have. We've exchanged having for being.

So if the bushman goes, through what one knew of him, and his stories, and his art, he was important to us. He must live on with these things. And that's what I've tried, merely tried, to bring back. To use it as a bridge between the world in the beginning, with which we've lost touch, and the now.

-- Lauren van der Post at 87, 1994, New Dimesions interview in his home in Chelsea




so, there is some re-organizing as well as "new construction" under way at this first revolution's juncture. nothing is "finished" or buttoned-up yet, but we wanted to make it clear that although there appears to have been an hiatus around here since June, in fact, the joint is jumpin'.

there are other plans in the works that unfortunately, aren't ready for visibil' descriptions as yet. the "bottomline" in this kind of work is the time-sink to get stuff fully hooked up and ready for explication webly. all we can say at this juncture is, stay tuned.


it has been a great pleasure watching this place begin to grow into its own. we deeply appreciate everyone who's taken a moment to pheedbak us and always enjoy "hearing" from those who through whatever means, find their way to the rat haus.



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