People look at religions the way they do outfits in shop windows. In the context in which I am speaking we should think of them as being all made out of cotton. There are a lot of kinds of cotton but its all cotton. People who think that there is an essential difference between Pure Christianity and Buddhism or any of the others are misled. Many who choose Buddhism because they think it gives them more latitude should wonder if latitude has any meaning without longitude. People who think that Buddhism contains no Heavens or Hells have not seen many thankas and not run across terms like ‘wrathful deities’. They also haven’t read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sure it’s all in your mind. But, is it in your mind? Think about it (grin).
We’ve heard that phrase, “It’s all in your mind.” and “It’s all an illusion.” And we get the idea sort of but we very seldom grasp exactly what that means. We hear things and we make an automatic acknowledgement but do not experience it essentially. We just glide on by. Hitting the concrete from a hundred feet in the air gives you the momentary impression that the concrete is real. After that, what is real? Think about shattered illusions. And why is it that when something unreal is destroyed it can hurt; sometimes hurt a lot?
Some people think there is no God in Buddhism. These people are using the philosophy to complement their perspective. It’s the same as picking a certain kind of eyeliner or lipstick, or an outfit. You’re using it to set yourself off instead of changing yourself into it and losing yourself altogether. That’s one reason that Glamour is (as Alice Bailey put it) a world problem.
And it’s always semantics in any case.
We take everything outside of us and use our relationships to it to enhance our personality and it’s standing in the world apart. It’s about making everything compliment us- whether by our aversion to it or by our attraction to it. We seldom think in terms of altering ourselves to become more like something. This is what children do and they don’t do it because they are of a higher order, or smarter, or better as some like to make them out to be. They do it because they must. They are still growing into something. We were children ourselves. We will be children again. Innocence is something we lose for the purpose of re-acquiring it again.
Occasionally someone will want to know on whose authority I say what I say. I might ask, “On whose authority do you ask?” as well as “On whose authority do you perceive and understand as you do?” I might ask, “Who are you?” You could ask that as well. I’ve seen people take things I say out of context in order to give them a handhold that didn’t exist in context. For myself, when I read someone, I am at pains to understand what they mean. It is my intention to discover what they mean to say. I want to know that. Afterwards I might say this is not for me, or I might agree, or I might forget and move on without even knowing I was there.
In any case, I’m not initially looking to dispute with people. I’m not just waiting for my chance to speak. I realize that means you aren’t listening and you believe that nothing you hear will be as important as anything you say. I haven’t learned to be as I am due to innate qualities of humility and a super-abundance of all other good qualities that set me apart from genus humanatus ordinaire. I’ve learned to be this way from having been wrong. I’ve learned to be this way from getting what might have once been a tap on the shoulder before it became whatever force was necessary to get my attention.
This entire world is an ongoing sex act. Without the sex there would be no warriors and no wars. There would not be a population problem or the host of problems that it causes. We get that population from sex- even if there is more too it than just that. The principles of repulsion and attraction are everywhere evident at all times.
When you have sex you are setting a table for dinner and inviting invisible guests. Depending on your state of consciousness and your intention you are preparing a creature that needs that as the emblem on their coat of arms. We are the gateway and that which comes through the chute. We carry with us, within the very cells of our bodies, ‘the sins of our fathers.’ and the hopes of our generation. We can stop the transmission of qualities and intentions that are centuries and more old by saying, “This stops with me.” The failures of our parents are meant to be a lesson to us. Those of you lucky enough to have had parents who were an ongoing inspiration can comfort yourself with the fact that you now have an attachment that might be difficult to break; take that any way you like. The idea of a small family unit is like training wheels on a bike. There’s only one family. No, let’s go further, there’s only one self.
The idea of bramacharya and celibacy are not what they appear to be in the religious interpretations. It’s the idea of reproducing and replicating and the realm in which you are operating in respect of it that is the consideration. You’re always having sex in some way or another. It’s electro-magnetics. Those who have grasped the essentials of the Alchemical Marriage are enjoying something that defies description.
I remember saying in response to someone while on an acid trip once; they had indicated a beautiful young lady and made some sort of comment about becoming intimate with her. I remember saying something to the effect that I would never have the time to make love to each of them individually but I could certainly make love to all of them at once.
I’m not concerned with getting everyone to agree with, appreciate or understand me. I would not like what I would have to become to achieve that- even if it were possible. I am concerned with my direction and maintaining my focus; or rather with the constant returning of my focus. All of the effluvia such as this and the music and other things are by-products and incidental to the main theme. They’re the items that fly off the truck on its way down the highway.
Arguing with people and explaining yourself to people who do not want to understand is just bad sex. It could even be considered masturbation since nothing comes of it. Eventually you reach a point where you know what you mean and you know what’s valuable and what is not. The former is an aperture and the latter is Wal-Mart.
It’s like the desire to be celebrated and the desire to be known; why and as what? As the wheel turns, every personality is brought center stage when their moment arrives. It is at that time that the whole world can see what it was that that personality spent its time on. It is at that point that the world can see what that personality thinks is meaningful and important and at that time the world can determine if it thinks so too. There are all kinds of audiences out there.
One never knows when the time will come, when the spotlight will arrive or depart. One can only work upon that which is the most important element of their craft; without which their craft will be hollow... that thing which is far more important than anything they will ever say or write or perform... themselves. It is yourself that is seen in all you do. It qualifies and illuminates everything. If this has not been refined and shaped by a greater hand, constantly invoked by an ongoing surrender and passion to be transformed, then....good luck, because you will need it.
P.S. for those who wrote wondering just what I meant in my recent piece at Smoking Mirrors and whether I was serious or not, let me say; "Do you have to ask?"
P.P.S. Now this could go on for a long time. The P.S. has nothing to do with anything mentioned in this essay to which it is attached. There are things that might suggest otherwise but that is pure coincidence. Certain references in the essay have to do with life itself and are not specific. I thought it might be helpful to know that.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
The Misconceived and the Disbelieved.
Beamed from the Saucer Pod By Visible at 16:43
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12 comments:
Well that was good timing. I checked in a few minutes ago and nothing and now here you are.
Good Sunday morning to you Les. I hope things are as beautiful there today as they are here in...ummm..Texas, right now.
Thanks for this piece.
ben
rocking good work and that entry over at Smoking Mirrors is a classic. I'm still laughing!
Pen
Now that was good sex.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I got really high today and just came in with my friends. Reading you in an altered state is a real trip. I don't believe I just said that. Thanks for all you do.
Erin
you remind me of Ginsberg a little,,just a little,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water fiats 'doating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night,
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, I listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels,
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the E.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930'S German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam-whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity.
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddhas or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive' or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisy-chain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally * * * * * *, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
"It’s like the desire to be celebrated and the desire to be known; why and as what? As the wheel turns, every personality is brought center stage when their moment arrives. It is at that time that the whole world can see what it was that that personality spent its time on. It is at that point that the world can see what that personality thinks is meaningful and important and at that time the world can determine if it thinks so too. There are all kinds of audiences out there."
It's pretty clear what you spent your time on. This was for me one of the very best things you have ever written.
Bradley
Every time I come here I find something different than I have ever heard before and wind up thinking things I have never thought before. You are definitely touched by God.
CC
i just wished you hadn't said it. that was the first thing that came to me. then i just told myself its alright, someone had to say it.
That's some poem there by Ginsberg in his slathering, homosexual frenzy. I would agree that the flow and force of the inspirational fire is similar. Gratefully, both your focus and your muse are very different.
a 'friend'
I do not need to add how exceptional your work always is and how frequently I am enlightened and changed by reading it but I will because 'someone had to say' that too.
hi, thanks for dropping by my blog (yourheadphones.blogspot.com); just wanna know how'd you find it. :]
Hello Les,
Your weblog was mentioned to me by another Satsangi. I am living in Texas but have spent some time in France and met some Satsangis in India who don't live far from where you are. I am researching one of my and my family's past lives in France near that area.
I speak French fluenty and presently working on getting teaching credentials for it. I am also a writer, history, nonfiction, spirituality.
Are you a Satsangi too? What city did you live in before you left the USA? I have ties to Chicago and New Orleans also.
Nice blog.
Netemara
Hi Netemara
I can't answer you unless you write me an email so that I can reply. Hopefully you will see this.
Regards...
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