Saturday, December 23, 2006

Dreaming that She is You.

I have the most intense dreams. Sometimes they are as real as if I were right there like I am right here. Last night I changed into a young woman; late teens, early twenties... pretty, which I was aware of but not as much as I might have expected; not that I had much of an idea of what to expect. There wasn’t anything sexual about the dream. Inversely I was also attracted to the women in the environment more than the men but, as I said, there wasn’t anything sexual about the dream.

I was living in London in a community where people came and went. Suddenly I/she was in it and Apollonius, the mask layer of Les, the mask layer of the observer was gone. I was briefly touched when people asked about him but I couldn’t tell them anything. The biggest difference was in the way people looked at me. I had an instinctive wariness that was similar to something I have had most of my life. I realized it was this female thing I had either always had or developed as a result of the fighting arts and kundalini experiences.

A woman and her boyfriend came to the door of the restaurant that was a part of the community I lived in and I was talking to them about what we were like. The woman was one of those big horsy English ladies and she wanted to go somewhere else. It was as they were leaving that I noticed that it was because of me. She was threatened by my elfin appearance, even though her boyfriend was just hungry and hadn’t taken any particular exception to my appearance. There were a lot of little nuances of this sort. The most interesting feature was that being female wasn’t exactly the way you picture it if you are a man. There’s a non-sexual aspect to the whole thing that seems to transmit itself in a sexual seeming way that isn’t exactly that. It’s more like the difference between magnetism and electricity.

When I got up this morning I felt this sense of intense well being. I have to say that that is often the case. Still, this morning it was larger than usual and, as usual, was encompassed by this female energy that is a lot like waking up in bed with your mother when you are still in pre-pubescent status; the sensation follows me out of the bedroom and into my study where I sit each morning with my tea and tobacco and have my morning conversation with God. For me God is a mother and ever more so as time passes. It’s an interesting period of time. We talk and she tells me things and sometimes I will make these deep noises in my throat that vibrate in my ribcage and have something to do with harmonizing me with the levels beneath the phenomenal world.

Early in the 20th Century the cosmic clock moved into the sign of Aquarius. There is a lot of complexity in this and it needn’t be addressed here. One of the larger changes that this sign brings is the feminization of the masculine. You see it in the emergence of Goddess worship and the Gaia principle and you see it in the wider proliferation of bi-sexuality and gay lifestyle. It is essentially geared toward the intuitive nature. However, in the material world it can take on all sorts of expressions. On the grosser level, materialism is one of the perversions of the feminine. It’s funny that the impetus for comfort is civilization’s reaction to pain. Well, it isn’t funny. It creates pain aplenty of its own and worse, it creates despair and existential emptiness.

I find religions to be a great curiosity. You learn a lot about people by watching the way they dress the unknown. Most of the time it seems as if they are making a larger version of themselves, complete with all of the fears and prejudices that they possess in the smaller version. They are certain that God will smite their enemies and that God knows who that is and that the heathen are going to Hell. Another curiosity is that God is up in the sky somewhere. That doesn’t make a lot of sense if you are a metaphysician or a mystic but if you’re in the usual dualized (my word) confusion it makes a kind of unfortunate sense to see God as something you are not and never will be; even if both areas of physics tell you that the thing is a whole. Well, the child and the mother appear to be separate things but they’re not. It’s the way things look as opposed to the way things are that screw us up.

People talk about going to Heaven and seeing their loved ones who have passed on. No one is going Heaven who isn’t already there. The time to get to Heaven is while you are still in this body. Of course, depending on how you handle things here, Heaven might come looking for you or it might not. It depends on whether you are looking for it. A lot of people think that Heaven is something like Las Vegas and that is the appeal of Las Vegas. Or it could be L.A. or a lot of other places. Heaven is a land of impersonality. The ticket in is something you leave, not something you bring. The loss of this thing is the automatic keyed entry.

Just about everyone has a domestic argument going on in their head. Their mother and father are having a fight at the dinner table in their mind or in the living room while they lie in bed reaching for sleep. Regardless of what you understand about that limited perversion called psychology, or about anything regarding the seeming dual nature of things, there is only one objective and that is to bring your parents together in your mind and heart and make them one. Indeed, it is about the heart swallowing the mind. It’s called the Alchemical Marriage. It’s the objective of Tantra. It’s what Christ meant about grooms and bridegrooms. It’s union really. It’s more than coincidental that the letters for the words, 'unity', 'love' and 'death' in a certain mystical science all add to 13; but another time for that.

If you go looking for connections (and I suggest that you do) you find that two poles always create a third that postulates another and on and on. Whatever you were disappears by degrees as you follow along, no matter which direction you go in. It all comes back to the same place. Outward toward the light and noise or inward toward the quiet and the light; they touch. The jury is out on which one hurts more. And most of us need for the jury to be out in the hope that going out actually will prove to have been smarter. Well, your mother has to let you go. She knows what’s waiting out there but you don’t. It’s that love that allows for all that you have to suffer that lets you go because she also knows that you can’t miss finding her no matter how lost you get or how long it takes to find her again. It's not like you can't find her at any point along the way.

In materialism, which is very pronounced at this time, she can be turned into a dark goddess with a bloody aspect. We all heard when we were young how certain things were for our own good. It’s a hard irony to learn that the creator and the destroyer are one.

Every Christmas it happens to me. Sometimes it comes late and sometimes it comes early. I never bother with presents or cards. A fine table and the human joy of company does me and mine better than any trifle could. We prefer to give ‘presence’ instead. All year long we can do for one another and hopefully for those who cross our paths as well. But every Christmas the day comes when I wake up feeling too good to define and this joy just starts to wash over everything and I know it is because I feel gratitude and gratitude is the highest form of giving.

Gratitude is recognition of the inexplicable gift and automatically causes you to give yourself away. Nothing more is needed and it is the key to Heaven as well. Opening the door to Heaven is not about walking into anything but about having Heaven flow through the door into you and beyond. Yes... and that just results in more gratitude and more gratitude exponentially... just so.

The shoving desperation in the aisles and the clamoring for attention... the demands and insistence upon service and a speedy exit; the terrible violence of the marketplace rape of the uninformed heart... well... to each their own. You wrap the plastic and shiny things in colored paper and you say, “This is for you. It’s because I didn’t know how to give you myself.”

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

A Wine Maker's Primer to Heaven on Earth.

You don't have to live where everyone else lives, even if you live in the same town. Even everyone else doesn't live in the same place exactly. It's all changed by degrees according to how they see it. But you could live in Heaven on Earth if you wanted to and people could visit you there; if they could recognize the place, if they might be comfortable to be there. Heaven doesn't begin somewhere up in the sky. Heaven begins where your soles meets the pressed dust of the Earth.

We move through this world or seem to move through this world, even though we are moving through our mind's idea of this world inside our minds while projecting it outward; you get the idea, if not the immediate reality of it.

Perhaps you have seen trees shaped by the wind. Surely you have seen rock cliffs shaped by water and wind. You have seen smooth rocks in stream beds and you have walked on paths formed by the impact of human feet. These paths might have been first formed by animals in some places. You have seen the sand shaped by the wind. Certainly you have noticed ocean currents and wind on water. The sun is responsible for many things. It may have a remarkable effect on the wind. What all this tells you is that things can be shaped; even very hard and tough appearing things can be formed into light and elegant shapes. Sound can move through these things and make music.

The mind is very plastic and so are the things that come out of it and everything comes out of it. Everything can be and is shaped over time. We are shaped according to wind and water and the sun. If we think of our spirit as the sun and the wind as our mind and the water as our emotions we can see that these things shape what we appear to be and we can see and hear if music comes out of the thing that we have been shaped into.

There is something about the process of wine making that has a great deal to do with humanity. Our grapes are affected by experience and environment and pressed by them too. The quality of the wine is determined by our reactions to these things. A fine wine is what it is because it is rare by comparison with other wine. Ordinary wine is common and vinegar can be had for pennies. Ironically there are fine vinegars as well. The finest of vinegars rival the finest of wines in cost. They are also rare and take the same amount of attention and care. It's something to think about. Then again, in the human spectrum it may well be something you don't 'think' about. Since masters are involved in the making of fine wines and vinegars it could well be assumed that the same is true of humans.

We become what we aspire to. Plants reach for the sun. Some of us reach for the sun too after a different fashion. Many more people bathe in it for a change in color or pursue it as an environment for easy living. Perhaps they have mistaken the purpose of the sun or perhaps the sun is multi purpose. Probably the reason so many of us are unhappy is due to what we aspire to. Why would we aspire to anything less than our highest possibility? We're afraid we won't get our piece of the action. Well, that's not enough is it? Many of us want more than our piece of action. Often our piece of action only has value by comparison with those who have less.

The same way that the sun can shine forth from a clear blue sky, this same sun can be obscured by clouds. Our minds can be clear or cloudy. The wind clears the air and sometimes the wind spreads dust. These are all simple details of observation but they have profound implications. Sound is transmitted through the air. All sounds are forms of information. In this world there are many forms of information clamoring for attention. They have their reasons, whether they are the result of one individual or a group of individuals. You can figure that out.

Messages appear and are geared to direct our attention to certain things. It could be the announcement of a new car; a war abroad, a religious movement, a cry for help, a shout of joy, someone weeping or someone laughing, a collective indistinguishable chatter of many voices in market places or concert areas. You can well imagine any of this. Some of the messages are designed to influence the way you think about what you see and hear and some of them are directed at the mind or the emotions or the body. Some are personal and some are not.

There are other messages that are not so loud and it is quite possible that they cannot be heard due to the greater noise of the other messages. Let us imagine that there is a single message that comes from the sun and that all of the other messages serve to create the environment that occurs between the sun and yourself. Let us imagine that this sun shines both outside and within you and that the messages create weather both inside and outside of you.

You can imagine that there is weather created for the sole purpose of distracting you from what the sun might be saying. Then there are messages that are designed to interpret what the sun is saying but are not actually what the sun is saying. Sometimes a new car is not just a new car. It might be a new political system, or religious system or something that doesn't seem to be about a new car to begin with but which deposits you in a showroom full of cars by virtue of some strange magic. You could imagine that this could happen. You might have even had it happen to you.

Many messages are designed with the implication that they will bring you close to the sun and the warmth of the sun and yet leave you in another place entirely and you can't figure out how that happened. Many people become discouraged about this sort of an event and blame it on the sun. It could be that this actually is the real purpose of the message.

Have you ever been in a funhouse where there are warped mirrors that change your appearance? Mirrors are very interesting. If you set a mirror outside, after awhile it will become covered with dust so that you cannot see into it. Dust is a naturally occurring thing. Sometimes the spread of dust is greatly assisted by the messages on the wind which are a form of dust and which write themselves upon the mirror in layers over one another so that you cannot see yourself at all. Then you might even forget who you are and there will be messages that will explain this to you for whatever reasons there may be.

There are ways to polish the mirror and there is the consideration that even the sun might have something to do with some of the dust that appears on the mirror. Sometimes the weather that appears between the sun and yourself may be mistaken for the sun and have the effect of making you angry or frightened because it is not the sun, even though the sun is shining behind it.

Sun and rain have a lot to do with making wine and vinegar, even if the rain is only a result of the action of the sun. You would have to decide whether it was worth it to make the wine and how important it might be that the wine was of a particular quality. It depends on what you think of the guests who visit you on the street where you live that is actually here or in Heaven or somewhere. It depends on what you think of yourself and the sun.

Heaven is possible where you touch the pressed dust of the Earth. Many things and places begin there. It really comes down to where you want to live based on what you aspire to. Meanwhile, some kind of wine is being made no matter what.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Sunbathing on the Rocks of Time.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there and just because you can doesn’t mean it is. We depend on what we see and hear. But we don’t actually see and we don’t actually hear. So we survive according to the accuracy of our assumptions until a lack of attention, a misperception, excess, want or attrition finally put our garments back into the Earth. Time to call your tailor.

All day, every day, it goes on. Reports of misadventure, loss, betrayal and the pursuit of booty in all its forms, organize themselves as signposts along the highway. This happened here. That happened there. It’s obvious and it repeats and repeats. There’s nothing strange about it. What is strange is the way it gets understood. What is strange is the way we explain it to ourselves and stand as a thing apart from our observations until it happens to us.

It’s fascinating to watch it go by and to see its reflection in the mirror as if the mirror were a thing apart. In some ways people are very fortunate and terribly unlucky at the same time. They are fortunate that they don’t see the real face of what is taking place. It’s kind of like the difference between The Virgin Mary and Smashin Tara. Things are hidden from us, like the journey of your personal hamburger from the cow to your plate. But that’s just a part of the journey. It started before that. It started in the grass and before that in the sun. I wonder what happened before that? It continued on after as well. The same hamburger may go on forever. There’s this maxim about energy being created and destroyed but it doesn’t have to be written out here to be true.

The unlucky part is living in a fixed equation with the idea that somehow chance and hope and dreams will conspire to let you out through the side door before the notes come due. Just about every human mind; what is incorrectly defined as a mind, thinks that it will avoid the common fate. In the meantime this mind moves ceaselessly in all directions away from reality and at the same time compromises the salvation of its host while in the very presence of what saves it. The fix is in, has always been, yet this mind works relentlessly to destroy what is beautiful beyond its comprehension for the precise reason that it is beyond its comprehension.

Philosophers have tied it into sailor’s knots in the struggle to be free.

Dreamers yearn after half formed pictures that keep rearranging themselves before the image can come into focus. The post man comes to the house with a package for the man who moved with no forwarding address. Angels appear in disguise and are shown the door. We make phone calls and cannot tell that anyone is listening because they do not reply while the information is being processed. Later someone appears in an empty room and says, “You rang?”

Frustration storms down the street enraged that someone somewhere wouldn’t provide them with what they wanted because they thought there was more than one will at work. They thought there could be more than one will.

Time passes. Perspectives widen. Perspectives narrow. Tunnels to nowhere end nowhere. Empty meadows go about their business. Humanity presses itself together in confined spaces. Millions add to millions and most of the world lives in a tight and unpleasant embrace. Heat builds. This is simple physics. Pressure makes heat. The whole nature of explosives and resistance, the science of electricity and those parts of the chains of events, the parts we can see in the little we understand about the laws of various applications are presenting irrefutable evidence of what we won’t accept and refuse to see. It’s a puzzle. It’s a real puzzle when what you think you want comes up against the reality of what you are.

Nothing is something. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something is nothing. Someone once said that the key to serenity is to cut down on useless craving.

We are most exposed when we feel denied the thing we want. We don’t know who our enemies are and we certainly can’t recognize our friends. We are easily led and a liability to follow. One of the difficulties that a child experiences in learning to walk is that it starts out its life seeing things upside down. In learning to walk they turn their vision around; think old time cameras. Think of nature’s reflecting surfaces. There are powerful forces hiding in plain sight. We just don’t know how to use them.

Advertising is a revealing thing. Note how often a product is presented as being God? Note how often God is presented as the answer to an appetite? The message isn’t wrong. The product is just mislabeled and not the item you intrinsically want. The outside is claiming to be the inside. Here is why the world ALWAYS goes astray. The nature of the manifest world is to deceive you into believing that what you want is outside. You’ve got a long walk ahead of you, or maybe not, but probably as long as it takes to stop walking anyway.

The world isn’t wrong to be the way it is. It’s doing exactly what it is supposed to do. You can’t have a movie. You can’t have an epic drama without a stage to have it on. You can’t have it without deception because without deception you can’t get sucked into it. At no point is anything going to be profitable except to find this out. At no point will anyone have anything worth having that will put an end to them wanting to have something until they put an end to wanting.

Just as the answer is simple, so is the procedure. Simple, in fact, is the answer. All through history, certain wise men and women presented themselves as fools for a very good reason. The answer is not to want anything. The answer is to value nothing. Nothing is extremely valuable. Who possesses nothing is rich beyond counting. Quietude. But we don’t want quietude do we? The saddest tragedy is the idea that we will miss out on something. As far as that goes you are more right than you know.

Controlling anything begins with understanding that everything is under control. You experience the downside when you contend against this. Any problem anyone thinks they have is based on this alone. Do not contend. Suspending thought is a key ingredient but it isn’t the end of the matter. Awareness has to become aware of itself. Since awareness is in place, whether you are aware or not, it is always there whether you are there or not. Awareness expands and deepens in relation to your awareness of it. Some things are past description and this is one of them.

There’s nothing complicated about this. It is the simplicity that provokes the mind to elaborate on it and then produces a confusion of thoughts followed by weights and measures, followed by angels dancing on the head of a pin, followed by philosophies and technologies that make the argument that you must continue on through the tunnel to nowhere until you have warmed and illuminated the space outside you.

Quo vadis? ...And my favorite- cui bono? Well, sooner or later right? Of course, sooner or later only applies in the dimension of time but, what the heck, it’s all relative. You’ll note the applause sign just lit up for our studio audience so, give yourselves a big hand.

Friday, November 17, 2006

The World, The Flesh and The Devil Mind.

Or you could say- the outside, the contact point and the inside. Or you could say- the stage, the actor and the plot. Or you could say- the appearance, the presence and the mind. All of these terms are easily parsed into something more or less precise than each other but they’ll serve for those paying attention and they will also provide arguments over definition for the terminally combative. One wonders if the point is what’s important or whether the position taken is what’s important.

People say that it’s all very complicated. How else can you explain the writings of people whose sole purpose is confusion? Here I speak of the leaden weighted philosophers and theologians. Can anyone say that any clarity has emerged in terms of philosophy and theology over the course of the years? One can’t hope to come near the truth until one shit cans 99.99% of everything by everyone who has written anything on the subjects.

The most ironic thing is how fixed opinion can be in the minds of those who have never looked further than the street on which they live and never at all within. Somehow the thing sought is always outside of the person looking. Right there in the mind you can see it every time you reach. It’s a simple trick to reverse the process until you encounter the presence but there’s a big problem with that. When you encounter the presence you cease to be. Of course, you come to be in ways more real than you had ever imagined but... whoever it was that went looking was obliged to lose nearly everything they thought they knew about themselves in the process.

It’s the nature of manifest existence to become increasingly more complex in appearance as civilization drives toward comfort of the flesh and a separation from the sensation of pain. At the same time this short circuits the body’s ability to defend itself in a natural state. Consonant with this, one’s ability to process reality is based on one’s ability to accept shit as reality; shit in custom colors and an infinity of sensations processed by senses confined within bandwidths that cannot measure reality except in terms of sweetened colored shit.

People dance in rapture circles like a dervish drunk on cheap wine. They celebrate what, due to time hypnosis, seems to be stable but is breaking down in front of them; people, things, political systems, governments, love affairs, everything pretty much. Loss is certain; total loss of everything while in the midst of a 24 hour a day commercial for instant replacement. Wait a minute... what about this? What about that? Have you tried this? Finally... you’re too weary to think about it. You can’t remember what it was or who it happened to. After so many disappointments you wish you were dead. Well, you are.

You show up here with this new vehicle, right off the assembly line and it gets delivered to a pre-determined address. At this location, while the vehicle moves through stages of development, the mind is programmed with an outlook that is shaped by stimulations and reactions. Meanwhile, not a single thing that happens has anything to do with anything real. It’s just part of the movie and relates only to the movie and ends when the movie ends.

People probably fear loneliness and isolation more than anything else. They fear this precisely because of what they are confronted with when the barrage of external stimulus is removed; cut to millions of old people sitting in front of day time TV. As long as people can talk shit about shit, hear about shit, watch shit, stick parts of themselves into the shit, play hide and seek in shit, buy and sell shit, steal and recover shit... its good shit. It’s engrossing and entertaining. It occupies the time in transition. Pain and fear are on the way but maybe not today.

Governments and religions lie. They haven’t a clue as to their real purpose. Because they don’t know what is essential to their practice they become travesties. Got a place based on freedom and individual expression? The reverse is on the way. Balance is not a stationary scale. Balance is a scale in flux.

So, do you save the world or do you save yourself? For some odd reason a good portion of those who set out to save the world tend to screw it up worse than it was. There’s only one reason to open all of the cages in the zoo and that is in order to escape yourself while the confusion takes place. The majority of those escaping don’t know where to run to and are soon back in their cages.

Sometimes the world is fairly stable and you can do whatever it is that you do without too much hassle. Of course, you still die and lose everything but it’s got more of an Ozzie and Harriet feel and maybe you drift away while napping in the rocking chair on Golden Pond. Sooner or later though, the world gets into its unstable persona. You can’t rely on it to behave. Personal adjustments seem to be the key. If you can see trends then it’s no sin to act on them. If you can’t see them you’ll eventually become aware of their import. Some people think explosions are cool.

Nothing happens by accident and there are no innocent bystanders. Yeah, it’s a drag what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. It’s a drag what China did to Tibet and ‘is doing’ to the Falun Gong. It’s a drag what Bush is doing to America and it’s despicable that inarticulate liars dominate in the various media. It’s a drag that so much of the food and the entertainment and infinity of products are shit. It’s a drag that companies lie and that almost nobody cares about you; cut to the soundtrack on the ipod. Nobody gets away with anything. Nobody. Intention is a big thing in this regard.

It seems to clearly say that judgment is required. You are the result of your choices. Wherever you are they put you there. You can pack a suitcase and disappear any time. It might not be a walk through the mall for a little while but life seems to arrange around everything. A place to live, furniture, a job, a girl or boyfriend... they come off the assembly line every hour. Adventure waits.

There are several eternal mysteries playing themselves out every day and all along. There are quite a number of false impressions being presented as goads to action (on your part). There are hallucinations on the sidewalks and on the other side of every door. There are a million things to think about and only one thing that is important. If it isn’t on your mind then you’re distracting yourself and pain is on the way to tap you on the shoulder until you do. How long can you hold out? You can hold out for pretty close to forever.

It’s just a joke. It isn’t real and it hurts if you don’t think it’s funny or you try to make it real. Simple awareness is all that is required. If you watch you will eventually see it and it becomes a non-stop immersion in deep oil ecstasy, no purchase required. It’s a non-interruptible mushroom trip. It’s orgasmic sex that doesn’t end and fall asleep. The funny thing is that it’s right there. I mean... right there. It’s always there, so in ten thousand years it will still be there. In a million years it will still be there even if nothing else is. You begin to acquire it the moment you flow toward it and you begin to lose it the moment you flow out. You could flow out for a hundred thousand years and then flow back in. It’s been done.

The dynamic animating principle (or what I call DAP) does this exact same thing every cycle. It’s a game it plays with itself. You’re incidental to that, although you are a critical part. It takes all the pieces to make the whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Good luck with all the other stuff. And at any moment... well ...any moment... It’s right there.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Around the Corner and Out of Sight.

Nature is red in tooth and claw
All the colors dance before the open maw

And the elements fight which accounts for the war on Heaven and in the human realm, the political, religious, cultural; economic and fashion wars go on and on and none can say which is dumber than the other. They’re just there like rides in an amusement park, like video games. Hunger marches across the landscape and it’s a good thing you can’t see him because he’s not pretty. It’s not about there being no food. It’s just about hunger.

The surrounding air is filled with ghosts and decaying subtle bodies that not a few people wrap around themselves like Ed Gein’s mother’s skin. They’ve taken down that stuffed ‘free bird’ to be their dancing partner.

Traffic howls along corridors where certain appetites wait to feed. They’ve got their locations and you can see the floral table arrangements that are left by the roadside in memory of that special headlight lit dinner. Other places it’s just about the sex oil perfume and it drives them crazy when you do that and eventually they’ll drive you crazy too and you’ll have to wear long coats with pant’s legs affixed to your calves with rubber bands and a real story to tell about how you got that carpel tunnel syndrome.

In thousands of innocuous looking houses around the world, young boys and girls are kept as sex slaves in converted basements and secret rooms, out in the desert and all sorts of locations. In France, a few years ago, hundreds of young girls went missing and no one saw them again.

There are lots of dungeons outfitted to a T, where the willing and unwilling are led through the stages toward some dreadful epiphany.

In a few places certain wiser souls hide with their comrades in monasteries and similar places repeating something over and over until the body molecules go automatic with it.

Everything you can imagine eating or fucking is being served somewhere right now. Some of these places are members only.

More than half of all the political and religious figures in the world are experiencing blackmail because they stepped outside the arbitrary margins.

In some farming communities, people are living the way their grandparents did. Nothing much that happens in the world will affect them. They’ll be there after whatever it is that happens.

Everybody that tried to change the world got beaten up or killed. Some of them got statues and groupies after the fact, when it didn’t do them much good. But they were trying to change or save the world not get laid. None of them changed the world except in a certain long range way that winks in the night like a lighthouse on the coast. Sometimes they are a star to steer by on a very long voyage.

Some people got famous and embarrassed themselves in front of the whole world and got pursued by people they couldn’t stand and they got carpel tunnel syndrome too. Some of them died from too much fun and got autopsy pictures taken. They were all subject to the same ills as everyone else so the fame didn’t help with that. They could usually afford to buy whatever they wanted to eat or fuck but a whole lot of people were watching too.

Some people just got rich and suspected everyone they knew. They were busy with being and/or staying rich full time and, quite often, they wound up drinking themselves to death in big empty houses. They developed a certain cruelty and had to trade away the capacity for spontaneous freedom on a pound for pound exchange level. It wasn’t what they thought it would be but it never is.

Wherever anyone lived, things occurred in patterns and the world changed so that before was always better than after. Most of them wound up living in images of the past that hadn’t actually happened. No one knew who they were or had been.

No matter where you went, something was happening, sometimes it was nice and sometimes it wasn’t. The world was best when it was being left alone but that was seldom. Sometimes the world encroached on the little worlds and everybody was affected by it and then affected everyone else until it was just a world of these effects.

It didn’t matter what people did. They just came and went. So what would be the best thing for anyone who was smart enough to figure it out? The best thing would be to go live somewhere where most of the people grew their food and where the economy wasn’t so hot but where there was plenty of everything and the weather was nice. Then the best thing after that was to stay mostly quiet and live outside the roaring wind of the urban heat machines. These people could invite people to visit them in the quiet and these people, if they wanted to accomplish something could also do it quietly or pretend to be someone else who lived somewhere else.

These people didn’t get too rich or too famous. These people lived on country roads where they could walk for some time and rarely see a car. These people knew that there were more places like this in the world than most people think. They had the world at their fingertips but not in their living room.

They knew that you can’t heal insanity before it comes up against itself. You can’t herd livestock when it’s spooked and you can’t protect the sheep that want to howl like a wolf. You can’t do anything but you sure can sing and dance in nothing because no one is going to travel there to hear you. You can get other friends, friends who don’t go everywhere else; who are driven away by heat and confusion. They still got to go somewhere and you can make that possible in the less crowded areas of the world.

You could be somewhere else the whole time that everyone else was in the other place. Who’s going to do something like this? Not very many people and that’s part of what makes it empty and nice. Meanwhile, the department store is open 24/7 and it’s always down the street somewhere.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

How Un-Self-Conscious can we be in a World of Funhouse Mirrors?

We’ve all seen quotes taken out of context. We’ve seen people misrepresented for the sake of sensational copy and we’ve seen people painted according to someone’s understanding of them, or lack of understanding as the case may be. So, when I say, “I have been as much a hypocrite and a liar as any man under the wrong circumstances.” I could well see that quote come back to haunt me. It would not make it untrue, nor am I unduly ashamed of the fact. I have to be honest with myself, even if I am not always honest with you; whoever you are.

I can’t be honest with everyone. That’s neither safe nor sane. I’ve also said one thing and done another more than once in this life. The fact is though; if we are too hard on ourselves we can tend to be too hard on others as well. We need to cut ourselves and others more slack. Surely we know how hard it is to live up to an ideal. Is it any easier for anyone else?

I have hated myself because I was taught to hate myself. I came in here with all of the shortcomings common to the mortal state. My view of myself was responsible for my behavior. The fact that my view of myself was wrong caused me to be very erratic and unstable. How I managed to survive to the point where I am writing this is a virtual miracle. We blame so many things on God. This I feel I can blame on God without hesitation. No other power could have saved me from so many dangers and my own ignorant state.

I’ve said it before and I will continue to say it. I know there is a God. I am absolutely certain of it. But when our faith in ourselves is so conflicted, it serves that our faith in God will be shaky too. We don’t know who we are and we don’t know what we want. We get the results that condition brings.

The fact is that I am God. I am that portion of God’s substance formed to express and experience in a manner peculiar to me. We can all of us say, “I and my father are one.” We are seduced into aping the world in order to fit in. We develop all sorts of odd behavior in order to be understood and accepted by our fellows. We become liars and hypocrites. If we were not liars and hypocrites every man’s hand would be set against us. One of my favorite quotes from the Bible is; “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

God is the life that is living us. Any power that we have, our health, our ability to think and to feel comes from God. Blessings await us like planes circling an airport. We forbid them to land. Had we any idea of what was possible for us and what is held in trust for us we would run dancing and spinning down the street. This is why the dervishes do that. That is the act of a madman though. It just isn’t done. Oh, I’ve done it plenty of times and received the usual reactions. The police are here to see that you don’t make a nuisance of yourself. Laws are created to circumscribe human behavior. Telling the truth is sedition.

Nearly all of our laws and those who enforce them are servants of materialism. THINGS MATTER. Wealth goes to the head of the line. Temporal power and the vanity of the imaginary self rule from the despotic throne like a chimpanzee in royal garb. All the vast power of earthly hallucination is arrayed like a vast army against our pursuit of enlightenment. Up is down, back is forth, in is out and crazy is sane.

The God that is denied, the idea of a God that is rejected or labeled as myth never did exist. God can’t be comprehended. What is the point of rejecting something you don’t understand? Now that’s crazy. There’s me and God and there’s you and God. One displaces the other. If you are you then God is apart. If God is you then you are you no longer. It’s right there all the time, through the ages, inside of every moment. That subtle thing is always there, permeating everything, composing everything out of itself. The entire drama of existence has only one point and that is self-realization. You are either really you or you are a collection of fantasy projections based upon your desires and appetites. Everyone you see is giving you their version of it.

Some dress up in costumes. Some makes laws and some enforce them. Some perform on a smaller stage and we all perform on the larger stage. The sage is sleeping, curled up within us. Sometimes we feel that presence; mostly we go ‘our’ way. Every time we miss the target we are aiming at; which is the real definition of sin, a new set of circumstances are written into the script so that we can try again.

I look around me at this vast mental institution. I look at the people crunching numbers and buying and selling crap with no value to people with no taste. I see sleepwalkers moving around in a dream.

Fear is the biggie because fear displaces love. When you don’t know who you are then you don’t know what anything else really is either. Fear is a natural in that climate. If you can’t trust in what you can’t see you are doomed to believe in appearances that fall every day like leaves from a tree and which the wind sends dancing down the street, into the gutters and down into the drains. Appearances are not real. Everyone sees them differently.

We fear death but we are already dead. The body is a coffin. You wake up when you die. Some can die while they are yet in their body and enter into life everlasting while still resident in the flesh.

We have to let go of fear and the only way we can do that is through complete reliance upon the master helmsman. There is that great poster of Krishna and Arjuna in the chariot. It says it all. The body is your chariot and the horses are the senses. The reins are your mind. It’s all been said a long time ago. It’s always the same. There’s no new and improved truth that’s going to evolve out of the mix. Intelligence is not the end result of existence. It is the initiator. People don’t get smarter as they get older. It’s right there all the time.

I often think of our life and the trial, the cross that we bear as being like a man hanging on to the top of wall by his fingers. He can’t let go. Who knows how far he will fall? Yet when he does let go he finds that the ground was right below his feet.

A guest waits outside the door. You are the habitation. If you have cast him out in order to be the ruler then you have made yourself the slave of circumstance. If you step aside and let him in all of your concerns are at an end. It’s that simple and it waits in every moment. It’s waiting there right now. Through your whole life it is waiting. Through all of your lives it is waiting right at that point… waiting on you.


Please forgive me if I wandered all over the place with this, trying to circle ever tighter up upon the things that can't be said. I haven't done this in awhile. I haven't known what to say. I'm not sure what's coming is going to be an improvement but we will see as we go by.

Monday, April 03, 2006

How to Make Love all the Time the Easy Way.

Generally I remain in a conceptual mode here. It is my preference to deal with existence and the conditions of existence and consciousness as they occur essentially. What I mean is, rather than arguing about perspectives and perceptions, or how and why one might change outer circumstance… all of this really takes place within and then materializes around us. Those who guard the gateway of the mind will know what I am talking about.

Some could say, “Well, then- why is the world so messed up?” The greater collective of human thought concerns itself with these things and the world reflects it. Certain individual lives are at a remove from it- even while in motion through it.

I’m into things that work. If something doesn’t work I want to know why and I want to know how it might- or could- work another way. I’m also into expedience. This doesn’t mean I’m looking for the short route or that which requires the least effort. I’m not a fan of new age mumbo jumbo; what I consider McDonald’s/Starbuck’s spirituality. If there is an easier way- and I don’t think there is- the sheer volume of traffic upon it would make your way slower that the harder route. The confusion attendant would intensify the problems of judgment and so on and so on.

There are people now who teach Tantra. They hold out the mystery of increased sexual enjoyment and with that- an increase in sexual contact. Sexual attractiveness and contact are powerful validation points for the individual in this commercial world. If you are attractive to the opposite sex you have a currency, a value. These teachers want to show you how to, “pump up the volume” and make yourself a louder broadcast unit for your own presence here. As there are more and more people and less and less space it becomes increasingly more important for the individual to obtain a unique cachet. Tantra is the realm of Magic.

Sting likes to brag about how he can make love for 8 hours at a time because of his study of Tantra. This is something he manages to get done in between filming his Compaq and Jaguar commercials. I find him an interesting case in some ways. He is a very gifted songwriter and musician. Then there’s this other stuff. It appears that genius is not guarantor of Wisdom. Intelligence is no guarantor of Understanding. The irony of the whole thing is that Tantra will make it possible for you to make love 24 hours a day. It will make it possible for you to make love outside of time and therefore make the ultimate of 24 hours a day actually less total than it appears.

Well, this isn’t about Tantra but in a way it is. Tantra can’t be learned from just anyone. It is a marvelously complex thing in its entirety. Its technology rivals any of our complex empirical sciences. Very few people on this planet are in a position to teach it and very few people have the capacity to comprehend and practice it. It takes a very special sort of person and a very special sort of dedication. It is similar to those who master the practice of Ceremonial Magic or Alchemy. First of all these things are not on the beaten path and second, you really need to be a different sort.

Here is where I come to the matter of expediency and the easier way. There is an easier way. There is a more certain way. You can learn all of the elements of Tantra or anything else without having to go through the Confucian practice and memorization of minutiae.

To begin with, Tantra is about having sex with God. Certainly it can involve an opposite number. It might take any of uncountable possibilities of expression. In fact it does take an uncountable possibility of expressions all the time. Birds do it, bees do it and everything according to its nature does it- in the mortal expression of it round and round the Ferris wheel of time. It is not called Le Petit Morte by accident. However that practice which ensures our mortality is also the key to our immortality. And you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to master it.

If I am going to understand what it is that seems to surround me I can approach it two different ways. I can analyze everything I can perceive through my senses or I can comprehend that which manifested it. You might think in terms of inductive and deductive reasoning.

I know there is a God. This isn’t something I have faith in; something I hope may be true and that I- just might- discover after death somewhere. I don’t believe in being good in order to impress some anthropomorphic projection. Jim Morrison was right when he said, “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.” Our understanding of the divine is flawed. So how are we supposed to contact and comprehend something that we have the wrong impression of? It’s like looking for New York City in some Mid-Western State.

If Tantra is somehow about making Love all the time; or loving everything all the time, or being filled with Love all the time, or understanding the intricate magical applications of breath and the exaltation of the physical into the realm of the divine through a myriad of increasingly complex operations then… you can learn all of the various permutations of it- if you’re smart enough and determined enough and in the company of the right teacher or… you can just love God all the time. Where a problem seems to arise is in the minds perception of difference. Then comes the minds disposition to preference and the idea that the seemingly beautiful is good and the seemingly ugly is evil. Now you get into the area where Tantra can be a problem as it turns back into the ‘same old same old’ with magic added.

This is how very simple people can achieve what highly intelligent people fail at. Anyone who puts their whole mind on loving God eventually comprehends the unity in everything. It may well be that you don’t need to know any of the things you think you need to know. Also, unless you know them exactly as they are, you know them wrong and so you don’t know them at all. So maybe it comes back to that ego thing of being better and more accomplished than others- having an edge. If it is about looking better by making others look worse, or by standing out as something more valuable in comparison to others of lesser value; by virtue of more accomplished PR; the advantage of money and cosmetics, better lighting… well, according to the world you might be more attractive and valuable than everyone else for as long as the plastic surgery and money hold out- as long as the breath lasts, but it is unlikely you have impressed God.

God knows everything exactly as it is. So if your mind is the same as God’s mind- and it happens that that is so- then you would know what God knows. Philosophers perform amazing feats of logic and argument. They are an impressive lot. They know all about everything without knowing anything at all. They speak at important events and receive awards. It seems that the whole world is filled with people who have mastered all sorts of things and who are also impressive and receive awards and hold high office and command armies and live well in the bargain. You could say they have mastered some elements of Tantra. They also die and are forgotten- or worse- die and are not forgotten.

It has been said that God forgives much in those who love much. Love is attractive. It draws the beloved near. Nothing impresses the beloved as much as genuine Love. The same holds true for God as it does for anything else. So you could learn a whole lot of things from someone and hope they know what they are talking about and that you are equal to the task or… you could just Love God all the time in everything that you encounter. You could pray for union without ceasing and let that prayer flow over the medium of your love or… what?

So maybe there is an easier way but it’s just not what is being offered as the easier way. Maybe it’s not ‘new and improved’. Maybe it’s not new and it can’t be improved.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Now Where Did I Put That 'get out of jail free' Card?

One of the problems that people have with the concept of God arises from misunderstanding the purpose of existence and the location of our greatest hope. People look at the circumstances of life and say that there cannot be a God who permits what we see happening. Right off the bat it is clear that the people saying this have some idea of who and what God is supposed to be. They must if they have such ideas about what God should be and how God should act. They get a lot of these ideas from religion and they also get them from an instinctive sense of what should be fair in a fair world.

Somehow people have gotten the idea that Heaven is supposed to exist on Earth. Though I am sure that there are people who do live in Heaven while on Earth they are not the same place; Heaven, Hell, Earth, Detroit, Hong Kong, the ocean, the sky- these are different places and different things happen in them. You can also say that birds are fish that swim in the sky and that fish are birds that fly through the ocean.

It is easy for me to explain just about anything in terms of what I understand about how the universe works. It is not easy to make it understood. It is easy to say that God is Love and that Love is Unity but it is not easy to give others a visceral sense of that; of how that applies in real time, in real lives and what it means as a cosmic truth applied to a personal being. Many people have an intellectual understanding of things which are of no real value.

When people who imagine themselves to be intelligent scoff at the faith that inspires some to believe in a loving and merciful God it makes perfect sense to them that the God the God described cannot exist because the physical evidence from their observations tells them this is often a cruel and bloody world. Either they are correct or their idea of what God is and what God does is flawed. God is creator, preserver and destroyer. Though there are people who have extended the life of their body far beyond that of ordinary people, the physical body is still a temporary dwelling because the physical world is a temporary place. Being a temporary place things come and go all the time. We object to the going and object to the means of the going as well. And since we do not, most of us, know what lies beyond there is much confusion and fear attendant.

The mind can dwell on many things. The separated mind sees things in terms of itself. It does not know what it is itself because such a meaning cannot be revealed to a mind divided against the unity of the one mind. Only the one mind can know what is in actuality and if one is existing in this mind then their individuality as they presently understand it is lost. This is the one thing that the individual mind cannot bear. The primary concern of the individual mind is its own survival. Even though it cannot and does not survive it does not believe that this is so. It believes it will go on forever and all of its efforts and arguments with itself are directed to this end. The individual mind is therefore the father of lies. It is a lie to begin with so its offspring, its thoughts, are lies as well.

This world that we are observing and moving through on a conveyor belt of time is the product of the collected individual minds in a grandly orchestrated hallucination. The individual mind is essentially a selfish mind. Even all of its occasional high and noble thoughts are selfish. There is a shift that takes place in this individual mind when it passes through puberty and for the rest of its life all of its actions and values are based on some individual understandings concerning the dual nature of the universe. The real object of life is regenerated innocence; becoming as a child. The great obstacle to this is the immediate idea that one is placed in constant danger by giving over their rational defense mechanisms to something that they don’t understand; no matter how they might believe in its essential goodness because one of the jobs of the divine is to test the faith of the soul in surrender.

It is difficult to be specific in this regard. Whenever one attempts to talk about these kinds of things they are inevitably led to parables and metaphors and examples from the sensory realm used to create an idea about something that lies beyond the senses.

It might be good to say that life as we see it before us is all about experience and adventure and discovery. It is about learning and sorting and accepting and rejecting. The pain experienced by the person deceived by the desires of the individual mind is meant to be instructive. You are actually here to discover that there is nothing here that you want. There is nothing external to you that is of any value other than relative value and that value is changing all the time. Good and evil are mere constructs that apply in one situation and do not apply in another.

Let us imagine that we are in prison. There is a Stockholm Syndrome that takes place here. Many do not see their jailors as prison wardens at all. Many do not recognize the prison although they do know they are confined- they just do not know by what or how. In prison the inmates often get institutionalized. They can no longer function in the outside world and quickly commit another crime so they may be returned to the safety of their familiar prison surroundings. Of course, prison is not safe at all. I have been in real prisons and I can attest to this. Well, the world is not safe either. You have to pay attention. It is not safe for your body, your mind or your heart. With the passage of time the inmates will often not realize or forget that they are in prison and fail to identify the guards and the walls and other phenomena as being what they actually are. You might even say that the physical body is a prison and that there are guards and walls in the mind as well. So the world is a prison composed of many smaller prisons and your mind and your heart are both prisons often enough.

What if someone comes to liberate you from your prisons? What if someone crashes the walls and bends the bars and scatters the jailors? What would you think? Would you think that you were being liberated or would it make you want to hide under your bunk? Would it make you grab the bars of your prison and resist this liberation? Would you not join with the guards to fight off this frightening appearance? What happens if the one who comes to liberate you informs you that everything you believe is a lie? What if the presence of this liberator makes everything you see and value and desire irrelevant? What if the presence of this liberator causes every cherished illusion to die?

What happens if your liberator tells you that everything you think and feel are the bars and walls of your prison? What if you literally have to die in order to be free? What if everything you hold dear must die? But it does anyway, doesn’t it? Everything goes. Everything. You and everything you know goes anyway. Yet the individual mind holds out the unfailing hope that this is not the case and that somehow your destiny will be unique. The funny thing is that this is altogether possible but it is not possible in the way that the individual minds conceive and/or wish it to be.

Only one thing is important and that is self-realization. Comprehending who and what you are is the only important effort for your attention. This is not to say that we do not have a duty to life and those we encounter. But like everything else, the truth is different that what we have been told. The reason we have not found our ‘get out of jail free’ card is because we are looking in the wrong pockets. It is not in the pockets where you keep the keys to everything else. But it is there. Sometimes you can find it on your own. Sometimes it can seem as if you did and sometimes someone can show you where it is. A good start is to ask yourself over and over again, “Now where did I put that?”

Saturday, March 11, 2006

How We Fool Ourselves.

The form side and the essence; when one hears that the word ‘messiah’ and the word ‘serpent’ are the same according to their numbers or that God and the Devil are parts of the same process we think the one who says it blasphemous or mad. When we hear that what confuses us is what liberates us we find it difficult to comprehend. Hearing that the tempter and the savior are one mysterious interplay; being told that the Devil is the way that the wicked see God- or to be told that the fearsome shadow has the outline of the luminous angel behind it... what are we to make of such things or the people who say them? You are not likely to find too many people saying them. You may have never heard these things.

Look at the world. Look closely. Consider the Sphinx. Consider the myths and the legends and the scriptures. Consider yourself for that matter. The deeper you go into a mystery... you go until it unravels into nothing. It’s just a presentation of jungle flowers and waving fronds with more behind them waving and beckoning. Once the mystery outside has revealed that it conceals nothing, the mind is immediately drawn within; this is not to say that many wonders and mysteries do not exist in nature but it would still take a particular eye to see them. The beauty of a young woman, or a woman of any age who has kept that beauty- or the eye that can see beauty regardless; what does it worship in it’s attraction for it; in it’s attention upon it? What does it think its desire is composed of? This beauty pulls the essence forth to create more form. Endless forms are created by the desire for forms. The world is composed of forms. The artifice of nature and the artifice of the mind upon nature in adapting the same substance into all the infinite varieties that we see, goes on and on, over and over- always making more. In all of this making, what is the result? The result is the re-occurring mortality of the form. We suffer in our desire for the possession of forms and we suffer from the loss of them. We suffer from our disappointment in them. They are dissolving even as we perceive them.

Is this what you want? How about this? What about this? Try this, taste this. Hunger has memory. Imagination creates ever new ideas of forms for the enjoyment of them. Tempting? Is it what it was advertised to be? If they are disappearing and fading then what has the mind or the heart gained in its experience of them? Sorrow and loss... Poignant regret... temporary happiness and disappointment... the expense of the self on behalf of experience. Wisdom may come and it may not.

Why are these people fighting, wounding, treacherous and lying, conspiring... dreaming of what? What is the object of these efforts and what is the result?

It’s a tricky thing and no mistake. It seems that the key is in knowing what to desire because you will surely get it, sooner or later. There is also the consideration of what you are willing to do and give up for the possession of what you seek. The whole world is going in a certain direction. You can see it everywhere. You can see the effect of it in the eyes of those you pass in the street. You can observe the eyes of those you pass at their every age as they move through time. The power of the world is strong. The hypnotic cloud maintains the drama of minds magnetized by dust. It seems real.

Things glitter and dance in the music. Goblets appear with fantastic shapes emerging from them. Jewels and gold and beautiful forms emerge and they turn and catch the light and they are jungle flowers and waving fronds.

How does one stand against the immensity of the cities and the omnipresent media and the countless forms and distractions that wave like the fronds? They call your name like the sirens on the rocks. They call you to war and to business and they call you to make your mark upon the attention of the world. Ships and planes traverse the world into all of the cultures and marketplaces. All of the movies and books and songs... they rouse and inflame and fire the imagination with dreams of accomplishment that accomplishes nothing but more of the same. It is like the idea that business must always make more money, that there should always be bigger markets and more customers so that things can grow bigger and bigger. GROWTH! ...More and more and more. There can never be enough. Those who understand what is going on are judged insane. Those who define and explain what is going on are called enemies of the state.

The wars of business and fashion, the wars of the elements and the competition of colors and the conflict of perceptions lead naturally to actual war. The arguments in the mind and the arguments in speech over conflicts of perception inevitably find their way to the battlefield. Commerce demands war. Merchants and bankers require it.

For those who are of and in this world there is one set of priorities and for those who are passing through it there is another. The hard men and women of the world cannot be convinced of anything but that the world must be shaped according to their needs. You cross them at your peril. Just as one who is caught up in the thrall of a nightmare will cry out and lash about them; so will those caught up in the dreams of merchants and banks and forms lash out from the fear of loss.

All of the events of this world and any world take place within a single mind. This mind resolves everything in it according to its relationships. Everything has a destiny. Do not think that some portion of the hard men and women of the world do not know about this. They do.

Some say the world is shit and you should have nothing to do with it. Some say we are all sinful. Some say good and evil are just constructs of the mind. Some say this and some say that. Some say you must surrender and some say you must strive. Whatever they say, here you are. So, where are you going and what do you want? William Blake said, “He who binds to himself a joy, does the winged life destroy, but he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternities sunrise.”

There are differences between saints and prophets and sages and mystics, just as there are between burglars and armed robbers and murderers; between wholesale and retail and second hand. Those who know very little, if anything, about these things believe that they are in a position to define and judge them. Often the hard men and women of the world point to those who would point the way ‘out’ and measure their behavior against standards of conformity; against dogma and doctrine and whatever. If they understood such things they would have little to say. They sneer at these things because the message in them compromises their justifications for the things they do. They are exposed by these things, so they make the truth an outlaw. They incite mobs and manufacture laws. All of what they do is to insure their own profit. The truth is your enemy if you are the enemy of truth.

So many systems of government and commerce have evolved out of the efforts of those who have engineered them for their own profit and sometimes to improve conditions for everyone. We all need to eat and somehow we need to get to the food and all of the things that contribute to the amenities of existence; therefore the markets and all of the shake and bake industries of form making and all of the industries that work within the many operations that spin in the realm of temporary wonder.

We fool ourselves and we fool each other for many different reasons that all have to do with what we think we want and the possibility that someone may keep us from it or get there before we do or take it away from us. The urgency and impatience of life are actual forces just like the invisible entities that haunt the highways and feed on the accidents, that haunt the battlefields and feed on the suffering and the blood, like the spirits in the bars that live in the bottles and the minds of the drunks, like the creatures that feed on the sexual fire and fluids that are the fuel of existence for them.

We are not who we think we are and things are not what we think they are and we will suffer for just as long as it takes us to find that out.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

A Constant Conscious Companion

We are inundated with spiritual books. The sheer weight of them would sink a million Titanics and put a billion Rip Van Winkles to sleep for eternity. It seems to me that the waters of Lethe flow out of the pages of these books. The unfortunate truth is that spiritual books are as dull as they are infrequently inspirational. Surely the words of The Christ have a power to galvanize the searching heart, but even these words fall like tares upon generally infertile ground. Even I am beginning to put myself to sleep just writing this.

Pressing within to the source of the origin of the words of life is a laborious business. The personal mind wars against the revelation that would dissolve it into The One. The heart goes fickle at the mention of surrender. At any time when we sense our own end in the face of the luminous light we fall back into the commonplace. The requirements of movement into rarified planes of being are beyond all but the exceptional soul. The surround sound of materialism has never been so dense and pervasive. What can you do?

To speak of God is to alienate your listener, unless you are somewhere in the dreary halls of fundamentalism. The God they speak of there has never existed, so the destination point can not be arrived at. There are as many chants and common prayers as there are passengers on the subway systems of the world. Religion is a fashion show of competing cuts and colors. The paraphernalia cannot be counted. The symbols defeat the minds ability to comprehend them all; each of them contains some mystery that leads only to further mystery or temporary magic. But the books and articles and discourses and multitude of ways in which words are combined to express the ineffable exceed even the total combination of all I have just mentioned.

Somewhere in the mass of this is the living light. More correctly it could be said that somewhere in the mass of this lies a portal into the living light; some highway exit, some indication of where to go and how to proceed directly. There are some few texts that I have encountered that serve in this capacity. They are slim volumes, often written in suggestive codes or wrapped in parables; submerged in fables. We know that some have found their way. We also know that none have ever given the immediate and absolute location of the light switch in the dark. Maybe they have and we do not understand. Maybe an immediate understanding defeats some divine purpose or is against the rules of pursuit. Maybe the switch is everywhere and no where at all times. Where is the switch?

Let’s think about this. There’s only one God right? Of course there are many apertures with names like Mohammed and Buddha and others. But these are portals, not the thing itself. In a manner of speaking, you are a portal even if the door is not yet open. In other words, if you are looking, if there is a ‘you’ that looks, then that is one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is the thing itself which you are looking for. It stands to reason that you and the thing you are looking for are contained in the same unit. Somehow you and the thing you are looking for are connected. In failing to see what this connection is you are in the place you are in now at some imagined distance from the thing itself. It is to be assumed that this imagined distance exists within your minds perception that there is a distance. No doubt you feel closer at some point than at others.

In all your lifetimes and in all the moments of this lifetime you are sometimes closer and sometimes further away. You are sometimes considering the thing itself and sometimes utterly oblivious to its existence. How is it that this simple thing, which has to be a part of you somehow, continues to avoid your possession of it? How is it that this thing which is looking for you and which you are looking for continues to remain beyond your grasp?

How is it that this thing, this consciousness which looks through your eyes, which watches you, of which you are composed and within which you live and move and have your being... how is it that complete union does not occur?

Forget all the books and the outfits and the churches and the priests and paraphernalia for a moment. There’s just you and it. Perhaps that is the problem, the idea that there is you AND it. Does it have something to do with the idea that there are things that you are meant to do that set you apart from the thing itself living the eternal life of infinite being? Is it all about having ideas? Is it about the minds way of separating things in order to perceive, compare and label them? After all, ‘Adam’ translated means “namer of things”.

It’s a simple construct, you and it. Since it is far greater and more real than you and exists forever and stretches beyond forever on either side it seems logical that grasping it, attaining it, must involve something like surrender. There you are and there it is. It seems logical to assume that you cannot grasp it you can only allow it to grasp you. It’s there all the time. It’s everywhere all the time, more palpable by presence in some places than others but no less there since everything is composed of the substance portion of it. It is obviously in the heart of a star and on the sidewalks of Las Vegas. On the one hand it is in essence and on the other hand it is in costumed layers of concealment. Even in the heart of the star it is still a subtle substance.

Part of me gets the feeling that everything is alright and always will be because of the encompassing nature of the thing itself and because I am made out of its substance. Once again, it is the mind that tells me otherwise. So if there is a devil it must be the mind in its ceaseless operations that are carried out in respect of phenomena. If only God is real then I must be either God or unreal. This has been a stumbling block of religions through time. The Mormons and certain Eastern religions recognize this though in no way does this endorse the former with any extra legitimacy in the face of their history as an organization. Christ spoke of it but it gets bypassed by the priesthood which becomes redundant in the face of it. Maybe I and you are both God and unreal. Perhaps at present we are unreal in respect of the real, because only the real is real. In other words there would be no us left in the aftermath of realization, although I suspect we do still remain in a new and unique way.

So it seems to come back to the exhortation of Brother Lawrence to “practice the presence of God.” It seems to echo the direction to ‘pray without ceasing’. It seems to indicate that constant remembrance is the key. It appears that half measures really do avail nothing. It seems that we must by persistence continue until we have gained the attention of the thing we seek. It is obvious that we do not know how to achieve our objective so it stands to reason that it is achieved for us by the thing we seek when we put ourselves in the way of it. It’s there all the time. We are not there all the time. We must be there all the time. In our constant remembrance we engage the company of the constant conscious companion. How can we keep this companion constantly unless we are constantly conscious? So it stands to reason that realization is an ongoing process dependent on the intensity of our desire for contact. God’s not in the ordinary habit of breaking into our day unless we break into his.

Visible sings: God in Country by Les Visible♫ Every Day ♫
'Every Day' is track no. 11 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)

God in Country by Les Visible

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

In The One Mind...

In the morning when I do my meditations there is a particular meditation that I perform along with The Pattern on the Trestleboard and The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismigestus. It doesn’t have a name except to be called Meditation #1 from the book “The Way to the Kingdom”. If you are the curious sort you can find out that the book’s author is Joseph Bremer about whom not much is known. If you were to define him you would probably call him a Christian mystic. Long ago I memorized these meditations and, as has sometimes been the case, should I lose my way or cease to perform them for some stretch of time I still remember them long after when I return to them again. They are not short meditations. I guess it goes to show that you can make them a living part of you by repeated performance. I’m not suggesting that the totality of these things lives in me at this time, they do not. It is my intention that they someday shall.

As you read this mediation; Meditation #1, pay close attention to the impact of it on your thinking process. The person who turned me on to this meditation attempted to do so for a long time before I gave them the opportunity. She was persistent and she finally caught me in a receptive frame of mind. I am eternally grateful to her. From the moment I began reading it, it captured my attention completely and I was at the same time able to see the effect it was having on my awareness. As I read it I could feel the pinging of the truth in every word. It soon became a regular companion of mine. If you are of a similar nature I hope that you will gain from it some of the profound good it has visited upon me.


Meditation #1


“In the one mind there is the consciousness only, of wholeness, completion and perfection. In it there are no ideas of lack or limitation of supply of any kind. To every center of that mind, and every human mind is such a center, there flows naturally every needed idea, even as air rushes into a vacuum or as the blood carries to every cell of the body, everything needed for its growth and its sustenance.

Remember that mind is in you, is your mind as there is only one mind. Also remember by your realization of this great truth and by making it the dominant fact in your consciousness are you and your father made truly one, for it unites your consciousness with his consciousness; he who is your real self and whose mind is the only mind. Of course it does for you are then in his consciousness and all that he is you are and all that he has is yours. Once believe this, once know this and you will be free from all lack and limitation forever. Be still my child and know that I am your life, your health, your strength your power, your understanding and your love. I am all of these things you are seeking to be and to have. Can you not see my child that you can have none of these things apart from me, can get none of these things without getting me and can get them nowhere else except from me, your real, your perfect self? ...who am all these things now and therefore you are these things now and forevermore.

Be still my child and know the truth of yourself. Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Can you not see than any portion of health or strength or power or love or understanding that you have is not of yourself but is of me who am all of these things in you? Then why not have done with your foolish, anxious striving to be what you already are, always were and always will be in supreme fullness and perfection, why not then let go completely and let me, your real, your perfect self hold full sway in your consciousness; letting therein no thoughts you know are not my thoughts. This is all you need do, I will do the rest. Beloved if you thus abide in me and let this my word abide in you all that your heart seeketh will surely come to pass in blessed richness and abundance.”


NOTE: There may be a phrase or a word askew here or there. It is very different to perform the meditation than it is to write it down; something changes in the dynamics. I gave someone my copy of the book and haven’t gotten another in quite awhile. I never seem to be able to keep a copy of that book for any great length of time

It appears, according to the author, that there is only one mind and that we all, in our perception of ourselves as individuals, touch upon it at a particular point. He also seems to be saying that if we would recognize this great truth and make it the dominant fact within us that something very powerful would result. If the ocean were God then we would be sea creatures, appearing distinct from the waters around us but very much a part of it, born out of it and absorbed back into it. Some fish swim in large schools and some in small. Some fish swim alone. It’s been said that there is safety in numbers. The reverse is observably true as well. This is one of the reasons that everything which is said can also be contradicted. Do we gain truth in contradiction? In other words, when we set ourselves apart for the purpose of definition, do we find the ultimate as a result of our efforts? Can we find the ultimate without being absorbed in it?

The particular point at which we touch the totality is the definition of our personal state in relation to it. It is that part of the elephant that the blind man is touching that explains to him what the elephant is. For myself it means that we cannot know the elephant, which is smaller than a mountain and much smaller than the planet and infinitesimal compared to the solar system and the galaxy. Then how can we know God who not only composes the whole of it but it far more than that and which cannot be seen? We can’t know it but we try; possibly the answers lies in the idea that it knows us and if we can know that then something wonderful takes place.

The part of ourselves which is God is apart for one reason. It is apart that it might come to an understanding regarding the whole, and that wisdom will be the result. When we “let go and let me, your real and perfect self have full sway within you” then it doesn’t much matter what we know. It knows. It seems so simple and at the same time impossible to accomplish. How do you dance with God? How do you know when it is God you are dancing with and listening to? Why do dervishes spin in circles? It has something to do with a spiral.

In all this time we have seen some marvelous examples in the lives of those who have considered these things. They have told us things and demonstrated things but we don’t comprehend them. Immediately afterwards the mind has gone off again on its business; whatever business that illusion of a personal mind thinks that it has.

“Then why not have done with your foolish anxious striving to be what you already are, always were and always will be, in supreme fullness and perfection, why not then let go completely and let me you real your perfect self have full sway in your consciousness letting therein no thoughts you know are not my thoughts. This is all you need do, I will do the rest.” Our striving to be what we already are... letting therein no thoughts that you know are not my thoughts... How much is contained in that. From this we can understand the humility of the wise and the exhortation to become as little children. Faith appears to be a major key. It is what we have faith in that sets our course of action and defines us in our passage through. It is our faith and lack of faith that determines the success of our pursuit. What pursuit should a person engage in, seeing that they are dying even as they live; that they begin to disappear as soon as they arrive? It gives meaning to the phrase, “The proper study of mankind is man.” So what are all of these other people doing? What are all of these ills and misfortunes that are repeating themselves? Why is the enemy of our study the environment in which we are forced to learn, or in which we ignore everything outside the field of our momentary interest? Why should we feel that if we do not plot and scheme and push and do battle that we will not attain or gain what we desire?

It is said that it is God’s good pleasure to grant you the kingdom; faith again, faith and the lack of faith in respect of all of these things. We do not believe that these things should be ours and in some cases when we make them ours they destroy us. But can we be destroyed? Time passes, or seems to. When will we find the moment to make the single adjustment we need to make and let the rest take care of itself?

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Everything is under control, take the reins.

A variety of interests and duties have kept me away from this site more than I have wanted to be for the last few months. A large increase of visitors to my other blog as well as publishing and musical projects has taken up the time I once spent here; I am hoping this is the end of that.

Many people have a lot of trouble with the word ‘God’. My interactions with these people have made certain things clear to me. One of these is that their conflict is with religion and not the origin. Who knows the origin? Our inability to comprehend the origin of spiritual impulse makes, or should make it impossible for us to have an informed opinion. However, ignorance has never been a barrier to our capacity to define all things according to our limited perspectives. I love the references in the Bible to our powerlessness, our blindness, our nakedness and our ignorance. I know full well that this is all true. It is amusing sometimes and sad at others to see people so certain of their assumptions; striding forth to conquer the world and bend it to their will. None of them succeed. This is because the world is already under control and always has been and always will be.

For the earnest and humble heart it all makes perfect sense. Such a person is already disposed to accepting their limitations. As they grow these limitations fall away because as the separated part of them disappears the abiding unity enters into the house that was formerly the habitation of ghosts and transients. The cities of the world are not the cities of the awakened heart. As the kingdom opens within, the world outside is transformed. Some few souls walk in the perfection of their bodies. The rest are the victims of what they have chosen to believe. This outer world ‘appears’ to be one of strife and discord. It is the nature of it, given the relationship between the elements. It mirrors our thought. Even though I know this I still contribute to the discord in the wider world; it is very difficult not to be a warrior. On the one hand, projects like this and the music are an attempt to heal the gulf within. On the other hand is the imperative to declaim against the empire.

Empires come and go; render unto Caesar. That simple phrase contains a vast complexity of implications for the mind inclined to study it.

Another thing I notice about people who have trouble with the word ‘God’ is their inability to resolve the horrors of history and the evidence of thousands of tragic destinies with the concept of a loving God. Well now, this isn’t your only lifetime. Personally I know this for a fact. If one considers reincarnation as a factor in all that can be observed it makes clear that people are experiencing the results of previous actions and beliefs. It is a process of the life force self correcting itself. If one is determined to carry the weight. If one is determined to operate in the Invictus mold. If one believes that their separated self possesses its own mind apart from the multitude of other minds then a lot of things can and will happen as a result.

There is only one mind. We plug into it differently, depending on our inclinations which are the result of things previous. We all share in this one mind. Telepathy is actually a simple talent, one that we all use without being aware of it. We hear things but we don’t hear them, further along we can hear them quite clearly. This may be useful on occasion but only one voice is important. On the way to that voice we may believe that the source of the voice is the medium transmitting it. No. As we move along we encounter ever more refined examples of people who have learned how to get out of the way of it. We are clumsy toreadors; clumsy at a great many things. People look at masters and associate their poise and perfect balance with some indefinable trait that they possess. They have done only one thing. They have surrendered to the one master that is everywhere present. That which we live and move and have our being in; that which has formed the phenomenal universe out of its own substance, is the consciousness within it and everything inside and outside of it. It has rendered itself into uncountable pieces and life is the process of the encompassing divine collecting them all back again.

If you have a problem with the word ‘God’ that may not be your greatest problem. You really only have one problem and that is the idea that you are separate from everything else. This is the state of mind that justifies all of the horrors that lead you to believe God is not real. It is you who are not real. Although it makes me laugh it also makes me sad to see the personalities that are so caught up in the certainty of their view of things; a view of things that is usually determined by their ambitions and appetites. They will get to satisfy these things in some scenario or another but... it’s not going to end well and it will end.

Of course, reincarnation gives us endless opportunities to discover what is what; to realize what we cannot know and to trust beyond the need to know. It’s always the same thing every time we appear back out here. There is only one point and purpose to life and then there’s all the rest of it. The rest of it is what you see around you, wherever you are. TV and movies dramatize the external acting out of all of the possibilities of expression that are moving away from the point and purpose of life.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with playing a role. You have to play a role; policeman, lawyer, grocer, entertainer or what have you. The difference is in the knowledge that you are playing a role or in believing you ‘are’ the role. Actually you are the self. If the self operates through the role the role celebrates and offers the self to all. If the self is forbidden this conduit then the role is in the service of the false self and will have a particular resolution to it; thus karma and suffering. Well, it’s all karma isn’t it?

I met a man on the beach when I was 21. He is a realized master. Though I have encountered him through my life I never met him in the flesh again so far. I did not know he was a realized master. The one thing he kept repeating was, “I don’t know.” It wasn’t too long before I was saying that myself. He told me some things. Some of them I have understood and some remain a mystery. One of the things he said to me was, “God is a serpent. God is sleeping and this is his dream.” “But he’s going to wake up isn’t he?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t know.” Then he rose to his feet in a marvelous way. He always held his hands as if he were holding invisible reins. I later saw this in the hands of Buddhas and Hindu gods. At the time I thought he might be crippled. I felt sorry for him (grin) and admired the way he handled it. Anyway, he rose to his feet and extended his hands and I saw three birds flying across the sky on the reins from his hands and he said, “Everything is under control, take the reins.” That’s it, isn’t it?

Behind the façade of manifest existence is ‘the one’, eternally and supremely under control. To the extent that we accept this our lives come into balance. We do not have to carry the weight. We do not actually have any problems. There are no difficulties that cannot be surmounted. There is no opposition that needs to be overcome. We are already whole and perfect if we will accept that it is so. What is stronger, our impressions made from our observations? The world around us? Or our certain conviction that things are not as they appear and that the self is the doer of everything? Well, that’s up to us. It begins in our mind.

It is in our mind that we form the ideas, or permit the entrance of the ideas; telepathically or as the result of sensory data that leads to speech and action and karma. It is in the mind that we can make the single adjustment that adjusts everything else. As long as we know, God cannot. As long as we don’t know, God does. Hey, take the reins, everything is under control.

Visible sings: The eponymous Les Visible Music Album♫ All The Things That I Wanted ♫
'All The Things That I Wanted' is track no. 7 of 10 on Visible's eponymous
'Les Visible' Music Album

Lyrics (pops up)

The eponymous Les Visible Music Album

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Dreaming on the Bank of the River

Greetings one and all; I haven’t been very consistent here of late have I? Sometimes our lives take over and what might have ordinarily made its way to the monitor screen winds up written on life’s living parchment instead. Unless changes are effected in the medium of transmission the message won’t evolve. Well, of course, reality is the ‘backing screen’, not the colors that dance on it. Truth doesn’t evolve, only the conditions around it do. But all they do is change and change and change; no one screen capture in the kaleidoscope will present the truth more certainly than another. They are all just colors and shapes morphing into each other. If I were a purist I would just post a blank page every time I felt like I should say something.

I need to point this out. Somewhere between the things that I say and the things I don’t say there is an aperture. This exists where you are in this moment, where I am in this moment and in between all the seeming moments that seem to be different than the only moment we will ever be in. Our minds tell us things and we listen. It’s the degree to which we are able to objectively sift and discard that we actually possess any wisdom.

While we are resident in this body our senses are going to be telling us things. When we leave this envelope for another plane we will have others senses reporting on the conditions there. This goes on until the only sensation we have is that of the indwelling self; what I earlier referred to as the ‘backing screen’. The backing screen is the movie screen before the movie begins to play, or- if you prefer, after the movie ends, or if you prefer, that upon which the movie plays while you are watching it. It is what is real, the movie is not real.

When we were born, before we learned to walk, we saw things upside down. In order to learn to walk we had to turn the world around. Similarly death is where we find ourselves while in the body. We come alive upon leaving it. This is backwards too. Rather, we might call this ‘in the body death’ a form of dreaming. All of us have heard some version of this; life is but a dream, merrily, merrily. The dream itself works against our comprehending it as a dream. It insists upon its reality. What is not real, demands to be real. It insists upon our attention because that is the only things that keeps it alive. It is our attention that gives life to things and life is all about what we give life to and with-hold life from.

All of us know people who are be-deviled by something, or several. We surely have seen in our own lives how it is to be pursued by fear and uncertainty; to be tempted by experience and appetite. Giving in is not only a process of discovery but also an opportunity to test ourselves against the next visit. Every monkey on a man’s back started out as a small thought. We fed it and it grew. You can reverse the process. It’s an interesting thing to be faced with having to tell an imaginary tiger of your own creation that there will be no dinner tonight.

Deep in our minds live the archetypes; the real archetypes. Outside of ourselves are other archetypes; images that represent forms of authority that are connected to our understanding of the inner archetypes, to our understanding of ourselves. World leaders, religious figures, parents, school teachers, policemen; everything you can identify as something has some sort of a power exchange with you. By degrees we submit or rebel. It could be said that the truth can be uncovered by either extreme. Nothing that we see outside of us is the real thing. It is only symbolic of the real thing in the back of our minds; just like the Coca Cola ad says. And, of course, if anything isn’t real Coca Cola is near the top of the list. When your car battery connections corrode you can pour Coca Cola on them and they will clean the contacts. You might think about that.

I don’t know what is real and if I did I couldn’t tell you. I do have some idea of what isn’t real. It’s possible by having a penetrating focus on what is not real to gain some insight into what is real. What is real and what is important are two concepts that come up more or less frequently throughout the whole of this temporary dream. It is the mis-identification of what is real and what is important that accounts for all of our pain and suffering. The degree to which we insist, to which we demand that something be real and/or important, is the degree to which we suffer.

It may be that you were born to play a larger role in the collective dream. Most of us are not. When you think of all the important roles that have been played in history and how most of them turned out, importance may well be overrated. In most cases these are nothing more than object lessons for the audience. In other cases the audience understood it not at all. When you think of the larger roles that are no longer even remembered you have to wonder what importance really is.

In not such a long time to come you will be gone. Everyone you know will be gone. Everything you have will be gone. Every article you possessed in the dream, the environment you inhabited, will all be gone. The key to the process can be observed in nature. But even while we watch the process we generally do not understand its meaning. We don’t know what the meaning is when we watch nature fall back upon itself. There it is, there it goes and there it is again. Music is playing, people are talking. Sometimes they are running from explosions. Sometimes they are tumbling in the air. Sometimes they are sitting by the fireside. Sometimes they are praying and sometimes they are scoffing. How much impact does any of it have on the backing screen?

Somewhere within us something connects to something that understands everything. Without this connection there is little point to anything. Without this connection anything can mean anything until it changes into something else that “struts and frets its hour upon the stage.” We really are fools and clowns. And we can view it with compassion or contempt. However we view it that is what will be reflected back.

We can live our little life in the bubble of our self regard or we can live a larger life by allowing the greater portion of ourselves to be the witness. In that single adjustment comes a significance to our existence that cannot be measured by ordinary means. We have then not only an ever increasing degree of perception but the security of the eternal resident in our house of flesh. There is an indestructibility to our being that nothing can challenge. Why would we not want this more than anything?

We cannot sit still. We cannot let go and we cannot step out of the way. Somehow we have formulated an idea about ourselves and this idea stands in the way of our greatest accomplishment. It is the job of love to wear that away. We can accelerate the process or retard it. It will happen none-the-less. In the face of all our pain and anguish, fear and loss, this stands as the great promise and perfect destiny that we cannot forever avoid. Though we may be blinded by the light we will eventually see as a result of it.

Do we just let go? Do we strive with all the intensity we can manage? It works either way. Sometimes I have to smile when I think about another world and how we may one day consider where we were today.

Visible sings: God in Country by Les Visible♫ I Need More Light ♫
'I Need More Light' is track no. 4 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)

God in Country by Les Visible