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: ♫ 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)

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: ♫ 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)

Your Inside is Out and Your Outside is in so...

I have two blogs. One is to talk about what is really happening; as far as I am concerned and the other is merely a vent for the personal vehicle moving through the gridlock of the manifest realm. It is not surprising that the latter, existing only half as long, has far more readers. What is surprising is how often readers will point out to me perspectives that have to do with the other blog. I don't know if they do it merely to express their take, or to point it out to me for my edification. It does make me smile in any case. It amuses me to see them make the points I so often attempt to make here, to me over there.

Like all of you, I am a work in progress. Ideally I would live in rarified realms at all times. Such is not the case for any of us writing or reading here. I'm not sure about even having the other blog (I hate that word). For some reason it is there. Regardless of the things I say there it is a matter of some certainty and faith on my part that all is well; that everything is under control and outworking perfectly. Though my orientation is Eastern, I live in the Western world. The Eastern realm can be considered to be one of contemplation and the Western realm one of action. This is in respect of spiritual practice, not in terms of the external. Anyone who thinks that has never been to Hong Kong. Although these two spiritual perspectives appear to differ they don't differ except in terminology and appearance. You have the seven planets, or metals on the one hand and the seven chakras on the other. Everything on the one end is the same as on the other.

One of the things I notice as I travel about is the difference in the languages, yet the people are the same. Their diets vary. Their religions vary and their politics vary. It's all various expressions of something that is exactly the same behind the colorful array of circumstance and sensory impact. The appearance of the differences is the source of suspicion. The appearances of the differences is what makes war occur as we make a greater divide in the attempt to force a unity that is already unshakeably itself.

In the present time we have a classic example of the manipulation of this in the actions and words of the present American administration. The head of this administration will go on television and say one thing and then do precisely the opposite the very next day and make everything stand on it's head to the advantage of those whose real business is confusion. Confusion can be fun and entertaining; circuses, carnivals, amusement parks... oh there are many examples. Confusion can also be very painful for those who are confused. For the ones doing the confusing that doesn't matter. Whether you suffer or not is of no importance to them. Quite often they enjoy, or think they enjoy, the fact that you suffer. Well, obviously they are more deeply confused than you are because that isn't the intention of the primary intender regarding what is essentially intended for all of us.

The confusion exists for a reason. It also exists 'as' confusion and always will, simply because shapes and colors and the intricate variety of substances and elements and what-have-you are in competition with each other in real time and in your mind. That's show business. For many, this confusion is a delight and a necessary distraction from the awesome reality of the one. It's especially true when we are young. We want to live and dance and fall in love and get rich and be important and slay dragons and save maidens and make the world free for our own brand of confusion. I'm wondering if the word, 'confusion' doesn't come from the name Confucious. A study of what Confucianism is seems to bear this out.

What Confucianism is is representative in the West too. It is putting the emphasis on tradition and all of the minutiae of accepted behavior and rigid containment of the spirit within long standing demarcations or grooves worn into the tracks upon which we move. When people leave these tracks some might say they "go off the rails" or they might appear to be criminals or rebels or just young people with bad haircuts and poorly channeled sex drives. The repression of this sex drive, ironically, often leads to criminal behavior. At the same time, according to whatever form of Confucianism is running the joint, letting it run loose is considered immoral and prohibitive.

Everything is made out of the same thing, you and me, the trees and the rocks, the oceans and the sky. We are composed of the same substance. Every religion is based on the same God. In 99% of the cases, all of the different forms of clothing conceal the same body parts. In some large percentage all of the lives being lived, appear and disappear in similar fashion. And it goes on and on and on and on. The conditions of life on this planet shift this way and that and always contain the same elements; war and peace, want and plenty, rich and poor, bound and free and on and on and on; joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure- interacting opposites constantly creating new scenarios for life to experience itself in. Right in the same moment, most of the time- inasmuch as this all takes place in time- people are on the rack and people are lounging in beach chairs. People are looking to screw up the world and people are looking to fix it and it isn't clear, often, which is which. In fact, in all of the cases of opposites just given it often isn't clear which is which. And certainly the results that follow don't indicate that the initial intention was what it appeared to be.

What to do.... hmmmm. I can only speak for myself; whoever that is. I look at it as a swirling maelstrom that is always tugging to pull me into a washing machine effect of tumbling among the rocks in the cylinder. I can look at the world and see that that is the case for most everyone and that some manage better than others. They do so because of disposition, values, programming or... well, there are a lot of things. For myself, if I take the time to sit each morning and, with the sure and certain knowledge that there is a divine consciousness that pervades everything, settle and reach; let that which is that know that all I want is that... I find that it orchestrates my day in that direction. If I close out my day the same way there is a gradual progression that moves ever closer to union with that and a continuing self realization is the result.

This is what I want and this is what I get. There are a whole lot of other things out there in the world of confusion and all of them result in something. To fight the world is to fail. The world is already fighting itself and it hasn't won yet has it? In fact, no one who has ever fought here has won as far as the moment goes and the moment goes on forever. Well, I'm not going to come to any conclusions about anything I talked about here today. I'm just going to let it hang there and enjoy the fantastic experience of realizing how very, very important it is just to remember what is important. Something really wonderful is going on. My suspicion is that it has been doing this all along. I think I'm going to think about that.