Some Thoughts on the Ineffable and the Exercise of Reason and Logic.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

Maya the spider spins her dream web, woven out of darkness and false light. The Dream Web is magnetic and our Karma is like iron filings that hang suspended in our atmosphere like dust motes. There are charged particles that are attracted to specific details in the web. It varies with everyone. Are Karma and Fate interchangeable terms for the same thing? There are many tales about Kismet in the Sufi tradition. There are many tales about Karma in the Hindu and Buddhist tradition.

Here is an interesting and thoroughly uniformed statement made at a forum where there was a question as to whether Muslims believe in Karma; “Muslims do not believe in Karma/Superstitions/Magic. We only believe in Destiny.” This is rather humorous if you give some thought to it. What have Superstitions and Magic got to do with Karma and... how is Destiny not a expression of Karma and therefore proof of the existence of Karma? What does it mean if conditions and events are destined? It means there is some kind of cause in play. What would that cause be? Since destinies are so various and remarkably dissimilar in many ways, logically, it has to mean there are specific differences in prior behavior somewhere and where is that somewhere? In what place did these prior events happen? Surely they happened on the same plane where the destiny is being effected. Or is there some other system that makes no sense that is the cause of it all? Look at the symmetry in the wider universe and tell me that a similar symmetry does not exist everywhere.

Of course, if you have no symmetry because your nature has been hijacked by the unnatural then this won't make sense to you. What do you believe is real or unreal? Your definitions define you. Maybe it would help if I explain how I have come to my own conclusions and beliefs. I test everything to see if it works and if it is valid when compared against the truth within me. If there is resonance then the sympathetic strings vibrate within. It is a kind of psychic smell test. It is one of those things where it feels right even though you have no immediate certainty, absent the ongoing experience of existence wherein whatever it is that one has under consideration, continues to prove out in application. This is the manner in which any legitimate philosopher and meta-physician comes to their conclusions.

Never assume anything because even if you are generally correct in what you believe, there are elements missing that are critical to the totality of your beliefs and may also account for an intensification and strengthening of your faith. Of course, without Love as the directing and most powerful drive, one is not going to come into the deeper stages of the quest. Only Love is sufficient to the necessities of the task, given the challenges that come on the way. More importantly, the Love and the devotion it inspires has more to do with drawing the attention and grace of the ineffable and it has been said by many wiser minds at different times that one does not attain to an interactive relationship with the divine under your own steam, given that all steam is generated by the ineffable to begin with and is then defined by our intentions. Intention is all important and one finds reference to this in many Buddhist texts and the scriptures of other faiths as well.

In the teachings of any legitimate religion, what is important gets said more than once and in more than one way. These elements are critical to one's understanding and the teachings of Jesus the Christ should be kept in mind where he says that there is one series of truths for the common mind and another for the disciples. This latter is to be diligently sought after and comes by revelation. Apparently, in most cases the ground has to be prepared over the course of time, as one is engaged in those trials by which ones sincerity is proven out. Cases like that of Paul on the road to Damascus are not the usual event. Of course, I don't know if this happened as it is said to have happened. I have absolute faith that Jesus Christ appears to certain individuals and it is a valid certainty when one considers that Jesus was a man but Christ is a station and everyone who attains to it meets Jesus, which shouldn't be that difficult for Jesus given how few in any generation achieves this state of awareness.

On the matter of Paul, I have no idea what was or what was not. I do take exception to many things he said. It is my belief approaching certainty that the tales of any great master omit more than they include and are often filled with made up details and some exaggeration, although I consider anything to be possible when it comes to masters, so I am not referring to exaggeration in that regard. One who has attained to a certain level of consciousness has the ineffable resident within and is capable of anything without limitation. That they do not go around doing all kinds of miraculous things all the time is a testimony to their character. The fact is that they do go around doing miraculous things all the time, they are simply, more generally done within the hearts and minds of those who gather and over the longer course of time in those who read their works, see films or whatever media there might be.

God is everywhere around and within us. God is, in some ways like the wind. Everywhere in the world the air is stirred by some degree of invisible breath. We never see it though. We only see that which is stirred by the wind. Let us look at human affairs. There is that which the ineffable inspires and that which the ineffable permits. You can well ask why certain things are permitted and I will say, Karma but Karma, like the wind... is often not seen at its point of origin, in consideration of the effect that the origin drives. Sometimes Karma is more immediate and sometimes it moves through following lives. We see the leaves that tremble and we see leaves fall. We don't see what causes it. There is so much we do not see but we base all of our beliefs on what is real on the idea that we aren't missing anything. That is a kind of arrogance we see every day in people's opinions on the meaning of events and the moral implications taken from whatever level of informed or uniformed morality they possess.

The almighty as we have been told, moves in mysterious ways. We might also say that the impact of the almighty on human events is often unseen. In times of Materialism, we collectively place far more emphasis on the seen as opposed to the unseen and the larger generalization on what is unseen are often misleading when not outright fabrications, indulged in by those who seek to manipulate the beliefs of the masses through promoting anthropomorphism, or whatever skewered ideas allow for catechisms, dogmas and cants that are approved for public mind control, which accounts for all the horrible things done in the name of religion.

Look, with rare exception, all political and fundamentalist religious systems are created by those who profit off of them. The same applies to economic systems and in every case as they apply to the basic understanding of any of these, one idea of the meaning of any of them is promoted through official vehicles and the real meaning is concealed because of the routine perversion of the principles over and over and over again.

We've all heard the name of Martin Luther but I will wager that most have read little about his life; the dramatic moments in it, the things he did and said and who he considered to be the enemies of humanity and Christianity. It is interesting to note that his ideas are shared by many another and that to this very day. When certain themes occur and reoccur over the course of hundreds and even thousands of years, there has to be a reason for it. Of course, in this time of Political Correctness, which is another pernicious by product of Materialism, all kinds of arguments are given for the belief in all manner of absurdities and these are promoted by those who benefit from the belief in these absurdities. Here we must keep in mind that the demonic authorities from the Infernal Kingdom most specifically promote discord and disorder. This is a consistent theme in the behavior of these entities, along with deception and the promotion of negative qualities in humanity. Keeping this in mind and noting the behavior of those who are in positions of leadership on the world stage, it is no reach to imagine who inspires their behavior.

Most of what needs to be seen is pretty clear but it is only as clear as the minds which consider any of it. What is it that clouds and confuses the mind of humanity? Once again, should you focus on things already said here and on what you have learned by observation about existence, it requires no great reach of the imagination.

May the ineffable inspire and motivate you in every positive way.


End Transmission.......

Dancing with Dervishes in an Invisible Wind.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

Stranger and stranger... mysteries swirl and twist in the invisible wind like dust dervishes. Images comes and go but nothing is clear. It is too quick to register or identify the images because of the spinning and like dust dervishes, their path is unpredictable. We live in the middle of their coming and going. For some it is just a prolonged uncertainty with undercurrents of incipient fear. They don't know much about the wind and nothing about what moves it and the images are swirling in the back of their minds, beyond the reach of the conscious self. In between these images and the conscious self are the programmed images that have been placed there and which they cannot defend themselves against because they are not informed about the value of an empty mind. They are unaware that the world is a lie and unwilling to consider it because it could well render everything they do and everything they want as something unreal... or a lie. It could render what they believed in to be as unreal as the world they live in. There aren't many people who can handle the truth and that is why the world is a lie. The lies make the passage between birth and death seem more comfortable, as if... even though they know they were born, they don't believe that they will die. They see people dying all around them and do not believe that they will die. So they face their lives with closed eyes and their value systems are adjusted accordingly.

I find it increasingly difficult to have something to say. I see what has been, based on my perspective, which is really only a point of view. Perhaps it only happened that way from that perspective. I see what's coming in bursts of vision that happen between the movements of the dervishes. It is like looking into The Mirror of Galadriel. I see things that are going to happen, things that won't happen and things that might happen and I don't know which is which.

It is uncanny how my own life seems to mirror the conditions in the world. I think, more than anything, I would welcome a stable environment where I could sink into my work and have no concern for being able to afford it and no concern for disruptive individuals drone hovering in the area. For some reason this hasn't been in the cards most of the time and I know there's a lesson there but I don't know what it is because it could be any number of things.

I keep running into the oddest situations. My mother passed about 6 weeks ago at the age of almost 96. There were a number of insurance policies; life insurance policies. One of them, I know was for 250,000 dollars. I suddenly became hopeful that my share of this would put me in a position to have that stable environment where I could sink into my work, etc. My brother is the executor of one of these polices and another brother is the executor of 3 others. My one brother had been in Ghana for the last month and just came back and he had told me that the insurance company, Stonebridge Life in Plano, Texas, only wants to pay 10,000 dollars total. How can that be? One of the polices is for accidental death so that isn't negotiable but the others are life insurance polices. There shouldn't be any question about them. I am mystified at the way life so consistently throws me curve balls. I hadn't spent my life previously thinking about these life insurance policies. I was barely aware of them, probably because the curve ball syndrome has been so much a factor of my existence and also because those aren't the sort of things I dwell on anyway, making money off of the death of another.

It is perplexing. For someone who preaches so much about faith, certitude and determination, I have certainly become an example of something in relation to them and I'm not sure what that is either (grin). Meanwhile, there has never been a time when I could have used such a windfall more and it looks like the wind came and took it. I don't know what to think. I know the ineffable will provide but things like this and all the rest of what has happened in recent years, tests my faith, certitude and determination to the limits of their possibility. I'm getting past the point where I can imagine I am going to meet an heiress or find a patron. One would expect that such a thing would have happened by now if it were in the riffling deck of cards that contain the elements of my life's destiny.

Well... let me stop myself here before I get all subjective and maybe even come off as morose or worse, I'm not feeling that way. I'll admit to being confused, because... no matter who you might be, you like things to be somewhat predictable but I am getting that 'born under a bad sign' feeling. It doesn't seem to matter how well I behave. If I could only understand what it is that I am doing or not doing, or if this is some kind of payback... or just a series of teaching moments, it would help a great deal. The thing is that all my life I have been engaged in the creative process and the majority of all my efforts have been about the ineffable. There were periods of satire and comedy because that is all I am left with when covering the world but anything else was always about my love affair with the ineffable. In earlier times it was a supernatural love affair with the goddess and that has formed and reformed otherwise as I have aged and changed in the sequences.

This is the part that perplexes me. Having loved the ineffable as much as I have and as long as I have it makes me wonder greatly at where I find myself. I think of those ashrams and fellowships that I could not integrate into. I think of all the places in this wide world where I have lived. Once Guru Bawa said to me. “You are in the jungle and you are out of petrol.” He said something about tigers but I can't remember that part. I imagine it had to do with danger and I now find myself in the jungle and out of petrol (grin). Oh right... he told me I must get some petrol. Many things tell me that this is not where I am supposed to be. I mostly know this from the invisible side of things... sensations and impressions. I am certain not to be in the particular place I am in because my stay here is up at the end of December. I'm going somewhere but I don't know where that is yet.

Another strange thing, an old acquaintance offered me a cottage at his property in California for a very reasonable fee and it is someone I have known for decades. We've seen each other at odd moments here and there. We've had moments of friction due to personality disparities but on the whole we have gotten along. It was late in the night when he wrote me and he also left a comment at one of the blogs, probably this one and he said that he would write me a longer email the next day and wanted to speak with me on Skype so I sent him my Skype ID for him to make a request to go on my list of callers. He never did this. He never sent the followup email and I haven't heard from him again, even though I wrote him about not hearing from him... there was no reply. Here is yet another mystery that makes no sense and I have had so many of these that I can't make head or tails of it.

I have to interject here and state emphatically that I am not in a negative state about all of this. I am not depressed or anxious. I feel fundamentally sound and in good spirits, despite all of these inexplicable setbacks and strange forces out of the invisible. Even more unusual, or maybe it isn't, is the appearance of an agent of the ineffable telling me that everything is fine and that all will be well. I was told more than that but... perhaps some other time. I have to laugh and all I can think is that what I am being shown is to rely on nothing outside of me and that all of this is designed to remove every idea of false hope and false support until I have nowhere to turn except for the good graces of my author and the promise of our reunion. No other possibility makes any sense whatsoever; not that it is supposed to make sense but given my life's work and the focus of my attention in the greater sense, it seems likely that this is something the ineffable would do to bring me into a stronger functioning awareness of utter reliance on the divine.

I have only given a few examples of things happening and going back in time there have been yet more. I have to admit that I am pretty impressed at my resilience and endurance... heh heh. I feel like a professional of some sort. I don't know what sort ...but a professional none the less. Unlike so many people who awaken to one day running on the same track as the day before and headed into a future on the same track... there is no telling what might happen in my day and the odds say that a change is going to come and however difficult it may have been arriving there, that is just how smooth it is going to be in the next reel. I took the time to write about this today because I know that there are others out there in similar circumstances, maybe not as extensive and intense and maybe worse. Each of us handles these things in our own way and I have sought to illustrate how I am handling it.

I look back on my life and I can see numerous examples of 'abandon hope all ye who enter here' and somehow I came out the other side. There were times far more dark than these and yet they are only memories now. I am reminded at odd times of the series of Thomas Cole paintings called “The Voyage of Life” I am reminded of struggles so much greater than my own. I am reminded of other lives in other countries that qualify as miserable. I am reminded of people in hospitals and hospices and prisons whose state of being is akin to a nightmare. I am reminded of people in the streets who suffer from all manner of maladies and have nowhere to go. I could go on in this theme but I think you get the idea. I don't understand the things happening to me but I don't have to. All I have to understand is that the ineffable is real and however weird it may be in expression, loves and cares for me and all will be well.

End Transmission.......

Love and Devotion; don't Leave Home without Them.

Two for one day!

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

It has really gotten strange in this world. You can't say anything anymore without it being taken out of context, or amplified well beyond the intent of this writer. My feeling about all of this has less to do with the pressures and uncertainties of modern life and ever so much more to do with unavoidable changes coming upon us and being some thing(s) we are not intrinsically disposed to accommodating. We fear and resist change at most points and we are not open to accepting this. I know this to be true because it is true of me. As much as I seek change on a daily basis, there are parts of my subconscious that are opposed. Beneath the surface of our being is a huge sea of impulses and predilections of which most of us are only dimly aware. Anyone who has studied the effect of the mysterious ID and all those other misdiagnosed terms that are in the common parlance, knows that there is conditioning and there is also the unfortunate incontinence of the subconscious (how's that for a snappy definition?) as it breaks through thin barriers and the subterranean customs checkpoints of our inner self. Not a day goes by when we don't hear about some poor soul who did something awful or awfully embarrassing that they would never have done if they had been in their right mind at the time. These days, far too many of us are not in our right minds because the world we live in is dangerously out of balance and we have adjusted to this and continued to adjust to it, until we have adjusted ourselves into a synchronicity with the dangerous imbalance of the world we inhabit.

It is due to an almost unnoticeable, incremental press toward chaos that we find ourselves increasingly separated from both ourselves and each other. It has also come to where anything we say to one another, no matter how innocuous and well meaning, can be taken for something else, something other than what we intended and we are left at a loss to understand how and why this happened.

I come here most days, although you may not see the results every day, trying my best to speak from the heart with all of the sincerity and passion that I am capable of. This is the truth of me and I do my damnedest to be and do just that. I think 'most people' who come here believe this and I also believe this about most of the people who come here. I often yearn with a great hunger to be in a proximity where I can interact with the majority of you. Alas... we are separated by great distance in many cases and such is not to be. This is the point and purpose of the work that takes place here because it is only in virtual space that one can accomplish such a thing. Many times I have wished to see more of the wonderful people I met in London when I went there to speak at that conference. I only had the day and that was that. The river of life flowed onward and around the bend. The days pass, all too quickly it seems and I grow ever closer to my exit point, hoping that as I go I can do more good than harm by an ever larger percentage. I seek with a greater and greater intensity, to throw off the shackles of my blindness, ignorance and intolerance. There is within each of us (for the most part) such a great amount of programming. Some of that programming is from other lives. It is not an easy thing to shake but we go at it with a will, even though Lao Tzu, says, “let life ripen and fall, will is not the way at all.” (grin). It can get confusing; to do or not to do. To try or not try. Which is it? It seems that it is none of them all the time and some of them some of the time and being capable of flexibility and finesse is the key. It seems this can only be made possible by a clear and open channel to the intuition because although we certainly do not know in any comprehensive sense, our creator knows everything in every sense.

What does this tell us? It tells us that the key is to come into an ever more deep and continuous communication with our higher self. The key is to be transported by grace, or faith, or relentless industry; good works, a ceaseless meditative focus... whatever it takes... to come into a state of utter reliance on the ineffable and everything that happens to us in this life is directed into bringing us to this point, IF we are so inclined in the first place because... in times of the apocalypse, we are all being brought to the direct resolution of what we are in the totality of our being. Going up? Going down? Going sideways? We are all going in the direction of our hearts deepest intentions, even when we are woefully unaware of what that is. For some of us, regardless of our rough state, we are being led on the proper course due to grace. At some point we impressed the ineffable with something and the ineffable has never forgotten. We forget of course but the ineffable does not.

We have to shake the persistent anthropomorphism that plagues our existence. We consistently mistake the mind and intentions of the almighty with our own. We believe that the ineffable thinks and judges like we do. We believe the ineffable is just as unforgiving as we are, just as petty and impatient. This is simply not true. The truth is that the ineffable loves us more than we are capable of loving the ineffable back. The ineffable yearns for reunion with us far beyond our own yearning. In all things, the ineffable pursues us with a greater fervor than we are capable of and it is this that we are meant to surrender to, the divine impetus for resonance with the ineffable.

Guru Bawa once said that he was like a fisherman and we were all runaway fish (I am paraphrasing) snapping at every brightly colored thing and that he had set his hooks for us and once the hooks were embedded in our mouths we were caught and it didn't matter how frantically and powerfully we sought to swim away in the direction of our pedestrian pursuits, we were hooked and slowly, or quickly, depending on his mysterious purpose, as an agent of the ineffable, he will reel us in. He was speaking in that luminous intensity of his and I was fixed on everything he was saying and all of a sudden, I caught myself (no doubt he was responsible for this) and there I was with my mouth wide open just as if there were a hook in it and I was being irresistibly pulled forward toward him. It was, is, an unforgettable moment and in the moment of my discovery of what was taking place I realized that it had been going on for some time.

Later, down the road, when I was facing a sentence of life imprisonment on Maui, my friend Michael Green went to Bawa and told him about my situation. I should also point out that in my situation NO ONE had ever beaten such charges before. It was a slam dunk and yet I, with no money and a court appointed lawyer did just that. At the time, Bawa said to Michael, “Oh, don't worry, he'll be alright. He has just chosen another path.” AND... so it was. This is one of the beauties about a great master like Bawa. He understood that not all of us must be compelled to be forcibly shuttled on to a particular path. As we often maintain here, there are many paths up the mountain but once you have reached the top you can see all the ways down. Bawa once referred to himself as a traffic cop who stands at the crossroads of existence and who waves people in the various directions that their destiny is meant to go. “You go this way. You go that way.” etc.

I wish I had appreciated him more when he was materially with us. I was so reckless at the time. I thought I wanted to be performing recording artist. I distinctly remember standing in my apartment back in 1976 in Philadelphia and saying to myself, “I've got to rock and roll.” It was as if I were at a crossroads; whether to immerse myself in the day to day of the fellowship there or to follow my dream, which was not all that well formed and which displayed a great ignorance of the music industry and the mindset of those who run it. All I got as a result was a great deal of pain and suffering and these days my music is a side issue affair going nowhere at the same speed as the rest of me (grin). Well... I don't know that actually. Probably a lot more than I am aware of is going on and only faith, certitude and determination will take me through it all.

I told myself before I got here that I would give myself a year to see what was what here for me and I have done this and like some kind of strange clockwork, I find that circumstances have put me in a position to vacate where I am, exactly one year after arriving. I did nothing to bring it about. It happened completely independent of me. If anything I was as peaceful and diplomatic as possible but... when the ineffable has plans it is better that one does not have plans of their own. I suspect it is possible I could be almost anywhere after the New Year. Somehow the means to be wherever that is to be will materialize. I am confident of this, just as I am confident I will not be rendered homeless and destitute. The ineffable loves me as much as anyone and everything in this life is created to bring me, or any of us, into an awareness of this. It is fascinating to see to what a degree the ineffable micro manages our lives if we are cooperatively disposed toward it.

I want to say in closing that although I will occasionally say things that are not understood as I intended them to be or which offend some, it is never my intention to make such a thing happen but these things become unavoidable when dealing with a wide readership, which incorporates so many different perspectives and states of mind that can vary from moment to moment. It's all timing ultimately. Shave a few seconds, or an hour, or a day, here and there and the whole dynamic can change. Stop on your way somewhere and everything is altered to a lesser or greater degree. This is why a consistency of heart and mind is so important. Even if everything around you is changing, the power within is always greater than the appearances without. It might take some time to get to where this is understood and employed but... we have forever.

Life can be very mysterious. It is happening at so many levels and all of our thoughts and words and actions are like the ripples caused by a stone thrown into a lake. These ripples reach distant shores and they interact with other ripples and a large complexity comes out of all this interplay between the countless numbers of us. Deep within the heart of it all is a profound simplicity and this is the most difficult of it all to grasp and it is achieved by a letting go of everything superficial and a consistent focusing upon the one who lies within the deepest center of our being. Love and devotion; don't leave home without them.

End Transmission.......

Sunday's radio broadcast is here.

Sailing on the River of Life to the Following Sea.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

The natives are restless. They can't actually stop anything and they are at their wits end challenging the credibility of the credible. Pot shots and ambushing hasn't been working so other tactics need to be employed. We have to remember that it's not all just black and white out there, anymore than it is all just black and white inside your head. If life were just black and white then the good guys would always come to a good end and the bad guys would always come to a bad end and though ultimately this is the case there is no real consistency in any of it in the short term. These days it is hard to know who the good guys and bad guys are. A lot of bad things are widely celebrated and a lot of good things are considered undesirable, threatening and increasingly more and more illegal as laws are made against behaviors that go contrary to the will to power as expressed on the big game board of the elite, also known as Planet Earth. For instance, telling the truth is considered bad form. It upstages and offends the comfortable shared lies that give us all something to pretend about.

We've brought up the persona of Shiva before. Shiva is not a welcome guest at weddings and any number of other celebrations because Shiva represents the truth. Truth is almost always at odds with those temporary things we have all convinced ourselves are more permanent than they are. Yet each of us can look at our lives to this point and recognize that many things we thought were permanent and hoped were permanent, turned out not to be permanent at all. Life is a fluid river of change. As much as so many of us talk about change and the need for change, we fiercely resist it when it runs counter to the things we would rather not have change. Change is a whole other thing when it moves from changes we would like to see, to changes we have to be.

The truth is that good guys get knocked around these days even more than bad guys and if you start including things like honor, integrity, a love of the truth and worse... a desire to express it, even though we know that absolute truth cannot be expressed because the truth is a light and our stage of expression is a world of appearances and truth is something beyond appearances, well... you could well turn into a pariah not grata. Truth does show up in a relative sense and relative truth is better than relative lies because relative truth might lead to absolute truth, or at least into some nearby neighborhood and you wind up like one of those Knights of the Round Table who could not look directly at the Holy Grail but could only see the reflected light because they weren't as virtuous as they needed to be.

Of course, as far as I can intuit, the Holy Grail is not an actual goblet but a chamber in the heart. I believe this the same way that I believe the real Bible or any of the inspired spiritual scriptures, are written on the human heart in a living, vibrating flame alphabet and I believe this because I have seen it more than once but not in awhile since I am less refined and other worldly than once I was but I am hoping for a return by grace and I fully expect that to happen.

This is a world where now the totality of what you need is greater than the resources you possess, unless your circumstances are very favorable and they might be favorable for all the wrong reasons and that could mean you are going to pay heavy somewhere down the line. Rents are out of control. The price for everything else keeps rising. Utilities are in the hands of enormous blood sucking ticks. The cost of maintaining your place in this world is great and it is not just the financial cost. I consider the personal cost to be greater and that is where you have to give up pieces of yourself in order to continue at an acceptable level because of the compromises you need to make to continue to be able to afford the unaffordable and this situation you are in has been constructed for you, for the purpose of hamster control.

This requires all of us to play a role. Of course, you can't get around the necessity to do this, no matter what you do or do not do because all of it is a role. If you do nothing, that is a role, so you pretty much have to settle on something that is acceptable to you, or else you play the roles conferred on you by necessity. Sometimes you want to be something more than you are; something better or brighter or more complete and for that you need a role model and I come out of the school where you fake it until it becomes real. This is accomplished by going through all of your moments as if the ineffable were walking in your shoes and- truth be told- he.she/it is. What this creates is that eventually the ineffable becomes the active agent within because all of us have some portion of the spark of the ineffable within; each part is unique due to the lens of the personality it is expressing through and it will express once the dross has been burned away and burning away the dross can be an extended and painful endeavor and just about no one is up to that because it can cost you everything you think you love and don't want to lose and the truth is (cue Shiva the Destroyer), you will lose most all of it no matter what. All you will keep will be the changes and additions made to your soul in the crucible of experience in the world of appearances.

You come into this world squalling and naked and then you develop into the series of characters that play your life, before that portion of the world you have been destined to perform in front of. On the way, you become more and more complex and then you become weaker and your grasp upon a self identifying awareness becomes, in many cases, more tenuous. Your grasp on an understanding of the world around you becomes less certain and secure and eventually you go out in a reversal of the way you came in, only at this point you might be wearing a suit, or some kind of shroud and either be also contained in a wooden box or reduced to ashes. We each have some kind of belief system or philosophical construct that we use to explain it to ourselves, trying to make do on the way to the great yawning jaws of the unknown. For some that is going to be a terrifying experience because they have done nothing to prepare themselves for it. They have no map of that further country to which they are bound. They might have had some kind of a map here but here... is fading while I write these words or... it is becoming more and more present but that... is selten as the Germans would say.

So we come and go, to and fro in this atmosphere that we fill with words that echo away and become the wind that blows in every direction around us and all of these forces of nature become an expression of our thoughts and words and emotions. The rain is tears. The thoughts are threads that are woven into dream clouds and sometimes they are cumulus and sometimes they are cumulonimbus and sometimes they are cirrus tracings and sometimes they are chemtrails. The whole of it is a projection of the mind and herein lies a key to the possibility of some measure of harmony to be gained and maintained here. It seems that what disturbs us most are the things we want. If we didn't want anything... how would that be? Of course, that requires placing an absolute trust in the ineffable and that is no easy matter. We are the fortunate ones where the ineffable has chosen to remove every support and prop of stability from us and reduce us to an utter dependence despite our every effort at avoidance. We may not feel very lucky but we are.

Life can be compared to a river in so many ways. It has a slow and steady course and then it can wind to one side and the other for some time. It has rapids and rocks and things that live below the surface and feed upon the surface and sometimes it is clear and sometimes not and the deeper it is the less clear it becomes. Big rivers are fed by many tributaries and there is some meaning to be found in that and each of them, big and small, all meet the sea and that has meaning in it too. There is meaning to be found in everything, or there is nothing to be found at all. There is meaning to be found in you, or there is nothing. What is to be found in George Soros is not to be found in Siddhartha Gautama Buddha but the seeds of both are there in the other. If was all a matter of what they watered and what got shined on.

You can't find what you are looking for by putting your focus on everyone else. That is just them, as they are for the moment, on their part of the river, sailing on whatever conveyance best describes the fashion in which they understand it and the manner in which they have adapted to negotiate it. You job is to avoid collisions and to take note of that which you are passing through because somehow it reflects what lies within or...is it the other way around? Lao Tzu said something about... paraphrasing... 'whether a man passionately seeks the surface or dispassionately seeks the depths, they are the same...' ah... never mind, let's go get the actual quote and... what do you know? It is the very first one-

Existence is beyond the power of words

To define:

Terms may be used

But are none of them absolute.

In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,

Words came out of the womb of matter;

And whether a man dispassionately

Sees to the core of life

Or passionately

Sees the surface,

The core and the surface

Are essentially the same,

Words making them seem different

Only to express appearance.

If name be needed, wonder names them both:

From wonder into wonder

Existence opens.

Ah well, my friends... we try to be an asset of some kind... we shall see and time will tell. We try to go about our days as if the ineffable were walking in our footsteps but we forget as often as we remember and we have been told not to worry about it, that what is to come will come and that all we are left to do is to surrender as well as we are capable and rely on the ineffable for all things. It's been an interesting journey up to this point on the river of life. I can hear the echo of the rapids far behind me in the distance and it is possible that I hear more rapids up ahead or... is that the sea? Is that the sound of distant waves breaking on that far shore? One hopes it is indeed the sea. Time will tell and we shall see.

End Transmission.......

There will be a radio broadcast some time on Sunday.

We are What we Are Not Until We are What we Are.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

What a difference a day makes (cue Dinah Washington). I had a very good day yesterday, mostly because it involved all kinds of situations, including driving about 200 miles and it all went down without a glitch. As a reward, last night, I enjoyed a spinach salad and a wonderful Chianti, followed by some wonderful reflections, overlaid with passable entertainments. It is a wonderful thing when your own statements come back upon you as verifications in the realm of experience. Personally, I seldom talk about the specifics of my struggles or their level of intensity. What is intense for one can break another and it is difficult to measure degrees of impact in any comprehensive or general way because it is all subjective. In recovery groups they talk about hitting your bottom and you hear about high and low bottoms. Some of us get more profoundly hammered (double entendre alert) than others but the one constant is that we are all affected.

Life affects us and what is less recognized is that we affect life and what might be even less recognized is how these two conditions affect each other. I was with an acquaintance during my travels yesterday and it was a pretty enjoyable interplay. The next to the last stop was a large commercial enterprise. It was filled with employees and shoppers and it is one of the big success stories in the area it operates in. This is because the man who founded it treats his employees well and provides a wide selection of high end products that I have never seen the like of anywhere else and does so at very fair prices that you often don't see anywhere else. This results in a pretty happy and bustling environment. I spend a good portion of my time seeking to catch the opportunities that come to all of us in every life situation and seizing the moment as it were. The point of all of this is that I consider myself a good will ambassador for the human race and I would like to point out that we are all ambassadors, whether we understand this or not. We all affect the dynamics of life in everything we think and say and do. So why not do it to the best of what we are able to? So I took every occasion to interact with people and it went well.

Since my acquaintance, who is also a blossoming friend was there, we wound up discussing this and I got a chance to explain how I see the moments of each day as a chance to affect life in a positive way. I will be the first to admit that I am not 100% in this regard and that is because when life impacts on me in a negative fashion, I am not always able to remain consistent as a positive force. I would say this happens at the blogs more than it does in life and I suspect we are all better in person than we are at a distance. Maybe we feel more secure taking liberties then, or we are less concerned about reactions. Whatever the reason, it is something I have noticed. Why I am mentioning this is to share an awareness of our responsibilities in life and to emphasize how critical it is for us to remember that we affect life.

One of the things this fellow and I discussed were public protests and any number of countless reactions that people and groups of people have to social and cultural situations that arise; like when corporations do what corporations do and when governments and government agencies do what they do and when any one of so many situations come up that pits the interests of the public against special interests of which there are many. He was telling me about how he had been involved in some of these things and how other people that we both know have also been engaged in these things and... I told him how I am almost never involved in any of these causes and concerns because the big money and the big influences always win, even when it looks like they have lost. They don't give up. They keep coming around from another angle. They corrupt or frighten whomever they can and sometimes they frame people. Sometimes they set them up. Sometimes they even kill them.

It isn't out of fear that I eschew. I'm not afraid of these people but I am afraid of wasting my time in fruitless and unproductive efforts. Afraid is probably not the right word. People can get together and cause positive change. I won't argue against that but I prefer to work from the positive side that affects the general consciousness of everyone I come into contact with, rather than to confront the forces that are always coming after humanity and working contrary to the best interests of us all. My feeling is that they are in the process of destroying themselves and I depend on Mr. Apocalypse for the heavy lifting.

Yes, I do go after some of the most powerful negative influences on the planet and I do it nearly every day and I do it in print that proliferates across much wider margins than any street protest but... I always seek to come out of it with a positive spin. In other words... I think some actions are more effective than others. I take note of how successful people and groups of people are in their struggles against the dark forces. I've watched Monsanto win time and time again, while engaging in all kinds of illegal and unethical behavior. I have seen them outright bribe and threaten the decision makers. Meanwhile, I have seen them take it in the neck with public opinion. I have watched them, like McDonalds and others, get hit in the wallet. I am watching them go down. All of this is the work of Mr. Apocalypse.

Perhaps what I am talking about here is simply differences in technique and I have no inclination to criticize people who have an approach different than mine. I simply think that changing yourself and working to shine your love and attention on others is far more productive than what is otherwise done. I think an informed and aware public is much more successful at everything than an ignorant, angry and confused public. I think internal change is far more productive at causing external change than are external efforts in times of opposition and conflict.

I also like to pick my causes. I am not motivated to protest on behalf of things like Hawaiian Sovereignty. Of course I support it but I am not Hawaiian so I do it invisibly. I consider cellphone using and texting drivers to be a major concern. I consider stupidity an even bigger concern and the other comes out of it. All kinds of bad things come out of stupid and greedy and selfish. If these were fixed then none of the other things that people protest against or dislike would even be happening. Fix stupidity and you fix everything else. However, there is no cure for stupid or... is there? I've looked into music and prayer and plants. There is a science at work there, or a system, or a law; call it what you will and I have looked into all kinds of similar things. I have looked at how a smile can be like the sun shining and I have seen what the sun can do. I read that old story about a bet between the sun and the wind as to which of them could make a traveler remove his cloak.

I believe in things that aren't generally in practice and I have noticed what successful people do and what unsuccessful people do and how these things work to cause the results that they do, regardless of whether the people are to be defined as good or bad people and that is all based on what anyone considers good and bad. They vary widely. Sometimes good is what gets you what you want and sometimes good is getting what you want but not at the expense of others. I think you can raise the consciousness of others around you and at a distance simply by raising your own and I believe you can make people better if you make yourself better. I believe that we are like planets of influence in a solar system of existence and I believe there is an interpenetrating awareness that commands it all and the more you come into line with that awareness, the more you reflect its will in everything you do.

I am not 100% at all of this and maybe not at any of it but I am trying to be. I am not focusing on mistakes I made getting here, or hearts I have broken or those who have broken my heart. I consider that a broken heart can be a good thing because those are the places where the love can leak out; the places where it is broken. I believe if life has broken you in many places and you are put back together by understanding and that whatever got you broken has manifested some degree of wisdom then you become like a piece of art that is done in a way that it works with light the way Rembrandt did, or a stained glass window.

I do not approve of Monsanto or our government and its branches and the way it goes about its business here and abroad. I don't approve of the way the marketplace behaves and many another thing but I pick my battles and I believe that everything I do not care much for comes out of ignorance; greed, overweening ambition and other similar things and that all of these, the named and unnamed, come out of bad character development, which are all the offspring of bad parenting, whether that involved a mother and or father, or a government, or religion, or educational system or whatever acts as a parental force at any particular point and we are all parents of the moments that follow the moment we are in; regardless of whether that whole concept is an illusion given that the sense of time is an artificial construct.

This is in no way a criticism of others and their preferences toward thought and speech and action. This is a critique of myself and people like me and as Lao Tzu said;

Be utterly humble

And you shall hold to the foundation of peace.

Be at one with all these living things which, having arisen and flourished,

Return to the quiet whence they came,

Like a healthy growth of vegetation

Falling back upon the root.

Acceptance of this return to the root has been called 'quietism,'

Acceptance of quietism has been condemned as 'fatalism.'

But fatalism is acceptance of destiny

And to accept destiny is to face life with open eyes,

Whereas not to accept destiny is to face death blindfold.

He who is open-eyed is open-minded-

He who is open-minded is open-hearted,

He who is open-hearted is kingly,

He who is kingly is godly,

He who is godly is useful,

He who is useful is infinite,

He who is infinite is immune,

He who is immune is immortal.

So it can seem that one is not socially committed enough. It can seem that one is indifferent in many ways that are not the normal way. It can seem that one does not care when one deeply cares and that one lacks something that they have an abundance of but are not showy about. All kinds of things can seem to be and not be because of the way people project on to others the deficiencies that exist within themselves, the way that a thief sees everyone else as a thief and so on and so on and so on. Insert whatever type you wish in place of the thief. I hate that I am such a slow learner but I am trying.

End Transmission.......

Sunday's radio broadcast.

The Robert Phoenix interview.