stuck in your own craw

"If one is whole, one will be filled with light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness." -- Jesus, Gospel of Thomas

We think we are individuals, but we are not. We pride ourselves as stand-alones facing the onslaught of the world, prize ourselves as back-of-hand-to-brow brave sufferers of the human condition, alone and misunderstood in our magnificence. Illusion! Mirage! Delusion! Grab the hook and get that sucker off the stage!

Or going the other way as a pitiful victim of a cosmic joke, a sheep separated from the herd for special ridicule. Stop it! Stop it right now! Quit playing those silly games. You know who you are, out there blinking like a firefly in the night, sending signals of distress. Wallowing like a piggie in your own, your very own ineptness. Quit it! Quit it now!

Games! All those games! All designed to make you!, precious you!, an individual stuck in your own craw. Cry out in pain! Yes! Suffering understood! But cry as the whole entirety of the universe birthing. If you are going to suffer, suffer for us all. Then wipe your tears and honk your nose and get on down the road. The Force is with you and is you. Here, here's a hankie.

london bridge

One of the old Zen practices was to meditate in a graveyard and to even meditate upon or near a decaying corpse. We are doing the same but just won't admit it. The world is decaying around us and beneath our butts all the time (and always has been). It is not proper to mention it.

The myth is if we exercise more, eat the right foods, think the right thoughts, live in the right town, use the right deodorant, invest in the right schemes, we and the world around us will stay forever young -- "those who decay and die just don't have the right attitude. Thank God I'm not one of them!"

And I'm not just referring to our personal corpses we keep dragging around, I'm talking about the entire organic world -- our everyday reality. Haven't you noticed? It keeps needing shoring up. We live in a rotting corpse theme park and pretend that it's just not so.

Yes, yes, I know. We are supposed to look on the bright side. Well, that IS the bright side. It is reality. This world is always falling down all around us. Have you not noticed the dust, the perpetual dust on your furniture? Even the most obsessive-compulsive of us can do no more than keep putting lipstick on the corpse.

Meantime, flowers grow out of the compost. And make more compost. For more flowers. Decaying ones. "And the painted ponies go up and down."

the intuitive field of awareness

The intuitive field of awareness in the congealing human today is exactly that, congealing. Human consciousness is becoming thicker jello every day. We are the intuitive-disabled. Dependent upon machines ever-increasingly, we will soon need a global positioning indicator to get out of our chair and navigate to the bathroom. "LEAN FORWARD WITH UPPER BODY. GOOD. CENTRAL WEIGHT IS NOW OVER FEET. FEET ARE FLAT DEVICES AT END OF BODY. PUSH AND RISE UP WHILE MAINTAINING BALANCE.", and so on until we reach our across - the - room - and - out - the - door destination.

The story has been told many times, but is no less true. The secular - materialistic, often under the guise of christianity, invaded the intuitive - spiritual (and still does), claimed and enforced power, and led us to our state of being today.

In our opaque density, we have forgotten where we came from, what on earth we are doing here, and where we are going. But this is no doomsday message. Though our cosmic awareness is as thick as a brick in this matter-ial age, there are still light-beings among us and more being born all the time. The tender shoots of intuitive awareness prosper and grow in the midst of this gnarled hardness -- forever breaking up our concretization of this world, this magical mysterious life-affirming ever-loving world.

Meanwhile let's go stare into our computer screens. In my jello-state, I know salvation is in there somewhere. Hmmm... Spider Solitaire must be like this nerve-ahnah thing I heard about. "ALERT! ALERT! CONSCIOUSNESS SHUTDOWN! ALERT! FIND FEET! FIND FEET!"

the world of appearances

The world of appearances is made up of objects -- "things" "out there." The world of appearances is teeming with objects: baseballs, persons, coffee cups, God, and so on. Any time there is an object, there has to be a subject, someone or something perceiving the object. If there is no subject, there is no object. It takes a perceiver for there to be the perceived, a conceiver for there to be the conceived. That's why some of our wise guys in the past said, "When I die, a universe disappears."

Stay with me here. The 64 trillion dollar question is who is the subject? Your answer might be, why I am of course. So who are you? As soon as you start to answer, you are describing yourself as an object. You cannot accurately say who you are. All you can do is endlessly create descriptions. You never can catch hold of the describer. It is like an eye trying to see itself, or a hand trying to hold itself.

Of course, you can, as most do in the world of appearances, glom on to a set of descriptors and say that is you. You de-cide who you are, which given the realm of infinite possibility, is a form of sui-cide. You kill off part of yourself in order to fashion a "vehicle" to putter through the world of appearances. By defining yourself, you have spurned, denied all aspects of you outside those strict bounds you have created.

You do not know who you are. You have settled on a definition and plan to live out "your life" (another object) within the bounds and bonds of that definition.

This is what it means to live within the world of appearances.

the synthronizing of spirit and matter (part 1)

At the end of this dark age, when we consider matter to be all that exists and behavior to be the only meaningful aspect of the human psyche, we begin our swing back toward sanity. The reign of quantity is ending and openness to quality beginning.

The devolving dark age was based upon division and separation: mind from body, me from you, us from them; and upon denial: no spirit, no soul, no God, and certainly no contact with our Source. Science became not just a tool for understanding, but a religion, scientism. Greed became the order of the day, "progress" became our death chant. All earth and its inhabitants were seen as a storehouse for plunder, existing for one purpose only, to fuel and fill the insatiable maw of Man.

We are nearing the end of this pendulum swing, not because humankind wants to. We would like to suckle at the breast forever, gulping down our Mother's nutrition until we suckle a milkless corpse. Leeches. Parasites.

No, not because we want to, but because we are forced. I refer not just to the explosion of human population and the ever-dwindling resources. We are at the end of an Age. According to our seers, we are at the end, once again, of a Time. Our Time is up.

A brief pause will occur, the same pause as at the end of an outbreath, and then an inbreathing will occur. We will return to sanity, wondering how we could have been so insane. We are on the verge of a new Time, the time of synthronization of spirit and matter.

spiritual drive-bys

I saw yet another person today in suit and tie going to people's homes to convince them their thought process and thought system is wrong and his is right. Seems as if that is an occupational hazard of professional religionists. It must be pretty wearing to think you have THE TRUTH and others don't, though I surmise that most every one of us feels that way, but are too courteous to mention it.

I think God, our Source, is quite benign about it myself; it being where we will spend eternity. There is only one place and that is the Wellspring from which we sprung and even now are springing. But that's the truth I know and I don't really want to get all spruced up and hunt you down in your lair to beat you over the head with it, like some kind of spiritual drive-by. Next thing I know your posse would be swinging by my place and slinging some spiritual ammo my way. No one listening to anyone, just spouting and shouting.

I guess we could go visiting those suit and tie visitors in our flip flops and shorts and let them know our truth, since they have already fired the first shot. Nahhh... Too much trouble and more than a little sardonic.

I guess we better leave well enough alone and just keep being courteous to each other.

the man with no legs sitting

How can we know The Truth if we constantly overlay It with our concepts, our verbiage? Is The Truth nothing more than the extent of one's vocabulary; the richer the vocabulary, the more profound The Truth? And in many, perhaps most cases, the vocabulary that one learned from others early on?

Each person feels s/he knows, thinks s/he knows The Truth.

Folk walk around acting as if The Truth is known.

I imagine there are some who feel/think that someone knows The Truth (perhaps a priest, a president, or the man with no legs sitting in the doorway) and therefore all is well; a burden is relieved.

I fall into The Trap Of Interpretation like everyone else. It seems to me that The Truth comes from inside out. The Truth emerges, is emerging, is always and continuously emerging. From in to out. The Truth is this Life Force expanding. All else is Made Up.

Seems to me that the Life Force Expanding interpretation has at least one advantage over the more Monocentric Closed System interpretations (all the ism's and ity's): it is Inclusive -- ain't nobody or nothing shut out.

heaven rollers

Why are we humans so screwed up? Various religions, philosophies, and psychologies have cumulatively provided us with generic answers: (1) the absence of love, (2) the presence of greed, stupor, and hostility. I add a third: blind spot. Just as we have a blind spot in our physical vision, so we are a blind spot in our cosmic vision.

Does the sun see itself? I think not. If it did, it would have to wear shades. And if it wore shades, it still would not see itself as it is, in all its glory.

We are like suns. We radiate energy outward in all directions. At odd intervals, we have flashes and inhibitions of energy (solar flares conjoined with sun spots) which affect and disrupt all communication channels around us and within us.

Often when we are so disruptive, we perceive ourselves as being brilliant. We consume ourselves with ourselves. The flash of brilliance that we are is a blind spot. We see only what is illuminated by our flashing.

There is an inverse flashing too. Just as a nerve fires and then moves into a corresponding inhibition, so do we have both extra (outer) and intra (inner) flashes. What flashes outward has its shadow flash deep inside. We experience both, ranging in all the gradations from manic brilliance to despairing darkness. Both types of flashes render us blind. Consumed by our own brilliance. Consumed by our own despair.

Like "that lucky old sun who has nothing to do but roll around heaven all day," so do we roll around our heaven. But also, like the sun, we flash brilliance and despair. Blind spots.

vicious

Some of us are angry about the Past, and double-angry because we cannot change it. So we beat up on the Present, which beating becomes the Past, forever increasing our sorrow.

This occurs at both the personal and the societal levels.

the meek

In the preceding post, by "meek" I mean the stuporous (whether by choice or by default). Remember I speak of states of consciousness here.

Those who are willfully stuporous continue choosing to live in stupor because it is advantageous to their greed and hostility (greed: wanting what one does not have; hostility: not wanting what one does have; antidotes: generosity and lovingkindness).

Those who are stuporous by default never allow themselves to think outside conventional realms; are entranced by the superficial, by the cosmetic face. It does not "dawn" on them that there is anything different than what society presents.

The stuporous are meek because they do not dare; have no daring to move beyond the consciousness currently destroying the earth and its many species, including the one called human. But this consciousness change of which I speak is no Save The Whales phenomenon. It's much vaster in scope than that.

The meek are not warriors, but are predators (stupor via will) or zombies (stupor by default).

Evolution is ruthless. What does not make the shift goes down the drain. We are moving toward integral consciousness now, toward coherence. Meek consciousness, by definition, will never open to cosmic citizenry. It takes a warrior.