If you have not read chapters 1, 2, and 3 scroll back and read those first please.

Apart, Chapter 4

To all the descendants of those who took the original exodus out from paradise let it be written:

Long, long ago, tired of living among the meek ones who did not care to be right,

our ancestors decided to pack a chest and to leave them;

we'd take along a god that belongs to us, the highest and the best,

who will stand along side of us in a well provisioned quest;

who will lead us to our country (and in our minds we draw a fence where no fence really is);

one that we only think our own shall separate us from the rest;

and declare we believe this fence drawn by the Hand of an Almighty God (although we know better)

who told one of us it's our duty to cause our destiny to manifest.

(shout) And, we want both!

Oh, we want a strong warrior god we can believe in and we demand all that that god can give!

We want a servile milk cow; a cow on which all who are like us can depend!

We want the milk always to be getting better and

What we believe we shall defend!

(aside) Nothing wrong with playing a game with an imaginary cow, right?

Answer: Everything is fine until you want to have real milk with your coffee.

Then it begins to get weird. The coffee is going to have to be imaginary coffee.

And, the breakfast you want with your imaginary coffee and imaginary milk? that is going to have to be imaginary as well…

and this is not going to end lest you give up the entire accursed game, leave the train bound for Hell.

Let's see...has it been 10,000 years? a thousand declared nations?

How many add-on theories have there been?

How many dead martyrs?

How many unknown innocents betrayed?

(shout!) Whole gen-er-a-tions!

It must come finally down to this: much blather and chatter about nothing at the highest possible cost until... all is lost.

Reality cannot be captured in the imaginary kingdoms of man. Peace that comes that way is going always to be imaginary peace. People assemble in a building where some wear robes and practice chanting about it and claim it is real for that reason. A child knows better! Are we not convinced of that by now? How long is it going to continue to be fake? All that has been laid before you here is equally applicable to both our gods...to religion and to science.

Laying aside all differences, with that which remains at hand proceed. It will be rebuilt by truth in joy as if by magic. That is so because we have the way safely tucked away inside us; we each hold a piece of an exact pattern of the best possible system for living together like it was diagrammed on our souls. The piece is known to each as a calling. Can you hear it?

One rule: Nobody has to join us and nobody can stand in our way.

If you have not read Chapters 1 and 2 scroll back and read those first please. 

Apart, Chapter 3

Christ: Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to

bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

Me: It has been told each of us has a deep wish to return home. Many tell that it is not possible and has never been known to happen in a lifetime of struggling. A Great Sword that does not injure the body cuts souls free from everlasting foolishness...the desire for what is already accomplished. If, with such a sword, I could cut away the ties that never were from around your entangled mental body and show you that you are no man's son, no woman's daughter, and no man or woman's sister or brother, no one's mother nor anyone's father I have saved you and I would. One goes home by moving not a peg. Do not say, I know the truth, truth knows you.

From a memory in darkness this was told to me.

From a memory in darkness this was told to me.

If you have not read Chapter 1, scroll back to yesterday's post and read it first please

Apart, Chapter 2

Another thing about being bought- it happens damned fast and it is practically impossible to detect and correct. People become radical slaves to football teams for example. That is correct. People move from Seattle to Dallas and to Atlanta living in all three places then finally land a position in Pittsburg where they become devout Steeler fans and buy all the merchandise that corporation will sell to them that they might feel justified as created beings. So clever is the process it is never even mentioned. It appears to be taken for granted.

I watched a movie where a family of daughters is being placed with respectable bachelors in marriages they want not to be in to be wives and bear children for a lifetime of service and in the background WWII arises, flares, and extinguishes many of the men. In the film nobody winds up happy. No one sees that marriages and wars are the same. I would offer that one cannot have a war unless one first marries someone. Marriage is the name for a certain type of purchase of both parties. In fact, all of these attempts to manufacture a feeling of belonging are always going to be as a practical matter a sellout on both sides. I once heard a wise man tell it that from the point of view of a Martian, for example, watching a Marine drill instructor discipline a bunch of recruits it would be logical for the alien to think the instructor who yells and threatens at the top of his lungs is begging the others to please do what he wants of them. Everybody is bought, in other words.

People adopt careers for themselves from a prepared list handed them like assignments handed to the inmates of a work camp. Once at work, people quickly require of themselves a duty to report on a schedule not their own and to do work they do not like and to do it in ways they are told they are supposed to do it. They buy things advertised to them as appropriate at prices that keep them tied to their posts like helpless, frightened prisoners.

Musicians in a band ride on buses to gigs booked on a schedule prepared by agents who sell tickets and expect everyone to show up on time and perform on cue. These same kids never once cleaned their room at home. How quickly the change just to please others who are using them to grow rich themselves and who care not whether it kills the performers. Do you believe for a minute that was the dream of the young musicians? (These same musicians blame others for the evils of the world and sing about it on stages all around the world.)

What Keeps Us Apart?

Chapter 1

One thing about us humans is apparently keeping us apart and keeping us thinking we are impotent in the face of those who would dominate us. We are readily bought. Not necessarily with money, commodities are purchased in that way, we know we are alive...so...we are bought from within where life resides. Because we are living things who created money and are taught to treat it as treasure, money plays a role, it is a prop, in the buying. We are bought with the lash. And the fear of it. Many of our taskmasters are quite meek in behavior and learned. Often we accept friendship from them. The lash in our case can be a threat of expulsion from a gang of comrades. The comrades are other people who expect us to think like them.

Clamor do we to be the next one bought. It is the strange tendency, shortly following incarceration inside a social institution, (a family for instance, a clan, a city, a nation, a school, a football team, a job, any gang really) to become a voluntary self jailer who maintains his assigned station as if it were his very own dream. This quality is the one keeping us apart, oddly, the strong wish to be a part of something. That seems absurd on the surface. Is it a paradox? Maybe. But what is certain is that it is so only because what we seek we have and when you are in that fix, having what you desire, you are at a complete loss to know what to do except to keep looking only harder! And since you have it, you will never find what you are looking for so desperately in that way. Make sense?

the PARIS REVIEW
Amusing Myself: An Interview with Bob Neuwirth, by Gary Lippman, Oct. 6 2014
Down the decades, Neuwirth, now seventy-five, has made the scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, Paris, Nashville, Santa Monica, and Austin, stopping in at the fabled festivals of Newport, Monterey, and Woodstock and associating along the way with Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, the Coen Brothers, Brice Marden, T Bone Burnett, Joan Baez, Shel Silverstein, Elvis Costello, Sam Shepard, Kris Kristofferson, Larry Poons, The Band, and The Band’s former front man, Bob Dylan. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recalled the decades when he and Neuwirth were especially close: “Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road, somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth ... If ever there was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it.”
For someone on the receiving end of such high praise from the famous, though, Neuwirth has a rather low view of fame itself. “Being famous is a full-time job,” he told me over lunch recently in the West Village. “You can get more done being anonymous. I know how people can get famous, but they have to want to do that ... It has to tickle the G-spot of their minds, because being anonymous is so much more powerful. You can get so much more done if you’re not worried about fame and fortune. You can get a lot done.

Me, I don’t give a shit. I’m just there to do what I do—for me. If anyone else gets enjoyment out of it, great, but I’m really trying to amuse myself. I was trying to think of something to do onstage, and I was driving past Will Rogers Ranch and I thought, You know, you can have an act by having a non-act …”

end interview.

J Swan: It must come down finally to this: all we name and discuss is nonsense and much chatter about nothing. What is real cannot be captured in a thought. When I cease thinking, I know.

When I cease thinking, I know.

All power is in knowledge after all. With that power at hand I proceed. Without it, I am a blathering fool.

And yet, people, not swans, insist upon treating their writings and speech as the ultimate knowledge and so long as that continues to be the road taken we shall get the same results we have always gotten. All praise to the author! To the copyright owner go the spoils! (blame)

All golden language worthy of a genius points only; does not claim to be the thing to be studied. It is much like this: the wise person tells us to “know thyself” so we proud-fully canonize the words by placing them in libraries and take great pride in our heritage and we never even look to see what it is we are. What fools!

In the universe there are waves and there are particles. There is light too. We know we see it. I read in a science book that light behaves sometimes as a wave and other times it behaves like it's a particle and it is neither. That brings me to the discussion of something that is but is not namable. Every time a person gets ready to name it, it disappears, and the person cannot find what it was about to name so is left holding an empty bag which is embarrassing and so the person claims there is no such of a thing. Or, at least says, “I never saw one.” Or, what is most usually the case, the person says, “I believe there is one of them but we cannot know for sure until we die”. I say we can know this thing better than anything! The thing I am discussing does not come and go, we do.

I wish to communicate about a certain type of exploration. A person who explores without moving to another place from the place where he is when he decides to explore. The art of exploration of where I am is a real one. The keenest one. The one that is most efficient of all arts. To many people it will seem a complete waste of time or as an act of vagrancy, a crime. For someone like me to decide, all of a sudden, I am just going to make an in-depth study of exactly where I am as a worthy activity more so than the pursuit of a degree at a place like Harvard is astounding!
You might be asked a standard question upon meeting a stranger at a party, “Well, So-and-So, what is it you do?” You may pause, seem to reflect inwardly, and then answer, “I study the moment. In that way, I am at work right now.”
“For whom do you work?”
“For myself.”
“Are you paid for it?”
“Not by anyone you can name, but, yes, I am paid mightily.” 
“In money? How much is your income?”
“That is a very personal matter. None of your business.”
“Yes. I am sorry. I meant I am really curious to know how this works.”
“I make no agreement with anyone to pay me an amount of money in the way you are accustomed to think of the means of a livelihood in a system manmade. I have nothing to sell. Can you grasp that?”
“Not really. How do you pay your bills?”
“Hmmm.”
“No, please, you do have bills to pay do you not?”
“Yes. And no. I have made agreements with some others to pay money to them in accord with a schedule they insist upon, like rent and utilities. But you asked me how I pay such bills and I am trying to help you understand.”
“Thank you, please continue if you don't mind.”
“Simply, I depend upon a power which communicates to me intuitively since birth, and before it, to provide me with whatever is needed for fulfilling my purpose on Earth, including money. But it provides me so much more, so much.”
“What do you mean?”
“People have been living this way far, far longer than the way you now want to believe is the best way. You see, it is a lost art, but not really. The very best aspect of what I am telling you of is the fact that it depends upon cooperation with others in truly intimate ways that fulfill the yearning of a human heart for companionship and love and shared triumph. I could talk on, but will not, for now, this is all I wish to say.”