Cry A Little Bit

A quiet mind absent thought is a most powerful friend. A noisy one is trouble. When a man or woman puts together by thoughts all constructs of security she can imagine there is always going to result a person in conflict with practically all the forces of nature. Then insurance may become the next construct of security, meaning, “I’ll at least get some monetary payoff on my inevitable loss.” (unless a tricky lawyer has placed in fine print a loophole to favor the insurance companies and I failed to catch it.)

My inquiry today is into a possibility someone suggested to me long ago.  He said, “There must be a way to harmonize my individual life with all forces of nature since I am here inside it. I predict I can be fed by a world each day that anticipates  my needs before I do when I am so aligned within it that I am at one with it. This is love. The same love can propel me along a songline that has on it my name as if I were anticipated before even my birth. Let us try it out for ourselves.”  I agreed. I have found it to be so as my friend told it would be. 

A faraway memory just appeared in my head. I was once a drunk who denied it to be so. On a Thanksgiving I had been invited to the home of a friend for a feast but was lost without a map and could not find my friend’s house, though I knew I had to be close. I decided (before cell phones were even marketed) to stop at just any house nearby and ask to borrow the use of a telephone to call my friend for directions. Pulling  up in front of the nearest house, I parked and walked to the front door and rang its doorbell.  A man opened the door.  I explained my situation and asked humbly for the use of his phone. He was most agreeable and invited me in.  His wife entered the front room and he introduced us telling her I needed to make a telephone call. After I made the call and was about to leave it became obvious the couple wanted me to stay awhile.  Without using the words they began in some unusual  way to beg me to remain with them, not to leave immediately.  I hesitated long enough for the man to tell me, “We have had some very sad news today.” His wife nodded. I replied, “Oh?”

The man added, “We just received a call telling us our son, our daughter-in-law, and both of our grandchildren were killed today in an airplane crash.” At that moment I was informed truly that I was the one chosen to give time to these two strangers in need of someone with ears to listen. Chosen by whom? What? Only a short time later was I to be led to an AA meeting where some former drunks had gathered to listen to me when I needed it and was ready to open up my pain to them. When such harmony is happening it is impossible to say who is helping whom. Really. I will stop for now to cry a bit. 

When I was a young child they wanted me to join their religion. It was told to me that to do so would amount to a solemn oath that I would remain inside the cloud of a certain memorized dogma for my whole life and attend meetings regularly together with people who were likewise so defined in that same cloud to insure my allegiance. I balked. I could not. I felt I was a disappointment to them.  It was not stated to me but I said it to me. I felt isolated. 

The feeling that prevented my joining up came from a deep place in me that was repelled by the notion that whatever might be responsible for my mortal life in human form did not make me complete as I am. Something flinched at that. I really could not deny my feeling that these ones are trying to pull the wool over me. They believe a maker of us all appointed a human being to make up a language, and then use it to tell the rest of us who we are and what we must do and otherwise we will be quite severely punished. It seemed to be accepted without question that the language developed by men was actually being concocted by the creative force back of it all (and so every word of it true) and the dogma presented to us by learned scholars of that language was sacred and true. (Too damn bad for the slow ones in class who obviously are inferior.) That was enough to make me sick. All these teachers that were placed before me by that unchallenged principle could not be counted they were so many and none of them were admirable as a child sees right through their bullshit. But how long can a child resist? In my case, I held out nearly 40 years.

I was lonely as Hell much of it. But from time to time a poem or a song or a film or a book or a comedian or a stranger would cross my path to reveal that they were still holdouts. It kept me pressing onward.

Next I want to jump forward to a moment when I was so downhearted and miserable as a spy behind enemy lines who does not have a clue where or how often we meet that I was contemplating suicide. Instead, I uttered a prayer inside me to nobody: 

“If you are there, please help me by sending me someone who can understand me.”

Immediately, there before me appeared a man on a bicycle riding in my direction.  As he neared, I recognized an old acquaintance named Buddy.  We had not seen one another in about five years. Once we had both attended a six week evening program sponsored by the American Cancer Society to help people quit smoking cigarettes. Truthfully, I had attended at first solely because an attractive woman had told me she was going to attend. Even though my motives were not pure, I had not had a cigarette since. It is important to note that Buddy was the most attractive force in that gathering and most inspirational to me and the others. He was a singer-songwriter and it seemed we simply could not get enough attention from Buddy. Everybody wanted to get high with Buddy. Here he was now in answer to my prayer.

No dogma.  From that moment until today, 34 years and some change, my life has taken a new direction and has unfolded as a dream I had to be awake to dream. No dogma. Awake in my own skin. Within a year of meeting Buddy for the second time I had lost all regrets concerning my difficult past and without them have I sailed like an arrow sent forth from a mighty bow! That’s my story.  Simply put, I reunited with my true nature by recognizing that nature in my Buddy like he is a mirror of some sort. Any swan can tell you that is reason to celebrate!

IN A PLACE OF COMPLETE INSECURITY

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

There are days when one prays and all seems very clear and what God wants from us is exactly understood to be good for us and we feel close to our maker and glad, we are actually secure in our faith, we might say. But perhaps that is when our prayers, our listening, are at their most distant from God. For it is then we are talking with, talking to, and listening with our own minds and not connected with such as God at all. We have sealed the truth off from us by walls of thought and time which cannot bind love and so no love will ever be found in such an illusory environment as that. And it is also the case that when we are fully in touch with the Great One we are aware that we are in a state of alert and must watch our step or fall into a trap that we are easily convinced God has abandoned us and for no apparent reason. It is this way because we want something we can hold as “my own” when there is no such thing in existence. Creation, however, is total destruction of all that is of time and thought, as that was yesterday’s wine. Nothing new can arise in the presence of time and thought. Utter stillness of mind must be for creation to be possible. I am saying only a quiet mind is open to build a bridge that spans all walls. That is creation.

One bit more, please.  There is something that but for which all the words above written would be but an unlit candle and it is this:  In this place of Creation where anyone’s mind finds complete stillness, there will be found your God, the only God, and God only. Waiting for you. Is it not the best news to be reminded God is not some image so petty it can be brought into our messes to sort them out? That is forgiveness. That is mercy. That is love.

When anyone is to blame, everyone is to blame.

The Only Way To Go

When you try to overcome an oppressive system by power of your will, take Heaven by force, you become, instantly, another oppressive system. The natural (wo)man is, was, and will be. Grow, then, spontaneously, out of yourself, naturally, as intended. And leave other people alone. Enter an ordered state by not seeking one singing your song. Others will take notice. You will meet up. Or not. Absent all dogma. 

That is love.

The Question

To be a self-organizing being or not to be at all? That is the question. Inside every living human heart is a brain that over-rides the one inside the head. If only a human decides in its favor. Places the heart on the throne of one’s life. There will never be another decision to be made by such a blessed one. Wholeness is not just a metaphor anymore. It is the only thing there is.

When such a one has a problem, or thinks it happens to be so, the question is not: what is the solution to my dilemma?  The question is: why am I divided against myself when wholeness is a fact? Life is not about what is the right thing to do, never, it is about everyones’ true identity. 

Surely, you understand some of this already. It is not so much to grasp. Work it out for yourself as rapidly as you can. But be assured it is the hardest thing you will ever do. Yet you are, as gods and goddesses, fully equipped for the task. And you are  being watched over by one who loves without reservation.

I had a crazy dream

last night. We were in Kentucky, not Texas. Someone died. A family member. There was talk that we had been supposed to go to court and prove the deceased had owned a chicken at the time of death. Otherwise, he would be declared to be nonexistent and never had he actually been alive. Then he could have owned nothing and we better get that straight. We spent most of the dreamtime trying many comical ways to prove our relative owned a chicken the moment he died and every theory proved unprovable. There were real chickens in the dream that we ate while we were trying to prove our relative owned it at the time he died. Ha! How's that for a dream?   Believe it or not, though, the dream was funny as Hell and we had a lot of fun trying and failing and just deciding to laugh it off. I sure wish I had filmed my dream.....as I wrote you this little account of my dream I was smiling and seeing how profoundly true it happened to be...nobody can prove who it was was ever even here which is the best of all possible worlds and you and I got to live it out this way, just loving what we love and laughing off the rest of it. 

HOW TO LIVE 

The austere, plain, unadorned life 

harkens into space and time its benediction, 

the self-organizing man; while the life-adorned reveals its deceptive nature daily as a leaky vessel.

HOW I LIVE

Rank Stranger: A man I met in the mountains told me, “You speak well, Pilgrim, and you can write a fancy hand.  Trouble is, that won’t make much difference. Something else determines how everything goes and no man can speak its name. You hafta get to know its nature as soon as you are able and lean on it all the days of your life. If you want the good life promised.” I wanted it’s all.

JUST THAT 

It is done everywhere  by billions of human beings all around the Earth. It is a very big business. The biggest, actually, when you consider that those who are pretending to have such a thing to offer are hypnotists causing you to believe you must have it and that these people are set apart by common consent as having the unquestioned, God-given authority to administer its organizations which they alone are allowed to create. Consider the organized religions.  Consider all the governments of the world. Consider entertainment (books, films, videos, theater, music, etc.) Consider education. Consider the dissemination of news and propaganda. We know that the wool is being pulled over our eyes and by whom, but, do we know why we accept it?  Same question in different terms: why do we accept war as inevitable? Starvation as inevitable? Hatred as inevitable?  Violence as inevitable? All of these and more we accept as being human nature and, so, inevitable. Why? Do we not know better?

What is more ridiculous than the purchase of someone else’s words as a part of a scheme, however stimulating, designed to assist you in the promised realization of something you are so obviously not? And yet, what is more in demand today than is just that? Is everybody born anxious for a logo to wear? Of course not. Such must be instilled.

Any guru says:  If you follow my words you will become what I am. They know something about you.  You will always follow somebody.  Why not me? If not me, it will be somebody else. There is a lot of power in signing up followers. Last place you will ever look seriously is within and that self-betrayal is your nemesis. And that is where is hidden all you ever dreamed of and much, much more…sail to Byzantium*, looking with the desperation of one who knows he is tied to a dying animal, and before it is too late.

For which guru has said as a single message: 

“You have all you need and much more. That is all I will tell you. I am busy being just another ordinary wizard of contentment.”?

Only such a one as that is worthy of the name of guru and if called one, will deny it. All others are fakes.

Hint: Only an idiots fail to know nobody else has the code for them. And The Giant Guru you hope you will ultimately find never made a world in which a guru’s time is worthy even of a penny. Any guru who knows not that you are shockingly complete as you are so are never going to benefit from hanging out with such a dope as him, is a faker. 

Find another who makes no claim to know a way for you to follow. Find someone to whom you can never be obligated at all. Love, which cannot be invited nor can it be cultivated, comes naturally, easily. Avoid applauding the ones you love. It will some of the time make them sick. That silly substitute for loving them is empty and immature and dangerous. Be the love you find inside.

_______________________

* “Sailing To Byzantium”, by William Butler Yeats