PROBLEMS

One man asks, Is it possible to live so that one’s brain, itself, has no problems?

A woman says, it can be so when one is centered in the heart or Tao.

A third one  says, I agree, if my brain clears itself of problems it can then solve whatever problem arises quickly and effectively, that is to say, no new problem is created by that solution from a clear mind. 

All three in peaceful and humble accord join hands and laugh together in great joy.

A listener chimes in: I always wanted to know what is leadership, truly. Now I see. Only a clear minded and humble child-like king is going to bring about peace. A smart aleck will fail and fail and fail and people will build monuments of his likeness and write poems and songs and books to praise the fool as great because he always was solving problems which created more and more and more of them and they admired him or her for it.

Now, when anyone asks “Can my brain be free of problems” who is expected to provide an answer? Up to now it probably has been the conditioned brain that is not free.  What kind of answer can such a brain come up with? The kind that creates more problems?

This could be a fresh new moment. “Ever hear it said, The answer to a question lies inside the question?” Have you? Nobody answered. A butterfly appears.

 THE BIND WE ARE IN

I want to speak of the bind we are in. It matters.

We depend upon courts to decide conflicts among citizens of a fictitious system we call a nation. As if that is not bad enough, we seat a judge on an elevated platform higher than everybody else in the room. We are to address him in a way that reminds us he is thought somehow to be above us in stature. The way the average lawyer or legislator expresses this strange scene is to say “I respect the office, not the man or woman who holds it”. So, we are to agree to respect a mere image above that we give a living human being. It can be seen by a child that by doing that we are giving utmost respect to that beneath us, a fictitious being we created, rather than simply admit all humans are equal and so a system of judging is unacceptable as contrary to truth. It is exactly the same as if we agreed on making Santa Claus our final authority. And stuck his figure on a high platform and bowed to it. An office of government has no reality. Why must we continue such nonsense. Recently, there was reported to the whole world a revolution in Egypt that lasted awhile and it was seriously suggested for the first time that perhaps people in Egypt needed no government at all. Ultimately, another government was invented and installed but it is worth reminding ourselves that the time draws nearer when some nation is going to decide it needs no imaginary government as the people living there are found to be completely competent to live together in an orderly fashion that far exceeds that any government ever installed has ever known. It shall come to be. For some reason, and for a long time, we have chosen to pretend we know not of the untapped power in a simple but complete grant of respect to any living human. 

I knew a man whose older brother was an alcoholic. He had been taught that the elder brother in a family is to be consulted on any problem. Sam told me that for many years whenever trouble arose in his immediate family he searched until he found his drunken older brother, sobered him up, and asked him as the elder for his instruction with regard to the problem at hand. Then, Sam confided, “never once did I fail to do what my brother suggested and never once did I regret that I had done so”. I have since personally seen so many people, when given trust and respect, rise to heights of excellence previously unknown to them. It is in us all.

And the best news of all I ever received is that for anybody who chooses to be that way it is, was, and will be simply a matter of finding the king inside one’s heart and accepting naturally full responsibility for one’s own life. That is done by answering the question: Who are you? You will surely find yourself in a new dimension where there is no conflict, confusion, or doubt.

 Jaxon Smith awakened in that state. He had been here before but that had no significance to him for one chief aspect of the state he found himself in is that it carries forward no meaning at all and absolutely no expectations present themselves. It just means nothing. Jaxon has no purpose. And that is all the purpose anyone needs to create something new. It seems that in this realm the absence of meaning gives the meaningness to it all. Clarity is present when meaning is not. Jaxon is nobody’s boy. And Jaxon feels no need to proselytize. So, I will stop here.

Jaxon saw immediately a new way to shave his face. It was quite easily done, enjoyable, and quite effective, giving more freedom to design his facial hair as he pleased for this day only. He dressed very quickly. Now Jaxon is struck to add that the absence of meaning is the absence of language and that is the absence of thought. Thought to Jaxon now is limited to the mundane. Is in its proper place at last. To locate his razor for example. So Jaxon may be the only person on Earth, or anywhere, who is not completely the result of his thoughts. Such might be the ending of thought as the master of life. It is thrilling! 

Jaxon’s brain is thrilled! A state of newness moment to moment is not just a theory. It is clear thought did not bring him to this state of life in a whole new unknown realm. Thought cannot enter this portal. The disappearance of proselyting is simply the certainty for Jaxon he is never alone. Or, rather, alone is not a  feeling of loneliness but a state of wholeness…all one…completion. No sorrow.

 Jail bird Song

I am a jailbird and you are one too.

I am a pauper. My cell’s tiny, stinks, has bars, no curtains, no indoor pot. From my dirty window I cannot see the stars-

yours has been sprayed, polished and is costly but, like Hamlet, its wiring’s all wrong and that brings me to the reason I would not rather live on Mars.

Some bird told me a secret I simply tell to you.

Tho’ we be alive and breathin’ there is nothing we can do.

Since we put our ownselves in prison we can walk. Lockups are mental incapacity. We don’t admit it but it’s true.  

It’s not funny. I’m not teasin’.

Burn yer dollars! Un-license lawyers!

Give away some stuff and there will always be enough!

Mention to your brain it has permission to cease thinking for an hour. Let it go. Let it go quiet.  Let it go quiet and still. Out of unprecedented rapture, it will find itself linked with all atoms of the entire Universe to perceive what is without has totally sprung from what’s within. The observed is the observer. Thinking, a limited tool, will be used for the mundane. A free life will begin!

Before you know it, the one who was a jailbird will fly by opening its present. 

 MY PART

A Friend wrote a song telling the answers are blowin’ in the wind and I thought for a long time he meant for me to search for the answers, but, no, no, no, he means for me to listen to the wind. That is my part. I began listenin’. Things began to change in my world as I listened. I have no answers. I AM TO LISTEN. I am the world when I listen. As I listen the whole world changes. Listen.

 Who Are You?

My parents have told me that I must be careful when I travel about for I need much experience of life before I can extract from it the many things to be learnt. They tell me again and again how I lack the very thing I most need and it sounds so very foolish to my ears. I mean, the idea I lack what I need. If I lack it how can I ever learn it from experience? One who lacks is bound forever to interpret every experience in a state of weakness. I am equipped for one thing and one thing only…to be myself. When I finally came to that truth I immediately saw what those adults I had been listening to were the product of the warped  thinking they had been feeding my brain, that a young person is not equipped, and that lie had brought them, most sadly,  to the state I found them in when I was born into their care. They are crazy. They are slaves to a thousand conflicting concepts born from that first lie. They, with warped thinking, have made here on Earth a corrupt world and cannot help me. I am to save myself from it. And, therefore, must find inside this human being all the strength I will need for that task. At first I thought, “I cannot”. Then a clear voice within replied, “Move into it and travel as far as you can in my direction and I will come the rest of the way”.

As a child, I watched on television in our home a talk show guest, a woman , a psychologist, an author of a best selling book* tell me things beginning always with “we know now that people are like this or that”… and I kept wondering who is this “we” you apparently are a part of, or think you are? It was clear to me that I was not one of them. I have come to see them as the modern “priests” of a worldwide religion brought forth by elitists who have had their brains specialized in schools to study the rest of us and inform the rest of us how it is all going down. The disease of conceit is what I describe. Every victim believes he or she is an elite person and everybody else the subject for study, analysis, and diagnosis. Truth is, was, and always will be these sick individuals are not more than anybody. They are the creators of more and more conflict among themselves on Earth without end. I was not sure of it but I was on my way to saving myself. On the way, I married, had children, and divorced. I became a lawyer then resigned to face a life with a totally unknown future. I became an alcoholic then got sober. I went into the desert and came out with a book. I was given art materials from a retiring artist and began to paint. I kept on writing and painting and began to sculpt. All the time I was sharing what I was learning with many other humans who would listen becoming more and more confident I had been born equipped and so is everybody.

Who told you to read this blog?

__________________

* I have learned as an adult that a bestselling book is a label for books some corporation has made so by ordering 10,000 copies be printed. Such is the disease of conceit. By the order the corporation immediately creates a market for ten thousand books! That corporation holds by contract from the author the copyrights to the book. Who is telling the sick what to read? Who reads what the sick promote? Who tells the sick what college is most desirable for admission? What jobs to covet? What team’s memorabilia to wear? What flag to wave? What is the essence of addiction? Who is not addicted?

 Who Is A Pilgrim?

One can go on a pilgrimage of some sort, maybe a hike into the wilderness. Go it alone. The point is to find clarity concerning what or who I am. One has come to a conclusion that all this time I have been following rather foolishly a trail loaded with conflict and danger and loss as one who is ignorant of himself, hoping to achieve something I am really unclear about altogether.  But, can I, individually, not as a member of a political movement, not as a  member of some specialization as part of a defined career set achieved through thought as a student in school with diplomas or some other certification process-or by apprenticeship from another person who has been taught a specialization before me- all of which I now see to be bogus- go forward as only naked, unborn me. Up to now I have justified what I am doing by arguing I am responsible now for others-my wife or husband, my children, my fellows on the same trip. Suddenly, I am confronted with a light of truth that I have been actually acting very irresponsibly toward them all and even myself.

 A famous poet once said it so much better when he sang “whoever is not busy being born is busy dying”. One can arrive at a point where such poetry can touch one deeply as “true about me. Maybe nobody else sees it, but I do”. This is when the idea of pilgrimage nags and needles. Go. But go knowing the pilgrimage is within you and not a geographic journey at all. Travel light. That means cease instantly any anticipation of what the journey is for or what you are wanting to accomplish. Kill any of that the moment it pops up. All of it is the beginning of specialization which is the disease that has brought you to the pilgrimage in the first place and will certainly lead you back to the grind…busy dying. One hears or one does not.  He who is not a pilgrim is busy dying. 

A suggestion to one and all: any human being has here and now the capacity to be a total outsider to all signs and symbols of organization and yet function at an extraordinary level among the throng. And this startling fact can only be found out by a pilgrim.

 The God You Can Really Know

God is a timeless youngster who awaits your call. God is EVERKID Forever Young.  Up a chimney, in a pool hall, up or down a creek. 

Find that Kid and be on your way.

 NAKED 

As a child I was taken to Sunday school to learn about Jesus. His Daddy is God. Well, I was struck completely by surprise when we read the story of Daniel and the lion’s den. Daniel was in trouble with the King where he was and was arrested and sentenced to be thrown into a den of starving lions to be eaten alive. It scared me to imagine that! Of course, I wondered could that happen to me? In the story, though, Daniel and the lions got along fine. The lions did not even try to eat him. I was relieved but had to wonder how that could happen for Daniel. The story said that Daniel was a person who arose every morning and went into a closet and spent an hour with God. And, in the evening he did that again everyday of his life and that was why God’s creatures treated Daniel so kindly. I wanted that! All the adults I knew seemed just as amazed by the story, did not doubt it, they said, but none of them offered any advice as to how someone like me could spend an hour alone with God in a closet. My parents never tried to my knowledge. I was left to wonder how adults who go to church could read that story and do nothing to acquire the knowledge of how Daniel done it. It was as if they all decided it was not worth it to try. Not worth it? That’s beyond crazy!

Everybody I met since is scared to die and yet does nothing to follow Daniel’s way. Many years later, when I was an adult of 40, I met a man who told me he had been shown how to be with God and that he believed if a man or woman would go into a quiet space for an hour in the morning and again in the evening he would know God. But he confided in me, “Still, I will not do it!" That was real important to me because it made me realize I was just like that man. I had believed since childhood the story of Daniel’s escape from  hungry lions by meditation and had done nothing myself to find out what it means to meditate and and how it is done. What does the name “God” mean? Who is it? Actually.

Today, I can tell that for me “God” is the truth of who we are as naked beings. By naked is meant someone free of all concepts. Such a one has a free brain that is completely active and aware of all there is. Rattlesnakes and lions are of no concern to that one.

There are billions who practice some “method” to meet with God and  find it so shallow they soon get bored with it and stop the practice. They are unwilling to spend up to two hours a day with a result so petty that it leaves them feeling like they just cannot measure up to a saint so they choose to “believe” some saint. It is quicker. Leaves more time for shopping. 

If you are like that, as I was, then I want to suggest to you that you already know that nobody rightly named ”God” would make puppets who need to find some human authority to teach them a method which the human tells them will put them in touch with “God”. That game is patently absurd.  Simply turn to knowledge you were born with that “God” is the name of a state in which one is free of all human concepts standing naked before it all. Birth, in another word. Check in. Check in twice a day. Swans be here all day long. By writing this post, I recall as a four year old being alone in a field near my home talking with something unseen but very real to me I knew back then to be naked me. I was telling what I was finding on my visit here living with big people. So, closer than the veins in my neck is that which is forever young and I love my time with that!

 I am lost. 

I need an experience of something greater than me to revive me by showing me who I can be or something…

I have met you here before, do you recall?

No. 

You asked me then to give you an experience. 

I refused.

Why?

So long as you think you want an experience to save you, you will remain in the clutches of a being lost carrying a map that is a false promise of some future reconciliation with what you only believe you lost. I refuse to serve that lie.

But on my own I cannot find my way home.

You are home.

What? I am lost!

You are not the lost one who wants an experience. Probably because that one knows you are already home and needs to keep you lost or lose its hold over you it will send you experience after experience. You are the experience you seek. And when you accept that totally you will not be able to say you ever were lost. Whatever brought you here is going to have to take you home. Not anybody else. It is nobody who longs to be you as you are who will never give you a useless map and useless instructions. You have always known this.

You can learn to press the keys on a piano in accordance with a system created by other human beings for their own amusement but what could be crazier than trying to learn how to be yourself? Any attempt in that direction absolutely must lead away from you. You are the courage to stop it.