The Way Of True Marriage

What’s It All About?

A Jazz master was approached by a younger man who wanted to play in the master's band. Without more, the master handed the younger man a sheet of music notations saying "Here are the chords I wrote for a number I composed. Call it The Territory. I will begin to play it and you listen until you hear me suddenly make a change and begin something entirely new. Completely fresh. Into God knows where. Call this the The Adventure. Or, call it living. 

And while you listen to what I am doing you respond in the adventure with ideas of your own and I will hear your response and respond to it as your response to my response has sparked in me to play and we continue this way back and forth as long as we please in another dimension to go places where nobody has ever gone before and where nobody will ever go again creating a time for the music we play that responds moment to moment to what is being played by each of us…that way we absorb truth.

Something I have for a long time found strange concerns the way humans relate to one another in practice. We seem to agree for the most part we are a part of the “living” world as opposed to the nonliving things of the world. But when we talk about ourselves intellectually we speak and think as we do of nonliving objects. So, our scientists, the intellectuals, responsible we think, for leading us from our present condition, about which we loudly complain, to a more appealing one readily work on us and our parts as nonliving “things”. For example, they think: having a light bulb makes a better world for us. Does it? Or did it make a larger bank account for Mister Edison and a more secure future for all inventors to follow him? To really answer that question we must address what in us makes us “living” beings. Is it mainly that we are aware of our existence? We do not think non-human animals or plants are so aware yet they are considered “living”. So, what is “life”? We do not know, if honest. We toss the word around, like we do the word “love”, in complete ignorance of that of which we speak. How about that?

How important is “life” to you? How important “love”? Why then do you not act like they are and spend at least as much time studying the meaning of those terms as you do planning your budget or your career or obtaining property or a mate or your children’s education? How aware are you as you go about your activities day-to-day that you are not a non-living object for you have “life”?

If these words upset you all the more reason to give them attention. Be honest. What is life? What is love? What are peace and contentment and freedom? What are the characteristics of that which lives? Can life be measured? Compared? Of course not. That is why science is powerless to study them and should admit that. 

Best science can do is to say a living human can eat and drink and breathe and respond to stimuli and a nonliving one cannot. What is religion? Really, what is it? To be truly religious, what does it mean? Is it at all important to the scientist? The lawyer? The corporate executive? The politician? What is meant by a call of the heart? Do lawyers, scientists, and executives feel often they even have one and it calls?

Can we label life? We label objects. Here is how you speak of yourself and your fellow man and woman-she is a Catholic, he is a Jew, they are Spanish, I am American, he is a criminal, she is crazy, those are unemployed, those are elderly, etc. he is my client, she is my wife, he is my boyfriend this is my son, he has special needs and on and on and on. Abstract labels for objects. Since I was a child I have wondered why people deal with me as an object and pretend to know me. I am sorry, but something terribly important to me goes missing and it hurts like Hell!

So, let us consider seriously enough to find the answer to a simple question: what is the nature of my relationship to every other human being I meet outside of the labeling game? If I call you my wife. What do I really mean? Do I mean: poof! you are an object I can own you? If I mention love, what do I mean? What’s it all about?

Love means to be unattached. You have been taught to mistrust and fear unattachment and to search madly to attach, attach, attach. You know the first cure for the pain of divorce suggested by all the remaining husbands and wives is another wedding. But to be unattached means to be indivisible and that is where you will find love.

Attachment to another is a mental concept only, not real, and cannot be made real. Thought and time have no such power. I am what I am. Funny, but maybe, in the final step, one learns it takes two or more to make a fella or gal feel lonely and then find that to be alone is to be all one. A body can have no more companions than that! 

Another side of that common experience of being lonely in a crowd is to understand it is a lack of love that leads the unloved to marriage, not love. One of the major religions that marries many people has taught for centuries love is not possessive. Marriage is based in possession and is a vain attempt to make the living into but a nonliving set of abstractions. How can such a practice be associated with love? Some never learn. The central question to be asked and answered in life is: Can it be possible to find out what love is by spending one’s life possessing others?

Getting real, ask, who is it that claims to have and be had by another? Who do I think I am when I say “I do”? 

A moment came in my own life when I wanted more to know whether I would behave badly if I ceased to claim to have a wife or a child or a friend of my own than I feared the answer. Up to that moment all my training had been that unless an authority orders me to behave in an admirable fashion I will shun all responsibility to others. That is pure bullshit. Truth is the opposite. 

Certainly the evidence is abundant that we are very unreliable in any possessive relationship. We let each other down too often to count. Wisdom suggests you are born as the person you want to grow up to be. 

The conditioned mind of a human caught as a prisoner in time knows nothing of love or life or death or God or kindness or generosity or compassion or passion or religion or discipline or loyalty or insight or creativity or anything else that transcends time. Minds make plans using memories from the past to craft an imagined future in the attempt to control human destiny and the results are pathetic. It only amounts to repetition of yesterday’s failures unto a dusty death of fools. (to follow a line by Mr. Shakespeare) 

Thinking can be useful as a tool for tying one’s shoes or inventing a light bulb and the like. But it is to be assigned to the mechanical applications and to be kept under constant surveillance from the eye of a watchman who slumbers not. Once set loose, the conditioned mind never ceases plotting and too soon it gets around to the sinister ways to take prisoners and breed abstractions so as to rule in a corrupt world of tyranny. By the time it has taken power it has become convinced that the reality of its very existence is a mentally invented image, an abstraction, attached by a label to a mortal body who obviously intends on taking Heaven by force.

A Man For Every Woman

 I want to question something almost universally held to be true. Possibly it has been written down or memorized in every language there is on Earth. 

Does a man have a woman? Does a woman have a man? What is the evidence of  it? A mere abundance of sentiment? Is it possible to live well without such? There are so many songs and rhymes that seem to want it to be so they cannot be counted. This questioning is a heavy one with far reaching consequences. If one is convinced “I cannot have someone else as my possession” what happens to that one? 

Obviously, if the statement is correct it immediately makes a large excess of energy available for other things. Imagine, if you will, what that amount of energy released can accomplish.

It could be so that the only reason for clinging to a possibility so doubtful is to have someone to blame, besides myself, for the mess I have to endure. “My wife does not behave”; “my husband does not behave”; my children do not behave”, etc. For this reason it is suggested we look into who is it benefits from a widely held tradition that for every man there is a woman. Often such inquiry is revelatory of the tradition’s invalidity as a fundamental method for experiencing a sense of well-being in life. There is a belief behind the idea of marriage as a binding contract that it will help to ensure the control of people. Who desires to control people? Whose job description is that? How is it so closely related to whose job is it to manage and control children?  What underlies the belief that if we can control a child up to the age of seven or so we have that child for life? Think like a free animal. 

We are getting somewhere. Ask: if I make the decision to be in the company of another human moment to moment am I more or less likely to have a sound and solid relationship as opposed to some traditional assignment of me to him or her for a lifetime? Am I ill-equipped to live here naturally? Are you? Think like a free animal.

Somebody sold us a bag of rotten fruit in the form of bad tradition with a motive when we crossed a line into a world organized by other people for us before we were even born. Not so good for children. Well, do not feel so all alone. Every child must get stoned. Resurrect your living bones! 

 ENLIGHTENMENT

A close friend and I were talking recently about gurus we have known. One stands out to both of us. However we both acknowledged that after his death it was written that not one single person could be found anywhere on Earth who was enlightened by that man’s life long teaching. Too bad he was such a failure. My friend and I laughed.

The next day it came to me like a bolt out of the sky-nobody has ever been enlightened from the beginning of time for the obvious reason that for enlightenment to appear one must first see clearly 

“ I do not exist as a separate self and never have I existed so” 

Nobody will ever speak out “ I am enlightened” except to prove to others, “I am not”. Not surprising then was the writing that not one single person can be found who tells “that guru (the one my friend and I had discussed) enlightened me” and that means he did his job ever so well. And that is what I know of enlightenment.

ref: The Nobody Book by Nobody at all 

A copy is available free with cost of shipping only upon request

 I am reading a small book by Larry McMurtry entitled  Crazy Horse. Only about 150 pages it seems to me the author accomplished what I would have thought impossible by presenting a reader with a biographical work which makes the characters not to be read as worthy or unworthy performers in an historical account but to be met up with as the real people each must have been. It leads me to say that we, all people, are like droplets in a body of water flowing and no drop is more or less important in the description of how the river flows. It flows as it does. McMurtry’s book shows the human race of people go as the composition of its droplets, taken together, move it along. People treat each other very badly. Attempting to explain who are the important players (droplets) is as ridiculous an undertaking as the ranking of droplets in a body of water. It’s a whole body of humans. Those few droplets of human consciousness who are the stuff of myths are inevitably the very ones about whom almost nothing is known, the mysterious ones, who honor something unspoken which reminds me that anonymity is a powerful reality. 

I was tickled to learn that when complete, if ever it is, the statue of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of South Dakota will be the largest sculpture ever made on Earth thus far. McMurtry writes that for all such as Crazy Horse “fact withers in the heat of myth”.  And that short sentence is the vitality of “myth” itself. A history book of “fact” is always untrue. Crazy Horse, unlike Sitting Bull, did not escape into Canada when it looked inevitable that whatever they have to do the White Men will do to take all of their homeland: and with it the right to exist. Jesus did not escape his arrest and execution. Billy the Kid did not run from New Mexico to save his life. Perhaps they just did not want to leave home. Therein is a taste of what is meant by 

“there lies something before us and in us unseen that transcends thought” 

Could it be the reality of one, indivisible human consciousness? Until that is grasped we humans remain but a conflicted, confused, lost and selfish lot separate and unnaturally lonely in the river of life, killing our own. How can one learn what the water is like? Only by jumping in!

 How I Built My Image of a “Separate Self”

First came “responsibility” followed immediately by “problems”. That is the self. Responsibility and problems. The self is an imaginary being who gets punished and rewarded. That seems completely outside the realm of “freedom”. Even a child, maybe especially a child, has got to scratch its head in wonder about that one. The child is told “you are free to be anything you want to be as long as it is what I want for you”.

Once in place, “Self” keeps a dreamer asleep and dull. When challenged as not real that self recoils and will first say things like: “You don’t understand. I have responsibilities. I must care for my spouse, my parents, my children, my career, continually update my plan of wider and wider responsibility, and all the rest. And I have many problems, you see, problems that you say you do not have, so, I am sorry but I cannot listen to or understand you.” If the challenge continues, and it will continue even without the challenger as the conditioned mind picks up this as a serious threat and wants to try to protect itself against heresy and imagined chaos. Self fears, most of all, freedom.

As a child self was taught that with freedom comes responsibility. That is a paradox. Makes “responsibility” and “freedom” elusive indeed.  Responsibility to whom for what? God(s)? Country? Parents? Bosses? Commanders? And, more importantly, just how far does freedom extend? Does the “catch” snatch away the freedom altogether? If one is set free by any of these superiors doesn’t that have to mean there is full trust? If the trust be justified the only responsibility is to freedom as a fact not an ideal and that truth nullifies responsibility. Which do you prefer? Freedom or duty? Self is scared to death by freedom…and that’s no joke. What’s behind that?

Some folks say aliens have been behind this situation for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years here on Earth.  Ancients left scrolls that were carefully prepared to last a very long time which they apparently hoped would eventually be found and translated. These scrolls  indicate some, perhaps several different groups, of aliens have been warring here to colonize the beings they found here as slaves to their alien programs. Hence all the books, movies, plays, etc. created to stimulate wide interest in the subject…including Star Wars! It is significant that some humans have practiced this very way against other humans and named it “colonization” and written it up as “history”. Wars and colonization and rebellion. Sums up history…oh, add “plagues”. It is not coincidental that selves write and speak of weather and disease as “enemies” to be fought and conquered. Hmmm.  Guilt pours forth from responsibility. Punishment from guilt.

Also, all the many gurus all around the planet who have definitely attracted large crowds of followers have been teaching there is a lot going on here of a spectacular and unknown nature that has led only a few to have much happier lives than all others. People sense the need for help. That is about it. What help? 

Well, it may be help to actually awaken from a deep sleep. At a point the urge to awaken in the slave will become so intense the dream background will be pushed far enough back to permit the dreamer to wake up to reality. Christians say you find Jesus Christ in you, for instance. That name is background from the dream consciousness and has a hold on those who have a Christian background. The other religions are much the same. The teacher in each story was attempting to awaken those present by showing he is just like them and it is so. All humans carry the entire consciousness of all humanity and that knowing itself is salvation. Self is but an image. Is it not obvious an image has no power but that given it by something that does have it? And if you do have it? What? It means, literally, each of us is what we wish we could be…as we are now!  Be you. The true master will be overjoyed!

PART TWO

And the waking up thing never ends since reality is unlimited. What waking up does end is the vulnerability to anyone or thing that might try to exploit again. What is present is what is. The past and the future are in the present and that fact is a powerful one. The operators are looking for someone under a spell believing the future is a fact which can be managed in the present that makes them “become” over time what they “wish” to be by sacrificing the present (which is all that there is or ever will be). However, by grace, these operators do not even see the human who is selfless because “selves” are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are attracted to a career where they can do “good”. When they get inside they learn the people inside are corrupt liars. By now they have a spouse, some children and a mortgage and a dream of becoming. That’s the hard place…the future to which they have been committed is the rock. Self concludes it’s a sorry world but there is no other as it struggles in its futile effort hoping to do what’s never been done. The selfless know peace and tranquility now. Big difference.

Everyone has been told that real freedom is not possible for living humans on Earth now, but, not to worry, you will find it after you die “up there”. What else has come from up there? Wherever you stand on the round ball of Earth up there is outer space. Real freedom is simple. It is a life lived moment-to-moment. Not dependent on a future, it is motiveless, open to the greatness in each moment. What you see is what you get.

It’s like a wild horse has built in its genes over eons of time an instinct that when anything gets on my back I must get it off as quickly as I can all else be damned and I must keep my neck free of its teeth. A cowboy ropes the horse. He gets the job to ride it. For a dollar. A cowboy who is free of self or motive approaches the animal knowing its fear of weight on its back and will only wish to make a friend and automatically allow the horse to be in complete charge of any ride that might take place. The selfless cowboy will ride the horse if and when the horse offers the ride. The dollar is of no importance to the cowboy whatsoever. Is it possible to live this way? Investigate with no motive. A motive distorts vision. Find out. A man is introduced to a pretty woman and told “she just might give you a thrill if you treat her right”. So, is it possible for the man to treat her right with no thought of a reward? Investigate. With no motive. Find out. 

When self is absent the background noise in one’s consciousness is pushed back so far that reality in the moment is all that matters. What is right in front of you is clearly seen. It cannot be more plain. What you see is what you get…as a way of life. 

Investigate. With no motive. Find out.

PART THREE

What is or was a self ever good for in the first place? Trouble is my answer. 

You go see a movie. To relax and find some escape from daily troubles self imagines to be real and important.  “Imagines”. “Real”. “Important”. That is the work of self. 

Seated in the theater, what do you know of how the picture made its way to you? The studio head made the decision to make it and to keep in going after it was begun. What are his or her selfish motives? 

The producer(s). What do they do? They are mostly concerned with the moneys spent and the money to be realized on the picture- if they do anything. Most producers listed in credits do nothing but draw a piece of any profit. 

The director and actors and crew do the creative work represented in what they hope to be art. Something we call a story is offered up. A story is an attempt to discuss, using thought and time, some mishmash of events that will take place on the screen. Is the purpose of telling a story to take the audience away from the story their own self tells them? Perchance to add a bit of advice? Or, comic relief? Or, to console? Action pictures can offer a feeling of revenge against those thought to have harmed the hero or to be standing in the way of his dreamed up utopia. As such, the hero is a stand-in for the self of each member of an audience, right? The self can pretend to experience revenge vicariously. That’s harmless fun, right? Well, it’s okay for the selves who are willing to go back to their own show on Monday to face the story of their lives with only some pretense revenge has happened for them or will happen someday. Consider this: do you know any more about the background of the self you claim as you is telling you constantly than you know of about the movie from Hollywood you go to watch? I like films, I do. I am only not so hot on “self”.

What would a life be like if thought and time could cease being used to narrate it? It would, would it not, be a life beyond both time and thought. Or, would life stop? Dogs and cats and goldfish live. Can you find out whether time and thought are required inwardly for a healthy human existence? If one human has done it, why not you? Ask to meet nobody.

Nobody knows you better than you know your…self?

The world of those who would say “I am religious” is divided into two groups. One is speaking of a divinity that is available through prayer and various other ways to make one supplicant to a deity believed to help one evolve over time into a better and better person and protect one from tragedy; the other is aware of how complete is the life inside and how absent is any “self” who could be praying for more. For the latter bunch prayer is simply 

“Thank you”.

 If you think you have a career that can be named or defined you are a boob, a fool, a prisoner in a jail of your own making where you are both the prisoner and your own jailer and where you are going to live throughout the term of this arrangement is the modern slave plantation whatever you may believe to the contrary. It matters not what they pay you it is not enough for what you have sold. You will eventually come to understand that the chances of a jail break are just very low. In fact, many like you have escaped through great and  arduous effort only to voluntarily return many times. Another thing. You will be allowed, even encouraged, from time to time, to change to an upgraded career with more perks. It won’t make a lick of difference. The deal you have made is so bad it cannot be quantified. The short of it is you have bargained with corruption to share in their artificial world. All your acquaintances will have done the same and these will be your crowd and to you it will seem the whole world is like the one you are in and that there really is no other. This factor alone will be a great pressure to stay for your choice is a complete unknown too scary to imagine. In this world you find yourself in people will from time to time say,

”I really don’t think there is anybody here who does not have a boss to answer to and this place seems like pure chaos. Nobody is in charge. We keep repeating the same pattern to nowhere. And that’s funny when you think how hard they sold us on the idea that to think otherwise than to join their system was to embrace chaos.”

When I was there I would often proclaim, “ Yeah, I know it's a sorry world but it’s the only game in town. I must adjust somehow.” Well, if you feel that way let me assure you it is not the only world. There is another. Right where we stand. Your locked up mind won’t let you see it. But it is here. Now. And open to all. It is freedom.

To enter is immediate and it is totally an inside job. Study what this means. Question everything you have been told. Discover your true nature. Then will it be known it is not the world that must change it is you! Discover each day and for the remainder of your days more and more of the endowment within. 

 ORDER OR CHAOS?

What need have we of a government from the outside when we have within a perfect governor in the form of moment-to-moment response to the whole of it all? Call it what you will the name is but a symbol for what cannot be measured, compared or copied. Music, as that word is commonly understood is memory. The personality wants to hear that song today we heard yesterday. As such it is old already and dying. What of a music that is new? 

From where does it arise? From where then does all music arise? Do we out of fear prefer yesterday’s music over today’s thinking it is security? Could that result in disorder on the outside? Or, could it be laziness as resistance to awakening each morning anew, fresh within, that keeps us in yesterday’s music? Both? Can you see that in such a state we are out of balance and likely to make poor choices? 

If so, at that point we become the source of the disorder we complain of and scream for a government from the outside to save us from it. What within us has a vested interest in controlling and limiting us? What separates, measures, and compares? It arises from thought not human nature. That powerful, dynamic fact can be proven by anyone bold enough to test it out in his own life. We need not await others to change. Once a human changes that change will automatically push for a change in others.  Find out what every sage knows.

This brings us to see something anew and to respond accordingly. Many times it has been argued that “We do not want to go back to living in caves” when a new song of freedom is heard. Such subterfuge is applicable only to mechanical technologies in the outer world and is used often to try to prevent a new way of seeing what is going on in the outer world from deep within. As in “How many times must a man look up before he sees the sky?” (Bob Dylan “Blowing In The Wind”). Look how little progress humans have made in how we listen to and respond to each other on the Earth. In fact, a good argument can be made that we have been digressing in that category since cave dwelling days. This is important.

 HOW SHARPLY IS THY RAZOR?

An Anonymous voice: Jazz was born from slavery in America when black people were slammed so hard it had to come forth as a way in secret to express freedom in the face of absolute freedomlessness. And that long word spells “I wanna perfect song to set things straight for me and you livin’ in a way we both know’s right before we die”. 

There are those here who are already thinking “this cannot be so because if {humansbeing} happened there would be chaos and mayhem and the apocalypse.” The answer everybody knows is: the law and order way we have been traveling so long we have no record of its beginning has brought a crisis so distressing to everybody it can no longer be denied. The other day another unarmed black man was beaten to death by five policeman. The President asked, soulfully: “ Where do we go from here?” Then answered himself: “We go forward.” And he’ll get votes for that.

Let me point out now the big difference between anonymity and anarchy. Both oppose superintendents. But anonymity means it. Anarchy is political. And anonymity is purely internal, selfless, founded in love. An anonymous person will point out what he sees from compassion for others and go on his way. When asked, “will you join the protest tonight” will reply simply, “no, I will be busy tonight.” What is mostly overlooked is the obvious fact that to be free of addiction to a selfish image one must let go of all consciousness that separates one from the whole of humanity to walk through life as Alias Everybody, a true friend to all.