I’d rather make the gravest of mistakes than to betray my own judgment.

Try to always see life as you would if you had just come out of a dark, dark tunnel. Whatever you do, do not let anyone send you back into the dark. For, you see, there never really was a tunnel in the first place, your thoughts built the one you live in.  It is so important to see the whole of it at once and act, when you do, from that understanding and you can never go wrong. By this time, you will have discovered freedom, as it is, not as an ideal written in a book for you will hold it in living hands as a part of you and keep it safe the rest of your life and notice its presence every morning you awaken. Your eyes will shine with its light.

You’ve forgotten everything.  Your brain’s been civilized. You don’t know how any longer to eyeball a moment.  To escape time through a gap into now. Make a beeline.  Open your whole self to pay full attention to the complete picture all at once. And let me assure you those capacities are worth far more than all the gold in the world.

A song says: we are all stranded here, doing our best to deny it. It is by Bob Dylan. Nobel winner extraordinaire.

Where is ‘here’ as mentioned in the song?

 Is it a place, a geographic location? 

Or, is it a make-believe world of commerce and ambition and competition and morality and war shaped as it is by politics and religion and all other forms of accumulated knowledge spewing forth from greed and lust for power of all kinds even to the point of self-appointed messengers who claim authority from God Almighty? 

Are we made so afraid to admit we are living unreal lives? Can we not be at least as brave as a pebble, a flower, or a child? Neither are they Christian nor Hindu. American nor Chinese or any of the rest of the illusory world we have trapped ourselves in. 

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.