To those who have not the eyes to see how young I am I may appear to them to be old. I am so young in fact that I awaken every morning in a state of infancy. Each of my days is a new life to live. I know not what to expect so find myself empty of ideas. Back when I was older, I carried many ideas about where I came from, where I am going, how I am going to get there, and what happens after I die. It took a lot of luggage to hold all the stuff and wore me out. Now, I intuit, see, all those questions will be answered today before I sleep and I will awaken tomorrow to live again. Tomorrow, after all, comes only as today. That I can depend upon. Some days it seems my body is aging and wearing out. But other days it is as though my body is as vibrant as ever it has been. It is not the same as the body I had, say, seven years ago, but just as alert and adequate to my day. Eager and ready. 

 A time came…

When I suddenly found myself saying, “I want to know who I am more than I want the approval of another human being. Who am I really? That was my question and so strong was it there was no room for another question inside of me.

The other day I heard a talk on the subject of loyalty. The speaker came to say, as humans we should all be loyal to humanity. I shuddered at the term “should be”. It got me to thinking that I have been confronted with that term from the time other people had made me into a creature who could begin to comprehend their words…”should be”. By now,  I am deeply experienced in the way of trying to be what I should be. It began at home. Then there was the radio. Then there was television. And schools. A spouse. And bosses. And groups I said I belonged to. Exercises. Diets. Religions. Politics. Art. Music. Books. And I had failed many times to be what I should be. I began to notice more and more that, wait a minute, for every thought I have of what I should be there is the opposite thought. I have been brought slyly into a great war inside of me by all this confusion. And I call it “My Life”. I considered an attempt to end it. Then the thought came instead to risk it all and find out who I really am loyal to if anybody. Immediately the term “Loyalty” came to have new meaning. I wanted to know who I am loyal to naturally absent any effort to be loyal. I thought of my cat. She was a one-man kitty naturally. I had no doubt about that. My cat was not striving for approval at all. In fact, she was teaching me how it can be so for a living thing to just be. I was seeing it as a strong sort of stubbornness that I had to admire greatly, so foreign was it to me. I wondered whether I might have that kind of stubbornness in me when it clicked that my single question was coming from such a place.

And gradually I am aware more and more that the truth is that the moment a named virtue is cultivated it loses all sense of being virtuous for it loses the soul in its meaning which is what my cat had all along. She was what she was and asked not to be congratulated.

I want to add that a willingness to stop shopping for meaning is the same as turning a valve in me that floods me with just enough stubborn to be a real human being.

NOBODY has written this before.

 A Critic

A critic will always be hopelessly in the dark. Critics assume an attitude way off course. He tells what his conditioned brain says is the meaning of what he has seen according to that brain’s conditioning. In doing so, the critic distorts every fact he has seen. Doing this leads to a life spent in a false world that resembles not the real one at all. Such a life is disturbing and becomes gradually intolerable. By trying to change the conditioned brain one merely goes deeper into the madness. A confused mind will find only confusion. The way out is simple but extraordinarily difficult for an arrogant person to attempt. One must see clearly how the conditioned brain operates and seeing cease the practice. What remains is brilliance.

The JOKER & The THIEF

 T: Do you believe the Universe is infinite?

J: Yes.

T: There is no proof of it, is there?

J: No. No proof, but I believe it to be so.

T: Some say we are all equal.

J: There is no proof we are.

T: There is no proof we are not. 

J: That is a  dilemma. We must act first or someone else will. So, let’s make believe we are not all equal and draw up a set of rules to determine a ranking order of worth of our own design which favors our kind and enforce it.

T: Okay. But what if it turns out we are all equal?

J: We must not allow it to happen. Everybody cannot be allowed to run wild. That would be chaos. And we need order.

T: But, if we are all equal might wild be order and enforced order be chaos?

J: You mean, do you not, it might be that order was in the plan from the beginning? I suppose we will find out some day.

T: No way. People will not ever allow it to happen. I have a new feeling growing in me now that wild, not the word but the fact, just might be humility. And people fear humility more than anything.

J: Humility? That sounds like humanity. Could it be found to be our natural state?

T: Who among us is in tune with his natural state?

J: There must be some way out of here. 

 The So-Called Scientist

Let us reason together in order to see what is happening to us. I am not going to teach you anything. Listening to me is like talking to yourself. Together we learn.

The so-called scientist looks through her microscope. What she sees depends upon what she is looking for but she is unaware of the effect of that upon her work. She thinks what she sees is the way things are. She knows not that the observer is the observed. She knows not that what she sees is colored by her memory of what she has seen in the past. She believes she can cross the same river again today which she crossed yesterday. That the river is always flowing is not important to her because that would keep her from being a scientist in search of fixed knowledge which she is convinced brings control to life and destiny. She believes herself to be dedicated to bringing to all a better world. She is this way only because she thinks of herself as an intelligent scientist with a reputation for intelligence among others who think the same way. It is mere group think. She is concerned with her career. Blind to how her fixation is in the past she is arrogant. She will tell other colleagues the meaning of what she has found in a paper she will author and publish. It is folly to do that in a world in motion. Yesterday’s knowledge is dead. But she has been busy gathering a following of fools. In this manner she will be nominated to receive coveted awards and the false prestige they bring. This she believes to be practical and secure though it be nothing but illusion made by abstract thinking. A translator who is not there is busy telling her what the thing she sees means. Words. Then, the translator tells her, she can tell others what to do about it. Meanwhile, everybody alive knows everything is getting worse.

The lawyer is bound to the past in the same way as the scientist as is the physician and the psychiatrist and the minister and the businessman and the journalist and the artist and the writer and the guru and all the rest. They belong to schools of thought and are proud of it. Each school has its private language others do not understand. They argue among themselves and teach in their schools that this will lead to progress which is thought to bring excellence but which is merely cosmetic. The word”excellence” is not the thing. Trends, latest fashions, and celebrity abound in a society of idiots. And the emperor of it all is naked. Humanity is riding a train traveling faster and faster and deeper into a purgatory-like condition of its own making and none of it is real. All is illusion. Should we all laugh? At whom? It might be fun if the price were not so high in terms of violence against all who have stood in the way of self-made, arrogant, judgmental pretenders over the ages. It is a very complex and convoluted  history. They kill each other. They kill children, women, the elderly, the helpless, and the best. They are constantly sending children to school where they can be forced to learn the game and assimilate.  Two Riders approach.

The game we have been playing is unfortunately very attractive to us. Or maybe it is not unfortunate at all. Maybe there is a plan to actually get us hopelessly lost and before we find our way back home we have to admit we are lost completely and mean it. That happened to me and some others. How many will it happen to before we are too far gone already?

Thinking, as we are taught to do it, divides us. It divides us 

abstractly into a thousand nations, a thousand religions, a thousand philosophies all engaged in one form of war or another. Wars among named groups are inevitable. As individuals, it divides us from within in wars against ourselves. This is done by observing what is named to be a flaw and then creating an illusion of an ideal human being without that flaw. Then one now creates with thought a method to become that perfect human without the flaw. All the world as we know it now is caught madly in this way of living. Look around. 

There is quite another,  largely ignored, possibility. It is possible to look only at the flaw in ourselves or others without a judgment that it is a flaw or a virtue. Observe the condition as it is without words. Be practical for a change! The result astounds! It works! The flaw is not. It disintegrates. It never was. It was being created by the blind scientist who is ignorant of reality. On the outside the pure observation works the same miracle. We see suddenly the other as another human who actually wants the same thing I do when we observe them with a still mind, anchored in reality, even for a short while. That is all it takes. It happens. There is no going back to resentment and fear and hatred now. And we heal. Healed and made whole by the loving winds of reality. Mediation as practiced by aboriginal peoples all around the Earth for thousands of years taught me this. I trust it without a doubt.

All people, and that means all, want to work together with pride and joy. Excellence comes from one place and one place only…it comes from the soft, yielding hearts of human beings regardless of their present condition. There is a way home. Each one who turns to the heart assumes the attitude of humility heart when trusted brings and will have to produce excellence and excellence alone. Such a train, bound for glory, will inherit the Earth. I did not say accumulate money and property.  I said inherit the Earth. 

Welcome home.

 A Song To Bob Dylan

from  jwhooperswan

Is there an observation, an observation pure and true?

One the scientist can never reproduce with her instruments not even the most advanced and expensive telescopes and robots equipped with a computerized slide rule?

Did the child say the emperor is naked and did he notice it to be so in spite of any lesson that was taught to him at school?

How many times must an innocent say what simply is before us all to be a-seein’ before

every scientist admits I am blind, I am a fool?

And hasten to ask forgiveness and bow before the child inside each one of us who sees with a light that’s pure and true?

A Thousand years ago the American Indian told whites…who would not listen…the Earth is our Mother and still we look to science to save us at the brink of what those learned in the name of progress have brought the whole world to.

While the scientist searches for the light at the end of the tunnel the innocent one who observes the obvious reports there is no tunnel 

if you humbly look at what clearly lies before you not covered up by all the many words you were forced to learn in school.

It has taken me a lifetime to hear the answer that has all along been blowin’ in the wind

It took that long for me to learn enough about how far intuition can extend.

All of us will end the wars, put a stop to suffering, by grokking the simple truth we need nobody else to save us we are and always have been sufficient to that end. (end song)

(spoken) A lone scientist at Columbia told his classes every semester that all would receive an A in his course and only those who wished to learn were invited to bother to further attend. In that same way, this song is informing you that your initial intuition is to be honored above all thought driven rules, beliefs, and opinions if we are to find the life we’re all dreaming for. And any who do so honor intuition will find. 

That same professor and scientist made the observation that “Nobody Wanted a Light Bulb!” It is not science that serves our dream. Science serves money and personal prestige. And politicians pass out both. And they work for Corporate  Giants. Who, then, must you look to to make your dream come true?

That same professor was a musician and songwriter. He rewrote the Star Spangled Banner to make it easier to sing, saying: Do not blame the singers, if the song is poorly written, rewrite the song. Just make it easier for everybody to sing along. Is that not the dream?

                                 

 A human being is someone who realizes by the time he passes through childhood and adolescence that he is never going to know the whole truth because that is denied him and so his grownup solution is to work very hard all his life to gather as much knowledge as he can. Many become dedicated to scientific research which is an illusory escape from living as a human being. They just overlook their disordered lives and pretend to live together on Mars. As a scientist realizes that money is never going to be enough to satisfy him, his solution is to work hard all his life to gain as much money as he can. He is convinced money cannot buy happiness only drugs and other distractions to blot out its loss. Still he works hard for money. A human being recognizes he is violent. His solution is to try as hard as he can to be non-violent. A human being recognizes she is inconsistent and her life is not in order. Her solution is to work as hard a she can to achieve awards handed out for achieving the order which cannot be achieved. A human being recognizes he fails to work hard enough. Not to pick on scientists it is made clear that the very same fate awaits everyone attached to a career. 

A human being has learned all of this by observing his parents and other adults and studying his own experiences of dealing with them. They are his teachers. Is it any wonder man is a mess? Is anybody out there who is ready to address only the facts instead? For those it will be a solitary voyage with no teacher but oneself. But freedom is coming to you. See how what you have been taught from the past is creating a non-existent world you must complain about for the reason that it exists not. Humans like Walt Whitman and Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan have broken through all that to present something original in place of the  expected.

Observe that one’s society is telling one constantly what you are expected to do to become someone worthy. Not fulfilled but worthy. Worthy of what?