TO ANYBODY-

It was like I joined a pack of drunken fortune seekers heading out to the gold fields of California. Hitch your wagon! 

Where you goin’? I don’t know. 

What you gonna find there? 

I ain’t certain. 

All I do know is I am on my way. 

Any lively slogan to be sung with vigor will do but it boils down always to an ignorant, selfish craving for an unknown result that drives human beings of all kinds. Many labels come and go. But the drive remains within us all our lives. The Great Hunger. 

For a few years of my life I was working in the public eye. I said I was doing good for everybody. Truth was, I was seeking treasure for me. My treasure was uncertain but it smelled a lot like power and influence over others who are bound to admire my service to them. I could envision a statue of my likeness standing prominently on a square. My work was scrutinized by the media of the day. It was not unusual for me to be interviewed by the press and television news. As I listened to the news I was told by the interviewer to watch myself on it was every time a complete shock. Nothing about the news report was remotely accurate. Knowing this, I would wonder whether every news story is just as lopsided. Of course, it has to be so. And yet I kept watching news and reading publications regularly which reported the lies it pours into our brains for many more years. It was apparent many educated people do the same and believe themselves to be well-informed. About what? Junk. It amounts to a madness whereby a force these well-informed trusted people of influence do not see is feeding them what it wants them to learn. Like an evil mother with a poison breast might feed a helpless child. Now, do not stop here and form your opinions of who that evil asshole is and analyze the situation in order to organize a gang to oppose them in like manner. Why? Well, it smells like power and influence. Besides, that is what you have been doing for generations and the trouble is growing stronger and stronger as you are sucked into its evil web of destruction it is time to reevaluate. 

The fact is the trouble resides in us. Not outside us. (a full paragraph) 

The Great Hunger is in fact back of your selfish self-centered desires, all of them, as they change even. Everybody’s got ‘em. Society is driven by greed. It is organized for that very purpose. It is formed to make you feed at the poison breast of an evil it has you hypnotized to believe you are, which you are not, and it wants you to believe you are something that has no real existence at all instead of trusting your true mother’s good, wholesome milk of love. Your society has an evil use for every fool. Its job is to sell its stuff to you which you do not need if only you had a good mother’s teat. In thought are you trapped and you are your society now. To restore dignity you have to change. (Remember where the trouble resides?)

A self-centered observer of the things of the world goes unnoticed by me because I identify my existence with that puppet. It is a form of blindness. Since I am crazy I aim crazy. I do not see straight. My milk is evil. It spoils my days. I must change. I must turn away from the poison breast. The voice that asks “How?” is the monster’s voice. Etch that on your brain. No action is appropriate. Once the false observer is seen, it is all over for it. Kill it daily. Kill it hourly. With a single eye, kill it now. It takes a single eye to see what does not in fact exist. You will know, instantly, without a doubt, who you are.

 We serve symbols.

We ignore facts at our own peril. 

Vital is it we change and soon. 

Fact: Every human being on Earth is very, very, very valuable.  

Almost all humans on Earth are overlooked for many and various reasons all stemming from ignorance. That ignorance stems from serving symbols.

Inside the limits of any game of symbols there will, of course, be winners who excel far beyond the masses. These people are symbolized as celebrities (winners) and all the rest are encouraged to imitate the winners in the tiny, almost minuscule chance they might themselves or their children become winners. The major games are called civilizations or nations and their subparts. Such arrangements pale in the face of a world where facts are superior to symbols.

In such a world lighted by truth everybody has plenty and enjoys life abundantly.There are no leaders in such a happy world, only trusted servants. And here, my friends is the very best news: 

This world can be occupied by anyone who chooses to live there now by simply making a commitment to oneself to cease to serve symbols.

And the symbol-servers will never suspect you have taken such action for to them there is no such place as Utopia on Earth. The moment two of us make the shift we will be drawn to each other and will recognize each other as one of the once misfit now fellow travelers on the road of happy destiny as a lightening strike of fact makes the rain fall at last. 

And how many of the wisest must say there is no greater beauty in life than the lost, forgotten, rejected, hated and despised redeemed and given new life before it is true?

 You imagine you are doing what is right for the country or your family or your buddies in the corps, a hoax concocted to make humans turn themselves into railroad passengers or some such shit. 

                                                                    Key To Freedom

Recently, I was told by a friend, “Ownership of private property is the key to freedom”.  I was stunned. And I responded quite forcefully, “I do not agree with you!”

Let us look at a simple flower, a lily of the field, if you will, in a new way. Ask, does the lily search for ways to provide its needs by studying alternatives, choosing one, and working with all its might to be successful as a flower? Or rather does the flower understand itself well enough already it must act as that flower and receive, as a result, a flower’s needs as they arise? When it is told here that a flower understands itself it is a matter of expressing a state of unification within the flower that makes it behave as a flower is brilliantly designed to function. Finding that state inside yourself, a human, is true meditation. 

In the present state of society there is no such way for a baby human to do as the flower and simply be what it is. The baby is going to have dumped into its brain a formula created by other humans and that formula requires the child to grow up to be someone who has tried to become something it is not naturally in order to be labeled in some manner or other “A model citizen”. The system we all know involves a striving to obtain money to buy what one needs as a human being, which requires one to go to “expert” humans to find out a list of those requirements on the grounds that a child does not know what it needs in the way a flower is endowed by the same creator of all the living. By now do you sense the corruption in all this malarky? 

Who will benefit when the child gives itself over to society’s formula? What can become of a child who follows this path? You know. You are that child. 

Children, at different points along the path assigned to them, will suffer a sense of loss.  Asking others, it will be told that everybody is in the same boat and “get used to it”. Adjust. Seek a counselor, a guru, a priest, or. some other professional “expert” if you need help adjusting to “the real world”. Do you sense another sign of corruption? You should.  You are that child. And this world is not “real”. It is in no way healthy to adjust oneself to life in a corrupt society. 

At this point in my conversation with my friend who told me ownership of private property is the key to freedom my friend told me any other reading is a seeking of a “Utopia” which is not real and not available to humans. I know better and am counting on you to know better too. Humans are not abandoned to an unnatural system involving loneliness, separation, conflict, envy, deceit, hatred, wars, and all the rest of it, any more than are flowers.

The key to freedom happens to be to seek first the natural human within, be that, and all else will be added to you by that which feeds flowers. And corruption, for you, will cease to be as if by magic. 

 Choice is a mental operation that divides a human inside. A human being out of touch with its nature resorts to making choices. It brings conflict and suffering. Being human is being absent of choice and, so, absent of conflict and suffering and the result is right living. Be you.

 

 

 Love Song

Pass the kindness cup.

Let all, in secret, drink it up.

There is an action which comes from an intelligence not my own but from that Great Intelligence we all share.

Now pass the kindness cup.

Let all, in secret, drink it up.

 A philosopher of some influence once said, “I think therefore I am.” He became a Lord. I serve my Lord, the Thinker. 

What I see is this: I thought. I thought some more. Then thought created a thinker. Thinking took more and more of my attention. Thinking then became my almost all. Finally I was the thinker thought thought up and recorded as my self on my brain and now exist in that tiny, isolated way. So limited. So confused. So frightened. So depressed. Now I do not exist at all outside my thoughts. I see this. Beyond thinking I see Thought brings pleasure but always accompanied by its companion Pain. The source of my pleasure is the source of my pain. Let me out, please! My thoughts have killed me. Almost. Some not thought which sees thought in action has written this using thought as a tool. I have hope. Thought and hope. These two. There is no going back. I am outside the walls. I am home.

 

 We are caught in a world which we believe to be “the way things are” wherein one is to work hard over time to become something acceptable and admired by others and so rewarded in many ways. This is supposed to bring happiness, but it is very rare to find a happy person here. 

It might be better to first use all your strength and concentration to find out what you might be  without becoming something else. And whether the problems the world complains about improve over time in gradual steps or whether in truth the method of gradual improvement in increments over time actually brings us the problems we suffer. In that way, are we actually foolishly utilizing the cause of our misery to free us from the misery? I once heard a talk by a very intelligent scientist on the subject of the environmental disaster facing our world. It was interesting to listen to him but what was almost shocking was at the close when the great man was asked, “What must we do to save our world, Sir?” And the man answered, “Nothing”. He then stated the obvious. “All our damage to our home planet has been caused by a process of trying to manage and control it and that system will never bring anything except more misery. The method of striving to make the Earth behave in a way we imagine we are benefitted is the problem, not the solution. 

Is there a learning in action that is radically different from the education system of gradual improvement over time we are the demonstrable results of as we exist today? Have we tried a new way? Have we striven seriously with dedicated passion to find out what our Planet would be without our efforts to manage it?

The greatest teaching I ever received was from a gentle man who listened at length concerning the dilemma I was in at the time and then quietly remarked to me, “Jonathon, you remind me of a man desperately trying to manage his own life”. 

I want to point out one more thing. The system we employ to arrest, try, and punish people who misbehave depends upon our firm commitment to the theory a person can and ought to be managed over time to become a worthy person who will be law abiding. Who really believes that? That alone is the justification for the practice of crime and punishment. Is it sound? Or, could it actually be the very source of crime itself? If it is, boy, oh boy, are we on the wrong channel. Channel of the dumb. Plow men dig my earth.  None of them along the line know what any of it is worth. Bob Dylan. “All Along The Watchtower”.

What if rather than becoming offended by the wrongdoing of another we follow instruction from a poem of love which suggests we utilize the offending behavior as a fact to inform us that we need to change not the offender who is our brother or sister and one whose conduct in all ways points to us all. After all is said and done is the underbelly of a society ever less the thing than all the rest? And can we not look directly at a fact without a word defining it? Just look. Could it be that in the radically different approach suggested by a poet many will be spared the pain which caused the offending behavior?   If it is so, boy, would we be on the right channel. Channel of the bright! Then might happiness begin to blossom the world over and we would take care not to trample all those flowers ever again.