Brief Introductory Remarks Of An Ordinary Human Being

Or

How Sharply Is Thy Razor?

Look into this. If I am to be truly useful to others it must flower from within me naturally and if it does so flower there is no reason for anyone to pay me for doing it. Or support my work. How sharply is thy razor? After all, I am doing what I love naturally. And will do it with no thought to be paid. And others will be served. So, what began the notion of work for pay? 

And, furthermore, can any accountant show the figures for how great is the loss to society to follow such a practice,,,work for pay…rather than naturally serving one another through compassion’s love? Of course not. Those figures are not kept for the reason that nobody pays money to free the world from money’s grip.

Accountants are so tired of their work they insist on being paid to do it. They are not alone. Is it not obvious we demand pay only when we do not want to do the work? How sharply is thy razor? Know what they call someone, especially a woman, who does work she would not do if the money were not offered? It goes even deeper than that by far. How sharply is thy razor? 

One cannot simultaneously act naturally and unnaturally. As in my story earlier, if a human being is doing work for any sort of selfish reward it means he or she is not doing what they are drawn naturally to do and there is no love. And there is so much pain in self-betrayal. Do the accountants & do-gooders have the figures for the cost in psychological and emotional terms to the human minds of a society practicing self betrayal for most of the adult years of each person’s  life? Who will calculate the weight of the huge burden of resentment, anger, remorse, envy, self-hatred, self-pity, worthlessness, loneliness, isolation suffered by such workers and all those closest to such workers, the families? NOBODY WILL CALCULATE IT! There’s no money to be made in compiling those devastating losses! Another thing. Does anyone know or care what wealth might have been created had all members of a society been acting purely by a human’s natural, inborn compassion for others? 

Laws are made to benefit a small minority of the population. A law that will benefit all would be completely unnecessary, would it not?  Think about it. So, laws will always lead immediately to conflict between citizens. Must. Think about it. There is a joke that an atheist dies and is standing before the Pearly Gates where he is met by God. The atheist says, “Sir, please give me just one tiny sign that you actually exist and I will know”. Think about it. The certainty that laws made by man divide people is that strong. Love is what we need.

I heard a native Navajo story where a boy failed to chop any wood one day as he as supposed to do and the family was caught with an approaching winter storm where several would possibly freeze to death. The boy was chastised by his mother. The boy simply had been occupied with thoughts from a book of how he could be better off than he is so was out of touch with that in him naturally responsible for the welfare others. He ran to chop wood and saved the family. We too often do not even consider what good we miss when we suffer a society that preaches and insists upon unnatural selfishness above natural compassion. So, we stand ignorant of the fact that such a world is corrupt at its core. There is a price for such grave ignorance.

Here is a great secret to consider: to live outside the law one must be honest. In truth, as Shakespeare wrote it, when one is true to himself he cannot be false to anybody else. So, decide now to do for your work what you love and do it for nothing. Work like a beaver!

We say we dropped the atomic bombs on our enemy in WWII because we needed to end that war and save American lives yet do we have any concept how many factors that led to the war in the first place stemmed directly from ignorance of our own human nature? Why not? We are blind because our culture has insisted for too long on inattention to natural wisdom.

A final word. I was raised by my family to study the life of Jesus Christ. After years of living I understand what it was all about, finally. Jesus was seen by a few as a special human and was asked to show the way to the rest. What was special about him was that he was simply and fundamentally natural. It has been so throughout the story of societies that many who had found a way out were urged to teach another what cannot and need not be taught. To undertake to carry that load for another is a hard rain. Any human born in the midst of madness must find the way out alone. Why? The way out is “stay put”. You gotta dodge all the unnatural games crazy people play. One of the last is the game of “won’t you please show us how we make sense out of  this chaos?”

We all suffer the same here…rich, poor, powerful, weak, pretty, ugly brilliant, talented, or not. We all feel an enormous lack. Whenever that is seen clearly by anyone, all comparison and measurement ceases automatically. That is what death will cause us to do everyone. Each one born dies. It is a perfect fact. And that is the great vitality in death. Take stock. How sharply is thy razor? Can one die early to live? Death is the surrendering of fear. Is resurrection possible for all living people now one at a time? The change by one will affect the whole. How sharply is thy razor?

 One might say “I need enlightenment”. Another says “I need salvation”. Another says “I need to awaken”. And so on and on. Some will say only, “ I need a peace I cannot name or describe”. Another has said it this way, “I need to find my heart”. All are after the same thing AND IT IS FLATLY “ORDINARY” AS ORDINARY CAN BE. 

Our brains, and therefore our minds, are loaded with stuff of past experiences. Memories, ideas, feelings, notions, theories of all kinds are in there. Religious dogma and political hogwash are in there. Imagined attachments are there. What is felt as a need by everyone of us humans is a call from inside to notice there is something besides all that “stuff” present that is not a part of it. It is like if a violinist has 400 violins in his music room and it is so full of them he cannot see he is there also. He is awaiting the violins to play something new to him. They cannot. He cannot move forward. He is like a walking dead man. He must think life is just this way and strive to accept that.

And this is why no one can charge a fee to make things right. There is nothing to it. Things are right. So many offer an extraordinary “experience” for a fee and make a lot of money doing it when it is a “non-experience” we began with and believe we lost. To find what is not lost…what is to be done? Well it really is so that what you are looking for is an enormous elephant in a crowded room right under your nose. It wants no name , has no possessions, and is alive. It is life. Remember? What more can be said?

 Doctor Scientist listen to my question please.

How many years will it take searching with the tools of your technology into the secrets of the human cell before reaching the notion you have found out all about us? Hell, even if 500,000,000 of you are searching day and night how long? Would it not be a lifetime well spent to open your heart to a mere possibility of a dance with a mermaid?

 People want God to forgive our sins.

God is either love or God is a sin-hater.

Which God? 

If a body really thought God will forgive me

that one’s soul would never know sin. Lack of love is the source of sin.

What is the relationship of God to self?

Self is an image put together by thoughts.

Love is not such.

What is sin from the point of view of love? That is the relationship.

 Separation of RELIGION

A Christian is to believe Jesus Christ, Son of God, died for his or her sins and His Father thereby forgives all sins of the Christian who so believes and such a believer will not perish but have life everlasting. 

The Bible presents Jesus to a reader as a holy man who is pure love…for all. The story is of a shepherd who loves each lamb so much he will leave all his flock behind to search for the lost lamb. As a child I was taught the story and even taught the story to other children. It is not surprising that a person becomes a lost lamb. First, right after birth, came a set of patterns I am to follow in life. These patterns soon become the facts of our situation. Trying to follow them brings conflict and confusion and, finally, desperation. When it happens to one of us we are ready to hear the story. A lost lamb in a human body wants more than anything to be found by someone who loves him or her. That feeling is like no other. 

This writer need go no further into the matter. It is enough to understand the attraction to any of the religions organized by man. I feel lost. A group with a name and symbols and a headquarters offers to help me. Enlisting in an organized religion, in some manner I am led to give my life over to an image I make in my thoughts of what it is like to be a complete human. One more loveless pattern. 

This writer writes only to question whatever led to the “organization”in the first place of what is so universal. It has unquestionably separated humans rather than uniting us. Created conflict where none is called for. In fact, to make a separate religion amounts to an attempt to make a separate “life”. That is so arrogant! 

The term religion comes from the same word as relationship. Life is relationship and how we respond to it. I am the living. You are the living. They are the living. All the same. Period. Actually, Jesus became famous for saying “love your enemies”. Now, perhaps, is the time to embrace such wisdom.

The method described in paragraph one above means when any child of God dies to its selfish life as it is being lived in separation that one act of pure love opens the human to an unknown selfless way of life where that one and any who follow suit will not perish but have life everlasting at the instant of such a psychic “death”, which means life never dies since death is always followed by a new beginning. What else is it than “life everlasting”? At the very famous Last Supper of the Christian religion Jesus told his disciples he was leaving the “master-disciple ” role, so goodbye. He asked to be remembered and then promised he would come again, right away, and did and continues to be born all around this Globe every day. Salvation complete. All organized methods fulfilled in the ending of conflict. This important understanding is real, based in fact not belief, unorganized, and unites all humanity.

                                                                                 LIFE & 

THE TERRIBLE WORLD

The world of persons as far as I can see is a terrible place to try and live. So much violence. So many people hateful and angry. So much cruelty.  Enormous greed and disrespect for what is beautiful and tender. Comparison and measurement in all corners. People buying and selling others. Corruption rules on Earth. Beginning with the family of separation.

I cannot change the world. Have not the power to do that. I want to but cannot. I also cannot even keep my family and close friends knowing they are safe. I was early taught I was to do that much if I am to have any dignity as a man. I found it very hard to admit that it is not possible for me to keep such a promise to them because I am not Superman or anything close to it. I tried many ways to escape that fact. But it eventually got to me. I lost my mind. 

Then something happened to me. I admitted my weakness and sense of shame and asked for help with my suffering. Some people told me they recognized me as one of them and agreed to show me a way out of the sickness. Said it was unlearning mostly.  What I have to say now is that there is a way. I found out my trouble was not really “mine”-really, it is that I am not who I thought I was before. Like in the story of Alice, a caterpillar asked me-

“Who are you?”

I attempted to answer and each answer was shown to be absolutely false. I arrived at a place where I just admitted, “I don’t know who I am.”

When a person is clear he has no identity his mind has to open up to the complete unknown. It loses its entire load of bullshit that was attached to the wrong ideas he had about the most fundamental truth- existence! Believe it or not it is a wonderful place to fall into. Empty mind, that is. Suddenly everything is possible!  It became my quest to question it all! Ha!

As I continued on the “questioning everything” journey to meet up with identity more and more gifts came to me I had not even asked to have as if they fell from trees or something. One thing for sure, empty mind has great energy. I tell the following and stop. 

Eventually, it came to me as a fact that my problem is the other man’s problem and the problem of all human consciousness and therein lies the source of suffering. We were driving each other mad in a House of Mirrors. Amness is life’s energy in a human body. That energy cannot be destroyed by anything. Nothing can reach it. It is in another dimension entirely. It transcends problems. 

My body is mortal and will die and can be hurt but not so for the truth of my identity. And it turned out to be what was left when I had established by serious questioning who I am not! With this knowledge was it realized in gratitude there is safety in a dangerous world. It is in me and cannot be messed with by anything.

This that is revealed here is not the property of any person or any group of persons. “Persons” are the great problem. To walk the safe road is not a choice and will not be found by shoppers. Lovers have it. A lover goes to any length for the beloved because that is what a lover does.

 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.