A Better Place

There was a man who decided to tell people he wanted to be a writer. He tried day and night but could not get anything he wrote published. Then something happened.  He found a manuscript in a satchel his wife purchased for him at a flea market. He read it that night and wept at its beauty. Oh, how he wished he could write like that. Secretly, he typed it up and then offered it to a publisher as his own. The publisher was amazed at the manuscript and wanted to publish right away. So, the man became a famous writer.

What is important to understand is that the man did not really have any interest in writing.  He wanted something else. Something he lacked. He wanted only the results of being a published writer as set out by the culture he served. He proved that when he stole the manuscript.

So, why are we doing things we do not really have an interest in? Why are we looking outside ourselves for approval and validation? Why do we want to be loved?

We are lonely.

Why are we lonely?

We do not feel love.

Where is love?

Inside us.

How much?

An ocean.

Furthermore, had the man not stolen he would still be lonely. So, to judge him to be a thief is ridiculous and futile. He is sad. He must find the love in his own heart.  When he does, he will begin doing what he is truly interested in doing. We must help him. We must find it in our hearts to help him. Only in that way will the world become a better place.

Culture. What is it? It must have begun with a mere chronicling of something observed about some people occupying a common area of the world. A comment, nothing more; seemingly innocent and not very interesting. For example, the people here only eat one meal a day, morning, and not three as do we. But it caught on. Perhaps bored, curious people saw in it a way to occupy themselves studying somebody else to avoid looking at themselves. I am guessing. Whatever its reasons, the outcropping is a dangerous place to play. It means I risk falling into a tar pit from which nobody escapes. Here is the ugliest part: the culture once it has us in its grip tells us we only exist for the glorification of its never ending story. It claims even to hold the Supreme Being captive for us. It's a bastard!

And, by now, every nation has its layers upon layers of cultural overseers. They are all about convention. That spells death. In every one of them there is a firm belief that the culture of the nation is the important thing. More so than the life of any baby. After all, the babies belong now to the culture. In every culture on Earth a trained horde of professional workers guard it day and night as the national treasure. There is the question of food and dress and language and emergency response and education and ethics and art and literature and music and religion and architecture and laws and law enforcement and commerce and national defense and health practices and recreation and all the countless labels. It is so complex by now it cannot possibly be grasped nor comprehended to any remotely complete extent by anybody. For the purposes of this writing the foregoing is deemed a sufficient description to communicate what is known by everybody to exist. Most consider it an absolute necessity. The other thing to know is that it dominates and shapes the lives of its members from cradle to grave. Finally, it it is important to realize the damned things that dominate you do not exist! More important, it does not even think for itself. It's like a puppet people operate for show. The hands inside the puppets' handmade bodies that give to them all of their power on Earth are the marvelously adept hands of human beings like you. Gods unaware! We could do so much better if only we believed in ourselves.

How often is anyone asking why do we not? How did this happen? Is it good? It is so absurd that even the methods of rebellion against the society are created as part of the culture by the culture and carried on inside it as determined by it. In other words, absolutely nobody is fucking real anymore. I had to face the truth that my own spiritual guru is a fake. And this is important.  He is a fake, not by the force of his ego, my own. I made him up to make the transition from caged tiger to free, wild reality. 

The inquiry open here is to study how a symbol for a thing becomes the thing. It goes like this-a bunch of people settle on an island. They symbolically name the place New York City. After awhile, New York is the happening thing and the people who named it are its servants voluntarily. The symbol now taxes them, arrests them, fines them, jails them, educates them, and separates them into classifications or castes difficult or impossible to escape in a lifetime. Imagine if you brought a puppy home and named it and fed it and it grew up to tax, arrest, punish, and classify you for the rest of your life! This is worse than that! At least a puppy is alive.

Situation. People today live to serve inside a culture and the culture has no existence except in the minds of people who are thought of by the population at large as its people. In other words people belong to a culture. Everybody in the population. Reading a novel about someone hiking the Pacific Crest Trail reveals that the trail was created by long and difficult attempts for a hundred years to get the proper federal authorities to initially officially designate it as such and then build it. I bet fifty people could have done a better trail in less than three years and would have maintained it through loving care in ways unimaginable at the beginning. Think of all the famous art that was created under the official direction and control of the Catholic Church as another example of this monstrosity. All those faked religious paintings! And, all the fake memorials to famous cultural heroes, my God! Do not you know the greatest hero is one nobody remembers for being that? The ones who kept the flame of truth burning in the attics and basements and unlit alleys of the culture's over looming artificial history? Those heroes? Famous for their anonymity? Where is the statue to them to be found?  The ones who died friendless in drunken, addictive, swollen, heartbreaking misery unable to speak their desperate need to be free of convention's locked  heavy door? Where?

That is backward. Cultures should belong to people. People should define culture rather than the other way around. The children's story of the emperor's new clothes comes to mind. The purpose here is merely to point out that the emperor is naked. Culture is dull, cunning, ravenous, boring, and blind. What you serve is so naked it has no beingness no life and no heart. All the ridiculous mascots and uniforms and flags and store bought pre-assembled teams you serve, My God! They buy that colored crepe paper at the dime store for a quarter. Do you not realize you are alive?

People, on the other hand, are bright, interesting, kind, generous,  courageous, and talented. It ought to work where we simply do what we truly want to do all of our lives and a clerk, if someone is moved to be one, merely reports on that as evidence of what we have done together as people to inspire us to greater heights of glory. Come to think of it, a clerk position is totally obsolete. And that is culture enough. The culture that had none. The culture that must always be coming. Every day a new wrinkle that comes out of the places least expected of having that one.

After all, a pack of wolves runs free so why can't we?

Let us truly live.

So, when you consider that a person who loves never considers himself to be a lover you gotta wonder what have we been doing the last few thousand years? We have been honing away at ourselves, alone and in groups, to become what cannot be achieved. What must inevitably happen to people who do that? Right. Suffering.

Somebody has twisted your mind in a knot. Life is not an obstacle course of challenges. It happens. It happens like your birthday...which comes to you wherever you are every time the Earth completes another cycle around the Sun. I am reading a story about a novice hiker on a trek through wilderness to find something she cannot name. Man, she encounters so many difficulties, each of which she reports leads her to the same conclusion...keep walking. I met her only on the pages of her book but I love her.

They told me, If you don't know where you are going, any road will do. (and laughed) I say, If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there. (and sigh) I am so aware just now of one thing: when I am open and empty of any motive without a clue where I want to go I am at my best and I cannot fail.

I say, we are drawn to walk, or sometimes kicked in the ass, and we walk on a journey without purpose to discover we have never fucked up. That's peace, Man. But those who walk with purpose, to save themselves from some imagined suffering, remain in limbo even though dressed in robes of salvation chanting psalms and prayers and proverbs.

Okay, someone who feels guilty may choose to whip herself continuously until she finally frees herself from the guilt only to discover she never did fuck up since the conduct she abhorred in herself led her to beat the shit out of herself which has led her to peace which is why she chose the self administered whippings. It's all good does not mean, whip Hell out of yourself, or drink yourself sick, or have sex with everybody you meet; it means whip Hell out of yourself if you want to.

p.s. You only want to when you want to. And nobody is going to change because I tell them to, real change will come when the person who changes wants it to be so.

To Understand

If you know you do not know what you are seeking, you will not ever tell yourself you are not following the correct path. And, nobody else can tell you that. Simply go where you have not yet been. You see, it is the damned if I do, damned if I don't bind that has mankind tied in dreadful knots. We don't have to be like that anymore.

Men are so very nice to know who know they do not know.

Men destroy so much when they think they know what they want,

they don't.

Take gold or oil, for instance, or love, what a mess those caused;

but when a man knows, I do not even know what I am seeking anymore

such a true friend you never have ever had before.

It is that simple to become what all living things adore.

If you feel this poem silly. Consider the facts: how can one who is all he is- nothing less or more- know what he's supposed to be wishing for? 

The very idea is like wishing not to be your self anymore.

Even those who wish for cancer's cure have no idea what's going to be behind that door. 

That means: I do not know how to keep score! 

What really is funny is how many of us are striving to get somewhere else who do not know a damn thing yet about where we are. (not to mention who or what)

I am currently living in a house with someone who speaks only Spanish while I speak only English. We two together. Nobody else. I gotta tell ya it is has been fun! As soon as one of us learns the other's language the trouble will begin. As it is we have a perfect understanding...we know we cannot understand each other. I am beginning to believe ol' Tarzan got it right. “Me Tarzan. You Jane.”

If a man be demented, does he know he is-

demented?

Keeping this truth in mind, let us consider ourselves

as we are now.

What if we are demented?

Those who are not will

appear to us to be crazy-

way off the norm-

as we perceive the norm (which is crazy)

No?

Time and time again we raise heroes up and

they fall down in a profound but ugly crash.

We say: what a pity he did not make it, but,

what if

we are crazy?

And, what if, for the sane man to survive among us

is to bear a burden of lonely isolation so great nobody has

yet to make it through, sanity intact.

So much anger arises in him with no friend -nobody gets me-nobody appreciates greatness-

nobody tries-everybody is sitting on their asses-that the sane man we admired

becomes a cruel and violent monster

striking hardest at those closest to him?

Dr. Jekyll met Mr. Hide, who said-

no friend cares what his friend says or does.

Only in that freedom greatness never dreamed,

hiding was!

Certainty, My Love?

Tell me I can count on having your love until death parts us. I cannot bear the thought of you giving your love to another. The uncertainty of this arrangement is killing me. I must know I have you.

Are you not content to have love for one night, this one night? Whatever gives you the concept of having me?

You are my dream come true. I want no other. Forever.

What makes you believe such a thing? Why must you think?

My parents married in a church before God and people and live together as man and wife to this day.

Do you really think I am the source of love, a fountain of it? Stop thinking. Can I determine where love chooses to go? Did I begin this feeling in you? Or me? It happened. How do things happen? You are lying. I do not believe you. You ask me for such a promise when we both know you, yourself cannot know who or when you will leave me for someone else? Nonsense.

Love is nonsense. Did you not know? It is meant to be crazy. It is crazy.

Then let us accept that as true. We must go mad to be in love. A crazy person is never held to promises. There is one love. It consumes promises and out beyond promises there is an open field. I met you there. Life in that field is far better than any other life. You have to trust me.

How can I?

If you cannot, have no truck with me.  

The superior people who conceived of the world as you presently know it must have come to despise uncertainty in any form at the same moment they conceived of superior people. Importantly, though, the real world, made before man was present on Earth to conceive of anything at all, is absolutely uncertain. That makes for a difficulty. You are living, or trying to, in a world created by the conniving minds of persons who argue against truth. What is that like? What chance do they have of bringing you home safely? Why do you even consider following?

Life is not difficult for those who understand uncertainty. It is understood by the human heart through music, dance, love, kindness, generosity and all else that stirs up passion. To make things even better when it seemed nothing else could, there is a certain peace in absolute uncertainty that surpasses all understanding. Certainty is a drag. Be like a child. It should come as no surprise that the folks who understand and embrace uncertainty make no attempt to live in the world made by the dissenters. The dissenters made up a world based upon a theory of gambling which they sold to you as a certain thing. With gambling come its rules. The house writes the rules, of course. With rules comes a strange, cold certainty all right. There will be winners and there will be many more losers.

Here's a game. Think of a serious problem, any problem. Now, state it clearly. Okay, imagine you hear an answer to be: So what? Play along and explain how important the problem is, in your mind anyway. Imagine the same answer: So what? Keep this up. Before long, you will begin to lose your concentration on the seriousness of the problem and become more involved in the process. You will find yourself wondering just how far this can be taken. Then, suddenly, it will no longer matter to you at all. Problem solved in a peculiar manner. Uncertainty dominates the landscape, your paradigm shifts, and the mind is robbed of its imagined need for certainty. Nothing has changed really, and yet, you are probably laughing.

In the West, the following statements of certainty are memorized by everybody who goes to school:

1. You are going to have to have a job when you grow up.

2. You have to have money to enjoy life.

3. You have to pay bills.

4. You have to get married to have children.

5. You have to either have a mortgage or lease from someone who does in order to live in a nice house with your family.

6. To enjoy the earth's bounty, you have to have purchasing power.

7. You have to have a country in order to live on land where it is claimed that a symbol you are supposed to love reigns as sovereign authority.

8. You owe a debt to those who have died fighting in a war to keep that imaginary country's incomprehensible sovereign power intact.

Is there any sovereign save one whose name is Love For All? None of these, not one, are remotely true in the eyes of a child. They see a big hole in each one. They are likely to grin and say something that sounds crazy to you, like, I can just change into a boat and float. Or, I can change into a rocket and go to the stars. They find it easy to escape your learned stupidity. They just pretend along with you. Why not? They probably believe you are kidding until the day you lower the boom on them and inform them the listed certainties are more real to you than a hug and a kiss and eternal bliss. And cruelty will abound at home. The cat's out of its bag at last. The family secret is: we are monsters and must kill people in this world in order to maintain our self images. That. Is. All. War. Has. Ever. Been. About.

And the last to be seen that the enemy is us on that same day when is seen the last day of war.