The Race Human

Can there be suffering when no sufferer is present? Does nothing suffer ever? Close your eyes. What if you open them to the discovery there are no humans, no human race exists? What if you knew somebody made that up and it acts like a veil that covers and distorts pure vision? Suppose you really did know that. In that case, what you saw as a three year old is true and what you have been trained to see since is false, malarky, or nonsense.

Once a three year old boy was given a gift by his parents of several new pairs of socks the parents intended to be worn on his feet. After the parents left the child alone with his new socks, the child saw a pair of scissors nearby and was delighted to cut the toes off the socks in a motion he had seen mother do often with scissors which he never had before tried out for himself. He was so proud! When the parents looked back and saw what the child had done to the new socks they cried out and suffered. “Why, did you cut up your new socks?” they cried. “Those socks cost us money!” The boy was so upset by the question and by his parents' suffering he knew not how to reply. Then, he suddenly knew. “Because I wanted to?” he offered in a question. And he began to sob himself.

Next, someone is seeing again. Clearly, now, one sees the idea of a human race has been creating its own sufferers where there are none. This leads to the realization that the thinking people (the ones who tell me with certainty what is what) are creating the suffering for which they are then researching the ideas book to find some cures. It's like they create jobs for themselves and a whole bunch of customers where there were none. A wise man once told us, “Nobody wanted a light bulb.” He looked around the room at each person and repeated more slowly this time, “Nobody wanted a light bulb.” What else could he do for us?

Think of a person suffering; ask me how come?

My answer is I do not know; but do know a thing one.

I know of a way suffering ceases to be.

Is that enough for thee?

Why did they call it the human race?

Is it because I am graded by my pace?

What if I stop running?

Just slow down and stop running for no reason?

Decide to relinquish any claim to a crown that winners wear?

Decide to go out without combing my hair?

Mosey over to join the losers. See what they are doing.

Who will take my place in the race? Who cares?

It Is Happening

There could be no people to be called artists where all people were living art fully.

Is it too soon? Too late?

What if every moment of every day of one's life were a brilliance? No performers, people living brilliantly?

Is it too soon? Too late?

What if all the world were a stage where nobody was a player because everybody was a player? If everybody were fully engaged by his own life who would be purchasing tickets to sit passively only to serve as the audience?

What if the script has been written on your foreheads? What if the scenery of the perfect setting for a play of a lifetime were present before your five senses complete and music plays all around you and you are, all of you, stars?

photo by Jon Wharton

Who would come to a show in a world filled with brilliance? Who is it would care? I was loading wash into a machine at the laundromat when I noticed a small grey haired woman folding clothes in a tall pile that grew to a point of tipping and her nonchalant response when the laundry tower she carefully built tumbled down. She dutifully picked it all back up and built two new piles. While my laundry was washing I listened to a woman in the room play a guitar who told me she would teach me for free. She said her music is her joy and she did not want it burdened with issues concerning money. We heard the sound that is made when a large drink spills on a floor and turned to see the older lady hobbling ever so quickly with paper towels to clean up her mess. Drawn automatically to be a part of the drama, and seeing the very tiny woman had four enormous baskets of wash, I scrambled to carry a load to her car. This happened somewhere on Earth yesterday so it is not too soon nor is it too late. It is happening as you sit and read. Get with it!

GLUM PASSIVITY

Consider whether anyone can teach you how to be you. You are a surprise that arrived with a timing that permits you the ability to respond to the environment which is ever changing so as to deliver a punch. Do you expect more of yourself than that? Less? There can be a sort of a teacher, if one must have one, who tells only that you should study yourself to know yourself. That teacher, if a teacher it is, never tells you who you are and never administers a test to check up on you. How could he? You are a surprise even to you. Either you want to know yourself or you do not. Seems to me all schools are based on fear. The fear that makes schools happen is the fear that I am not enough (and my child is not enough). Bob Dylan never attended class at the university where he enrolled, saying, I did not have time. I want my grandchildren to be like that. Sadly, teachers at universities, having no clue who they are, cannot deliver the punch they came to deliver so have taken jobs at universities that promise to support them in their glum passivity. For the most part they study people who delivered a punch on time and make students memorize their names. I know that because they give tests which they grade to check up on others who have enrolled to seek the same fate. They want to determine whether any impostors have escaped detection. I also know their students build bombs for war machines and ovens for mass extermination author publications to support political genocide fill penitentiaries and nut houses foment litigation fill prescriptions for drugs otherwise illegal and build games like Wall Street and games to addict children or sell insurance and real estate or edit poetry. Glum passivity born of caustic, scathing criticism of the dreams of children is the main disease. The only cure to know thyself.

From the outset, was it ever going to work?

I was told some kings sat on thrones in Europe in 1492 where kings and queens had ruled for a very long time under a false claim of divine right claiming that God Almighty had given them power over others not to be questioned on penalty of death. There the whole property thing had begun upon a proclamation the land all belonged to the sovereign and he or she parceled it out to select favorites on a promise they would use it to amass a lot of wealth and pay taxes to the sovereign. These land owners were then falsely made by the sovereign to be royalty also ruling in specified locations under the king or queen's authority with titles to be passed on to their heirs. Or, something like that. Whatever exactly happened it was pure bullshit and everybody with a human brain knew that.

Europe became Hell for millions of its citizens who wanted out to make a new start. You know living as a serf to a bunch of megalomaniacs is no fun. It is madness. So, someone had the idea first to send these undesirables on boats across the sea if a boat could float far enough to find land and work it.

Then some of the royal gentry realized an opportunity presented itself for them to go along in first class accommodations as bosses to actually own the land that was to be found in the name of the sovereign and keep the same basic system going in the New World, which they called it. Actually, there was nothing New about it. At the beginning the white skinned Europeans thought they had found India and so called the natives of the land they came upon to be Indians. Whatever they called the people of the New World they treated them poorly indeed. Torture, murder, and rape were common. Gold was what they hoped to find first and take as their own. Much blood was spilled. It was evil.

What is hard to explain is how somebody thought to be in charge told the other Europeans that they (the bosses) had the authority to parcel out land in this so-called New World to them that would be rightfully theirs to hold for a lifetime and pass on to heirs after death. There was probably some mumbo-jumbo to the effect God wants it to be so. It involved murder to bring it about. Knowing just this much is it not easy to understand all the wars these Europeans have engaged in throughout the centuries and all the misery they have suffered? And how the squabbles are never ending? And how they threaten now to terminate the human race?

From the outset, was it ever going to work? Being convinced, are you ready to do your small part to restore sanity to the scene? I cannot think for you. You are going to have to decide, in light of what has gone before, what is required of me to accomplish that. This is no place for excuses nor for imitation of others. Something real.

One parent says to its child: You have failed to live up to the taught as proper code of behavior designed to lead you down a straight path of righteousness and you have dishonored my name. Shame on you. You were taught better.

Another says: You have failed to live up to the taught as proper code of behavior designed to lead you down a straight path of righteousness; and, so, I must confess to you, did I fail. Remember, I told you that I had found a way to live on after that failure? Well, it is what I have to offer anyone in your shoes. There is a resource in your soul that you can contact in your hour of misery and ask in your own words for help. I suggest you try that; for in so doing, I came eventually to see my downfall as a singular benefit. It may be so for you. I love you and always will. The paths of righteousness lead invariably to Hell on Earth.

Most will say with force that they know the difference between right and wrong behavior and not one of them know truth. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, as the poet wrote. And it is all we need to know.

How'd ya like to make $250,000? Do you know any red blooded American boy who would turn that down?

Suppose what you are asked to do is a little bit shady? A good deal shady? Down right felonious? Who in the employ of a corporation of a size large enough to influence legislation is not confronted with such challenges? Is it not the expected? When does a young person find it out? First year? Even before that?

Who are we kidding? We all live off the crimes. Even the small businesses are taking chances of being caught for wrongdoing to make larger profits. It is so tempting and so contagious. What else can be expected in a society that worships wealth measured in dollar earnings? Universities cheat at football to make big dough. Universities! Elementary schools cheat the system every day. Doctors cheat patients constantly. Lawyers cheat clients. Priests cheat families. The manager cheats the artist. The fan cheats the musician. And spouses? Parents? Kids? Fact is, you would have to look very closely with a powerful microscope or a blood hound to find anyone not cheating his way to the top and one of the most outrageous myths told and retold in the public media is that before law and order was brought into the picture in a wholesale way and made to be present constantly the place was filled with crime. Then it becomes easy to convince the public that we must have ever increasing police protection. It is seemingly apparent to everyone that wild, free people are horrible people. And yet, all the evidence points to the opposite. Controlled, manipulated conforming populations are wicked beyond belief. Living wild things actually get along in a naturally balanced way with little, if any, malice present. Wealthy members of the elite corps of citizens who want to believe they got that way by hard work and honest toil (and not by cheating) go to sleep at night in expensive mansions knowing that many children in their communities are starving to death unable to sleep from the pain of hunger. Some will perish in the night not because there is no food available, but because it is not available to them.

It is not the intention here to leave an impression that the poorer members of a cash driven society are victims. They are more accurately viewed as the losers in a contest of questionable virtue. In this setting it is the intention to suggest to the losers a new way of living.

The popular message is that when the lights go out on society's fun bubble of greed all of us will eat each other raw. It is at least as likely we will all finally love one another again. I would say the odds lie heavily on the side of peace. What is known, and has been so for thousands and thousands of years by some, is that if any man or woman chooses to step free of the game being played and give reality a chance to show what it can do for someone, anyone willing to accept it, wealth beyond one's wildest dreams. What is promised is a way of life that is passionately felt, and fully realized in a fulfillment at the core of one's being. That, and only that, satisfies the human heart. The other choice is to remain in a rigged game like Las Vegas with its flashy lights knowing that even if you win the prestigious award society praises you will know it is given out by liars with dirty hands which will cancel any hint of your deserving any glory. Lest you try, you will never know the purity that is felt and so known by a completely anonymous person who has given all that he has to save another.

What's Going On? And What Can be Done?

Odds are, the Salvation Army Christmas bell ringer under a flag that reads Sharing Is Caring, whose silver bell is legendary now, is never going to understand his own role in the big rip off even with his hand in the cookie jar. So, forget it that a banker or a dentist or a shoe salesman will ever see through the veil he hides behind. And the protest singer who dreams of a better day financially is not likely to hear his own song and fall down on his knees and admit his complicity in the crime he sees others committing. The only difference between the victim and the culprit today is the victim is feeling the pinch of his political world at the moment and it hurts. Take away his pain and he will protest on demand in the manner prescribed by his doctor or not at all. For example, the farmer whose land is restored to him is a born again patriot overnight with no patience for whiners. An environmentalist today is one who will go to any length to keep filth out of his habitat and never notices he enjoys a habitat when others have no place at all. Every bit of the foregoing is free of politics but you will not believe me. We are all Mister Jones in the singer's lament. No matter you clearly see the crooked deal going down there will be no change in your lifetime or mine and the singer will keep on saying, You don't know what it is that is going on, do you, Mister Jones?

We all live off the war.

So, in 1969 I was told this very thing. I wanted to change things. I found I could not. No system has ever been changed from within the system. No political action brings real change. I suggest this: an outsider be. However, since you are a product of the system you wish to see change, it will require a complete letting go of all you hold dear. Notice please how the only requirement to become an outsider is to cease everything. There is nothing to be done. Just clean up and stop aggravating the wound. Let nature handle the rest. You are actually a good person if you only knew yourself. In my own experience, when a person stops what he has been doing he attracts unconditional love from others and an epidemic of love erupts. A fountain is discovered that has always been here. Life takes on new meaning. Prosperity happens with abundance for all who are free of any system. (Life is not a system.)

Now, the above, too, is free of all politics and you still will not believe me. A picture has been drawn this way-

to have love you must lose love

to have wealth you must lose wealth

to have life you must lose it

This is so, for you hold the false so tightly to your bosom you do not know what love, wealth nor life happen truly to be. Give away all you have and come and follow me was never meant to be heard as give away your holdings and come be poor, wretched, and miserable with me. Oh, no. Not that. This paragraph, too, is free of all politics and you still will not believe me.

A rich man according to the world's measuring cannot enter the Kingdom of God. There. You have it. And, this, too, is free of all politics and still you will not believe me.

There is nothing can be done.