What We Know Already

Nothing is demanded of us.

Call that love.

Anything short of what love demands is doomed.

Ask anybody on Earth if you do not believe me.

Can you accept that love?

That wants only for you that you be you?

That the music of your heart be played?

Love demands only that we show

no allegiances to anything else.

Do not ask, what is meant by love?

All that shows is how wounded is the pride

of belonging to mistrusted humanness.

Mistrusted humanness.

How sad is that?

Love cannot mean anything else.

Most know pride only as pride in

believing I am not just a human.

That followed being taught the lie

something is demanded of you.

As love, you cannot be anything else but

what you are.

Tap the artesian well of love within.

Love goes its own way.

We join the way of that explosion

or we do not

in the simple way of not joining

anything else.

Love cannot be anything else.

Settle in.

Already I have reminded you

that all humans alive know this to be so.

There is no need to teach it.

All that is required, if anything is required,

is to honor that in everybody you meet.

One man said, I believe Joe is a

nut. The other replied, yes,

he is just as nutty as we are

only in a different way.

The above conversation illustrates the point that everybody wants the

same thing and we have been acting as if that is not so too long not to stop now. Trust in you for a change. That which yields to truth surpasses

that which resists it in every moment. It is as if two wolves reside in

each person, an ignorant wolf and a wise wolf.

The one you feed is going to win.

I want to avoid being so wordy I feed ignorance.

I looked up

at the blue sky and its clouds spread across it and saw written there for me, I am Alive! I am here! It 

is now! I closed my eyes and sheltered in such love and when I opened them the sky had grown 

blank, pure whiteness. A moment had come and I had seen.  

How can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride?
K Gibran 

NOTHING 7

Let me tell what I have been shown. Let me tell it well. Many have told of an experience in times of great difficulty or at moments of triumph and glory when they were suddenly released from the limits of body and rose away from it to a point above or beyond it from which they could observe their body and all the other bodies around it and see easily the way it is and the way for them to go. This made what is ordinarily thought of as miraculous into an ordinary task. They like to remember these times and to tell about them and rejoice at the experience. That happens. Yet, it does not see far. For that reason the same difficulty is going to happen all over again. Most people I meet think this is the way life is, it hands us troubles, sometimes huge ones. Look deeper and see we make those difficulties ourselves because we are blind. All hero stories end at a point where a new hero story begins.

A mosquito was bothering an old man. He lifted his right arm and waved away the insect and blew wind from his mouth to say “Go, Mosquito Brother, do not bother me. I am here as a friend to all.” That is what is meant by seeing far.

I tell of the mosquito because it is the small things get to people most and cause the most trouble to us. Engineers are put to work because somebody decided a river was in the wrong place so was not going the right way and needed to be corrected. It amounts to, “I need the water to complete my little plan.” Always, it is a little selfish plan behind these big projects and the others, the crowd, or the mob, we just go along for the ride being told this plan is for the overall good. Wars that kill millions begin this way. By the time the historians tell of it, the people of an entire generation have completely endorsed the little plan as their own and hold it to be sacred.

To know how to address the mosquito is to know how to prevent wars. One who has the know how to prevent war is bound to live at peace. And, the general who prevents war goes unnoticed by historians, naturally, because the historian is ignorant of what a large thing is inside a human being that acts in the presence of humility. And a historian would close his shop if he knew of it.

To conquer whole nations and enslave a million people and corral 10,000 thoroughbred stallions and capture 1,000 wives is puny compared with the know how of the old man who addressed the tiny mosquito in the correct way. I want you to understand this because I love you. You are deceived. King Arthur was a fool. So, were all the other studs you read about as heroes of your culture's historical record. Did you finish it, by the way? Arthur landed in the soup. Merlin tried to warn him I am told. But, would he listen? No. Too busy with his little plan, his castle, his queen, and his round table of a few brave knights. Had he only known what the old man knows who has overcome the irritation of a single mosquito with neither sword nor bomb.

The stories worth telling are not very popular these days. Did you read the one about the Green Knight? There's a tale worth the pondering. Another one is about a fella who decided to spend his whole life making a perfect walking stick. It took about 150 years to find the right tree to obtain the proper wood for a perfect stick. Lost in his work, he lived happily for eons and eons and more eons. 

Nothing 6

I watched recently a film depicting the rich mythology of the American Indians. White man (what is intended by the term is those people of lighter skin who imagine ourselves to be separate and different from people of darker skin color) teaches the world that he is a member of a culture that represents a departure from primitive ways into a modern world of interesting opportunities for advancement.

As I see it, when people grow bored and anxious, they fall prey to any force that promises relief. What culture offers, as it is practiced, is a multitude of distractions. What red culture offered is a difficult quest by each individual to discover inner power of the person with the promise of fulfillment as a human being through self realized abundance of a different kind altogether. Once the lighter skins also taught this other way to their children and grandchildren. No longer. The way to be a true human being rather than an entertainment freak is the difference I see.

In 1492, a lot of bored, mentally unsettled young men in Europe were roped into a plan as a disciplined, trained and armed force crossing the Atlantic in boats in search of riches. The nature of the adventure is well documented torture and rape and pillage and enslavement and murder of millions of people. I was born 450 years after the bloody affair began and after all the people of a darker skin color throughout North and South America had been subjugated to a life in service to the dominant white culture. At the present time, the entertainment freaks are way out in the lead, worldwide. They have a web you have attached yourself and your family to. Like a spider, it catches prey quite effectively. That's about the size of it. The people caught in the web believe they have found freedom and praise the spider and bow to it.

Amazing, how the other way hangs around, though. Tough little bastard, I reckon. Undeniable. It attracts the hearts of people; and at its own pace. I am certainly grateful for the chance that came my way at a critical point in my life to catch a ride with the soaring bird of the winged life. So, I do not recommend any attempt to change those freaks, but the undertaking of a difficult quest by each individual to discover inner power of the person. Perhaps, in that way, some others will be inspired to rise above the ashes of the suffering world.

Nothing 5

Some special quality I experience in a person makes me label that one a friend of mine. It is not the name or the address or the credentials, or the values and traditions, or the looks, or even the personality. It is in spite of all that. A friend is one I have beheld as timeless, nameless purity.

“What ever do you mean by purity?” you may ask. Fuck, I don't know. And, that's it! Purity cannot be anything else.

So, now I am contented to look at people searching for that nameless purity, and nothing else, until I see it. Whenever I see it, I shall embrace it! If I should never again see that person as my friend, so be it. It means that one has decided to hide the friend within from me. As a waterfall contains a power of awesome strength a human being contains a nameless purity of soul.

A true friend cannot be anything else. 

DYLAN'S DIFFERENT, All RIGHT

Why has it been the rule that so many...all...other performers, singers, musicians who work with and know Bob Dylan say, “He's a very private person” when asked to talk about him?

My take on it is that what he is about, has always been about, is so alien to others, even ones who do what appears to be the same work as he does, that they can only express it as, he's different. That much is clear to them. Among the paid commentators, and critics, who philosophize, disgrace, and criticize all fears, some try to go deeper and settle on reporting that he was able in the space of a performance to enter into a song and live through it and that is what the audience who got him saw and heard and felt, and to an extent it's true, but, the real power of Dylan, the private person, lies in the fact he is singing what he lives all day in the hope you, the listener, will also know you are what he is telling you you ought not be...do not have to be, and that telling is not in the music nor the words of the song but from the core of it, making use of music and lyrics, live, onstage, to arouse his audiences- arouse us on our own behalf….for example, the early Dylan, known as the folksinger, sang a song entitled No More Auction Block For Me. For many it is a disagreeable noise that goes right past them and does not apply to them, they believe. For the rest it is heard as a song calling on white people to recognize the plight of black slaves and rise up to the cause of abolition. A very few realize this singer knows about real freedom and knows we, the white folks, do not have it, but could, and just as the black person who has thrown off his chains sings, we could sing. Dylan never served the music business. All those others did...and do still. In closing, is it not so that the slaveholder is as much a slave as the ones he believes to be his human property? Have you never watched a dog train its master on a walk in a city park? Or, watched a child train a parent? An employee train an employer? For Heaven's sake, have you never realized even for a moment how much you serve your cell phone? Your watch? To me, Dylan sings that none of these relationships are real, just a waste of precious time.

Dylan is a true friend. Oscar Wilde said, “A true friend will stab you in the front.” I sometimes miss my true friend. I miss the gifts sent my way. The music. The images. The messages from a secret heart cavern. I thought these things this morning early while watching dawn break in an imperceptible motion of lights. Decided to tell you. Please stab me some more.