DOOR

1 For a long time there were people who depended on God's way.

Then came a strange people who depended on a store.

2 These blind people carried powerful rifles and other things of war

assembled in factories and sold by the store.

The blind ones could see not that the store owned them

and all they once were proud to stand for

were lost to them as beggars who with shrunken soul

knew not life nor what it is for but had weapons of war and the things in a store and a plan which they misrepresented as part of a method they called strategy along with a slogan tell them what you have to tell even if it be untruth and tell nothing more. And never feel inwardly bound by what you have told before. And, sadly, the people of God's way kept not their wits about them that would have warned them to stay away and not trade with these ones who belonged to a store.

3 And no one saw that the art of the blind was also without vision and that it was an art that said as much and it continues to this day to be that same way filled with sorrow and pain and regret and they sing it and dance it and write of it and make films around it and worship most strongly through the things from the store which by now does not have to be a material place staffed by people at all but an imaginary store reached by clicking and robots bring the things from the lifeless store to my door.

4 This is a heartless, sterile way to live I tell you. I yearn to return to the way it was before. My heart tells me to sit with the yearning and let it build to a roar and when it forces a shout leap up and roar! And look for a yet unfound door. And, by Golly, remember where to find what you never lost from the road of before and this time hold tight as a human to the treasure of the heart like your ancestors of forgotten lore written in a forgotten language, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.

Nobody Else Can Do It You For*

A hint: seek and read as if your life depends upon it Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

A Look

I have begun a book. It is entitled Look Homeward, Angel written by someone named Thomas Wolfe who died quite young, leaving some books behind for us. It has taken me a week to read the first 60 pages of the novel. I am no expert, just a human being alive enjoying this moment I write. I am a poor writer, I know that. The only thing I can say is that the subject I write about is great. In that sense and that sense only am I a great writer like someone who writes about horses might be called a horse writer.

I found Mr. Wolfe's amazing contribution to us in the library of a tiny school in a mountain village in the cloud forest of Costa Rica where I am a visitor. Having read so little of it you may wonder why I am already writing its praises. I just had to. I have a feeling I have little chance of finishing it but am eager to attempt that.

This unusual, to say the least, book is opening me to a more genuine understanding of what it means to be human, as we call it. It moved me already to speak out what I have felt. Should it be there is no time to waste is there no time to use? Moments are not subject to the drama of waste, having no consequences. Time, it is said, can be used or wasted. But, as yet, I have not found anyone who is living or has lived who can answer what it can be used for. Has it any legitimate purpose? Anyone who could, would certainly have an advantage over me.

The Wolfe book is telling me indirectly, as novels are written to do, that at the same time a family of people are experiencing all manner of trials and tribulations just as the consequences of birth, something else is happening to them that is of another nature entirely. It is apparent to all that life is worth living whenever the second thing I alluded to is apparent, and only then. The other experience, the one with consequences, seems to dominate us, even the ones of us believed to be more holy than the bulk of the population. This fact makes everyone wonder why they are even alive.

It is about time we are so concerned. A false clock is attempting to control us. It knows not of the moment. Now is a synonym for contentment, absolute, with no worry- for there are no consequences to it. Rivers flow, flowers bloom, trees give shade to all regardless of age or gender or name or credentials or criminal record. There is nothing to do but savor. This now thing happens to the family in the novel who are just riddled with flaws and unable to understand life at all. It seems to happen once in awhile but when it is happening there is no concept of time so it can raise the question,”Was that reality or is this reality? They all experience admiration for each other although they clearly should not whenever consequences are considered to be relevant. The very moment the world of consequences occurs to any of them they harm one of the others, every time, as if they have no choice. In short, these monsters are capable of greatness.

As I read the novel I find myself going along with the author's unstated (so far) belief these people are to be admired for their courage if nothing else. Much as one might have to admire, if only a little bit, someone who actually plays Russian Roulette with a pistol and a single bullet. It is heavy for me to write this down but somehow feels necessary. Am I admirable in such a way?

My own father are these people and I became him. (This I feel is a paragraph.)

I Am

I am a Buddhist but not distracted by the word Buddhist

without any oath, without robes, and without the teachings of the Buddha

and I am a Christian but not distracted by the word Christian

without any creed, without candles or crosses, and without the teachings of Christ

I am a Jew without distractions of any sort

I am a Hindu without distractions of any sort

I am a Muslim without distractions of any sort

I am as I am and as I am I can see the truth inborn same as anyone sees

and all truth is my religion without distractions of any sort

and that frees me in a certainty

truth needs no advocate

it's obvious to me

Truth stands so tall it cannot oversee

a cowardly, pushy truth is no truth to me

Let me tell you what I have been shown

If I attach myself to a word I must say, I shall believe, and allow no distraction!

But permitting no distraction is the greatest distraction of them all

It has been mentioned by religious people forever as the Last Distraction

But it is the First Distraction!

Who has forgotten all words?

Who has forgotten even silence?

I want to talk to that person

What Is A Society, Really?

What is a society, really, in simple understandable terms?

It has many aspects but the moment any one of them is all of them can be understood. Let's look at one. Consider a professional football team. It is actually a corporation, not a team at all. The team is owned and controlled. The main purpose of the corporation is to make money from its ownership of the rights to field a team in competition against other teams who operate under the rules made by an association of all the owner-corporations in a sports league. Each corporation owning such rights owns a team of athletes, a stadium, the exclusive rights to the team's logo so as to merchandise all types of products for sale to fans of the team, most of which remain throughout their lives completely ignorant of any of these arrangements and prefer that condition to reality so they can actually fall into a thinking pattern which attaches to a created group think, psychologically designed, to hypnotize them and their friends and loved ones into a trance that has them feeling strong loyalties to a completely imaginary system. No corporation of record, and they have no existence otherwise (unlike you and me), none of them bleed, feel pain or give a damn about us. 

Johnny Cash sang a song dealing with drug addiction the horrors of which he had experienced personally and from which he was able to find freedom. A simple opening line of the song is: “I hurt myself today”. What is described above in discussion of one aspect of an organized society which of itself is only a minor part of a huge web wrought out of nothing, a figment, called a nation is equally addictive and more disgraceful by far. The number of casualties and atrocities during all the wars waged over the centuries is incalculably enormous. In fact, wars are fought by young boys who are drugged to enable them to kill like maniacs and endure its horror.

What have we become?

The goal or driving force behind the sports team is to win the Super Bowl and become a dynasty. The goal of a society is to become an Empire. Most of its citizens will remain fans. However many fans will become bored and drop out of the scene to be labeled as losers by owners and fans. Only a small proportion of its citizens will own one or more of its teams. They run the show. Do we honestly believe that without a society organized in such a way, you and I would be too inept or stupid to share the Earth in a happy, fulfilling way? One thing we do know by now, though, is the way we are going about it has totally failed billions of us. The key thing to understand is simple: the creation of an organized society automatically and with absolute certainty creates a drive to build an empire. This means all but a relative few will be dragged headlong into an abyss reeking havoc along the way.

Now for some good news. The Maker created the Universe to be friendly to all who will receive its warmth as a gift. Arrogance is the true enemy of people. Humility opens a door you do not know exists if you but give it a chance. There is another way to live that is fulfilling. Trust in the giant who you are to show you day by day. It is as sure as the tides and the Sun and the Moon and gravity and breath there is a society afoot that was not organized by the mind of man. It does not print money and does not build jails and never argues.

We humans are here to care for each other in the face of cold, heartless societies. We alone have hearts.

And Another Thing, Too,

In a silly press conference in the sixties, Bob Dylan, when asked to define Folk Music replied, “a constitutional replay of mass production”. I refer to this moment as an entry into a very important fact of modern life concerning humanity all over Earth. Mister Dylan was playing and he was making a serious point that if made directly then would have been ignored. It sticks out to this day as an unanswered dilemma, and a growing cancer.

What have we become?

We will hurt ourselves again today. We sponsor our injections in pain-numbing doses and blame “them”.

It is not to say that there are no true art expressions. It is that there are so many fakes so readily made available they drown the real thing. The rela thing requires a serious, diligent, unstoppable search, and it always will. Art used by a system of mass production to further its interests is bound to be a “replay of mass production”. The question on all the minds of all the artists used this way is “what sells?”.

Book publishers, theatre production companies, film production companies, from the largest right on down to the single artist acting alone on his laptop attempting with the best of intentions to make dough from his art are asking it.

As an example, a sizable commitment in time and money and professional collaborators was made just prior to the almost certain entry of the United States into World War II in the form of a film entitled How Green Was My Valley. That award winning film, emotionally stirring, brings tears to all our eyes to this day. The performances were of the highest quality. It is called a masterpiece. It portrays real hardships in a low-income mining village of proud hard working miners and their families. Wages were being cut for these men solely because the owners could hire unemployed workers from nearby towns at lower even starvation wages. The patriarch of one of the families who has spent his whole life in the local mine dies as the result a cave-in at the end of the film. The whole story has been told as seen through the eyes of an innocent child of that unfortunate man. All who watch suffer his grief. But, the film ends in hope. It is the replay ending of all such works. We hurt ourselves with the pain of the miserable state of

our true situation as much as we think watchers will tolerate and then entertain the hope that we can keep up the same way of life that has led us time and again to horror and one day all will be as it should be.

I have known, sadly, a lot of alcoholics who have followed this tired, old saw right into the jaws of death. One more. But for grace, one of them would have been me. We have met the Illuminati and it are us.

“Illuminati” is a word for an unknown who is, or one day may be, the real ruler of the world. It is us, our greed, our fear, our anger, our intolerance, our ignorance. Each is brought to the point of realization in his own life, and it happens this way, I am the one I hate. What have I become? Maybe the Dark is from my eyes? The evil I see in another is in me.

In this manner is the solution a most personal thing. I must end the process for myself, begun in childhood, of following another's formula for my life. It turns out “The Jedi Knight” or the One I have been wishing for and praying to, is me, and has been all along. I know I truly joined the entire human race when I ceased looking outside for my answers. We are in the same boat.

And another thing

Go to a lecture at ivy-covered Harvard University (there you will see a living pyramid of ass-kissing action). You'll not hear anything so wise and powerful as time spent alone with a tree. Einstein received Theory of Relativity from a beam of light he watched bouncing around free. And, he was a misfit, an outsider, a daydreamer who wrote to his family, saying, it would have been better had I never been born. Said he wanted to understand how God thinks. Do you and I want that? What better way than to listen to God's own symphony? Indeed, what other way is there? A pyramid? That accursed management tool?

That was a fool's attempt to outwit death. Many workers struggled in service to that monstrosity and not one Pharaoh has come back to collect his treasure (still in the pyramid, stolen, or in a museum) or to give out advice about cheating death. What is known popularly as science operates in a cloudy, murky closet directed from the top down in the image of a pyramid. Same is true of politics and religion and education and business and all facets of the art and speech worlds. All of these are dollar driven. The same figure is displayed on the dollar bill and that's as unstable as a three-legged table. Man, talk about failing to learn from experience!

Life thinks. Anything that comes between man and the way life thinks retards brilliance. Because of the long endured tyranny of pyramid regimentation, which is the opposite of how life thinks, it has always had to come from the fugitive, the misfit, the daydreamer who reaches somehow beyond the weight of suffering loneliness to call attention to truth. Now, more than ever before, do we lack the genius of brilliance. Never did it have to be rare. It need be rare no longer.

If we only will listen, Yours, Oh Sweet Giver of Brilliance, is our deliverance!

The Way I Am

It is established in understanding now that water by its nature flows along the path of least resistance on its way to join the oceans. How convenient. Is there a similar dynamic available to an ordinary human being like me which will help me find an ocean of peace in my life? It happens there is such a friendly dynamic awaiting my discovery. It works like this: when I follow the path of least resistance I find a friendly power that leads me gradually to take on the attributes of an ocean of peace that I am a part of by my nature. Conveniently, I absorb the exact type of qualities in the correct amount I am going to need as I flow along my way. I am fortunate after all.