More on Pure Action

Jesus, it is told, was resurrected from the dead. Only Jesus knew. A firefighter has risked his life to save that of a stranger. When interviewed he tells “I only did what anybody would have done”. Neither you nor I can see that take place. We see him take a great risk. Only the firefighter knows his action to be quite natural. A man spits in the face of another. The other simply wipes the spit from his face and tells later that at the moment of the spitting he registered nothing within himself concerning the spitting man. He had nothing to forgive nor anything to avenge. Neither you nor I see that. Only Atticus in To Kill A Mockingbird knew it to be completely natural action. Pure action is from another dimension beyond thought. In athletic competition it is referred to as “the zone”. In that state nothing I do can fail. Pure action is another world here and now open to us all. Find out for yourself. 

 PURE ACTION

What Is It?

The Story of Jesus Is To Me The Story Of Pure Action. It is the story of resurrection from death. Organized Christianity seeks converts on that basis. Jesus died for you. It adds he died for your sins. That has to be a load of guilt for any convert. Suppose we all agree Jesus died. We all will. Next let’s look at resurrection. Rebirth. In some way, Jesus’s story represents when one dies one lives! Many Christians and many non-Christians know that. It is so because death is a pure action. Life is pure action, too. So, life and death, inseparable, have something in common. 

And all who live have life and death in common. All who know that when one dies one lives say life and death are one. It just may be so that all human beings qualify as Christians in this one sense. All must die and death and life are one. I see it this way. 

There is definitely a way to die while the body lives. It is giving up psychologically to this world of personal worship in self-centered action as we are taught to experience it to find another world parallel to the one given up that is far superior.

Truth is not property of any group but belongs to us all without joining up with a chosen bunch. No dues or fees. Pure action is action anonymous. Hey, Action Anonymous, that’s AA, which is the death of personal worship. Sports coaches teach their players to act for the team because that is the way to victory! Life is a team sport. The team is all humanity. Action by a human who feels that way must be pure action as much so as the firefighter who risks his life to save that of a stranger…because the team we belong to without a doubt is humanity as a whole. We were automatically enlisted as a part of that team at birth. 

We can agree that life is pure action. Death is pure action. And action taken by a human that is for the team is pure action. What is not going to be explored here is “how”. How carries with it the corrupt notion that you do not know and drags us back to seeking the best group to join by comparison and measurement. We know how to take pure action. Nobody need train a firefighter how to take pure action. If a child could not learn to walk without being taught by an adult nobody would walk. We crawl. We stand. We walk. Adults who already walk simply feed the child and stay out of the way. That is the way of pure action. Feed each other and stay out of the way.

Sigmund Freud studied the behavior of infants and of adults and concluded that infantile personality is such that the baby believes all its needs will be met as if by magic while the adult personality is such that it knows its needs are going to be dreamed up by its brain and met by its own efforts. He wanted to teach the adult who remains in an infantile manner to grow up and face the facts of life as he ( Freud) saw it. It is becoming clear to humans now that the infant has no personality as yet and simply lives by pure action. It is more wise for the adult to become as a child in that respect, eliminating its adult personality to find resurrection or pure action while alive.

 GREAT NOTHINGNESS  

Seek Great Nothingness with all your might for it is the home of love, peace  and compassion. We are creatures absolutely inseparable from Great Nothingness and yet to seek that, which is totally alien in our lives, is quite extraordinary in the world as we know it. Thought separates everything and demands concentration. So it is at odds with anything outside the limited area to be concentrated upon. Teacher does not want the students to look out the window when teacher is lecturing. That is supposed to make the students smarter. Does it? Or, might it actually make them accept and admire dumbness? Find out. The King does not want any of his subjects to object to a war he is waging which is always said by the King to be a war to bring about peace. That is an example of dumbness brought about by concentrating on but a fragment of reality. Can you see?

Through paying full attention to nature, what everything else living participates in, one can happen upon something extraordinary. Call it what you will. It is called here Great Nothingness. Such a non-thing cannot be organized and taught in schools by a method of concentration and memorization. One has got to look out the window. Nature is in perfect order by the fact it is nature. It belongs to everybody equally. Excludes nobody. Rather than separate it unites. I am reminded how music united rednecks and hippies in the seventies. Extraordinary happenings like that are worthy of all of every child’s attention. Organized religions separate people by arguing over God. That is another example of dumbness. It is possible to find that which unites all people as one by simply joining without reservation the world to  which we obviously belong. Truly, it is impossible in this way to fail to find it.  Science is indeed unscientific in failing miserably in this regard. I know a math genius who cannot ask a woman to go for a walk.

To close, I am reminded of a great saying attributed to Plato and to later mortals. The saying is: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. Everything I read on the internet about the saying totally misses the point. So, it is no wonder the identity of its author is unclear. Nobody seems to grasp that the battle everyone fights all the time is within the fighter, not a struggle against any outside circumstances. Really listen to Bob Dylan’s music. 

Once that is clear one sees immediately the cause of all other conflicts. The war within us is the cause. Why do we continue to wage wars of all kinds against one another…why did Cain kill Abel? Only when the cause of conflict is seen, really seen as fact, will anyone cease conflict with everybody and be kind. Until that happens the slogan is just a slogan reminding one that we ought to be good, not bad. And like all slogans committed to memory and repeated, ad infinitum, it will have no real effect. But, anyone can be kind to a stranger for real at any time without joining a peaceful movement or asking anyone’s permission and regardless of what all others do by seeing the cause of all conflict as the battle inside me. Looking within, into the battle there, conflict ends for that one individual. Great Nothing cheerfully accepts the blame. 

What is a problem? What is its makeup?

A dictionary states it this way:

In everyday language, a problem is a question proposed for solution, a matter stated for examination or proof. In each case, a problem is considered to be a matter which is difficult to solve or settle, a doubtful case, or a complex task involving doubt and uncertainty.

Or, a problem exists when a current situation compared to the ideal situation is unacceptable and must be changed. Problems seem to raise the question ”How can this current situation be made ideal?” Right?

The most urgent matter to be addressed in the case of a problem is to notice that facts actually exist and ideal situations do not exist. It is one thing to deal directly with a fact and an altogether different matter to try to deal with an ideal which does not exist and will always involve conceptual preferences of self interest. Self interest corrupts any attempt at certainty. It is guesswork at best. And guesswork will bring  new problems with any of its attempted solutions. Always there is loss and the problem solver is worse off by trying than just accepting the current situation as fact. Such effort is completely wasted. Wasting energy is foolishness. More to come on that score.

What is going to be revealed next is the most important learning a human being can receive. It relieves one of the futility of an existence in a world of ever increasing problems. And brings peace.

For centuries humans were baffled with a problem of alcoholism. Nothing they tried helped. The poor creatures afflicted by the condition were seemingly beyond aid. They were condemned to a horrible life leading to a pitiful death meanwhile inflicting pain on those who loved them. Then came a miraculous discovery by two drunkards themselves that resulted in the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous. Millions have recovered from a seemingly hopeless condition!

The heart of the Twelve Steps is Number One. It is an admission that the fact is a fact. The admission is no easy matter. Great courage is required to actually mean it when one says “I am powerless to do anything to change my situation.” Hopefully, some who have not faced such a moment can still feel its power in there lives. By the strength of the admission self is removed from the picture long enough for a selfless solution to occur in a flash of insight. A direct flash!  Seeing the fact as it is is all that was ever needed! These men and women never drank alcohol again, not as a punishment or retribution for sin but by an obvious realization that absent self-centered interest which sets humans at odds with each other and nature they had no use whatsoever for alcoholic consumption. Freedom is a fact now for those fortunate ones who can understand the real problem was.…me… and that eliminates the need for problem solving for all time.

My sponsor in AA told me that every morning since he made the admission his first order of business is to humble himself before Truth and admit from his soul that I am going into the world today without sword or shield so if I need defending today in any way, you, are going to have to do it for I am not going to lift a finger in my own defense nor to have my own way.

Do you see the implications of such an attitude? It helped me greatly to recall the meaning of the term”attitude” is derived from the nautical term for the direction of a ship at sea that determines a successful crossing. And I find it humorous indeed that a pair of drunks found the secret to life! There is something about drunks not easily understood by those without the affliction which involves a stubborn refusal to march in lockstep with the crowd that is wasting so much energy solving problems in the interest of self that always create so many more. The great poet William Blake wrote: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.

In my own case, I can say that since I began following my sponsor’s daily attitude I find it is so that one in that posture has no response psychologically whatever to insult or threat. There is simply nothing present to receive them. What happens is in the nature of pure action and that is precisely the same secret discovered by those first two drunks who formed AA. Pure action is quite different from self-centered action or problem solving. It is from a different dimension entirely. It is a fact. Try it for yourself. It will do you no good until it is your truth. There is virtually no power in believing somebody else. Find out.

 GOING HOME

I’ve been reading a very different book to any I have read before called The Origin of Vermillion by Katy Masuga. I ordered it because I heard her interviewed in France or Belgium concerning the book and learned she is a lover of Henry Miller’s writing and has written two monographs on his works and I happened upon Henry Miller at a tiny library in Jonestown Texas and found inside its pages a close friend so I wanted to read her book as soon as possible. 

Writing a play concerning wild kids has taken me back to Bob Dylan again and again. I own two DVD’s of his early career in the 60’s. There is a time on a European tour in 1966 in Italy where a reporter asked him, “When will you return to Italy?” And Bob replies, in pain, holding his head and rocking, “I don’t know. I just want to go home.”

In that is something all humans have that fascinates me. "I just want to go home." The alpinist wants that. In her book at one point Katy Masuga writes about a character who sees a trail of skywriting with a crowd who are trying to read the message and all the particular character sees is a message for him directly. “They are signaling me “ he says. He cannot read the words, does not consider the message to be words, only beauty, exquisite beauty. 

It is a life that amounts to a following of signals of exquisite beauty that I find to be real. At a point of watching all collapses into a wholeness, like cream stirred into a cup of hot coffee, and nobody is there to say that some signaler who can be named sent a message to some receiver who can be named. It happened. It is being home. 

I am beginning to appreciate the difference between “concentration” of ones faculties (school learning) and “giving full “attention" of all one’s faculties to all there is (adventure) two entirely different ways of living…different dimensions. I find it profoundly sacred that the people who know a remarkable mountain climber or tight rope walker report he is doing something extremely dangerous as seen from where they are situated and yet is completely at peace and comfortable. Don’t you?

 CEASE THE GAME

After being plagued with miseries arising from within me from anger, fear, hatred, and sex problems for some period of time I suddenly admitted to myself that I am all of it and can do nothing about that. I came to an abrupt halt with all dialog over the years of denial and the commitments to become a better person. I had had it is the best I can express it. No more. In the instant I mention I met God in the sense I met the place inside where mankind must have originally discovered God-not the concept but the reality because as suddenly as I made the admission I felt the deepest peace I had ever known. The feeling is freedom. What a surprise I had! Never had it occurred to me that If I admitted my shortcomings in a genuine way, passionately, I would find what I had so long striven for. Peace at last!

In a miraculous fashion I had come to see the source of all my misery had been the “talking image” of my self that had been planted in my brain and fed by society and to discover true God as a breath of fresh air. The answer was blowing in the wind for me but I had been listening to confused noise and could not hear it.  Suddenly, scriptural wisdom was freely my own. That which I was searching for I had. That which I was searching for I had not lost. It is situated in such a place it cannot be taken from me, a place where moth and dust do not corrupt. Divine consciousness makes me humanly present. No politics for me. No organized religion for me. I know that a regular bowel movement is far more valuable than discovering a gold mine.

 Sometime about 8,000 years ago or earlier some humans ceased a hunter-gatherer way of life and promoted living in settled communities with designated worship sites apart from others not associated in their minds as “one of them”. Later these were replaced by larger and larger temples for worship of the god or gods of their imaginations which were thought to have the interest of the members of a group as its priority since these were the very people who “believed” in the particular god or gods they  prayed to and who performed the rituals to flatter, gratify and coerce them (and the angels and fairies and other imagined helpers to them) to take their side on matters. Probably, this odd and foolish practice was begun by someone’s brain asking the question: Can I have a better life? The “I” or “Self” asking it is at the center of such a thought. Self-centered thought was activated at fixed locations and envy was born into the world. Which immediately was followed by the question:  “How can I accomplish a better life?” Envy proliferates like a wildfire. Human brains changed. Had to. And with it was built a mentally drawn world of problems. 

Schools were thought up as a need in this new world to develop children into problem solvers instead of playful wild monkeys. Solving problems brought the political world into fashion. Had to. Leaders and planners of this “progressive” scheme had to be designated as had been the imagined gods for better living by the community. So, it was thought that it would be most advantageous to have the imagined gods and their helpers appoint the political leaders for the community. This practice is so widespread and entrenched in thought it has become what is called and understood to be “natural” when it is anything but natural. Political power and religious power on Earth are both products of self-centered thinking and, therefore, quite unnatural. The important thing to find out is that self center is not you, is not even existent. Do you understand that? 

The term “human nature” is bandied about in schools everywhere though it has no legitimate meaning at all.  Better it would be to call what is going on here the nature of chaotic thinking. All historical study is really the study of self-centered thinking. It is so chaotic it is even labeled to be “Freedom” by the intelligentsia. It has to be the history of false freedom and false progress. But, understandably, is the result of a prideful curiosity. Let us worship ourselves is a pleasurable idea. Even though that history turns out to be abundantly humiliating! History of every form of human suffering. 

One argument commonly advanced in defense of what has been labeled human nature is the one that goes “every combat soldier under fire on a battlefield will pray to the God we taught him to pray to!” That is supposed to prove everybody who hears the message is really a Christian. In actuality, that argument begs the question. Only consider the life of any such poor soldier under fire at the moment and the prayer amounts to “Can I have better way of life?” So our children are still asking the question thousands of years after problem solving on behalf of a designated portion of humanity, with its separate flag, arose because it has definitely not worked to provide a better way of life. In fact, each soldier is most likely to call out “Mama?” That cry is at the heart of the passion in the writer which writes this piece today. “Mama? Are you there?”

Nobody speaks for the whole of humanity. Every attempt at improving life for fewer than all has created more problems. In awhile, people in everyone of these fixed communities were flooded with problems. More and more effort to solve them eventually led to incursions upon neighboring peoples and brought warfare, the ultimate chaos. People invented more and more ways to try and force “other” people, viewed as “enemies”, to provide a better way of life to them. Conquest became a justified activity until, ultimately, it became settled in human thought as a duty owed to gods who instructed them in warfare in their imaginations and instructed them in the educating of their children to make of them killers and masters of “other” conquered humans. Politicians and church personnel preach that to suffer as we do is our fate as proof of our needing them to continue to lead us. Where? Belief got us into this mess and the belief we cannot do any better while living on Earth as humans is all that is keeping us there. Another term for that”belief” is fear.

Crucial to the development and growth of the mess we are in today was the asking initially of “How can I have a better world”. And the one, if not the only, answer being “We must call on a Greater Power” to show us the way to have a better life because we do not know how. In this manner what can be called the true Satan came to be leader of human activity on Earth. A true God or Creative force is the champion of all or none at all of its creation. That goes without saying. Nature, including its humans, is in balance. Cease praying for anything better and find the humility to say : ”Thank You for a balanced world!” What follows that will astound.

Satan is the name for the giver of better ways. People pray to Satan using names like “Heavenly Father”.  In his great song “With God On Our Side” a very young Bob Dylan pointed out this insanity worldwide. In his way, a child of the time simply pointed out to everyone the “Emperor” is naked in a brilliant song. Hans Christian Anderson had made a children’s story ages before to warn of the terrible spell the adults had fallen under. The story has been translated into over 100 languages worldwide. As a child I heard the story, liked it very much, but what can a kid do to change what is happening among grownups? God’s on our side is a complete contradiction. Bob Dylan also wrote words that caused an uproar of feeling in his beloved song, “Blowing In The Wind”. The answer, he sings, is unfolding for us all, together, as one, with no effort on our part. It is done. We gotta find the way inside ourselves, friends, where the true creation of each human has taken place already, or not at all. Satan, the giver of better ways, completely an illusion, is a very powerful fact now, and ain’t gonna change its stripes. Can I have a better life? is a confession of “confusion”. Confusion makes only more confusion.

Wouldn’t it be strange to hear a human voice ask, “How can I help somebody else have a better life”? Actually, a facet of the way humans live that is mostly ignored is how obvious it is that within every grouping of man that excludes anybody there almost immediately arises conflict. It grows, too. Americans, for example, do horrible things to each other. It is the same for all other groupings. Insiders in the development and operation of a hospital feud and deceive and play cutthroat with their co-workers. The way of self-centered gratification fails in all its attempts. Still it is done as if mandated by God or human nature. It can be ended. Seeing will end it.