Monthly Archives: June 2014

When we are young, we have no sense of our own wisdom.  We view anyone we perceive as showing the slightest wisdom to be more enlightened than ourselves, and we are impressed.  And we adopt their wisdom… well… we attempt to emulate it, not at all discerning that their wisdom is just an ignorance that doesn’t look particularly like our own.

As we age, and as, unwittingly, the wisdom we were born with dissipates and disappears in the inundation of fabricated data that the culture smothers us in which we collect calling it education, we begin to perceive ourselves to be wise.  Suddenly, those whose ignorances don’t look particularly like our own appear to us as ignorant.  Neither we, nor they are able to recognize that we both remain children, and wise beneath the piles of detritus that growing and interacting in a culture without aware and un-agenda’d elders has required us to operate through.

Photo by Jeff Evans

We are childish, not child-like.  We have forgotten what it is to be child-like.  We will be more wise, when we can become child-like; lose the sense of our own wisdom once again.

This “Oneness with God” idea is tricky even in the simplest of terms.  Like sitting at The Master’s feet, one can’t really not do it.  And yet what it generally comes down to is a measure of the magnitude of mishegas that stands in the way of an awareness that one is, in fact, doing it.  And it is surely that measure of magnitude which regulates how much one is actually capable of taking away from the perpetual encounter that will induce, even by fits and starts, anything akin to enlightenment.  Many, I dare say most, of the junior partners, if they care to put things in the language of the common man, employing the vocabulary of the body-bound, will tell you that that very lack of awareness is, in fact, madness; that we are all stone crazy in our dis-ease, while everything is, in actuality, simply perfect, or at least (“perfect” being a human invention to name a human perception) as it should be.  As a mystic I can buy this.  As a fair weather mystic, I’d like to send the monk back to his mountaintop with my sneaker firmly lodged in his butt crack and search on alone.  And that very desire, of course, confirms my continued practice in aloneness and separation from God, Source, Spirit, in essence, my anti-oneness while at the same time seeking to be one with.  Boy, am I fucked up! Read More →

The idea of all being perpetually well is another tricky one.  It is a particularly fuzzy point for those of us to whom it tends to only become clear when we are contented, sated, unafraid, and other adjectives that connote fair weather.

In my pursuit of my life’s goals, (And where do they come from, by the way?  Do we choose to aspire to one thing or another?  No.  They are in us, like DN-fucking-A.) I have searched for, and attempted to manifest resources to sustain my endeavors.  Sometimes they have been there, and other times they have not.  In neither case, however, have I ever starved, or been homeless.  I have not subsisted for any length of time in destitution, though a sojourn on skid row might have helped since this is where some of the more obvious consciousness pimps say they first heard God speak to them.  Oh, the drama!  Jackleg preachers do this too.  Me, I’ve always been alright; frustrated, yearning, angry, lonely, but alright.  So have I always walked in abundance?  Maybe.

I have always found something perverse in the idea or the act of petitioning The Universe for something specific, like say a million dollars, or, in the case of Religious Science, Earnest Holmes, Thomas Troward and the like, believing, as they espouse, that I already have it, when I most clearly never have.  How much easier for me to believe that there was service to the greater good (And who knows what service really?) but service: a fulfillment of some unrevealed spiritual agenda in the acting out of my various endeavors, and it was exactly that which sustained me.   I didn’t say “made me rich,” or even, “made me happy.”  But I have somehow been sustained.

Along with understanding “abundance,” it behooves me to adopt similar perspectives on another human invention, “justice.”  In fair weather mysticism, the relativity of right and wrong, and in fact, the negation of them as absolutes, is taken as a given (well… taken as a given on days when I’m not feeling wronged, or feeling that I am right about something).  But the dialectic that leads us by a circuitous route to that truth and others gives me a headache on any day.  I’m a fair weather mystic.  I tend to avoid pain if at all possible.  The human condition makes us each a little factory producing steaming piles of rationale to serve our human ends, or perceived ends.  Very seldom are those ends, in the final analysis, anything surpassing staying alive and comfortable.  On the level of Spirit, there is no concept, and so no vocabulary for “comfort,” or for that matter, “alive.”  It is simply a function of our physical over our spiritual awareness that measures both abundance AND justice relative to ourselves.  I am well.  It is my job to know that.  As a fair weather mystic, however, I feel no compunction to admit that I know it.  It is more satisfying to whine regardless of my awareness.

I sit at the feet of a Master that doesn’t speak my language, or any.  Nor has It any cognition of my subjective, earthly experience.  It respects only consciousness, which means It respects Itself.  I, being of It, or that part of me that is at all truly conscious, or Spirit, It respects as well, and that part of me respects It.  Why else would I sit here?  However, the other part of me, that which thrives only in the fair weather; thrives on food that feeds not only the body, but the ego, remains restless and looking to intellectualize a plan of action.  The “I AM” wanders out seeking other theories to refute; for other fair weather mystics to show their asses.  It wanders out knowing that it is not looking for enlightenment, or even truth.  It is looking for itself, which is all that it can recognize.