I think somewhere (and when I say “somewhere” I mean in some state of awareness) there must be a place, a place and means, to play perpetually. Now some will maintain that we do play perpetually, “…dancing on this Earth for a short while” was what Cat Stevens called it, and may still, though the wandering marabout in him has since taken him searching in unexpected directions. But already I digress. The fair weather mystic is even peripatetic in his thoughts. Sorry. But, a place to play, perpetually, where all of one’s giving to this world, to life, is only the totality of one’s living; of one’s isness. This is more than a simple notion, even though it may very well be the true nature of life on Earth. For we are generally taught that more is expected of us than to simply live fully, and there are many interpretations of what “a full life” actually means. Or perhaps we are taught that life is a struggle, that no one owes us anything, and that we should expect to need to work for anything that we ever get or achieve. Make hay while the sun shines. Soon you’ll be dead. Many a mystic, particularly those of the fair weather variety have heard these admonitions, and, though they strive, cannot quite disbelieve them. And if they can’t, how shall I expect all of greedy corporate America, or you, or the world, to do any better?

There is a breed of mystic, the pure ascetic, the 24/7 sadhu that walks through the world with nothing, and, in essence, attempting to be nothing, egoless, an empty vessel.  And one of the many things that he, in his life-long practice, has emptied from his vessel of being is fear.  The pure ascetic is unconcerned, not that nothing could harm him, but rather what could it matter in the least if something did… However, while this is an attractive state of mind, I think he may also be incapable of appreciating, for instance, the beauty in the work of his own hands. I doubt he would derive any pleasure from the sexual admiration of another seeking his company. For such things as these require some ego.

For each wrung below him on the spiritual ladder I suspect we must take upon us some concern. Worry… I am a fair weather mystic. I want to know with certainty that all is well, and provided for, including me, if not me primarily. But I will not step into nothing to see. It requires too much of me. I am not that disciplined. My bliss remains preconceived. It is of something that I already recognize. To hold and defend those preconceptions is of the ego; of my ability to say what is. I needn’t defend them. In fact, I know they are the height of bullshit. Yet I have them. To have them is probably of ego too, but could it be of less ego?  Could I be slightly enlightened to know that all I act from is human, because I AM?

I am a fair weather mystic. I know that doing what I do and seeing what I see is not all that I could do or could see, and yet I know as well that it is me (there’s that ego!) and being me, a perfect imperfection, that it is no less a perfect contribution into this earthly everything than the sadhu’s nothing.

Try to get this.  There will be a quiz.

…If You Can Read A Course in Miracles

You will never buy a book written by a truly enlightened person.  The closest you may come is a transcript of a talk he/she was giving to someone, or group of someones for free.  You will sit, or walk about, and wander through this human experience alone making what use you might of The Master’s presence, or perhaps having no awareness of it at all.  But each of ours is a singular experience, and you are “right” just by making a choice, even if your choice is divining how everyone else is “wrong.”

At that Santa Monica school, they were fond of asking, “Would you rather be right, or in the Love?”  Since I sit at the feet of The Master, a captive audience of sorts, I figure I am always in the Love.  Being that that’s taken care of, I’d like to be right.  I am right.  But I don’t plan on making a case of it, or changing anybody for it.

According to all of the books and DVD’s all the new-thoughters are selling on quantum theory for dummies, we can power-of-positive-think ourselves right into anything we want.  So why then should any of them need to slang books and DVD’s?  Well, the argument goes, for those mystics feeling argumentative, “This is a mode to disseminate this information, which is as intrinsic to the creative vision as anything that I have prayed up for myself.  What serves all serves me, and visa versa.”  I’ll buy that.  Though, You-too-can-have-anything-you-desire schemes for the masses are probably a bad bet.  The masses never really want world peace, generally speaking.  They want a boat.  I know I do.  There is no cumulative consciousness towards transcendence because there are very few individual ones.  Bodies prevent that mostly, which is probably why The Master feeds us this stuff through an eyedropper over multiple lifetimes.

And why a lifetime at all; a body-bound lifetime of reactions and erroneous ideas?  A Course in Miracles says we made it all up.  It says it about ten million times embedded in page after page of obtuse prose, supposedly the channeled voice of Christ, or the Christ Consciousness.  And why not?  I read the book.  It had to be too hard to write that shit for some fair weather mystic like me to have done it.  But anyway, it says we created this illusion of separation from God that we cling to; that our self-imposed sense of separation is as good as actually being separate…  The good news is it’s only a sense, and as soon as we chose to stop sensing it we will no longer be separate, but since we sense it, we’re pretty much fucked, because the sense that we’re sensing was being sensed before we were born, so that this is now the cumulative reality, rather than the still and unthreatening Oneness with Spirit that we might have if we weren’t so busy not having it. No one’s fault.  Just the unfortunate situation wherein we discover ourselves to have created ourselves with no clue as to how we did it, or how to undo it.  See how silly this stuff gets from the get-go?  It posits that we are, in fact, One with The Divine, but are too crazy to be aware of it, which is not to say that it will necessarily be any easier to be aware of our oneness once we stop being crazy.  In fact, the chances of stopping being crazy are quite slim, and so it might be better to get cozy with the idea that, no matter how One you are, you’re never gonna much experience it in it’s nirvanaesque beatitude.  I would suggest that the relative truth of that, if you follow the breadcrumbs, would also make me way too crazy, or practical, to spend the next five or six years trying to digest the impossible and repetitively obscure scribblings in that way too big book when the upshot is that we remain forever at The Master’s feet, probably by design.  Didn’t I say that?  I said that, didn’t I?

Where to begin?

The fact is you’ve begun and there’s not a thing you can do about it.  Keep doing what you’re doing and try not to be a dick.

I am forever seated at the feet of The Master.  It is a perpetual circumstance.  Something like being mentally retarded and not possessing enough proper brain function to wonder, much less deduce why.  My supplication at The Master’s feet is not, as many of the bookstore adepts would suggest, an awe-inspiring journey of wonder and discovery.  In fact, the awe that it seems to inspire is most often a fascination with how endlessly uninspiring it all is. Read More →

Can’t Buy Me Love

               I can’t sell me any either…

There is a school in Santa Monica, California (Where else would it be?) that offers advanced degrees (advanced as far as they are concerned) in what they call Spiritual Psychology.  I sat with them for the better part of the first year of a two year program, again because the part of me that was satisfied with sitting at the Master’s feet was not, and could not be, on speaking terms with the part of me that wasn’t.  My brain and body needed something to refute.  For some serious money, I got that in spades.  This corporation of consciousness peddling sold class jewelry to augment its income to a student body many of whom were eager to buy both its brand of sensibility and symbology (yes, it’s a word, because I said so).  I suspect that to those who bought from the table of trinkets at a purported school of advanced spiritual study, the rings and pendants and things where tokens to commemorate their having been to that particular mountaintop, and having communed with the two latter day gurus that abided their.  And the gurus spoke their nostrums, codified and specific, from a raised platform to congregations of hundreds at a time, a great many of whom listened and fell in line with an almost cult-like obedience, regurgitating ideology in language verbatim.  Such, I think, are the manifestations of the raw panic that we are in, we body-bound, searching for any port in a storm.  I watched for the gurus to behave in ways contrary to what they perpetually espoused.  They did.  I knew they would.  After all, they were me, as were the four hundred or so seekers hoping for access to a higher truth, and hoping that higher truth would bring them a better boyfriend, or a bigger income.  Perhaps some found it.  Some must have.  But I had been hoping, in my need, that I would not find myself among them, that the peddlers speaking down from the dais at least, body-bound as they were, would actually be people more of Spirit than of flesh, and that when I watched and listened to them I would not see me.  But there I was, stamped all over their insecurity, and inauthenticity, and even in perhaps their lack of awareness that what they were about was anything but perfect.  Or was it my lack of awareness?  Were they not perfect as it related to me and my spiritual advance?  And was I not even a little bit enlightened if I realized just that much? Read More →

Meditation is overrated…

…at least it is in the rarified form that it is sold to us.  When I say the word, does it evoke images of sitting cross-legged on the floor with wrists resting upon your knees, palms turned up with thumbs gently pressing second fingers?  I think there are probably only a few thousand people across the entire planet who can actually sit that way in comfort for any period of time.  I might be dead wrong about that.  I’m dead wrong about most truths, as you are, and every other one of the human species is.  But I haven’t met very many who could…  But more to the point, whether you’re forcing yourself to maintain uncomfortable postures while you try to achieve a state of nothingness or not, the court stenographer of your life that resides in your brain will begin reading back the transcript as soon as there is nothing more tangible to distract you.  This is a process of the human mind.  It will not go away.  You’re stuck with it until you die.  With persistence, you can for moments overcome it, and achieve the stillness where something that might slightly enlighten you lives, maybe…  But a truly meditative state, where you have completely turned off all of your mental processes, and you are actually engaging in productive communion with your “inner voice,” or better still, the silence is rare, and highly unlikely. Read More →

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.