EVERYTHING NOTHING

Over the last few years, it seems like almost every time I see somebody I've not seen in awhile, like in Food Lion parking lot, one going in, one coming out, we exchange the customary greeting, "How you doin?" "Doin all right." "Really?" The first time or two somebody came back with, Really?, I thought it was funny. It's become such a pattern, I'm about to say it's in my appearance. I don't look in the mirror anymore, so I can't comment on how I look. Going by last time I had a look, it was frightful, like something people on LSD see when they look in a mirror that inspires them to put towels over all the mirrors in the house. I've gone through life totally uncertain about everything. In school I memorized for test passing, uncertain all the time, knowing what I was learning didn't solve any of my questions; though it did teach me how to articulate my questions.

Evidently my looks don't speak what I feel. I don't have aches or pains, no arthritis, no physical complaints. Heart issue, but it doesn't slow me down. No mental complaints. Slower to think now, but I prefer that, anyway for this time of the life. Names don't retain very well. I've seen this process so many times in others that seeing myself flow through it I see it natural as a baby learning to talk. Mind gets weaker. So what? American life doesn't require much of a vocabulary, so when I get down to cool, awesome, they, them, everybody, nobody, all, none, everything, nothing, totally, like, dude and a few others, I won't need any more words. And, of course, the cuss words that never go away. These simple words in varieties of combinations can be used to be understood by almost anybody in America. No problem. Maybe my writing will macerate to key words and phrases in different combinations to make paragraphs.

It's curious to see "the world as we know it" breaking down, coming to its end, which has already happened. It's doing the equivalent of tying up the loose ends now. At the same time the old civilization of the last 6 millennia is going away in a hurry right now, the new is coming in at the same time. We don't recognize much of the new yet, because it's new and we tend to miss much that is unfamiliar. We see the old going away, the familiar, and it looks like the social structure, the economy, the form of government, and that magically sweeping key word, everything, the world as we know it, is falling apart. My guess is that the new is coming in at the same rate that the old is going out, replacing the old ways with the new ways coming in. From the future looking back, the coming in of the new will be the perspective of the story, whereas from this side of the divide the fading away of the old is the perspective. We look back to when electricity came on, not to when whale oil lamp sales ended.

"No! Right! Dude! Like, everything! Awesome! Know what I mean?" This minimal and objectively meaningless riff in a given context can have meaning. It's the nature of slang that context understood determines the meaning of words spoken, like, cool. Oxymoron: cool parents. The hard part for mental activity with language dumbed down to slang is keeping up with the changing context. Sometimes context changes mid-sentence. It is a good exercise for brain activity trying to keep up with somebody who only talks in absolutes, abstractions and slang---keeps the mind searching, reminding self of a rule of thumb: it seldom means what the words put together in a sentence would mean using dictionary definitions. Same goes with spelling; phonetically close is good enough.

My dumbing down in advanced age seems to be coinciding with the rapid dumbing down happening now in the world of adults. If I can just remember that list of key words, I don't have to worry about losing touch by dementia. When I'm lying on a bed with my mouth hanging open watching daytime tv all day every day, and a visitor drops by, all I have to do for conversation is speak a random key-word phrase, "Like totally." "Yeah, Uncle TJ. Right. Cool." I could say, "Nobody all. Know what I mean?" "Awesome, Uncle TJ. Totally." No problem. In my time of mental atrophy, I'm fortunate that the collective mind of the tv-watching world around me is fading by atrophy too. Conversation with visitors need never be a problem. One says, Dude. The other says, Cool. One says, Totally. The other says, Awesome. One says, Like. The other says, No shit. One says, Know what I mean? The other says, Nothing everything. One says, I brought you headphones, Uncle TJ, you can hear some music. Brought THE CLASH ON BROADWAY, your box set, that old music you like. The other says, No! Right! Dude! Like totally!

 

 

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TAKING OUT THE TRASH

joe pye weed in the rain

One perspective I have from living to a certain age is seeing social convulsions manifest into phenomena like the tea party, union busting, gun madness.  I have come to see the social evolution, how the various expressions are part of it, instead of separate from it. The issues coming up one-after-the-other in this time have been problems all along. They just hadn't reached the problematic state of concentration they're in now. It's like the mass of floating plastic in the middle of the North Atlantic the size of two Texases. This seems to be a time of clearing out the trash of a few thousand years in the gathering. The republican never-ending harp on abortion is definitely not new. This has been going on all my life. The popular American love for war is not new. The popular rage for police state is not new. In the 1950s the conservatives and liberals were called hawks and doves. The propaganda from then to now has become so sophisticated I look on in awe at today's propaganda techniques. Elections amount to hard core tennis matches between professional propagandists. My early years were the transition time from oratory in front of an audience to sound-bite television propaganda. Years of studying political science have taught the propagandists that one percent is what they need to win. The attention now is on the undecided, the only of the three voting possibilities to work with. Strategists of both parties are equally proficient, keeping them at a 50-50 rating. They don't concern themselves with the committed to either party, only the non-committed.

vada

Elections have become such slick propaganda events that I wonder what's the use of voting when it is so subject to mind control. Knowing, too, that our representatives do not represent us makes me all the more indifferent to voting. Then I think about the beginning of the republic, before television, the time of oratory, man vs man, instead of one man's propaganda team vs another man's propaganda team. The seed was there. Now the candidates are something like race cars on tv. Each car has equal performance capability to all the other cars. The drivers are almost all equal. The drivers look straight ahead while "spotters" and strategists tell them what to do, what lane to get into, when to change lanes, to pass or not to pass, to pit or not to pit. The drivers keep the cars in motion, the strategists tell the driver what to do. The political parties are the same. Candidates watch what they say, because it has to stay in line with the present moment's strategy. Last election, I gave Karl Rove more credit for strategic propaganda than he was due. He failed to get the one percent needed, even lost a few. I thought he might get us another rich moron for president with his ruthless propaganda techniques. Leave out Ralph Nader, Florida's and Ohio's republican party chicanery, the republican supreme court, and Bush lost that first election by at least the margin Romney lost last go-round. Bush lost the second election by vote count too, but Ohio republican mixing of numbers under Karl Rove's direction took care of business.

caterpillar

Even though I don't take the election process seriously, especially since the process itself has nothing to do with democracy and amounts to a smoke screen, I still like to participate in the process. I know it does not matter, in any way you look at it, how I vote or that I vote. I vote as a single digit saying I want democracy. It's a make-believe process I want to believe in, Peter Pan. I was given a bumper sticker I at the Ralph Stanley Museum in Clintwood, Virginia, DR RALPH STANLEY FOR PRESIDENT. I said, "I wouldn't want that for Ralph Stanley. I love him too much to wish hypocrisy and an especially hot seat in hell for him." I would not like to see Ralph Stanley's picture in The Nation on the Timeless Whoppers page with a long, pointed nose. I took the bumper sticker thinking I might cut out the Ralph Stanley and put just his name on car bumper, but I don't want to. I think about it until it comes to picking up the scissors, and then decide not to. It takes a certain "Gimme" personality to be a politician, like it takes to be a preacher, the outstretched hand. Old-time mountain preachers were not paid. They believed the "gift" was received freely and must be passed on freely. The people of the church took care of maintenance. It was their role, not the preacher's. The preacher was one of them. He just happened to have the gift.

geode and ferns

 

It appears one hidden social ill after another is brought up into the light to be dealt with. None of the issues are new. In some cases it's just the first time they've been paid attention to. Like gay marriage. I personally do not care. I'm for the freedom not to get married. Other people can do what they want. I can see the practical side of it from the perspective of a civil society over employee benefits, taxes, insurance, and a great long list of paperwork and money to be saved by not having to file separately on taxes, for example. The telephone just now rang: a computer male voice said, "May I speak to Thomas please." I clicked the END button. It's like issues swept under the rug over the years are coming up for review. Issues buried are surfacing. The preacher in the church I grew up in gave an illustration for, Your sins will find you out. A mother without much money made her daughter a doll and stuffed it with oats. The little girl's brother mad at sister buried her doll behind the barn. In the spring, oats grew up behind the barn where he'd buried it, in the shape of the doll. This seems like a time in our national identity to put to rest old pre-judgments from the time before scientific inquiry, from the Age of Fire. Evidently the Age of Electricity must set aside belief systems from the previous age. Another couple of generations and the slate will be clean of the old ways.

baja rock

 

 

 

 

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CHRISTIAN THE POLITICAL PARTY

shroud of turin

It seems like I've come to a place where I want to change my ways of thinking, but know I won't, because, for the most obvious reason, I'm too lazy. My thinking is changing, though. It changes all the time, from cosmologies to everyday life details. A few days ago talking with my friend Crystal, I suspected somebody in particular of an act of meanness. Between then and today, we learned otherwise. Instead of just letting it go, something I would have done in the past, I fessed up and apologized for my suspicion that turned out inaccurate. It was not a problem, at all, but I felt better about owning up to my mistaken lack of confidence in somebody we both knew. I had spoken opinion without knowledge, just like Faux News. Expressing my regret that I'd misread this individual felt like that was the way to go, like using an eraser. I had caught myself doing something I don't like when others do it. I made a conclusion on a subject I knew nothing about. I know better. Hearing myself say it, I remember hesitating within, pointing out to myself I don't know what I'm talking about. I went ahead and said it because it sounded good. I regretted it ever since. Not a big regret, because it doesn't matter, just a misspoken sentence that has fallen into the nothingness of all sentences ever spoken after they're spoken. The dead sentence void. I'd have gone on thinking about it, adding to it failure to apologize and regret over that in addition to the initial regret. Fessing up erased all of it. That's a pretty good example of a recent change in my thinking, an ability to freely open up and say I made an error.

I'm happy to see at the age when men tend to lock down in their opinions and beliefs to where they're carved in marble, I am able to change my thinking at least a little bit. I see men I know my age and avoid extended conversation, because I really don't want to lapse into White Man mind dead set against this, that and everything else. I can't stand there and say, "Right...Right...Right," on Obama not being an American citizen, government's gonna take our guns, women shouldn't have abortions. I recall a time in my store, a couple in late 70s I was having friendly conversation with, suddenly asked if I'm a Christian. I thought: Oh no! Ruin a good conversation.! I did not want to go there, because they'd already identified themselves fundamentalists. I said, "Christian has become a political party and I'm not a member." That didn't work. They had to explain that's not what they meant. I had to explain my distrust of people calling themselves Christians. Of course, they're Christians. They're white Americans, not from the Middle East. Only thing it tells me when somebody identifies self a Christian is they are absolutists who will soon find me wishy-washy because I don't clamp down on absolutes with the zeal of a preacher pounding a bible with his fist. I like to allow others their own beliefs without me believing it's my place to change them to my way of seeing. Not acceptable Christian behavior. People who make it an issue to call themselves Christian tell me at the start they are not.

I was talking last week with a woman who is a Baptist and she remarked about something God hates. I thought: we're not going there. To change the subject I said, "When did God start hating? I thought God was love." She explained that God really does hate, and I didn't want an explanation. I just wanted her to give it a moment's thought. I've come to a place at a certain age that I don't let somebody get away with making a remark about God hates one thing or another. They're just quoting preachers. They don't know what they're saying. The preacher sez. He doesn't know what he's saying either. Anybody who starts a sentence, "God hates..." does not know what they're saying. They've not thought about it for even a second, ever in their lives. The belief that God hates attributes to God the nature of what the Christians call Satan. It's Satan that hates. But the Baptist religion has become so focused on Satan over the last half century, or maybe I should say Protestantism has been obsessed with Satan and hate for several centuries, they've incorporated hate into God. Like the saying, you are what you eat, we also become the subject of our focus of attention. Like my mother, the Kansas fundamentalist, in the course of a phone conversation will say Satan several times and never once mention Jesus. Jesus is never a consideration except in the clichés, died for your sins, son of God, born of a virgin. Compassion is not given a moment's notice. That's woman stuff. Preaching is a patriarchal phenomenon. Patriarchs don't do love and compassion. That's for women and babies. What if somebody takes advantage of your compassion? And love is a four-letter word. That's how it was in the fundamentalist church I grew up in. I don't see it any different among "Christians" now.

It might possibly be a new way I've come into seeing God that has started changing points in my thinking. Lately, I've been seeing God an invisible flow, like my own consciousness. Consciousness is not a thing. As far as I know, the scientific method has not yet been able to find it. It amounts to essence. Like an image of a hammer in my mind might be the essence of hammer. Merely a mental image: empirically nothing. Love. What is that? Almost everybody knows the experience, but nobody can put their finger on it. A warrior society based in the Hebrew wars of the Old Testament hasn't yet evolved unto love. They're still back in the old way Jesus said was "fulfilled." I think that means it's over. Actually, what I suspect most strongly is behind the "Christian" rejection of love is that it is anti-dramatic. Love is about inner peace. In America the word peace is political. It identifies one a liberal, a 'secular humanist' (whatever that is), anti-war, not a patriot (whatever that is), a hippie. Christians committed genocide on this continent over and over modeling and justifying themselves after the Hebrew wars of genocide. After Catholicism, Protestantism, Fundamentalism, I am unable to go with Christendom. The words of Jesus have been overtaken by belief systems one is expected to believe without questioning. I'll just go my own way seeing God as love, love as God, opening my heart to God to spray WD-40 on its hinges. If understanding equals love, and if allowing equals love, then understanding and allowing are God. This is how I find my perspective with God.  

 

 

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THE DALAI LAMA: ETHICS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM THE MOVIE

hh the dalai lama

 

 

Lazy day, a good nap, a little nip in the air outside, a gentle nip. The netflix movie of the day was the Dalai Lama's ETHICS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM. It is an hour-long talk given at the Albert Hall in London, 1999. He speaks English well. My associations with the Albert Hall is Eric Clapton's band CREAM playing there in a concert video (a guy in the front of the audience obviously on acid, jerking his head up and down so fast he surely had neck problems by the time he was 35), and Bob Dylan playing his transition time there, first half of show acoustic, second half electric. The audience went nuts at the Albert Hall, just like at Newport in USA. It really was an in-yer-face gesture. Now, my associations with the Albert Hall include HH the Dalai Lama. I see him talk, hear him talk, read his writing, and I celebrate within that China overran Tibet and chased out the Dalai Lama and the other lamas, sent them out into the world through the funnel of India. Another example of God working in "strange" ways. Brings to mind a little girl who needed to get away from her mother she was living with and live with her daddy who cared about her. Mommy's new boyfriend beat child such that Protective Services turned her over to daddy immediately upon seeing the bruises. That's what it took to help push her through the transition from one home to another in one day. She's a tough little kid. It must have been time for Tibetan knowledge to go out into the world, like it was time for little girl to grow up loved and cared for.

dalai lama

We need an ethics for the new millennium. The last round of ethics that run from Greeks onward through Western philosophy and religion to now has come to nothing. Ethics is not even something people think about, but for a few scholars. By this time, what we call ethics has become so confused from indifference in the market place where the only ethic amounts to: self first--others last. The Dalai Lama's ethic amounts to others first, self last. A reversal. The Asian view. The balance. The decline and fall of Capitalism will make a big opening for a new understanding of ethics. Enlightenment Individualism in America has devolved into hyper narcissism, self-centered with blinders to keep out all but self. The degression has gone to its most absurd extremities ending itself. This has to be the turn-around time where ethical thinking and living is concerned. Could there be a time for collective humanity that might be called darker? This time we're in is so dark, it has to be the dark before the dawn. That a Tibetan holy man can fill the Albert Hall in this time indicates something having to do with a collective inner need. The audience is white middle class educated, likely university associated, mostly Londoners, liberals. It's in the middle class that revolutions have their beginnings. Might have something to do with why the republicans want to do away with the middle class and education. It's too late to stop it, the revolution to put an end to Capitalism has begun. Occupy and Anonymous are serious beginnings.

dalai lama

 

 

One of the many aspects of the Dalai Lama that appeal to me is his perfectly natural behavior. He talks like anybody talking, except what he says is not spoken by many people. The whole story of Tibetan lamas, every one of them, of which he is one, is in his mind. It is believed by people who have tested it for several centuries, that this Dalai Lama's is the same soul as the first Dalai Lama. His soul is devoted to returning in a new body every time to serve the Tibetan form of Buddhism. This incarnation is his fourteenth, XIV. I look at him knowing the Tibetan Book of the Dead is in his head, the life of Milarepa and the entire wealth of Tibetan wisdom. When I was a kid, I asked the fundamentalist Baptist preacher about wise people living in our time. No. There haven't been any wise people since Bible times. I did not believe it. I did not take him for wise, but figured that it had to be that somebody on this earth is wise. I wanted to find someone wise. There were not any in my world of Kansas fundamentalism and school, as far as I could tell. It became a search in the back of my mind for the rest of my life to find someone out here in the world I would call wise. I found quite a lot of people, both men and women, I thought of as incredibly intelligent with a wide range of penetrating knowledge, a few I'd say just a little bit shy of wisdom.

 

vada

"all babies are yogis" --- baba hari das

 

 

Through my 60s I knew a wise man, a hillbilly farmer and bluegrass banjo picker. I believe I was guided to him for the purpose of having a man of wisdom to pay attention to. I can't help but see that I was sent to him for some spiritual upliftment, to be an acolyte, a follower, to help him in his time of leaving the body. I projected it something like Elisha wanting to be with Elijah when he ascended, and Elijah passing his mantle (spiritual power) to Elisha upon his departure. Jr Maxwell, my hillbilly neighbor and friend, passed his car to me. My Toyota pickup burned up two weeks before he left the body. He said to me about finding a replacement, "Don't get in a hurry." Then his twenty year old Buick Century became mine. The heirs unanimously agreed it is my car. Nobody wanted it (but me). It spluttered, didn't have a great deal of power, but I knew it was out of time and probably hadn't had new plugs and wires since it was new, or not many times since then, broken taillight, broken headlight, headlights going everywhere but the road. I had the cooling system and the fuel injection system flushed. The money the insurance corporation gave me for the truck was the amount I needed to bring the Buick v6 3300 up to perfect running condition. It was like I just switched vehicles one day. It has 150 thousand miles, is 20 years old and does not burn oil. From oil change to oil change, I never have to add oil. I keep it running in perfect condition. After 3.5 years of driving it as "mine," I still think of it as Jr's car and my role is to take care of it.

 

 

 

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