CHANGING PATTERNS

whistler, nocturne in black and gold

It's time now to creep back into my daily flow, slowly, no hurry. Did grocery shopping today, a wearying thing to do, including bringing everything into the house and putting it up. Next thing I need is a nap. Naps make a good day better. Paid bills all over town. With postage going up-up-up, I tend these days to drive payments to the various places, figuring it costs maybe a quarter to drive from one place to the next instead of 42c. Prices now going up again, this time leaving the reach of the working class, such that people in the working class have not much choice but to go deeper and deeper in debt, lose houses to the bank to bulldoze into a pile to be hauled to the landfill in dumptrucks. Seeing to it that if the bank can't sell it, they can destroy it so nobody else can use it. I used to think it was contempt the corporations and the banks had for the American people, the bottom 99%, but since the Bush2 administration it has revealed itself as hatred. I think of contempt as passive, hatred as active. It's definitely active what the 1% is doing to the rest of us with intent.

It's a bizarre science fiction world we're in now. Like our money is nothing but numbers, very little has connection with what used to be called "feet on the ground." There's no ground anymore. This has something to do with why the old people all around the globe are uncomfortable in a world they never foresaw nor learned to understand. The old way everywhere was feet on the ground, walking, working on foot instead of sitting down. There is a great number of people whose feet never touch the ground, only floors, stairs, elevators, pavement. To these people, the ground is dirty. It's dirt. Dirt is what washing machines are for. Pay somebody else to mow the lawn.

I'm not really trying to define our time, pretend I know anything about it. It's that I see patterns of behavior that pretty much define themselves. I don't mean for you to think conclusions I draw are set in concrete. I look for conclusions to draw and patterns to define without taking any of them seriously like something I know anything about. I can't even claim to know the house cat Caterpillar I've raised from the time she was born. I don't dare draw any conclusions about Caterpillar. I can understand her a little better by paying attention to the patterns in her behavior that help define her behavior so I can have some insight into understanding the meaning of a being from another level of consciousness.

This is how I read political patterns and social patterns, as aids to reinforce the illusion that I understand what cannot be understood. When we get right down to the web-like interchange of all the individual roles in civilization, just the humans, in a Persian carpet design that slowly changes over time, it's so complex we can't even fathom it. I like to see the interactions of objects, of thought, of bodies, of words, a living design that simply is what it is, but we have to name things and stop things (in our minds) to get a grip we call understanding.

Without patterns to see of recurring cycles, we're the same as in a kayak on a roaring river in the night. For my way of seeing, patterns of behavior and patterns of how things get done give me the illusion I have my feet on the ground. It's like walking through a big field of ferns in a forest. You never see where your feet are. That's why I like walking in the woods with a dog. They stay in front and are far more attentive than I am; they're like landmine sweepers. I don't worry about stepping on a serpent in a forest of ferns when I can't see where I put my feet.

I sometimes wonder about what Tibetan, Hindu, Sufi, Zen practitioners call enlightenment, what Meher Baba calls God realization. It seems like names, patterns, belief systems would fall away, all the mental devices we use to hang on to that which cannot be understood for its simplicity and its complexity. Boiling water transforms an egg from liquid to solid. There is the experience of the egg, the water, the pot, the heat source, each a subjective entity without mind as we know it, changing continually, never the same even when in stasis. My supposing is that an enlightened "mind" (actually absence of mind) would see everything as it is without names and beliefs, the processes, something like how we see the wind in the trees by the moving leaves.

Like Bob Dylan said, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. I think of Caterpillar and my other pets along the way as enlightened beings. They are without human mind. Enlightenment is transcending human mind, getting to that place of no-mind. That's where the animal kingdom is. It's where the insects are. The farther we go back in evolution, the closer to the Source the different beings are. Fish would be closer to the Source than a possum, and a possum closer to the source than us. When we make it to human, then we have to leave mind to reach the Source we left behind so very long ago when we were rocks.

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