IT'S ALL ILLUSION ANYWAY

john sloan

 

It has been with me all day today that I have lived my life poor by choice. Went to further education with ambition to make more money, have a nice car, a few really nice suits, a nice place with a good sound system. The Fifties American teenage dream. By the time I'd finished schooling, I didn't want any of it, mostly on moral grounds. Those were the years of developing my morality to live by. Continuous church from age six to eighteen, I was in flight from religion through the college years, wanted no more to do with it. I'd learned no  morality to live by, only No, Don't, and You Better Not. I wanted to break the rules, commit taboo, and, at the same time, look for a real morality to live by. The morality of you-better-not was a coffin. For somebody growing up into his unknown life, I did not want to live my life in the grave. Much as I resent, still, the overkill browbeating of a dead religion throughout my early years, I see in retrospect it set me on my spiritual path as a natural consequence of recognizing what I had was fake, inspiring a search for what is real. Then the question, what makes something real and something else fake?

 

john sloan

 

I looked for a lot of years at that one. In illusion, what's the difference? Start over with collectively agreed upon reality, the reality of the scientific method, physical reality. Kick a table leg barefoot, it hurts. Duality: pain and pleasure, right and wrong, high and low, in and out, to and from, the wedding of heaven and hell. In this reality I attempt to distinguish real from fake with no guidelines or rule book or discourses to go by. I have to go by intuition, by feeling. I recall my friend John, whose bookstore I worked in through the college years, who grew up Catholic, and had the same allergic reaction I had to Fundamentalism, threw the baby out with the bathwater. He called himself an atheist and I understood his reasoning. He was, at once, the most moral human being I have known, along with a few others I've known in the mountains. He kept a quotation from Shakespeare on the wall in the store that I saw a hundred times a day, To thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. I found it to be so in John, and over the years found it to be true in myself. In a real sense, this is the foundation of the morality I live by. More has grown on top of this, though more or less subtle versions of same. The morality I've come into on my own is not restrictive. It expands.

 

john sloan

 

 

In the dark is the seed of the light---in the light is the seed of the dark. In my time of agnostic thinking and atheist thinking, this quotation from Shakespeare of being true to self was an everyday point in the life, the core of my moral thinking. I didn't need any more verses to memorize of God sez. I needed something to live with that had practical application, something that was not a s'posed-to, but made sense, something I could see applying it in everyday life would, indeed, improve the quality of one's life. I believed God in the early part of the life, but such a twisted version I could not live with it as a rational, or even semi-rational human being, but in denial of my humanity. In the time I was seeking my humanity. Early part of the life, God was Fear. Later part of the life, God is Love. The seeking part in between had in it the seed, To thine own self be true. It is the mountain ethic, be who you are. John has been true to himself all the way along, is now 103, still has a clear mind. When it comes to truly honest people I've known, I'd say more than you'd think, because sometimes I think of a liar as true, true to who he is. Sometimes the lies are self-defense by vulnerable people, and there are an awful lot of different vulnerabilities going around.

 

john sloan

 

What does this have to do with why I live poor? It has everything to do with it. I live below the poverty level and the taxes due from my labor is no support to American military rule of the world and the American people. I do not support it morally, and I do not support it with the fruits of my labor. It's not about politics. It's about morality. Like a conscientious objector. I live simply in order not to pay into the military machine that kills poor people all around the globe and at home. I don't support it morally, and cannot contribute to it with my labor. Patti Smith sings in my head, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. I live in a self-titled Christian society that hates the poor, the vulnerable, the down and out. How can I live with a moral conscience  in this society and not be one of the poor? I live simply by choice, and in one way of looking at it, by empathy. It's different from being put out of your work and your home. Thanks to Social Security, it bypasses the desolation. I can look the truly poor people I know and come in contact with straight in the eye with understanding, them not feeling like I think I'm coming from a higher place than they are. A few weeks ago I saw someone I know who is the poorest of the poor in every way, we talked awhile and my heart glowed with love for this guy I've known since he was a child, who was born with everything against him, keeps on going with another woman taking care of him, and all I could think was, There but for the grace of God go I. It was a powerful moment. I made myself leave before falling into weeping. I don't want to pay taxes to my government that will not help people unable to help themselves. It's that simple.  

 

 

john sloan by john sloan

 

 

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QUESTIONING REALITY FINDING NOTHING

vada

by cheyanne

Out on the road yesterday it came to me that we humans are, individually, art forms. Animals are too, every life form. It is the spirit of life in our lives that art aspires to, reaches for. Each one of us is a work of art. Our lives are art forms, each making our own story as it goes along. I'm inclined to think we weave our life stories with our attitude toward life. I've spent my adult life with an eye to improve my own attitude toward life, make it less self-destructive and less regrettable to others, imbue it with a loving spirit in place of a suspicious spirit. I see in my friends incredible art forms, complete ongoing stories of everyday life moments, interweaving with the stories of others making a Persian carpet of the mind in motion, constantly changing, even more complex than flow patterns in turbulence. As I interact with friends periodically, we fill each other in on the progression of our stories, catching up since last time we spoke. My friends whose lives I know from occasional installments are ongoing stories composed by an individual attitude toward life. A novelist attempts to catch the spirit of life in the telling of a story, much like learning the lives of our friends from updates of "what's going on." Somebody who complains all the time has a fairly rotten attitude toward life, due to their own series of experiences, how they're interpreted. I want to reach a place where my interpretations of everyday life events have a more realistic perspective that includes the stories of the others concerned.

vada

by cheyanne

I said I'm looking for a more realistic perspective. But what does it mean? Realistic? I can't find any guidelines to define what's real. It really is in how we look at it, the eye of the beholder. The beholder interprets what the eye sees, ear hears, or mind thinks. The beholder's attitude toward life colors the interpretation of an observation. I recall when Patti Smith's first album was new. Someone I knew heard a song and said, "She sounds so angry." It rendered me somewhat senseless. I had never thought she sounded angry all the times I listened to her. It's like it came from out in left field, off the wall. I thought without saying, what a shallow hearing. Patti sounds to me to have compassion in her singing. Anger was so not what I heard, I still wonder how her vocals can be taken for anger. My feeling is that the other wasn't listening, didn't hear the music, missed it all. Superficial hearing. I don't mean false by superficial, but skimming the surface like a swallow taking a drink from a lake. It was in a time when I did not comprehend reality to be anything but my own point of view. Growing up baptist, I had to learn relativity after years of I'm-right-you're-wrong-no-two-ways-about-it indoctrination. I remember when I first took an interest in writing poetry, I wanted to write Truth in every line. It didn't work. Didn't work at all. Started seeing what I took for Truth wasn't always the case. In fact, seldom was the case. I learned eventually to give up thinking Truth was something special. Ultimately, it's nothing at all. Perhaps the only real truth is there is no truth. I learned to go with what works and forget about truth. I still have a hard time letting go of it as a concept, like there surely must be something to it, though I can't find it.

vada 

by cheyanne

William Carlos Williams' image of reality comes to mind, a red wheelbarrow and a white chicken. This image I have held most of my adult life for a definition of reality. It's hard to find words for. It's red and white in relation to each other. It's a sense that is wordless, felt, understood. Using the image for a reminder of reality, I see the sense of the scene, white and red, coca-cola truck, the Russian Revolution, associations. Chicken, a living being, and wheelbarrow, a manufactured object. We human beings live in a world of cities and towns, roads, houses, cars, creations of the human mind. As individuals, we are in relation to objects all the time. I'm typing on a keyboard made by humans. Even the robots involved in the manufacture were made by human mind. We individuals live in a world created by the human mind. Every time I have flown in a big jet, I look at the plane's outer shell, the wings, the rivets, and a quotation from Hamlet comes to mind, What a piece of work is man. I can't help but think it radically awesome something that big can fly, it made of metal, and so heavy I could probably not move one of their tires, it lying on the pavement. A passenger jet stands as a symbol for me of the wonder of the human mind. The chicken and the wheelbarrow have become my symbol for reality in like manner. It's not that it's a chicken, and it's not that it's a wheelbarrow, same as it's not that it's white and red either. It's an epiphany without words. It's you-get-it-or-you-don't, like the Tao te ching. It's hard to explain what I get from the chicken and wheelbarrow I call an image of reality.

vada

by cheyanne

Once I got it that what we call reality is illusion, reality went away as a consideration. I used to argue with Poe's quotation about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. I think of the short stories of Gao Xingjiang, Buying A Fishing Rod For My Grandfather, where he questions reality by way of various points of view. Again, like patterns in turbulence, one event observed by several points of view will have as many realities as observers. Is there one reality more real than any of the others? I don't believe there is. Used to want there to be a truth in reality that would say this is how it was, and then a variety of observations for the different ways it can be seen. By now, I don't see any event separate from observation having any meaning. It's observation that projects interpretation and then it has meaning, then it becomes "real." I have a rock on my desk I think of as real. When I'm outside the house, not observing it, I believe it continues in its place to be just as real as when I see it. Though, unobserved, it is not even a rock. It has no name. Its existence is unconscious, or so I presume. The rock is not aware of itself. It doesn't know it is a rock. It doesn't know. Observed, I give it meaning. It's a beautiful gray rock a geologist could look at and give a string of other names. Half of it has one kind of flow lines and the other half has different flow lines. Rocks were once liquid, and before that, gas. I see the rock a chunk of ice, frozen in place when a river of molten earth cooled down and froze. Before it was liquid, it was gas that came out of nothingness. Or what we think of as nothing. In that vast nothing must reside the essence of everything, like in the darkness lies the seed of light, and in the light is the seed of darkness. In sorrow is the seed of joy. How can I put my finger on even a rock and call it real? To me, it's small. To a three-year-old, it's huge. To somebody in China it is as non-existent as to my next door neighbor. It exists to you, because you take my word for it. If somebody came along and convinced you I was lying, the reality would go away, a silent explosion of mind pixels fading into nothing.

cheyanne herself

by cheyanne

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IN IT NOT OF IT

winged victory

I've wondered for years what it meant to live IN the world, not OF the world. Seems like a fine, wavering line that never stays in one place. Also seems straight-forward. Upon first becoming acquainted with this distinction, I thought, Oh yeah, I get it, I understand. I set out to attempt it and became so confused about its meaning I could only say, I don't get it. First thing, I had to figure out what was meant by "the world." It's a concept I heard about in church my entire childhood, taking it for granted I knew what the world was. There is the world and there is church, its apparent opposite. However, I found church to be part of the world just like the obvious, a poker table, just more subtle to see. That seen, I had to rethink at the start, to include church, religion, as a part of the world, not its opposite or apart from it. The definition I settled on for "the world," is having to do with the human mind. It comes to that made by God, life forms, and that made by the human mind, products, ideas, beliefs. God's creations grow, whereas human creations start their entropy upon completion The only living part of a human creation is in the process of the making. A painting, for example, lives while the artist is making it, applying colors, feeling the process along. Once it's signed, the process of entropy begins. Eventually, it will return to dust, its original form, the dust being God-made, origin of all things and thoughts human-made. Everything that comes from thought is human-made, like the question, does the shadow of a flying bird move? An argument can be made that the shadow does not move. Absence of light cannot move. In like manner, from God's way of seeing, this whole world, even our own existence is illusion created by our own minds. This one is a bit hard for me to grasp, given that ants are just as subject to gravity as I am, and they don't have a human mind, though for an ant's needs, an ant has plenty adequate mind. I start being able to get it looking at atoms as the building blocks of the material world. An atom is nothing but space with one kind of electrical charge orbiting another.

 

 

eva hesse

 

My pocket knife, made of atoms, cuts my finger, made of atoms, and blood appears, made of atoms, all of it the same thing, or same non-thing, solar systems in galaxies, infinite space, what the Buddhists call nothingness. How many universes can exist in infinite nothingness? That nothingness in which we dwell on a really huge electron orbiting a much bigger proton, a star among billions of stars in a major huge galaxy, is an illusion made by my mind? How was it there before I was born, evidenced by books written about it before I was born. I'm not the only one to dream up this illusion of standing upright on earth. It's said in the East that all this creation we live in is created by a belief system believed in common. I have a hard time seeing that, or maybe I've got it wrong. I can't help but see it that if I am walking toward a barbed wire fence and tell myself it isn't there, seeing it is an illusion, a dream, I walk into it and I'll be jabbed and scratched in several places by sharp barbs and thrown backwards at the same rate of force I hit it. Getting up and looking at it, scratching my head saying, but it's an illusion, how could it knock me down and make me bleed? I can see creation in the realm of illusion in something like interpretation of experience and projection of expectation onto experience. Takes it back to attitude toward life, mentally projecting expectations, the experience itself, and interpretation follows, interpreting from the same source as the expectations. I go to London as an American tourist, come home and tell friends I learned as an American in London how it feels to be black in America. An internationally famous actor, like Liam Neeson, can go to London and be received as an honored guest in every restaurant he eats in, hotel he stays in, and the places he peruses in the course of a day. He returns saying London is friendly, gracious, couldn't be better. It was circumstances that made the two experiences different, not so much expectation or interpretation.

 

 

I can see the two experiences self-created in that studio promotions made Neeson a big star, he goes to London and everybody recognizes him, a star. My life experience made me somebody nobody outside my immediate world ever heard of. In London that makes me an American. Every cliché about Americans is stuck on me like sponsor patches on Nascar drivers. No, I don't wear Bermuda shorts; no, I don't wear Nikes; no, I don't wear Hawaiian shirts; no, I don't talk by way of interrupting, loud and endlessly. Doesn't matter, American. Or an Anglo-American girl says to a Chinese-American girl, I just love putting chopsticks in my hair. Projection of what we believe about an other, however limited or fantastic it may be, becomes reality by way of expectation and interpretation, both serving what we go into the experience believing, our attitude toward life. It's our attitude toward life that precedes us everywhere we go, that creates our experience before we get there and concludes it by the time the experience is over. My next question, was there even an experience? Attention on expectation and conclusion at once, the experience slips by, hardly noticed. In this way I can see illusion in attempting to order apparent chaos and nail it down with expectations, conclusions, names, categories, words, language, self-awareness, and then the confusion really begins. Off we go into interpreting the unknowable and calling it God. In American Anglo-centric illustrated Bibles, Moses is white. He came from south of Egypt. That's getting into Nubia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda. You don't see many white people in that region of the world before European colonialism. I'd guess none at all however many thousand years ago Moses lived. And somebody from south of Egypt, I'll venture Ethiopian, could have similar features to an Egyptian of the time, enough to pass for Pharaoh's family. Pharaohs are often portrayed white or off-white. Sculpture portraits I've seen of Pharaoh heads don't have Nordic features. White Moses is projected illusion.    

 

 

In Indian portrayals of the Buddha, he looks like he's from India. In Nepalese depictions, he looks like he's from Nepal. In Tibet, he looks Tibetan. To see a Burmese Buddha, he's from Burma. It's the same in Indonesia, Thailand, China and Japan, as well as everywhere else. In California, he'd have blond hair and a surfer's tan. Aryan Buddha. American Jesus is northern Germany white face, Irish red hair and beard, wrapped in the American flag as a red, white and blue gown. Expectation and interpretation complicating illusion further. And further until we have a whole history in Christendom of believing in a Medieval idea of hell, then a pope comes along in the beginning of the 21st Century and says hell is something a loving God would not do; hell is an invention of the human mind. Expectation and conclusion confirm the projection. Another case of the few controlling the many, operating from the human mind: the world. I attempt to separate IN the world from OF the world by looking at this idea called the world as the illusion, projection of belief, literally not fact-checked, going by what was expected from what was already believed for whatever superfluous reasons were most convincing to a given world-view, attitude toward life, in different times along our way. All the mental construct about God I take to be of the world. I'm more interested in seeing God in the flow of life, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (Dylan Thomas), the love energy that flows through all life, through the veins in the leaves. Water evaporates into the sky and forms into clouds that rain on the earth. The cycles of life on earth have been so interrupted by heedless exploitation, of the world, there may not be much left for anything but cockroaches and bacteria. Something will evolve to eat roaches, something to eat that, on and on, until we're back to the crisis point we're facing collectively in this crucial phase of our spiritual development. I live in a world of people informed by Faux News, but I don't have to support them, go with them, oppose them, listen to them, give them any attention. At the end of the story Good Soldier Schweik, by Jaroslav Hasek, Schweik was conscripted into the army in the time of WWI. The regiment marching down a road to war takes the road to the right. Schweik sees some flowers growing up the road on the left and goes off walking by himself up the road to the flowers. Schweik was a light-hearted, guileless, comic character who was in the world not of it.  

 

 

 

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PLAYING WITH CHANCE

A Friday the Thirteenth Full Moon. Can't beat that. I'm a fan of Friday the Thirteenth. It has been my good look day as long as I recall. In childhood I wondered why I never had bad luck on Friday 13 like rumor said it was supposed to be. My best Friday 13 experience was in the winter of 1975-76. I went to work that morning with no thought of it being a loaded day. Walking to work I took a shortcut through Kress, a variety store, used to be called a Dime Store. I took my time through the toy section looking at everything. Found a wobbly rubber snake that was so real I could not buy it. I knew if I bought it, I'd prank somebody with it, and it would give somebody a heart attack. I'd probably still have it and it would be on the floor someplace in the house. It was too creepy. Then I found Silly String. Hadn't seen any before. Bought a can and went to work with it in jacket pocket. High tension time at work. I was dressing crazy in this time for the fun in it. Wore a black mohair suit that day, an electric blue shirt and white dress shoes. Had co-bosses, a couple, people I'd seriously lost respect for. I was at my space doing my work when "Miss Bird" sauntered by saying something smart-mouth and looked at me like, what are you going to do about it? I took the can of Silly String from my right jacket pocket and emptied the contents on her standing still in shock unable to move. A spontaneous sculpture of pink Silly String. Steam was blowing out her ears as she picked the pink string from herself a string at a time like lifting tinsel off a Christmas tree, taking her time, deliberate movements of suppressed rage. A co-worker struggled just as hard to suppress her laughter. Miss Bird picked it all up from the floor, dropped it in a trash can nearby and marched to her man with glowing red eyes. I had a good laugh within, laughing at myself for doing something so spontaneous. It surprised me. I didn't see it coming, not a second before it happened. Subconscious saw it, but conscious mind was outside the loop. Even wondered if subconscious mind might have set up the situation. I picked up what few things were mine, said good-bye to co-worker and walked out the door. Passing the front desk, I said, Bye. Mr Bird said, Forever? I said, And ever, and stepped out the doorway onto the sidewalk, never looked back.

 

 

I walked home thinking, What have you done? I didn't regret it even a frog hair. But it surprised me. I'm not that spontaneous. I was discovering and playing with chance in that time and learning the value of spontaneity. I learned it better than I knew. It was a time in the life of a major inner change and chance was becoming something I relied on, learning that chance and the random was quite different from what  I had thought. The I Ching showed me chance opens to a new idea of order. I was trusting chance in that time, going with it, seeing where it might take me. I'd gone nowhere thinking I was doing something. Letting go and giving over to chance was admitting I'm no good at directing my life. Chance couldn't do worse than my conscious mind. I was walking home, a half mile or so, and it struck: This is Friday the Thirteenth! What have you done? Wait a minute, I said to self, Friday the Thirteenth had always been a good day for me. It didn't ring true. I was looking at leaving the job a mistake. I thought, What the hell, I'm interpreting again. It was no mistake to leave that job. Should have left it months before. By the time I reached home, I had shed thoughts of leaving the job as an error and was left with jubilation to be free of the interpersonal knot of tension that went with the job. A few months before, I had found to my personal satisfaction that God Is. I was changing fast and didn't know it. I was wondering, too, if now that I'm a lover of God, maybe I'm supposed to act right and not spray people with Silly String. Maybe I'm supposed to keep a lousy job and try to make it work like a bad marriage. I don't think God saw it that way. I felt like God had a good laugh too. It was like God was saying, Get out of that Negative environment, buy some Silly String. I was happy I'd done the right thing by the time I reached home.

 

 

Chip, whose apartment was behind mine, I saw working on his Volkswagen engine with repair book, parked by the curb in front of the property. He asked what I was doing home at this time, between ten and eleven. I said I'd quit my job. He said, It's time for celebration--I'll get some beer. He went back to his apartment and brought out two bottles of beer. We sat on the curb behind the Volkswagen. He told me what he was doing on the car and I told him about my morning caper. It was a good spirit between us. We laughed all the time we talked. After we'd finished the beers and our talking wound down, he needed to get back to his car and I wanted to change clothes and settle. A few minutes after twelve, co-worker pulled up out front and brought me a big package of every color of Sugar Lips in celebration. Shortly thereafter, another friend, Bob Brown, dropped by with a bottle of champagne. He saw I was home and stopped. He didn't know I'd left the job. He just happened to have this bottle somebody had given him and was looking for a reason to drink it. Pop went the cork. He had with him Patti Smith's new and first album, Horses, exclaiming I needed to hear it. I can only keep it overnight. He'd be back to pick it up next day. Fine. Chip came in and had some champagne with us. We drank it in plastic cups in celebration of the country song then popular, Champagne In A Dixie Cup. I probably had a Kiss Live album on the record player. It's what I was listening to at the time, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood's band Traffic, among many others, like Dylan and the Stones, Isaac Hayes, Santana. Saw Kiss in concert a few months later. It was just before they started filling auditoriums. It was the tour that put them on the map following their first live double album. The entire day and into the night spontaneous party went with me like having a troupe of modern dancers swirling in circles around me to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, chance encounters with friends ready to celebrate. By bedtime late that night I was convinced that chance had done its thing again.

 

 

I don't think of it as chance anymore. Its meaning has grown. I like the saying, Let go and let God. That's what I was doing. Just because I didn't know about God doesn't mean God didn't know about me. Following chance, God led me to his/her metaphorical doorstep. It tickled God that it was so easy to reel me in and impress me out of my mind doing it. I don't mean giving over to chance is the Path to finding God, because I don't know. I felt like God was saying it's time for me to wake up, it's time. Exploring chance opened a trust in the unknown, becoming aware that consciousness is everywhere. There is only consciousness. Like what Emerson called the over-soul, I've come to see that what we call the soul is consciousness. Consciousness sees through our eyes, hears through our ears, feels through the skin, thinks through the mind, is the self that sees our dreams. All living beings are animated by consciousness. Life, itself, is consciousness. The nature of consciousness is love. Consciousness is only love. When I allowed chance, I opened into realizing I had discovered consciousness. It is so not separate from self and others, even insect and worm others, it's like a word that is merely a thumbtack, it tells nothing, a nonsense syllable. It's why God is the commonly agreed upon word that amounts to a sign pointing to the unnamable. It is so much our very self, our very innermost self that sees thought, is the self we mean when we say, "I thought to myself." I see in that common saying an unconscious recognition that consciousness observes thought. It's consciousness seeing the thoughts in my mind and directing my fingers that dance on the keyboard independent of thought, automatically. When we say I, it is consciousness we mean. I is a much deeper part of ourselves than our names. I is the consciousness within. God is the ocean of consciousness, of which we are not separate. We are no more separate from consciousness than we are separate from the stars. I'm fascinated by a recent discovery in astronomy inspiring thought that the universe might be a brain. In infinity, micro can recede infinitely and macro can increase infinitely. Who's to say the universe is not conscious? Consciousness Is. There is only consciousness. All else, illusion, imaginings. Illusion in infinity is, itself, infinite. There is no end to trying to figure things out. I wonder if my explorations with chance opened a peephole in the veil of illusion, enough for the light on the other side to catch my attention. That's illusion too.   

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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THE DRUNK MAN AND THE PARROT

found art 

It is a hard time to take anything seriously. The mystery of the obvious stumps a lot of our  politically minded public figures. I like to think, surely they don't "represent" us, but they do. It's like the goal is now the bottom. The latest comedy I've seen several times was a quip from Sarah Palin noting that the new pope is "kinda liberal." Wildman comic Bill Maher's response: Wait til she finds out about Jesus. His jest speaks for the entire time we've had to endure the "Christian Right" harp on taxes. Hearing them makes me laugh. Didn't Jesus say something like, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's? My take on this saying has to do with paying taxes without making a fuss. For me, personally, it has something to do with staying out of politics. The people who claim Christendom for themselves in the realm of politics exhibit little but venality toward others. Compassion among them is a four-letter word. These are people, who, if attending the crucifixion, would say, "Gimme that spear! I wanna stick him too!" I see them in my mind's eye doing this when they pat their own backs calling themselves Christian. It fails to be a bother to me, because they're only fooling themselves. Back in the 1950s I saw this coming when fundamentalist preachers started turning toward the political arena. The belief system does not stand up well to public scrutiny. Inevitably, the belief system, the fog of dogma around "the word," will be picked apart and declared lunatic. This has already happened, and the reaction has been that they're being denied the right to worship.

found art

Yesterday I spent some of the day with my friend Kathryn. We went by a local diner for pie and coffee, really just a chance to sit face to face and talk for awhile. An old boy we both recognized, but neither of us knew, was sitting at a table nearby. He had the angry white man look of somebody who listens to Limbaugh "religiously." He spoke in our direction asking what we thought of Obamacare. Kathryn said she didn't pay attention to the news. I said I have medicare, it's of no concern to me, and we went on with our conversation. We were not going to jump into that bucket of shit. Just by speaking, he told us where he was coming from. He wanted to gripe out loud. I don't like to be short with somebody, but in a case like this, I can't be short enough. We were not going to let him get started. He's the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving who keeps everybody miserable with his rant. And, by God, he's a Christian. Aint no two ways about it. Kathryn and I talked about him without talking about him, talked about the American white man's mind after a quarter century of Limbaugh mind whipping up artificial anger in white working class men. We spoke of two women we know, both going through divorce, desperate to get away from abusive white men. In both cases, the man was of the Limbaugh rant mind. We felt sorry for the old boy in the restaurant wanting so badly to rant and nobody to listen. At the same time, I felt little to no patience for him, the same as for a Jehovah's Witness at the door interrupting the day pushing their agenda.

found art

We had just come from visiting a friend of ours who had a white man staying with her at the moment. He was drunk and getting drunker. Neither of us knew him. We both read him for a wild card, no guessing what he might do in the next minute. I took it upon myself to keep him calm by encouraging his talk about himself. It could have gone off into blubbering tears over mama or throwing a fit of rage, anything in between. I didn't feel like it was a dangerous situation. It was a dumb white man drunk. Keep him the center of attention and everybody is happy. Kathryn told me later she didn't know what to do about him, how to talk, anything. I felt at home. Just another white guy in a world of white guys who have issues galore and can only address them drunk. He was tremendously hung up inside, twisted in knots probably in early childhood, needing the liquor to soften the hard edges of guilt and self-loathing. I felt I understood the guy. I can identify with somebody who wants to get shit-faced drunk. It feels great on the inside. It just looks stupid on the outside. I don't ever have a problem with somebody being drunk unless it's a mean drunk. We all have our own issues and issues don't get solved overnight, no matter how fast you go at them. It takes years on the psychiatric couch to really start getting insight into dealing with our issues. Guys growing up in a world where it's an embarrassment to expose that you have issues, or to talk about them, or even own up to them, hold so much emotional turmoil inside they often become time bombs. One unpredictable moment sets them off. Getting good and drunk every now and again acts as a release valve in a pressure cooker. The ones that need to get drunk the most are the ones with the most pressing issues.

found art

By the time Kathryn and I were having our pie and coffee, we were wondering what kind of day this is. We talked over what we were seeing and how we were feeling about what we were seeing, not with judgment of the particular individuals, but seeing people locked into their minds such that they miss everything going on around them. I'm wanting to pull my own mind away from the old belief that what I think matters beyond myself. We complain an awful lot because we believe what we think matters beyond ourselves. I want to withdraw my mind from "out there" to "in here." I felt like seeing those two men, one after the other, were telling me that wasting my mind on illusions of what is going on "out there" is distracting me from what is important "in here." I take "in here" to mean the heart, living by the heart, thinking by the heart, feeling. "Out there," I take to mean the constructs of the mind, agendas, even beliefs. I see venality comes out of too much emphasis on mind. The self-centered nature of the "Christian Right" is all mind. None of it comes from heart. The Christians operating from heart are not making the news. In both cases of the men we saw, the drunk man and the parrot, I could honestly say to myself: There but for the grace of God go I. Without the grace of God, I would be both those men in one. I don't mean to imply I thought they were bad people. I saw them unfortunate people, as I would see myself without the grace of God. I can't imagine living without the grace of God.

found art

 

 

 

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SCIENCE AND NONSCIENCE

the door to everywhere


Summer is here. Upper 80s the last several days. Kinda sweltering in town among the paved parking lots, roads and flat rooftops. Out here among the trees it's not nearly so hot. Temperature is close to the same, but it's not sweltering. I don't know if it's me or them, but some of the people I know have been acting very peculiar lately. Unconscious is how I can only name it, doing things that work totally against themselves and just as totally unaware of it. I know I have done similarly, so I understand how easy it is. It appears so epidemic right now it makes me think about staying home all the time. Gas prices make staying home all the time look better and better. I have my gas usage trimmed down to the very least I can do and go on living in this world. Last week I paid $40 for half a tank of gas.



Earlier in the day, talking with a woman of 93, she told me she saw a revolution coming. This is someone whose mind is not jaundiced like mine, who isn't always looking for the worst. I've noticed the older people I know are all talking like this, like the American people can't take much more being pushed down into poverty. From my own perspective, I can't see revolution, because American government surveillance of citizens is as perfect as government surveillance has ever been. Not only do we have agents infiltrating every kind of opposition group there is, we have agents getting groups started, teaching and training some terrorist activity, then having everybody arrested and sent off with life sentences for nothing. It's not right. But what is? The American legal system is as due reform as the British legal system was when our all too human forefathers rewrote it. FBI could really clean up here, with all the old people talking revolution. Round them up and put them in prison where they belong for terrorist thinking. People are arrested for much much less.



One of the things I think is happening that makes me aware of unconsciousness going on around me is that I'm coming into a place within where I see a little bit into what is meant by illusion, how it is that illusion is the nature of everything we call real. It's like I'm coming to see that all is without substance. I was alerted to this when friend Jim Winfield let me have it for thinking morality is relative---there is only good and bad, no in between. My next thing to say, which I keep to myself because I don't want to hear what comes next, is good and bad are, alas, interpreted, therefore relative, therefore illusion. I see there is no good and there is no bad. All is neutral like a camera. The consciousness that works the camera is the one that determines what the camera photographs. Considering that everything we do or say comes back to us, what hurts when it comes back we call bad, and what puffs up our ego when it comes back we call good. Good and Evil are totally subjective, handles to make holding a concept easier.



We call something that causes death evil. But is it really? God evidently sees death as no more than the blink of an eye, changing shirts, nothing to consider any worse than a nap. From our self-centered points of view, shutting down the ego is the worst of all possible evils. It hurts like hell to think about the ego shut down, fear of non-existence, fear of the unknown. How can something be evil that shuts down the body and ego, releasing the soul to Gloryland? Death is thought to be bad because nobody really believes Gloryland, Heaven, Yonder is waiting. Like the Peter Tosh song, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Of course, the ones that know better know there is nothing the other side of death and feel smug toward people who believe God is. IT CAN'T BE PROVEN. That's horse shit. The joke is that you have to have the faith first before you can start finding out that prayer works consistently, therefore can be proven. It is faith that gets God's attention. It's hilarious that way. It's also just right.



I have found with other people's dogs that if I pay them no mind, they pay me no mind. They might come around and want attention, but if I don't give them attention, they quit trying and I become the same as invisible. If I look the dog in the eyes, speak to it, let it know I recognize consciousness in there, I am present for the dog. It is aware of me, pays attention to me, comes to me when I call it, takes me in as a friend. What I'm getting at is when we ignore God, God will in turn ignore us. God can't work with us if we don't pay attention. If we don't believe there is God, then there is nothing to pay attention to, and it's our attention that gets God's attention. I've had so many with superior knowledge tell me there is nothing to it. I know so well, FROM EXPERIENCE, that when I pay attention to God, God pays attention to me, that when I'm told I'm a fool to believe nonsense, it only makes me laugh. Same as a scientist laughs from certainty if I tell him I've had experiences with God, not hoo-doo experiences, but everyday life, out in the open sorts of things.



I tend to laugh at people who call themselves scientists and take science for a word that means they're informed and have the last word: IT CAN'T BE PROVEN, I know more than you do. Great. I'm glad for you. You'd be in (relatively) bad shape if you knew less than I do. Funny, working class testosterone expressions are about I can kick your ass. Middle class testosterone expressions are I know more than you do. Ruling class testosterone expressions are I have more assets than you have. When somebody comes at me with I-know-more-than-you-do, I recognize them as middle class, which is already visible by everything in their appearance. When somebody comes at me a threatening tough guy, it's obvious he's working class. You say there are no class distinctions in America. I differ. This place is class structured almost as set in concrete as India. Again, it's only denial that says otherwise.



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