FAITH IN HUMANITY

A little bit ago I saw some headline about somebody who found money and gave it back or something, I didn't read it, didn't want to after the headline telling me it is "faith in humanity restored." I've heard that dumb saying all my life. Somebody does something basically decent and it restores somebody else's faith in humanity. If one little act of common decency restores faith in humanity, it didn't take much to lose the faith. And who puts faith in humanity? I hear meaningless nothing every time I hear that mindless statement. Putting faith in humanity equals putting faith in the roulette wheel or the spin of the chamber playing Russian roulette. Isn't this why we have religion? Because we can't have faith in humanity we turn to the unknowable enigma of all time, God? In gangster movies is where I see "faith in humanity," the bond between criminals, the loyalty, bought loyalty, the death sentence for rats. These bonds get broken by money and the view down a gun barrel. The stuff of drama. The deal is, if you want a peaceable life, don't put your faith in humanity. That's where you find drama. People who get their cheap thrill gossiping look for and make drama out of other people's stories. They have faith in humanity, telling the stories of other people's weaknesses behind a mask of piety.

I'm taking these words literally, leading me to take the phrase for "a manner of speaking," instead of words taken literally. Like "I love you to death," can be haunting if taken literally. But it still sounds unconscious to me to say that something restored my faith in humanity. I see us, humanity, as born with a wide open loving attitude that gets shut down day after day in this world by disappointments, by not being understood, by not being paid attention to, unable to talk, frustrated. The love light dims and dims until it's time to start school and get further humanized so new from the spirit world where love is the attitude toward life. I reject that old Christian (?) dogma that we're born in sin and have to be made good. In my experience of the babies I've known, kittens, puppies, calves, I see love like a beaming headlight. It's a hard edge for a delicate soul beaming love to live in a  body that is being trained by everyday life to shut down the love, dim the light, the ideal to shut it out, snuff out the candle. This is a world of people whose lights have been dimmed by overwhelming continuous experience in a world that doesn't have much use for love except as a four-letter word. Makes it difficult to find one's way back, by way of the spiritual path, to that initial love that shone through from our original self. The wide open vulnerable love I see in babies shows me the light that is the soul. It doesn't take long before the light is covered over by layers of experience until the layers become opaque and no inner glow can get through. It's in babies that I see love really is the light of this world. I have a feeling the women who gather around a new baby and get into a state men look at as sappy woman stuff, is for the women a feeling of being blessed by the presence of a pure soul. I do believe a saying from Baba Hari Dass of someplace in India, "All babies are yogis." They are love lights. That's what a yogi is, clear as a baby so the love light shines through and you feel blessed in his presence.

In my lifetime I have seen three men with what I can only call dead eyes. In each case I had a hard time believing I was seeing a living individual with completely dead eyes. And I don't mean the dead eyes of inner city gangstas who have become accustomed to killing unto profound indifference to life. In the three I've seen with dead eyes who were not gangstas with multiple kills to their credit, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Each one was an upright, breathing walking human being, very well off in an upper-case way, the inner light shut down, like a lantern with the candle burned out. I saw darkness in the eyes and marveled that I had seen that darkness. It felt Biblical. In all cases I do not know their pasts that led up to the time I saw them, and I don't know any of their names, don't know where they live, don't know anything about them, but that they are the three men I've seen along the way with dead eyes. I've seen two women with dead eyes, one a junkie, the other a bitter, mean old woman who kept everyone around her sucking up to her disapproval. She manipulated the ones closest to her with an alternating current, come here I love you, get back I hate you, come here I love you, get back I hate you. The first time I saw somebody with dead eyes, I fell into appreciation for the light in our eyes. It's said the eyes are the windows of the soul, and I see it. I took the dead eyes for dead souls. There is more to what constitutes a dead soul than playing cards and getting drunk on Friday and Saturday nights. Among the people I've seen with dead eyes, I was not curious to know what killed their eyes. It felt like a zone I dared not enter, even with a question to see if the individual talks. The eyes were tunnels without light at the other end. Long caves into absolute black darkness, elevator shafts miles deep in the coal mines.

In a city I see a lot of eyes that look but don't see. Anymore, I feel creepy in a city for this reason. Country people have brilliant light in their eyes. They can look at you without seeing you, but it's not because their eyes are dead. They're just shut down with the No Entry sign up. It's the light of life I see in the country people I know. I've not known all the country people by any means, but I don't see dead eyes in the country people I've known. I thought a lot of people had dead eyes for years until I came to understand it was their No Entry sign for people they don't know. The empty look that doesn't see you will vanish when you know each other. You never see those empty eyes again. That their eyes are alert to detail keeps them out of difficult spots. One man I know has eyes that give the appearance of dead, but for the fire glowing through. He shut his eyes (soul) down to everyone, but he aint dead inside. He's very much alive inside. His eyes just say No Entry. They're for seeing out, not for seeing in. Mountain people have a way of looking at you when they don't know you with eyes that are disturbing to an outsider. They can stare at you like you're a television. If you speak and they don't know you, they'll just keep on staring and think nothing of it. That was in my early years here, 35+ years ago. Those would be the back roads people in the laundromat and gas stations. Now, when I see people from a back road in a convenience store staring at me when I walk in the door. I say, How you doin? and they answer or they don't. Now that I know the people, I could walk up to the table one of those men staring at me, sit at the table with him and have a conversation and be talking like people who have known each other a long time. Not knowing the people, it was intimidating to be stared at emptily. Knowing the people, they're just looking because they're facing that direction. You just cross their field of vision. No big deal. It's the same as watching the sparrows in the parking lot.

It's that looking at you and seeing nothing that gave the early city people coming to the mountains the heebie jeebies. The mountain people have changed a very great deal over the last half century. Television brings everybody watching it into the same culture, so even though country people and city people don't mix none too good, they still have television culture between them making communication possible. Mountain culture has faded out and television culture has faded in like a slow zoom lens. Television has its viewers believing it is necessary to be bright-eyed, cheery, happy with the eyes, making a good impression, being fun, uplifting. Political correctness is actually television correctness, conforming to television's rules for itself. Don't say the Ef word or you'll get in a heap of trouble. I'm happy among the mountain working people who laugh at political correctness. These are people whose eyes are clear and open both looking out and looking in. People who are satisfied that what you see looking in is themselves, which is what you see when you look at them. From inside the eyes to the color of the tshirt is the same. The mountain people I think of as my friends are people who are wide-open who they are. They're not objectionable people. They don't hurt anybody, but themselves sometimes. Who you see in their eyes is who you see after years of knowing them, who you see in how they dress, what they drive. From all the way within to all the way to the surface, it is the same one, man or woman. I could name several, but wouldn't embarrass them. It is that living energy I see in the eyes of my friends here in these hills without masks in their eyes.  This is one of the great gravitational forces that makes me unable to leave the mountains any more. I know my subjective findings are not absolute and exceptions are like spray from a shotgun that nullify all I say, but that's ok too. It's just the musings of an idiot full of.... It would be too self-flattering to finish the sentence and pretend I understand William Faulkner.

 

 

 

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IN THE WORLD NOT OF IT

rebecca ward, electrical tape

It has been an odd day. It started at doctor's office being told that the Sunday afternoon incident was not a heart attack. It was something that happens in my heart regularly; it's just that this time it hit a glitch or something. I didn't quite get it. But I got it enough to not be alarmed. Not alarmed, but need to pay closer attention. Maybe. I don't know what pay closer attention means. If it means obsessing or becoming a hypochondriac about it, I'd prefer to go on. I'm not going to worry about dying. Like the day a character I know, in response to "How you doin?" had to answer with all the profundity he could put into it, "I'm dying." He was so profound about it I bit my lip not to say, "Oh no. That's never happened before to anybody. And it's happening to you? Wow! How special you are!" That was my inner bitch. I try to keep her under control. I don't want to get profound about it. I want to look at it in practical terms. The unknown makes it kind of spooky, but there's not really any unknown about it. We have scriptures from all over the world through all time that describe the same about afterlife. I don't pay attention to the Christian fantasies about Hell and Heaven that were compiled over the centuries from art and fiction. Like the Rapture is a 19th century invention. It is not scripture.


If it's said we have heaven on earth when we don't have any worries, desires or guilts clouding our consciousness, then it's within reach in this lifetime. It appears that consciousness itself might be that place we call heaven, or Home. In this time of my life, which in the traditional Hindu way is the time for a man to leave his family and devote the rest of his life to the Way, to the Pilgrim Way, with a guru or however one might do it. I understand why this time of the life is taken for a time of contemplation, understanding, moving inward. I feel in myself a need for quiet, for stillness, for acting on what I have learned from reading, seeing how scriptural guidelines are practical and have nothing to do with sacrifice. I've come to see scripture as explanations of the invisible world of spirit that is the world we live in. The scriptures give us the principles of the spirit world, possibly the ways of heaven in this world. I'm thinking that when I'm in the present moment, that's where the "kingdom of heaven" is. Jesus said it's in the heart. To be in the present moment is to have undistracted consciousness, consciousness so clear of concerns that one finds Home in the present moment. I don't even think about polishing the mirror so smoothly as to have no dust motes of concern on Home Sweet Home the soul. The point of clearing the mind of desires and fears is to come into the present moment of inner clarity. I'm not close enough to that to even think about it.


On the other side, I've an idea whatever dimension or "world" it might be has the same principles as scripture teaches is makes for a good life. Take it all the way, it can take you to enlightenment, ultimately. I imagine "dying" a kind of enlightenment. We've heard so many accounts of people who look up and see light and angels, their faces light up and their eyes close. I don't anticipate anything like that for self. I just imagine what happened Sunday, light-headedness, collapse to the floor, then overwhelmed by light like an abduction from above, following the ray of light upward. The other day I saw something about UFO aliens that we're looking for them in the macro. The suggestion is we'd have better luck looking in the micro. That opened up a new drawer. I've been seeing the same way of looking at the "spirit world" whatever that is. Maybe we can't find it because we're looking macro. Perhaps micro is a better direction to look. What's to say the proportion of our world is the same proportion of all other worlds. Once that opens up, it's a whole new way of seeing that is so expansive it's kind of intimidating. Back to Johannes Kepler. An interesting site: http://kepler.nasa.gov  The search for habitable planets.        


If the kingdom of heaven is in the heart, that indicates micro to me. It also indicates consciousness. Consciousness is nothing at the same time it is everything. If there is anything that cannot be grasped in this world, it is consciousness. I mean grasped by hand or by mind. Can't be done. Consciousness can only be experienced. It's with us all the time, but we're too distracted to have a look. It's like we're in an international girlie bar with flashing lights and techno that keep us dancing and looking. I think I'm closer to my own consciousness than ever in this lifetime, and see I am still quite a ways from it. Fortunately, Las Vegas is not between me and my consciousness. Thomas Merton and I agree that Las Vegas is the last place on earth I'd want to go to. Out here in the world, the madness for money is so crazy-making I stay out of it. There, the focus is money to the point of what I can't help but see is madness. I've had two chances to go to casinos, one in Atlantic City, one in Germany, and I could not walk in the door. It seemed to me a zone where money is the Only. It's that way enough out here in the world. It's suffocating enough out here. I don't want to go to the center of the universe of the god Mammon. Mammon is the god the world worships, which is why I focus my attention in the world not of the world. Las Vegas is the dancers around the fire before statues of their god Mammon. Spiritually, I see Las Vegas something on the order of the final scenes in Apocalypse Now of the people around Marlon Brando, General Kurtz.


I don't mean to preach, but that old testament god Mammon is the god America worships. They just call him Jesus and it works really well. Send us your checks and dollars, send us your credit card numbers, Jesus loves you, he wants your money for his ministry, hoodwinking more people for more money. Gold bathtub fixtures, gold-plated toilets, jewelry that would put an ox on its knees. Because God wants them to have it. God wants them to be prosperous. God wants them to drive a new cadillac every year. Positive thinking. Believe it so: it is so. Whatever. I'd not like to be the mortician assigned to fix up Tammy Faye Bakker for the casket with her makeup and getting the jewelry in place so it all shows. No false eyelashes in heaven, no crocodile tears. In heaven, gold is pavement, asphalt. St Peter might say, Why are you bringing asphalt? What god do you suppose hears the prayers of evangelists with gold toilets? Some of the prayers I've heard on television no god heard.


I'll go with God as consciousness, that nothing that is everything. Consciousness, the present moment, Home, answers the kingdom of heaven is within. It's in the heart (consciousness). The scriptures are about realizing consciousness, not about building churches, ruling people with guilt and asking for money in the name of God. Consciousness has nothing to do with gold, nor does it have anything to do with pavement. The animals are in the present. The birds, all of what we call nature is in the present. The difference between their consciousness in present is that it's unconscious. We are wanting to evolve spiritually to being consciously aware of consciousness. This is what is meant when it is said we are unconscious. Our consciousness is clouded over by mind, by ego, by desires, by what used to be called the 7 deadly sins, distractions. For me, the spiritual path has been a matter of transcending distractions. I still have plenty, but a dumptruck load less than before. As one who identifies with the spirit before the body, I would have a very different view of dying than someone who identifies with the material world. When I look at myself as the soul, I see I am immortal. I look at self as the body and I am quite mortal. Looking at self as soul, there is no dying, only changing bodies, like changing clothes.


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DEPARTURE DATE UNKNOWN

william wegman

In my mind today the song is Ella Fitzgerald singing, "There's a boat that's leaving soon for New York." It tells how I feel, like I have a boat to catch some unknown date in the future. I have the ticket, just waiting for departure date. It concerns me and it does not. For myself, I'm looking at possibly changing location. That's all it means to me. But to my friends, I will have vanished never to be seen again. That part bothers me. I won't miss this body and all its wants and needs. Suddenly, I'm looking at mortality, again. First time, I looked mortality in the face and found no alarm. Now I'm looking mortality in the face a second time and feel no alarm. This time, however, I'm thinking about taking care of some details before I get on the boat for whatever adventure is next. You might say, this time got my attention. Not to alarm, but to practical reality. It's not fear of death that is bothering me, but missing my friends already. I feel like I want to see all my friends and be with them at least for awhile, a period of appreciation. There are people I need to see I've not seen in a long time, people I care about as much as I care about the people I see regularly.


I'm having a fair understanding of what Jesus meant about loving neighbor as self, which I translate into my language as treat other people right. It's that "in the end" we find that other people are the very most important parts of our lives. I like my solitude, but I also need others to break the solitude. I like both, the balance. Solitude recharges my batteries as interpersonal relationships take energy. It's like the computer. I have been advised to unplug it and let the battery run down, then charge it back up. The idea is that the computer battery lasts longer running up and down the scale instead of staying up all the time. For me, time with others and solitude are important. Time with others I expend energy. Time in solitude recharges batteries. I like to hear other people tell their stories, say what they have to say. Knowing somebody is the same for me as reading a Faulkner novel, a really good living story. In the time of looking into the other side, the people in my life take a new level of importance. Maybe, too, it's that my friends are my treasure. If money were my treasure, I'd be looking at missing my fortune. I'm glad I don't have that disease. Carrying a body that needs clothes everywhere I go is disease enough.


Sunday I had what I'll call an incident. Like going to the floor from light headedness and puking really bad. I took it for food poisoning from my coffee thermos. Tuesday the "device clinic" at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem read my "device" (pacemaker/defibrillator) and Wednesday morning I have a call from doctor's office to schedule to see doctor first thing in the morning, upon his arrival at the office. This tells me the Sunday afternoon incident had to do with what we call a heart attack. I felt no pain in the heart region. Possibly the pacemaker took charge and walked the heart through the "attack." Maybe the heart just stopped. I don't know. I've an idea I'll be finding out before very long. Ever since the phone call from the doctor's office, I've been feeling mortal. I find that in my mind I tend to identify myself immortal, considering the evolution of the soul, and when this particular lifetime comes to its stop sign, mortality becomes an issue. Up until then, I feel like dying is not an issue. It's like the word rights. Our bill of rights lists our rights according to government. Inside myself, I feel like I have all rights. Everyone else does too. In like manner, because I (soul-self) am immortal it comes as a shock to learn the body's mortality is at hand. It doesn't mean soul (self) is coming to an end. Just changing horses. Chaning clothes. Changing.


I feel no urgency about leaving the body. The only urgency is my friends, leaving them like getting on a boat to someplace else. And there is Caterpillar. I'd prefer not to leave her alone. I'm thinking it probably is time to go on, because I find that this phase of my life is the best that I can recall. It's like I've learned how to live my life, so it's time to go. Finally come into appreciation and it's time to go on. That seems to be how it is. Like maybe it is that appreciation I need to feel before going on. Get there, feel it, and go. Strangely, I don't think of it as dying and don't think of it mortality. It doesn't seem to be anything. Just a transition from one state of being to another. It's like a ufo abduction, maybe abduction by angels---Up in the air, Jr Birdman. I find I feel a sense of loss for my friends I'll be leaving behind, and feel their loss for me, how, for a few, it will be painful, and for most just another obit. "Did you know him?" "Yeah, he was that crazy old shit lived up there at Air Bellows." "Which one?" "The one in the old schoolhouse."


Speaking of schoolhouse, did I learn anything worth carrying into future lifetimes? I think I learned quite a lot. This lifetime was a learning lifetime. Learning is the one thing I wanted to do in this lifetime more than anything else. I learned first hand, second hand, third hand, however experience could be found. I wanted to learn what was real, not just information. Information is one thing. Knowledge is another. Wisdom is yet another. All my life I'd wanted to meet a wise man, and found the wise man in Jr Maxwell, the only man I have known I can call wise without hesitation. I've enjoyed knowing a wide variety of people, a wide enough variety that I found my own place. By this time in my life I have found my people and my place. I know who I belong among and who I don't. In this period over the last 5 years, I have found that I am, indeed, stable in myself. Recalling a time 5 years ago a tough-guy set out to intimidate me by telling me about myself. I laughed, told him I am comfortable in myself, I know myself, and I know for a certainty he does not know me, because he had just proven it by telling me he doesn't know anything about me, going by what he said. I was struck when I heard myself say those words. It was like someone else speaking for me.  It was automatic. It surprised me that I knew what I heard myself say. Even if this isn't the last day, week, month or even year, it's still close. I do need to start making provisions for my vacancy.


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