Earth is a place of joy and strife Where spirits can soar or slither Some find nourishment in love and life Others see their spirits eaten and wither
From the mountains to the rolling hills From the oceans to the fields of grain This planet has so many thrills and beauty But it can also bring great pain
For some, the Earth is a sanctuary A place of peace and harmony For others, it can be a battlefield Where their spirits are crushed, you see
So let us be mindful of our surroundings And do our best to lift each other up For on this Earth, our spirits are bounding And it is our choice to fill our cups
With love and light, or fear and doubt The choice is ours, let’s make it right For on this Earth, our spirits can sprout Let’s tend to them and take flight
Here is how Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, describes the compulsion of the mystic to capture the fleeting unity of consciousness:
YES IT IS TRUE; THE ECSTATIC [MYSTIC] CANNOT SAY THE UNSAYABLE. HE SAYS THE OTHER THING—IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS—NOT UNITY. HE SPEAKS, HE MUST SPEAK, BECAUSE THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. . . . HE DOES NOT LIE WHO SPEAKS OF UNITY IN IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS, WHO STAMMER OF UNITY.. . . HE SAYS THE FORMS AND SOUNDS AND NOTICES THAT HE IS NOT SAYING THE EXPERIENCE, NOT THE GROUND, NOT THE UNITY, AND WOULD LIKE TO STOP HIMSELF AND CANNOT, AND FEELS THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SAYING IT, LIKE A SEVEN-LOCKED GATE WHICH HE RATTLES, KNOWING THAT IT WILL NEVER OPEN, YET HE MUST GO ON RATTLING IT. FOR THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. ECSTASY IS DEAD, STABBED IN THE BACK BY TIME, WHICH CANNOT BE MOCKED; BUT, DYING, IT HAS FLUNG THE WORD INTO HIM, AND THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. AND HE SPEAKS, SPEAKS, HE CANNOT BE SILENT, THE FLAME IN THE WORD DRIVES HIM, HE KNOWS THAT HE CANNOT SAY IT, YET HE TRIES OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL HIS SOUL IS EXHAUSTED TO DEATH AND THE WORD LEAVES HIM. THIS IS THE EXALTATIO OF THE ONE WHO HAS RETURNED INTO THE COMMOTION AND CANNOT RESIGN HIMSELF TO IT; THIS IS HIS INSURRECTION, THE INSURRECTION OF A SPEAKER: RELATED TO THE INSURRECTION OF THE POET, SLIGHTER IN POSSESSION, MIGHTIER IN EXISTENCE, THAN HIS. THIS IS THE BENDING OF THE BOW FOR THE SAYING OF THE UNSAYABLE, AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK, A LABOR IN THE DARK. IT’S WORK, THE CONFESSION, BEARS ITS MARK. (9-10)
I would venture to say that we all know the burning of the Word. We know the work in the dark. And indeed, such confessional work bears its mark.
Like prophets, we go into our caves. We know the peace beyond the commotion of the every day, and we cannot entirely resign ourselves to this ordinary commotion. There is something deeper. Something below the surface, beyond the clatter. There are ways to transcend the commotion and seek an inspired insight that transforms human life.
“The great human error is to reason in place of finding out.”
—Simone Weil
She was a force. She shames me. She lived her philosophy.
She defined the price and purpose of philosophy. Attention for Simone was a crucial skill to develop if you were not going to live at the mercy of the the forces around you.
How to properly focus your attention was key to her philosophy.
A different experience of everything you do is available to you…right now. Or you can just accept your default perception.
You have to be open to receive what is beyond the circumstances of the moment.
This requires for you to pay attention to what is happening around you. Most just settle for their default state of attention.
Simone’s attention saw the world as sacred.
She didn’t care about becoming a famous philosopher, she was too busy living her life.
She became a teacher. She encouraged her students to think openly.
Staying open is the key to everything!
What if there is no single right answer, so common in life.
People find a position and then just vehemently defend and die on that hill.
A shame.
One must avoid this collectivist thinking.
Acknowledge at the beginning of any conservation you only have a partial truth and that there is always more to learn.
Don’t chain yourself to a fixed position. How to pay attention?
The middle path between no activity and too much activity, is to put in effort, but you remove your own prejudices from your experiences.
You look and listen and wait.
I am in awe of her focus, attention, and openness.
“If, at some point in your life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage—it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.”
I think the greatest lesson in life is beyond all work and play, it’s learning to love and be loved.
It’s the only true thing in my experience.
Do not seek for your own gain, seek to lift others up and you will be great!
Leaders, serve the people you lead. Seek their best and not your own. This is true capitalism.
We have certainly lost our way to greed and progress and fear of not having what we want.
I have found nothing greater than forgiveness, kindness and patience. Lifting up the least of us, makes us great.
Make yourself available to invest in others and you will be great.
I’m just a dreamer you may think, no, I stand in the sun sunny I know the hard won freedom of true love.
One has to learn to love themselves first and best and from there, give from an overflowing abundance.
This is all I have really learned of value in my life and I will never cease sharing it, until my dying breath.
I ran from love terrified Until I could go no further There I collapsed…finished But I heard something In my dirt filled ears Lying in the land of the dead It was the softest music at first Like nothing I had ever heard before Slowly I began to feel the tug of gravity Suddenly it lifted me up up up Out of the dirt All the way into the big endless sky Suddenly clouds of dark matter split wide A golden light Unlike anything I had ever seen Shot right through me I felt love in every cell screaming Love had raised me from the dead Then I heard thunderous words Echoing from everywhere at once
NOTHING COULD EVER SEPARATE YOU FROM MY ❤️
Then I heard every cell In me singing I found the music Was always in me I just never heard it Like Apollo singing Through the underworld Nothing can touch me now I’ve got the music in me
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
—Henry David Thoreau
This begins my master class on how best to apply philsophy. Henry spent a long time in the woods, he went a little crazy. Bodhidharma stared at a wall for years. Cold Mountain lived on a cold mountain. Diogenes lived in a wine barrel. What do most of us do?
Consume and get fat and die of rich person diseases, most without a positive balance in their checking accounts, how absolutely ironic and funny.
Give up the ghost, you are already dead.
Let’s start there, you are a goner. You are not going to win life. Your purpose isn’t to be free or have a happy life or be rich or poor, it’s to spread your DNA and die, to be consumed, to allow the next wave of being.
But let me tell you something, this is the doorway to joy, to Eden.
Failure is freedom!
I feel most folks are utterly asleep and full of 💩 There, I said it. We live in a fishbowl full of turds. I don’t want to be a winner. I don’t want fame or riches. I ain’t gonna start a YouTube channel or TikTok. I mean, I have a YouTube channel that gets 1-100 likes mostly per post. No one likes what I like really and that’s just fine by me.
“The straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat— you know when they are in the room with you.”
—Marcus Aurelius
I’m weird, a misanthrope, a smelly 🐐 but I love life on this little blue marble, I really do. So I ain’t all bad. Hell is other people Sarte mused and he was close, what he should have said is, hell is yourself, enjoy your stay.
I was one of the walking dead 💀 how did I find my groove, I failed and failed and failed. I became a bum. I wrote my heart. I puked my guts out. I read broadly and saw I was just another bastard. Welcome to the party.
The funniest thing, once you finally embrace the above and stomp around and splash in it, a funny thing happens, people hear you and see you. Your worst fears realized. They want your freedom. Some hate you for it, others sit at your feet.
Well, I don’t have anything to offer the little birds but a kick in the ass out of my nice comfy nest.
There you go, that’s lesson one in how to be a loser.
“The arising and the elimination of illusion are both illusory. Illusion is not something rooted in Reality; it exists because of your dualistic thinking.
If you will only cease to indulge in opposed concepts such as ‘ordinary’ and ‘Enlightened’, illusion will cease of itself. And then if you still want to destroy it wherever it may be, you will find that there is not a hairsbreadth left of anything on which to lay hold.
This is the meaning of: ‘I will let go with both hands, for then I shall certainly discover the Buddha in my mind’.”
‘The nature of the Mind when understood, No human speech can compass or disclose. Enlightenment is naught to be attained, And he that gains it does not say he knows.’
-Bodhidharma
—from The Zen Teaching of Huang Po
I’ve been studying the early sources of zen, which is the Japanese name and Buddhist/Indian sources. I use the lower case there because what is written is not Zen. You can’t really study Zen on anonymous social media sites. But the discussions can be interesting and revealing of our dualitic thinking.
Anyone claiming truth is making a power play.
No word can reveal this, silence enshrines it.
Piercing sensory perception and conceptual thought brings an immediate end to illusion. This is directly seeing and perceiving with the mysterious intuition. This awareness is not exclusive to Zen. Plotinus and Eckart seemed to have come to the same place as the sages.
Hands off, yes, indeed.
—-
I think this is where the best art comes from.
Feeling this fire is one aspect, but walking into it is a whole other experience.
Walking into the fire is an act of self immolation, sacrifice and an overcoming of fear and is maybe the only courageous thing we can do.
No longer bound by talent or skill or lack thereof, but truly transcending these.
I would say walking into the fire is an act of faith as well and opens a portal to nowhere and everywhere.
The raw expression of Jack Kerouac from ‘On the Road’ or the writing of his insane mad friend, Neal Cassady, being western examples.
An enlightened, if sad teacher, Harold Bloom, explored the American Sublime deeply through our literature. I like his thinking on these subjects. He’s a bit too brilliant for me though 😉
Reading Jack Kerouac again and Neal recently and Bloom’s Opus, The Daemon Knows as well as the old zen texts.
Quantum Heart 