“He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise”
Mel Brooks said as long as the earth is spinning, we are going to be dizzy and make mistakes, we are unrehearsed.
😂
Whether we like it or not, life will give us an education of the heart.
Some are good students and others not so much.
Nothing in life is worth a damn without love ❤️
It doesn’t matter what you believe, like, at all.
It matters what you do locally, to those who need and love you and to the stranger too.
Actions have consequences.
How much love is in your life?
It’s all that matters to you.
And by you I mean me.
There is no happy ending here, but there is a whole lotta love ❤️
“If you’re quiet, you’re not living. You’ve got to be noisy and colorful and lively.
..
Look, I don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you’ve got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death.
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.
I couldn’t sleep and the Lion told me to offer myself as a lamb to itself. It said it is all that is moving. It told me love kills. To take my small flame I have cultivated and merge it with the only real 🔥
And I wrote this with some help from my friends…
“Love is like the lion’s tooth.” —W.B. Yeats
I’ll tell you a secret about love Life is love and love is life A riddle and plainly known
I’ll tell you a secret about love You can cultivate your little flame But love will kill you when you come close
I’ll tell you a secret about love Though love may slay you as a lamb You shall be raised up a lion
—smelly goat
“You that come to birth and bring the mysteries, your voice-thunder makes us very happy. Roar, lion of the heart, and tear me open!” – Rumi
Only now do I realize I have prepared myself as an offering to the Lion.
Quantum Heart 