The Gates Are Open

A reading and my useless commentary from the Mumonkan.

There is no God and We are His Prophets

I titled my meditation today with some powerful words from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. These words were spoken by the lone hermit Ely to the man and his boy on the dark grey road to nowhere in a dead world. These words will wreck you as you let their meaning insinuate into your consciousness. If you are a student of yourself, you need to read The Road. The movie wasn’t bad either. It looked exactly as it felt to me in the book. If you have seen The Revenant, the movies are very similar in tone and esoteric meaning. I’m going to write more about the story behind The Revenant later. It is very personal and magickal for me.

Anyway, I have been reading Native American mythology recently so themes of Apocalypse, God, Spirit, Prophecy and Rebirth are swishing around in my head and heart in an alchemical mix at the moment. Why would someone read about Native American prophesies? There is a thread that led me there. It led me to some interesting folks waiting for an Eschaton to destroy the world, aliens of the grey kind, through my own experience with the Apocalypse through the Evangelical religion/cult of my Mother and finally it led me to my true self who I found laughing at me. All I can do now is go through the motions and write the burning words floating up from my soul, my confession I guess or last will and testament maybe. So, on with the confession.

My culture brought the Native American’s judgement and Apocalypse in a way. Our entire culture is built on the ashes of theirs. If any American feels that pride sticking in their throats, that’s why, whether they are aware of it or not. I came across these haunting words in my title today, There is no God and We are his Prophets, as I meditated on my own internal Apocalypse and Apotheosis I have been exploring recently. That is not an end of myself, but an uncovering to the ultimate awareness and expression of myself. That sounds mystical, well, it is. Also, The Apocalypse seems to be coming at me from every input channel these days. That’s what they call a synchronicity. You don’t ignore those. I don’t anyway, not anymore. In a way I am a child of the Apocalypse. Let me explain.

As long as I can remember someone was predicting the end of the world. It is amazing actually when I stopped and thought about it. I was born in 1972 and when I was a boy I remember Walter Cronkite on CBS News talking about the long gas lines and energy crisis every night it seemed or US hostages in Iran. We had acid rain, floods, eroding ozone layer, growth of terrorism into adolescence and the terrible liberals to fear. Reagan came and saved us. Oh and I can’t forget the nuclear bombs flying over our heads and waiting in the ground to unleash Armageddon. The world I grew up in helped to foster a bitter angst and skepticism in me I carried into young adulthood unaware. A ticking time bomb of doubt. I gather now that was more by design than accident. On top of all that my Mother went and got Saved and dragged us all with her. I’ll spare you the details, insert your own inauthentic religious forced experience -> here.

The Christian Apocalypse literalness, as presented to the common Evangelical today as infallible, is laughable. I laugh, ha! All you need to do is consider the source of this doom and gloom and their gold plated fruit, no more to say about it. The metaphorical Apocalypse of the true self and uncovering of our Divinity has been co-opted by a cult and dangerous fairytale! Those are fighting words, so I better back away. Any person who spends a day in this world knows the norm is change, in every Planck unit of time it is a new Universe. It is fear that seeks to build a hedge between yourself and an unknown future. Do not look for an absolute, for that is like putting your foot on shifting sand. There is no bedrock to put your foot on in this decaying material Universe.

Logically to me, the answer, if there was one I often thought, would be found beneath the myths that were presented. I didn’t have a map to that place though, so I was no better off than the rest of the dreaming world. But there was some voice inside of me, some force, that took this opening in my thinking and began to work on it slowly over 2 decades. It just always felt like the right way to look at these things to me. Intuition I have found becomes your greatest guide and friend the more you learn to hear and trust it. What is literal in a world of myth? And that was my only point ever to those around me sharing the delusion we were under, I always felt it was important to think about the things beneath these things in this old book and look beneath the ideas and see the archetypes. Who wrote them? Why? It was at the end of religion and recognition of common archetypes across all religions, myth and culture that led me to an esoteric occult secret about myself. One that I knew I would find.

One I was destined to find it seems.

So today, researching the recurring theme of Apocalypse in my life, I was thinking about the boy from The Road and how often I feel myself walking like him on in a gray dead world that does not know it is dead yet. I found an essay suggesting a correlation between the boy’s father in the book and Virgil from Dante’s Inferno. Virgil could take you through your past and illuminate purgatory, but only we can climb that fiery stairway to Heaven. As Elijah did in that old book. The boy in the story represents the last child God born from the ashes of the old world maybe. A Messiah? The boy asks if there are other people and his father says no. Not anywhere, the boy asks? Maybe somewhere else, the boy says. Does the father live only to keep the boy’s hope alive? Why keep walking? That is the question, isn’t it? I will not spoil it and I am not sure I have a satisfactory answer yet anyway why they still kept walking in that dead world. I think it was partially driven by that unspoken intuition that drives us as a Light in the darkest storm from deep within and because humans have that unique sense of the future and hope keeps you warm in the cold. Better to hope than have none maybe in the end, as many wise sages seem to have said.

That sounds very depressing and shady, doesn’t it? I’m sorry, right now, as I look out the window though, it is beautiful actually. The Diablo mountain range is covered in a fresh coat of pastoral California green against a clear blue sky. The rains have come and gone and left us many gifts. For me I only see unicorns and rainbows now when I think of the Apocalypse. All myth is being washed away from me layer by layer. When I let all the myth of all creeds go and ask myself about the future, I feel a real burning hope and joy. There is no reason for it or specific message. My hope is just a Light burning inside me. I have no use for any other person’s version of reality. I know myself, here, now. What else can I offer you, but my view from here? I found something in myself I could never have dreamed of. That was mystical. I am only beginning to plumb the depths of myself. I invite you to shed your myths and stories. Shed your illusions and dreams about yourself and see what is left.

There is a New Age at hand I believe and I chose to and will play an active hand in bringing it into being with my Light, however it chooses to shine in this world. It is beautiful to me that when I asked myself about what I AM I could only respond with poems and pictures.  The future must be one where we learn to live in balance, so we have to learn to do that today and now. It began and will continue with individuals learning to love themselves first. In this New Age suffering will be seen for the illusion it is, created by our own desire for ourselves. We will and can find Heaven here now. Is that a place of rest? Rest from what? Suffering? Whose? Work? For what did you work? If no one is here suffering or working, who needs to rest? Maybe Heaven is being fully connected in this life, now, because now is all we have. Can you live with now being enough for you? If you can, you will find balance.

 

‘I’ as a Ray of Light

shining-sun-vector_17-608220232.jpeg

Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection…— J. Krishnamurti

“And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.” Gen.1:3

I wanted to share some perennial wisdom distilled from many sources by the mysterious Wei Wu Wei in the 60’s, who reminds of Magnum P.I.’s secret benefactor we never saw. It has been coming to me from several places. I have been experimenting with the Taoist idea of Wu Wei, “non-doing”, over the last year. Perhaps better understood through Wei Wu Wei, “effortless doing”, which allows one to express their being creatively in the moment with no thinking, just intuitive non-action. This way of thinking has many benefits.

For me, creating spontaneously using this Way of Non-Action ultimately helped me realize myself as a ray of Light from the Sun.  If you look at the Sun too long, you can forget the trees though.  I realized that I AM just Light, and all rays go back to the same Sun. Behind that Light is Love. To simply Be is evidence of it. But you suffer you say, this is no heaven. Who suffers? What is suffering? What is Heaven? Who is sacrificed? Who dies? Nothing suffers in the Light. In the Light you can only Be what you are. You only suffer when you turn your eyes from yourself. We are all reflecting the same Light back at each other. I hope you will look with new eyes upon each other in recognition of yourself.

Are you a reflection? A “conceptual effect” of the Light being processed by other’s brains? It must be a sick joke! How absurd! I was kidding, better not read any further. I warned you. And yes, you Uber smarties, I just swallowed it all hook, line and sinker. Perhaps I looked at the Sun way too long and it fried my brain. Move along. Nothing to see here but the ramblings of a Fool.

THE TENTH MAN : 14

Light on the Subject

Light shines: it does not seek to shine; it does not know that it is shining; it just appears to shine on encountering objective resistance, and shining is all that it appears to be.

Shining, therefore, is the apparent nature, the apparent being of the suchness of Light. And wherever it is shining it never finds darkness – but always itself.

Light in itself is insentient and incognisable, invisible, inaudible, intangible; light is ubiquitous in space although the sky itself appears dark. Sensorially, in manifestation, imperceptible, as light it may be said to have no conceptual existence apart from its shining, but is cognisable only by objective reflection from sensorially perceived particles in our conceptually assumed atmosphere.

All this, however, merely happens to us, or appears to happen or not to happen, to us. We think, and say, that it ‘exists’ merely because it is among the experiences that are sensorially perceptible to sentient beings, among reactions recorded by one or more of our five rudimentary senses and interpreted by the sixth. It appears to happen to us: that is all we can know about it; the assumption that it has any other existence whatever, to suggest that it exists in any manner or degree independently of our cognising of it, is entirely gratuitous. Therefore to think or to speak of it as being this, that, the other, anything whatever or nothing, is merely absurd. All we can ever know of it is what we ourselves think about it; it exists, therefore, as an appearance in our psyche, and it has no known or knowable existence of its own.

‘Light’ is our light: and there is no reason whatever to suppose that there is any other kind of light. And so, being our light, it is an aspect of whatever-we-are; being nothing whatever but whatever-we-are, we must be what it is, and since whatever-we-are must always be reduced to the vocable ‘I’, no matter who says it, Light must be I, and I must be Light. Therefore whatever Light may be, I arise and shine. But I only manifest when I encounter the apparent resistance of objectivity, whereby I shine, for when all apparent objects are removed, objects and I remain in the potentiality of Dhyana, the static aspect of Prajna, which is the not-shining of Light and the apparent darkness of space.

In whatever direction light may be oriented, on whatever resistance it may manifest and shine, it never finds darkness, but always its own light; in whatever direction I may be oriented – all sentience being ‘I’ – never can I find other than I, for whether or not I manifest and shine, I never encounter darkness, but only absence of my light as ‘I’. My presence and my absence, therefore, have none but an apparent difference due to the apparent existence of objects, for there is nothing but what I am as Suchness.

Every shining action which is the apparent aspect of the functioning of Light, finds only itself – for nothing can be perceived that is not illumined by Prajna which I am. Darkness is a concept which entails absence of light, which is the voidness of annihilation. Only in the eternal and ubiquitous shining of timeless and spaceless Prajna can there be sentience, and sentience can be said to be a distributed radiance of prajnaic shining, finding expression dualistically via supposedly independent entities, whose apparent independent existence is a conceptual effect of such divided reflection.

The luminosity of prajnaic functioning, which to every sentient being is ‘I’, renders every action universal – since only the luminous functioning of prajnaic ‘I’ can produce the appearance of action. The supposed individuals concerned may be regarded as phenomenal reflections in whom prajnaic shining is all that they are and all that the vocable ‘I’ can be assumed to imply. (didn’t I say that)

Therefore by ‘the seeing’ of you, you can see me; in ‘the hearing’ of the stream, you can hear the stream; in ‘the cognising’ of the sensorial universe, every sentient being can cognise the universe; and in ‘the apprehending’ of ‘the truth of Ch’an’, every sentient being can apprehend it – and so can be ‘free’.

It is what I am that is seeing,
And I have ten-thousand eyes.

The Parable of the Three Men

Three men fall into a river after the bridge they were walking on collapsed. You guessed it, a Buddhist, a Zen Practitioner, and a Taoist.

Floating down the river, the Buddhist looks about him and decides through much effort to swim to the shore and leave the river. Ignoring the discomfort of his situation (cold water, burning muscles, etc.) he swims to shore and watches the other two float away, content that he finally made it out of his nasty predicament.

The Zen Practitioner looks about him and decides that he is in the river now, and if he waits, he will eventually drift to shore where he can leave the river. He learns to embrace the cold and ignore the fear of rocks and rapids, and eventually he comes to a stop and climbs out, happy in the knowledge that he has escaped the river and all its peril.

The Taoist looks about him and decides that since the bridge he was walking on collapsed, he is now floating in a river, naturally… So he decides to wait and see what will happen next, confident that whatever happens is part of the natural process of the Tao.

P.S. Did you know you can change the dimension you live in? It is all about the dimensions you let yourself exist in. Truth be told, you are limitless across an infinite number of dimensions. Let yourself flow into that reality.

Image – MD – Seeking Center