Category — worship

::clapclapclapclapclap::

Stars from Space 

[HD video, really worth your time to let load, hit fullscreen, sit back and get ready to grin like a maniac]

There are approximately ten thousand posts backed up in my brain right now, but I've no idea when I'll get a chance to write them, so instead you get one of the (many!) good bits from the Tao Te Ching:

In dwelling, be close to the land.

In meditation, go deep in the heart.

In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.

In speech, be true.

In ruling, be just.

In business, be competent.

In action, watch the timing.

No fight: No blame.

-Chapter Eight

New quote added to the Random Quotes scroller:

"Seven Deadly Sins:
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice."  – Mahatma Gandhi

I like this more complete formulation of a "sin"…as a Catholic child I was basically taught that single words ("wealth", "pleasure", etc.) were "bad", without any reference to why or how or what could bring them into balance so they could be good.

Gandhi makes the excellent point that a thing or condition like Wealth or Knowledge can be good or bad, depending on whether it's in balance.

I might even add some others:

Cursing without grammar
Gifts without gratitude
Work without goals
Help without sympathy

…Can you think of any?

Working on a more meaningful post for later, but in the meantime…

Last week I felt my first ever ground-shimmying-from-an-earthquake.  (I was napping!  The rippling of the concrete under me woke me up.)

And today I'm sitting on the porch (with my family visiting from MI = awesome) and watching the wind blow as my first-ever hurricane gets ready to brush by us.

It's strangely relaxing, after a tumultuous couple weeks, to be hanging out and not planning anything (except to sit around talking for a couple hours) and watching the wind blow and thinking unimportant thoughts about how very awe-inspiring things like wind and water are.  I've had the same feeling while climbing mountains, or swimming in the ocean…the thought that the world could just reach out and squish you ceases to be scary when you realize that it hasn't yet, quite possibly for a reason.

I hope everyone is safe and enjoying something today, too, even if it is a brush with disaster.

ON is OFF.

Or rather, ON is a natural state; OFF is something getting in its way.  To get to ON, you drop the stuff that's holding you in OFF — you take the OFF off.

The secret to mastery is to part the curtain of your own thinking; to get your mind out of the way so that you can interact directly, swim without a wetsuit, use all that sensory equipment in your cranium (and body) without forty "safety" filters in the way.  Those filters may be making you feel safer, but that's an illusion, a sales pitch; you're built to plug straight in.  This is Reality and you're a child of it, and if staring it right in the face shatters your whole frail tangly Psychology, guess what?  You didn't need it anyway. 

Are you made in God's image or not?  Does God need a mental hazmat suit to live in the world?  Is there any reason Adam and Eve can't go naked besides their own fear?

Everyone who has ever done something perfectly — sung, skateboarded, wrote, or even just sat in a room — knows this; you don't do it perfectly by doing it a certain way — you do it perfectly by getting the hell out of the way and letting it be done.  (This is why you have to learn to do it first; until the mechanics of it are rote, second-nature, you can't fully shut off your mind and let it come naturally.  Ask any martial artist.)

You don't think about the results, you don't think about how you look or why you're doing it.  You don't think.  You do, but not in the sense we construct that sentence in English:  "you" don't "do"; more you arrange things so that you are done.  (You yin-do, I would say.)  The activity, whatever it is, happens in a pure unfiltered form; you put yourself between it and Reality as a conduit.  You are spoken through, by Tao, or God if you don't mind sloppy definitions.

But look:  If you've ever sung, or danced, or climbed a mountain this way, you're missing the point if you think it's about singing or climbing; this is how you should be all the time.  This is what mastery of existence is.  Get rid of all the filters…the illusions of control, the attempts at planning, the mental blast-shielding.  The world may look radioactive, but it won't hurt you; in fact, when you do get hurt it's because your hazmat suit gets buffeted, twisted or heated and that hurts you.  Without it, you're invincible.

Isn't this the point of every story, the lesson of every hero?  Strip!  Walk completely without fear and there will be nothing to fear!  Turn off the targeting computer, Luke; suspend your critical disbelief, Bastien; let go of your past and your shame, Vash.  None of it is really helping you…in fact, the opposite is true. 

Pascal said that the source of all our discontent can be found in our inability to sit quietly in a room.  I think he meant our inability to shut things off (turn the OFF off) to the point where we can just sit — or just do anything.  But that's not to make it sound easy (simple, yes; easy, no)…turning off the targeting computer before taking the shot of your life with worlds hanging in the balance is actually kind of a weeny pale description of the level of stress and fear involved, for most people. 

But the fear is just the alarm-system on the hazmat suit; it is meaningless beyond its own confines.  Extreme or life-threatening activities cause you to skip over the fear, to ignore the alarms, because you don't have time, and physical survival is an easy way to trump the insistence of psychology that you Not Go There.  It's not actually hard to be fully present while clinging to the side of a mountain; and this is probably largely why people do it, and similar things. 

This is  why the true test is being able to "sit in a room"…when you can do that, you've managed to drop the curtain on your own, without some kind of emergency to distract you from the discomfort of it, or even a rote task like singing or painting to smooth the transition.

I've never sat in a room, not without some major emotional crisis going on that functioned pretty much the same as clinging to the side of a mountain.

I did, however, walk across a floor today.

It was amazing. 

"Hell hath no limits, nor is it circumscrib'd
by any selfe place; but where we are is Hell.
And where hell is there we must ever be.
And to be short, when the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purify'd,
All places shall be Hell that are not Heaven."

-Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

…By Ralph Waldo Emerson.  I copied some of this for a friend the other day, a friend who isn't as happy with "thick" reading as I am, and he made me realize that if you sift through the rather dense weave of old language and dense arguments with your fingers, you can pull gems out of Emerson that will make anyone's day. 

This is a list of the best sentences, if you will, from this excellent essay, with my adjustments and occasional commentary in brackets and elipses.  It's less a collection of quotes, and more an outline of the piece.  If you like it, please understand that the whole tangly mess is brilliant and wonderfully worth it to read and you should do it no matter how long it takes you; but for some geniuses like Emerson, even skimming the bones of his thoughts are marvelously good for ours, so I offer these here for the time-stripped and classics-averse to enjoy too.

• Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost

• Great works of art…teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility…most…when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
  

• We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.  …but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.  [I want that on a T-shirt.  In Chinese.]

• Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the [self-reliance] of every one of its members. … The virtue in most request is conformity.

• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. 

  [There's a great part right after this where he describes a churchgoer asking him when he's young, essentially "how can you trust your impulses when they might come from the Devil?", and his answer is, "I don't think so, but (quote) If I'm the Devil's child, then I'll live from the Devil."  For Emerson, self-reliance meant having the guts to be what you were created to be, and having enough faith to not doubt the usefulness of your own creation.  <3!]

• Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none.

• I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

  [Italics mine.  An excellent example, perhaps one of the best, of a positive argument from existentialism!]

• It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

• The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

• But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

• The sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows.

• [There are some bits that just can't be condensed...the "foolish consistency" argument is amazing, but it's all or nothing...]

• Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.

• Be it how it will, do right now.  [If that's not Zen, I don't know what is.]

• Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.

• That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.

  [Fascinating that we don't seem to have a story like that nowadays.]

• What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? 

  [This one I put in just for sheer gorgeousness, and to point out that science has informed beautiful literature for a long long time...this whole section is a great example.  And by the way, the "power" he's referring to here is Spontaneity or Intuition, if you were curious. ;)]

• The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

• Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. 

  [This, and what follows it in the text, may be my favorite bit.]

• [Only Life] avails, not the having lived.

  [In the original it's "Life only avails", but that antiquated construction confuses the point for some people.  I love, love, love this one; I think it's the greatest wisdom one could possibly carry forward into growing old.  Only Life...not the "having lived".  It's sort of a restatement of my Higher Law #1:  Keep Trying.  Only said much, much better...but there's no shame at all in being jealous of Emerson I think.  (Well, he would think there was.  But he dead.  ;)]

• I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

• Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law.

• The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.

• Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious.  [AMEN!]

• Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.

• Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

• Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.   [Fascinating point, which he supports with arguments later on; for example, "The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. ... He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun."]

• Great men…leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, [a] founder.

• Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long…They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.  But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.

• Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.  [These are the last two lines. ;)]

*One last comment — Emerson refers to "man" and "manhood" throughout this piece, and others.  I believe his sexism is ignorance, and further I firmly believe that if I had an hour with the man, I could talk him right out of it, because he was obviously a clear thinker and a believer in honesty and universalism of principle.  Hence, it doesn't upset me here like it does in some other writings…in the time he was writing, to say anything else (he/she?) would have been pretty literally unthinkable; it would have been such a huge point as to require a separate essay.  But it is worth meditating on how this wasn't that long ago, really, that freedom and education and uprightness and full life meant, literally, "manhood".  And that not only doesn't it mean that today, but I can openly write here about it, throw my education around and furthermore, openly threaten to kick anyone's ass (or perhaps flash my tits at them) who disagrees with me.  Viva las modernity.  ;)

I'm in love; I'm in pain; I'm having a hell of a time and a wonderful time, often minutes from each other.  I'm remembering fictional past lives and making silly sound-effects in meetings.  I'm in One Of Those Phases, but shed ye not a tear, Internets, for I love what these phases do to my writing.  ;)

So, the other day my trusty Book tells me to "Contemplate the Higher Laws".  I'm sure it had some in mind, but of course being me, I had to ask the question from scratch anyway, because all the Higher Laws I know that other people wrote down are missing something, and I'm picky about wording.

Hence, I wrote my own Ten Commandments.  Except there are five, and they're actually in order of importance (which I think is far more useful; the Bible never did say what to do if the commandments conflicted with each other.  My list covers that ;).

This list has actually been of surprisingly great help to me…the Book was right about Contemplating Higher Laws being a good thing for me right now.  (The Book is usually right.)  I post them here on the offchance that someone else could use some rewording, too.

So WHAT ARE THE HIGHER LAWS?

1. Keep Trying. Live out your time and do not resent it. Remember that your job, your one single job here, is to Keep Going until you Stop. Realize that wanting to stop rather than continue in pain is an important lesson itself, but that in the end you are not allowed to stop, or even slow down: Living is your whole purpose here. No matter what happens, or how you fail, keep trying, and you will avoid regret in the long run.
    

2. Pay Attention. Strive to be fully "here", aware and alert, every moment. Use the facilities you were gifted with; do not blunt them or deny them. Do not fall prey to boredom or dissatisfaction; there is always something to learn, and it's often hiding where you'd least expect it. Do not throw away reality in favor of things you desire instead. Also do not shut down in defense against pain: Pain is a lesson too, and some forms of growth are only possible through it. Be open and aware in every situation.
    

3. Practice Karma Yoga. Do not deny or reject what the world presents to you – say Yes and strive to incorporate everything, even hard lessons and disappointments, into your life. Remember that everything is here to teach you, and that you're designed to be changed by the process of living. Do not indulge in fear, or hate (which is born from it). Strive for inner calm and balance, and approach the world with openness and honesty.

4. Doubt Everything Else. Remember the world is in many ways an illusion, and many truths are beyond our direct comprehension. Do not be afraid to be guided by your Faith that life is worthwhile (#1) and your Perception of the moment (#2): these are the Great One's tools, and better than any systems human beings have ever built on top of them. Take good advice whenever and wherever you find it, but do not become entangled in words. Be prepared to let any individual belief or principle go when it conflicts with your heart.

5. Love. Never pass up a chance to love. Don't quash or deny your feelings of love for people, places, or things, even if you'll never get any reciprocation or pleasure out of it at all – even if you know it will only bring you pain. Love isn't about pleasure; it's about feeling in your guts the truth of your connection to, and oneness with, the rest of reality. It's an obligation and a right as much as a privilege and a gift. Remember when it's good that it will be difficult; and remember when it's difficult that it can be wonderful. Learn to make space for it to live inside you without crippling you: The skill of letting it abide within you results in great power. [Gundam metaphor here.]
   

It's 5-21-2011!  I've been waiting years to celebrate this day!  *Wooo party!*

What do we celebrate on this day?  Well, I think it's unequivocally about the power of fiction. 

Today we marvel at humanity's ability to write powerful words that motivate each other across unthinkable miles and centuries of distance; and also at humanity's ability to convince themselves of outrageously stupid things that appease their psychology.

This particular Celebrate Fiction day is, I think, more about the latter.  I mean, this 'prediction' isn't exactly Nostradamus-level; it's just some crazy geezer wailing to himself on the radio … and yet, look how many people think it's credible!  Even people I know who aren't even Christian (nevermind the specifically batshit sects of Christianity that typically go for Rapture stories) have, in my presence, made "Hmm, well, you know…" noises when confronted with questions about their belief in the/this* Rapture. 

*because let's face it, there's a Rapture planned every couple years at this point.  And why wouldn't there be?  It's great publicity.

But if we expand this Celebration Fiction day to include the Bible itself — which isn't so out-of-line as it inspired not just Harold Camping, but literally countless other whackjobs — then we can truly appreciate the power of the combination of good writing and the twin human flaws of fear and desire.

A brilliant teacher I had once told me, "An honest man can't be tricked, because he doesn't want anything for free."  Simplified (and I was like sixteen, so simplifying made sense), but very true — and applicable to the Rapture as to anything else.  The whole idea of God Will Reset Everything is, at its base, just another desire to get something for free:  You get your faith vindicated**, your enemies proven wrong, and your life started over***, and you don't have to lift a finger or take any blame.  And even better, in sublimely passive-aggressive fashion, you get to gasp and bring the back of your hand to your forehead and say Oh no, oh my goodness, how just awful and aren't we all (say it with me now) such martyrs!

**which is, of course, antithetical to the whole point of faith — not vindication itself but wanting vindication.  Seeking vindication for your faith is like seeking a machine to do your pushups for you.  (Now simple little beliefs, yes; but the whole thing about the Mystery and the extranaturalness of God is that you can't get any vindication for it as a simple belief, so you're forced to have faith (which could be defined as a sort of meta-belief that needs no proof in order to exist) or nothing at all.  …Or you can invent a Rapture-any-day-now and bank on that, I guess.)

***I don't think I have to explain that getting the benefits of suicide without taking the moral hit for it is an attractive proposition to the ego ipso facto, but hey, I explained it anyway.  ;)

So let's address some of the questions this day is about celebrating — because if Rapture Theory has a light side and a dark side, the dark side is losing control and being an asshole/idiot, and the light side is looking honestly at what this all says about humans and their worlds; and I'm all about the questions, as you know.

1. Will the world end?  ABSOLUTELY.  We just don't get to know when or how, and hence the Ending becomes no different than our own physical mortality:  They hold exactly the same moral, spiritual and psychological lessons, and the important thing is that we learn those lessons before whatever's going to happen happens and we lose our chance.
2. Will my Faith be vindicated?  ABSOLUTELY.  See question 1.
3. Will my enemies pay the price for their crap?  ABSOLUTELY.  See question 1.
4. Will I find out if my beliefs about God(s) and the Afterlife are true?  ABSOLUTELY.  See question 1.
5. Why do all these answers disappoint me deeply?  Because the hardest thing about faith — maybe about living, period — is the patience it asks from us.  We are forced to admit that we didn't start this thing spinning and we don't get to stop it either.  We get to know that it will stop — we will definitely stop living, each of us individually and all of us collectively — but we don't get a say in when.  Could be 6pm today; could be thousands and thousands of years yet.  The lesson we're being asked to learn here is not "find the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything", it's find how to live correctly without that answer.  The need for Faith, or the reality of Time if you like (I think they're the same, but I'll save it) forces us into an open-ended system; forces us to make decisions with much less data than our self-awareness makes us want.  Learning to do this, and do it well, and find happiness in it, is arguably The Whole Point*^.

*^Or if it's not, then the structure of our very existence is antithetical to the point.  Some people are willing to assume this; but I say it flies in the face of everything we know about how Nature, Physics, Cosmology, etc. is constructed.  Everything we know of in existence has an astonishing balance about it; a messiness (chaos) bounded by brilliant rules without which none of it could exist.  Lacking even allegorical evidence to the contrary (hell, every time we construct an allegory we show it), I prefer to assume that human life follows the same rules.  Ergo, we were put here the way we were put here — mortal, and without answers to questions 1-5 — for a reason.  Life is pushups.  ;)

…Don't get me wrong, I think dying in an actual Apocalypse would be a pretty cool way to go, as they're measured.  You get to say you played the game all the way to the end; you beat the last level and saw the final movie; and on top of that you don't have to think about all the cool stuff that you'll miss from being gone.  But again, the point isn't how or when you go; it's what you managed to figure out first.  And you have to figure out as much as you can first, because assuming that there's someone waiting to explain it all once it's over is silly.  All the evidence points to the experience of living itself being the teacher, not the prelude to a 101 class that you get to attend after you've died.

And on that note, I'll cease with the blather so you all can go enjoy Rapture Day.  Spend it marveling!

Marvel that people write and say shit so powerful that it can make zero sense and still gain thousands or millions of literal believers!

Marvel that people are so desperate to believe in certain answers that they'll pick human-produced fiction over all the facts the Universe places in front of their eyes!

Marvel that there may actually be God/s and that it/they may have resisted the urge to Smite us all silly for this long!

Marvel that the answer to all these conundra is probably just to relax and do the best you can, and marvel at how frothingly offensive people find that!

Then go celebrate some fiction.  That'll be a good day, and if it's your last you'll have done it right!  ;)

PD

If you want to save your most valuable relationships, and all the prized possessions of your life (material and otherwise), you must do this, and you must do it quickly:  Admit that there is something miswired in your brain, a bit of bad code, and that that's what causes you to lash out, or in; to hate and fear and hurt.  Forgive yourself for this — it is not your fault — but admit that it is there.  And don't wait.

You may be afraid to do this, to admit this problem, because the next logical question is, "What do I do about such a huge and terrifying problem?  Who's going to fix my head, my heart, my soul for me?  Isn't a misconfiguration in my core something that only my Creator could fix??"  — I like to refer to this as Warranty Panic.  We all fear that we don't have access to the entity that built us; that we can't be taken back to the dealer for a repair.  This makes admitting that a repair is needed a truly terrifying thing, when you're talking about your own self, your personality, the awareness that runs your life.  But ignoring the smell of smoke is not the proper response — and anyway, thankfully all the panic is unnecessary.  Our Creator, whatever it was, made us to self-heal.

And this is an easy problem to heal.  You have all the tools and knowledge to do it already — even if you're old, or stupid, or a child.  How can this be, you ask?

You have all the tools because all you need to do is look at it. 

Not once, in some mega-special super-introspective way, under a Banyan tree.  Just in the regular way, but all the time — by noticing, every time you feel the pain, what your mind is doing.  Just…see it.  You don't have to have an opinion on it, or fix it, or blame anyone for it — just see it.  See it clearly, fully, feel it, and accept it.  If it happens to occur to you why your mind is doing this thing — because you were taught something, or experienced something, or are operating on an old assumption — well, great.  But that's not even necessary.  The light from the flashlight of your attention is the Vorpal Sword to this monster, and you need nothing else to stop the pain, now and forever.

Learn to pay attention to your mind.  Practice seeing it, watching what it's doing.  This is easy when nothing big deal is going on, so use those times to gain the skill; and then you can pull out that flashlight during the darkest moments, and prevail handily over even the worst pain — and even more importantly, eventually you will prevail over the cause of all pain. 

It's your nature to doubt.  But before you doubt me, ask yourself, What can I lose by trying this?  It is the most harmless cure anyone has ever offered you, is it not?

…Told to me in a dream.  Thought you should have it.  ;)

P.S.  "Don't fight the darkness, bring the light" indeed!