~~~~~~~~~~~~Camping Out~~~~~~~~~~~~

   My brother & I had psychic experiences, he the participant & I the observer, at the tail-end of the '60s, particularly during the year 1971; therefore, since the age of 21, I intuited that this world was only a derivitive one, and all of my personnas since, the psychological clothes we wear, were woven of my past spiritual experiences. The essence of all these was an adaptation of Hunter S Thompson's gonzo journalism & acid visions of society. My identity was seperate from my culture, and I tried on many sets of psychic clothing to wear, many lifetimes in one. Middle class suburbean TV Generation: High School to College. LSD Hippie Dropout. Fundamental Christianity reborn on a college campus and exorcised upon being kicked out of a cult. Healthcare Corporate Management Type. Taxi driver. Ski bum. Golf bum. Now? Old guy. you know, someone who has been many things.

   These days I just try to see things as they actually are, but thought is thought, and image only illusion. I guess it doesn't depress me, too much, the seemingly inate violence of this world, because all the clothed that I have worn are now in tatters. Isn't it sad when your favorites wear out? But this world is not all that there is it is, there are other ones, and I trust in the spirit like a little child to clothe me while I am still here. We're all just camping out here you know? One fine day we all will strike tent and head home.

 

 No grand plan here anymore. No flow charts. No Theory of Everything. Not even a 'teaching' like Jiddu Krishnamurti and Ekhart Tolle have each come up with, although, I enjoy meditating upon both of their 'teachings' I deal with all  of the evils and negativity this life dishes out by accepting it, as  duality is necessary to what's going on here. I used to try and blot it out with ideals & meaning & stuff like that, angry at the evils within this world, the darkness of our selves, reflected in society, as most of what I have written were words spit out in anger at the seeming injustice of  it all.
 

   Plato's Cave Metaphor is the great grand-daddy of all spiritual metaphors. DNA and sociological/racial conditioning trap each of us into the roles we play in this Shakespearean Drama we call being human Some get it good. Most not so good. Every twist & turn of  human lifes plots covered as mankind as a whole gets it everyway it can be gotten. Many mirrors in the prism. Many observers to the double-slit experiment, as we're all a bit skewed in our perceptions, to some degree or another.

 

   The Life Within Us All, that supports us and all of this, is Truth, not skewed in any way, and that is why I look at the evils within this world and don't hide from them anymore, or get angry. I just look in wonder. That could be me. What's that guy up to? I'm glad that death is an integral part of this life, not a bad thing, for death is like Life's Alarm Clock. When death comes it lets you know that you were always just camping out here anyway, and now it's time to head home.

 

   But now? While I'm here? I want to see things as they are, and that requires a death of sorts, while still living. No self. No observer. All of  the synchronicity you see in nature when you are not there, timeless, in the moment, clothed in an ever-expanding and ever-new wineskin. The choiceless awareness of the spiritual winds that are ever-moving through our lives. Having the eyes to see is not a constant reality in my life, for it comes, then it goes, always of it's own volition. very personal, but I have no control over it. Sometimes I'm out of the cave basking in the timeless sunlight. Sometimes I'm sitting in the darkness trying to figure out what those dancing and flickering shadows on the electronic cave wall are doing. Sometimes there. Sometimes not. Camping out, being human, doesn't seem to allow for all the comforts of home.

 

   Who knows? Is this personal relationship with our creator real? Or is all this personal stuff just an illusion of mine born of my christian days? It's one thing for sure that the timeless has a hard time establishing itself in time, that is, in human consciousness. The Life is everywhere, but mankind can't seem to bottle it. Abstract it? Yes. But grasp it? Hold onto it? Control it? Organize it so that it is always available through belief and religion? No. Thought, like all the psychological clothing that we wear, can not touch upon Life's reality, for thought is only a substitute, an abstraction, something that is not The Life. The Life? That is only there when we are not. Old wineskins can't hold new wine. What a strange and paradoxical world we live in where we must cease to be for The Life to flow.

 

   The Life touches and sustains all that there is, but where is it's source?

   Are we all just camping out here?

   Is this all just a dream?

 

   Why all the confusion?

   Why all the misery?

   Why all the old wineskins?

  "The ending is the beginning,
    and the begining is the first step,
    and the first step is the only step."
        Jiddu Krishnamurti

   It's a funny world when all the enlightened ones leave it,
   and the beginning,
   The Life,
    walks hand in hand,
   with death.

  

~~~Mystery Religion and Personal Religion~~~

   There isn't any adam and eve ashamed of their nakedness within the mystical feminine, these ladies, pictured above. It's a celebration of all of nature, this life, and there seems to be no personal religion and it's judgements clouding their consciousness, at all. It's like The Spearmint Rhino in Las Vegas, Nevada in the late single digit years of the beginning of  the 2000s, except the equation for bodily pleasure doesn't involve any Ben Franklins, a world we have created here in The Great American Spiritual Desert. In Las Vegas 'the savage heart of the american dream' it's most always an orgy 'controlled by money'. The painting above is a celebration of youth. Either way, it's this kind of personal freedom that personal religions have no desire to allow, as their Gods always seem to be dressed up in holy robes, or a business suit.

   Empires and religions walk hand in hand down the corridors of time as The King or The Caesar have a special audience, the preemminent relationship, with their God, or gods. Heirarchial control rests at the top of every totalitarian pyramid of power, be it held by a king, emperor, priest, or shepherd. Speaking for God and telling everyone what God wants them to do is every psychopaths wet dream. When religion gets personal, personal freedom vanishes. Brave New World. 1984. The former ecumenical christian community, Lamb of God, Incorporated. When you have that kind of power it's like an addictive drug, something you have to use, for when you really get down to it all of any society's behaviors can be controlled.

   Constantine and the cannonization of The Bible. Justinian I and the doctrinational elimination of reincarnation. Christianity lifted from obscurity by a dying Roman Empire and shaped in content by two Roman Caesars. Christianity is an extremely personal religion for it guarantees the salvation of your soul, he self, the little you. No longer do you have to fear death for your consciousness will be delivered into eternity by your own personal savior, Jesus, and through what he did you will be able to live forever, in Heaven, with God, and the other people he saved. That power a personal religion gives to the organization that represents God in this world is the deepest penetration and most controlling hook one person can have over another. Knowing God's Will for you creates two classes of people: those who know, and those who are told. An elite class, the master race spiritually speaking, and the common man who needs their help. Personal religions get really personal in their control of all that is personal, and that's why they're the best political religions ever invented. The Roman Empire and The United States of America, so what's the difference between these two? One sold religion 'over the counter', one 'under the counter' due to 'prohibition', but either way their personal religion was sold, it was toxic. The implosion of  Lamb of God personally illustrates just how personally violent personal leaders of personal religions can get, for it's just what happens when you try to establish, and manipulate, that which is sacred. The genocide of the Native American Peoples and the theft of their continent, the religious crusades and all their veiled conquests, The Final Solution of The 3rd Reich and mass extermination, the psychic slaughtering of all the sheep in Lamb of God, all of these holocausts, are examples of how personal religions go toxic. Doctrines that divide the whole, festering the belief that they are the best, that god is on their side, and they the chosen ones, and that all other non believers have no value whatsoever, such are the toxic mutations personal religion manifests, in mankind's consciousness.

   What in time is released into the timeless? What besides That Which Is can reside in both places? Is time just an illusion? What survives death? Mystery religion say that All Is One and the creator of all, That Which Is, is all around us and dancing within this temporary maya, this violent world, our earth, and all of it's seeming seperateness. Mystery religions tear at the veils of the illusions of thought, beg us leave the confines of Plato's Cave, awake from the dream, open our eyes, and see things as they actually are, timeless. The Life is within all of us, no one besides ourselves holds the key of our being alive, to all,  and to everything. Through the valley of the shadow of death, all this seemingly violent impermanence, space time, where everything comes and goes, is born and dies, has it's beginning, and then? The End. Mystery religion embraces the everchanging dance of maya, trusting the life, it is elways dying, always being reborn anew, in the moment; while personal religion, hangs on to what it's got, the illusion, for dear life.

   Mystery religion is molten, fluid, organic, alive and not fixated, while personal religion is set in doctrine, belief, and all the rigidity that the dead words of set cannons brings to consciousness. I've vacillated between these two religions all my life, from spiritualist hippie, to fundamental christian, and now, some kind of vedantist who really doesn't know a thing, but trusts the life that is within us all, like a little child, thankful for all that I have been given.

   Old wineskins can't hold new wine, and maybe next lifetime, I'll be frolicking in the springtime of our youth with those naked girls, having the freedom to be lost, and dance to the mystery. It sure wasn't in this lifetime, until I walked in the door of The Spearmint Rhino in the winter of 2005, and I was 55 years old.

  Life isn't death's opposite, birth is. Life is something altogether different and the only way to 'discover this' is, to live your life, not try to hold onto it, with thought and belief, for old wineskins can't hold new wine. Life is too expansive, alive, connected, whole, sacred, and one for that to happen. Life can not be held in a rigid vessel, for how could time ever contain, that which is timeless?

  Dead trees don't move with the wind.

  

Open The Doors and See All The People

Log Community Meeting circa 1976

The Other Side of The Red Door

The two little guys in the center of this picture are David Nodar~~~on the left with the beard~~~and Steven B. Clark~~~on the right with the shiny head and glasses~~~they respectively were the overall leaders of The Lamb of God of Timonium, Maryland and The Word of God of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both were, and I suppose that they still are~~~big believers in something that doesn't exist~~~Spiritual Authority~~~and it was their personal ambition that consumed many a spiritual pilgrim along the way~~~and led to many an untold Shakespearean Tragedy in the lives that their political powers touched. All that they built imploded and collapsed around them~~~although they both probably got out of it all with a pretty big hit from the money machine. So much for being the spiritual men of God they took themselves to be~~~they ended up looking like a couple of bumbling Spiritual Idiots. I wouldn't want to be around when death brings them face to face with reality~~~because it's probably gonna be pretty messy scene~~~but I would like to know the ending to the story that I was once part of as I got kicked out of The Lamb of God in the fall of 1978 when I was labeled a Son of Satan and a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing come to deceive and lead the flock astray during my last prayer meeting~~~and always wondered what the horror of the end of days of LOG was like. Damn~~~I missed The Ending.

The Lamb of God, Inc. 1972-1991 RIP

Saint Joe's Parish Hall

Texas, Maryland

Years later, reflecting on our experiences in The Cult, my friend Michael Miller put it to me this way~~~when you walked through That Door, the red one pictured above~~~it was like entering a different world. What happened to me when I joined LOG and that door figuratively closed behind me? Cutting me off from the outside world? Making that world my only world? LOG became my own personal and spiritual Plato's Cave. It's where I learned the ways of the world, the inadequacies of power, and personally it's as far from The Truth as I ever got in this lifetime. I passed Through The Looking Glass when I joined The Lamb of God Charismatic Christian Community~~~especially when I began to believe that a hundred or so twenty somethings had been singled out in a special way to do a special thing by God Himself~~~over the other six billion people on the planet. I believed that LOG had been anointed and set apart to do a new and special thing and that we knew something that everyone else didn't. We had to be better than all the rest because of this~~~our esoteric relationship with God~~~LOG was the best. Me? I was as crazy as a bat outta hell for even considering thinking such a thing~~~but after about a year or so of imbibing this mantra day after day I was sold on it. I believed. I bought the ticket~~~and took the ride.

Plato's Cave Metaphor

It's The Grandaddy of Them All when it comes to spiritual analogies, a Through The Looking Glass experience to say the least, as both the personal death involved in enlightenment and the physical murder of the social heretic walk together hand in hand. It's 'kinda like leaving a cult~~~or any dysfunctional symbiotic relationship~~~as death awakens you with a jolt. Are things what they seem to be? What society teaches us? What we watch on TV? Or is thoughts web of images that construct our worldview a little off? Or way off? All meaning skewed? Or nullified? Thought is too blunt an instrument to cut into either spirit or truth~~~and when things aren't illuminated from the inside you can be as sure as shadows that something basic is missing. Have you ever been untied so that you can walk to the mouth of your own cave? Have you seen the world beyond? Only seeing things as they actually are changes you. Everything is in the seeing.