~~~~~~~Writing Eveyman~~~~~~~

This was my spot
536 Kathryn Street
Santa Fe, New Mexico
where in my 40s
I did most of my writing

my apartment was nicknamed
The Hovel
and on weekdays
surrounding my job
as Bellman at The Radisson
I wrote

on weekends I was Uncle Plaything
to my niece and nephew
sweet days 1993 to 1999
unraveling my consciousness
of things that once were

it is
what it was 

Samadhi #2~~~Chamisal, NM~~~Last 2 Weeks of June~~~2014

 

 

 

In terms of our extended conversation, here is what Yogananda has to say about it all:
"“Just as most people on earth have not learned through meditation-acquired vision to appreciate the superior joys and advantages of astral life and thus, after death, desire to return to the limited, imperfect pleasures of earth, so many astral beings, during the normal disintegration of their astral bodies, fa...il to picture the advanced state of spiritual joy in the causal world and, dwelling on thoughts of the more gross and gaudy astral happiness, yearn to revisit the astral paradise. Heavy astral karma must be redeemed by such beings before they can achieve after astral death a permanent stay in the causal thought-world, so thinly partitioned from the Creator.

“Only when a being has no further desires for experiences in the pleasing-to-the-eye astral cosmos, and cannot be tempted to go back there, does he remain in the causal world. Completing there the work of redeeming all causal karma or seeds of past desires, the confined soul thrusts out the last of the three corks of ignorance and, emerging from the final jar of the causal body, commingles with the Eternal."

 

To surmount maya was the task assigned to the human race by the millennial prophets. To rise above the duality of creation and perceive the unity of the Creator was conceived of as man’s highest goal. Those who cling to the cosmic illusion must accept its essential law of polarity: flow and ebb, rise and fall, day and night, pleasure and pain, good and evil, birth and death. This cyclic pattern assumes a certain anguishing monotony, after man has gone through a few thousand human births; he begins to cast a hopeful eye beyond the compulsions of maya.

 

Osho's 10 Commandments:

 

 1. Never obey anyone's command unless it is coming from within you.
2. There is no God other than life itself.
3. Truth is within you, do not search for it elsewhere.
4. Love is prayer.
5.To become a nothingness is the door to truth. Nothingness itself is the means, the goal and attainment.
6. Life is now and here.
7. Live wakefully.
8. Do not swim—float.
9. Die each moment so that you can be new each moment.
10 .Do not search. That which is, is. Stop and see.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samadhi

 

Samadhi #1~~~Monterey, CA~~~!st 2 Weeks of March 2014

"If there is no continuity what is there? There is nothing. One is afraid to be nothing. Nothing means not a thing - nothing put together by thought, nothing put together by memory, remembrances, nothing that you can put into words and then measure. There is most certainly, definitely, an area where the past doesn't cast a shadow, where time, the past or the future or the present, has no meaning. ...We have always tried to measure with words something that we don't know. What we do not know we try to understand and give it words and make it into a continuous noise. And so we clog our brain which is already clogged with past vents, experiences, knowledge. We think knowledge is psychologically of great importance, but it is not. You can't ascend through knowledge; there must be an end to knowledge for the new to be. New is a word for something which has never been before. And that area cannot be understood or grasped by words or symbols: it is there beyond all remembrances."
Jiddu Krishnamurti

"I see the cruelties - the big fish eating the little fish, one animal living on the flesh of another, life fighting life, the horrors of poverty and disease. I say, "Lord, this is YOUR show. So be it. But I do not care to be a part of it, except to do Your will. As quickly as I can, I shall do your work and get out of this play of Yours; but I want to take others also away from this delusive drama of comedies and nightmares."
Paramhansa Yogananda

~~~Living In This World of Magical Thinking & Maya~~~

 

   Conflict exists between various desires, not between light and darkness. There can never be struggle between light and darkness for where there is light, darkness is not, where there is truth the false is not. When the self divides itself into the higher and the lower, this very contradiction begets conflict, confusion, and antagonism. To be aware of what is and not escape into fanciful illusion is the beginning of understanding. We should be concerned with what is, the craving for self-expansion, and not try to transform it, for the transformer is still craving, which is the action of the self; the very awareness of what is brings about understanding. To be aware from moment to moment brings its own clarification. The desire for achievement and recognition prevents awakening; the sleeper dreams that he must awaken and struggles in his dream, but it is only a dream. The sleeper cannot awaken through dreams; he must cease sleeping. Thought itself must be aware of creating the structure of the self and its perpetuation. One who is earnest must discover for himself the truth about self-perpetuation.  Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ojai, California | Third Talk in The Oak Grove, 1946

   So the battle between good & evil is an illusion? That all comparisons of one with another have no merit whatsoever? That all desire for the self to expand it's horizons to envelope things as they actually are just an impossible dream? That all the drama thought creates has no meaning? That the fullness of life is there when you are not? What does this imply about our individuality? Our selves? Our personalities? Do they continue on into the next life? Or are they just parts we played in this current lifetime on Earth?

    Is there anything really to lose?

 

   Ramakrishna said he was just the dust on his servant's servant's shoes.

   The ego can't even take credit for the act of  abandonment.

   Robert Adams put it this way: The knower is the last to go.

   Is there nothing you can do?
 

   Or as Sri Ramana Maharshi put it: "I am" alone is; and not "I am so and so", or "I am such and such". When existence is absolute it is right; when it is particularised it is wrong. That is the whole truth.
 

   You just can't dream your way out of a dream.
  "There is no use in trying." Bob Dylan

   Does the ego have any value at all?

    I've lived most of my life in images & illusions & dreams. My childhood. My days as a religious fundamentalist. My time as uncle plaything to my brother's children. It's the...magical thinking...of the individual who believes in...the innocence...of the worlds that thought creates....weaving it's dreamworlds....over a lifetime...that last...like bubbles...only for for awhile.

    Eventually we all wake up. The fact that we do has no dependence upon the individual and his or her capacities, it's just that the dream is not reality, and that reality comes upon us all like the dawn. And when you see that you've been asleep? Dreaming? The creator of your own illusions? You also see everyone else is dreaming their own dreams.

    Why else would a world of maya exist except to dream?
    So creating a place where illusions can exist for awhile?
    But why do we dream?

   Is it that we could stay awake no longer?

   

~~~All of the Personal Dramas of Our Impermanence~~~

 

 

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-...down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama. ~ Alan Watts ...from "The Nature of Consiousness"; also published as "What Is Reality?" (1989)

~~~~~~~The Whole Truth~~~~~~~

 

"I am" alone is; and not "I am so and so", or "I am such and such". When existence is absolute it is right; when it is particularised it is wrong. That is the whole truth.

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

...from "Talk 363"; 20th February, 1937

~~~~~~~~~~~~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.

  

~~~~~Sideways Glances~~~~~

sometimes

 when you're on the move

from one place

 to another

traveling through unknown parts

you see things

 that remind you

 of things

you have not known

in this life

 

things

that seem

timeless

 

like when

 you were young

and

thought you'd find

 what you were looking for

over

 the next horizon

something

fulfilling

something

permanent

 

but death

swallows the moment

and time

separates us from

our loved ones

why

 should we expect

 more

than this?

 

is it that we're in a dream?

and those moments

remind us

that we are dreaming?

 

between rock and sunlight

matter dances

in all manner

of intricate forms

such design

so?

where did all that

 come from?

 

love, death, and beauty

are one

 

only in a dream

does love seem to die

then

become lost

 

in my dreams

i'm always going somewhere

figuring some thing out

with other people

trying

to resolve it

be free

 

get to where i'm going

 

kinda what i do

when i wake up

every morning

 

inbetween times

sideways glances

 

dreams

within

dreams

 

until

the sun

rises

 



Shakespeare and Religion by Aldous Huxley

Shakespeare and Religion by Aldous Huxley

~~~~~~~~~Flying Dreams~~~~~~~~~

   i've had two~~~flying dreams~~~that i can remember. one was half a lifetime ago when i was 31 years old~~~the other two nights ago. i've named the 1st dream~~~Takeoff~~~and the 2nd~~~Landing, but they might as well have been named~~~Birth and Death. the 1st dream came after escaping from the personal strictures of fundamental christianity~~~and finding my tenuous balance~~~in the spiritual world~~~once again. the dream consisted of finding myself floating above lush green fields scored by rows of trees and streams~~~much like springtime in baltimore county. 1st feelings of apprehension were replaced with a growing trust as i found breath controlled my altitude~~~for as i breathed in i gradually went up~~~and out~~~i gently descended. the dream ended when i landed on my feet near an old stone wall~~~and only slightly turned my ankle. it was a dream of empowerment.
   two nights ago~~~my brother david and i were in a convertible car that was bigger and more powerful than mine~~~and i was driving as dave rode shotgun. something bad was back there and after us and we were on the run~~~as i gunned the car down the pavement that became off road smooth rock~~~and then~~~we were launched into the late afternoon air...
  dave took off and went much higher than me~~~and i found myself wearing an old weightlifters back brace belt that arched my body into a foil shape~~~kinda like the foil shapes of the kites~~~that the guys that ride boards on the ocean with~~~and i was as one of those foil sails that pull them. below us was southwestern desert~~~with rocks and cacti~~~and dave descended as i arched my back and rose higher. he was wearing that gray flannel hat of his and a clint eastwood poncho as he hit shoulder 1st into cacti and a rock shelf~~~and at impact his legs came up so that i saw his tennis shoes. he hit slow enough that i knew he survived~~~and was probably cussin' up a storm'.
   he was 1500 feet or so below me and i knew that i could not get down near him as my foil shape kept me too high aloft~~~and i was being pushed westward by the wind. spotty fog began to cover the ground~~~and i could see the light was fading~~~and the fog thick~~~where i was heading. no way to tell what was below the fog~~~the lay of the land~~~or water. whatever it was~~~i was headed there~~~and then? i woke up.