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

  

The Spiritual Pilgrimage Blog RIP August 1st 2010

There are many things that happen to us within this violent universe. Things we do to each other. Things we do to ourselves. Within the horribly twisted duality of all the lives that have been led some of us have had a Sophie's Choice to make~~~even responsible for the suffering and death of innocence~~~or someone you loved more than life itself. Sophie had to choose which of her two children would live or die. People driving cars have maimed and killed strangers and loved ones. Fathers have shot and killed their sons, and sons fathers~~~hunting in the woods. Too many military scenarios to mention. Oppenheimer and The Bomb and designers of all types of killing machines. And what do you do with that? Say I didn't? But our brother and sister human beings have been visited with every tragedy imaginable.

How does one put forth an ideal or fundamental belief system as the all encompassing truth? Deal with this messy universe by cleaning it all up with words and thought? Is it that they want to be right and then tell all the others what's right and wrong? No system of thought can embrace the wild duality of things as they exist in this world. There can be no path to truth~~~as Krishnamurti put it Truth is a Pathless Land. Truth is a living thing and only that life that is can embrace us~~~and it~~~all. This is something that thought can not contain. It just Is.

And why do we end up with such tragedy? Such heartache? One thing about this world~~~we pass through it. Have we been somewhere else before? Will death lead us to somewhere different? And where do you find such answers? Not in books~~~although many of the best sellers are such~~~paint by numbers spiritual books.

If there are any questions their answers lie inside of you. Here. In the moment.

One. All is one. Connected. Whole. Alive. Sacred. One.

What Does The Future Hold?

The Oracle at Delphi

The Way We Live Is Insane~ & this great TV Show documented it~~THE WIRE - 100 Greatest Quotes (spoilers)

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.

The Torch of Evil that continues from Generation to Generation

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Even in death, we want to be important, to our vanity and pretence there is no end. Everyone wants to be somebody or be associated with someone who is somebody. Power and success, little or great, and recognized. Without recognition they have no meaning, recognized by the many or the one who is dominated. Power is always respected and so made respectable. Power is always evil, wielded by the politician or by the saint or by the wife over the husband. However evil it is, everyone craves for it, and those who have it want more of it. And that hearse with those gay flowers in the sun seems so far away and even death does not end power for it continues in another. It's the torch of evil that continues from generation to generation. Few can put it aside, widely and freely, without looking back; they have no reward. Reward is success, the halo of recognition. Not to be recognized, failure long forgotten, being nobody when all striving and conflict has ceased, there comes a blessing which is not of the church nor of the gods of man. Children were calling and playing as the hearse passed by, never even looking at it, absorbed in their game and laughter.

Krishnamurti's Notebook

Paris, September 7, 1961