Dog Poet Transmitting.......
May your noses always be cold and wet.
Ah... it's good to be in the rarefied air of Visible Origami (grin). Recently we've been perambulating through the seedy side of existence but... isn't that pretty much all of it in the built up sectors? Where do you go? You go to the inner islands of the mind. It's all mindscape and mindstuff; everything is AND you coordinate the meaning of things with the value you place on them. You don't pay any attention to the rest of it; what has any of that got to do with you? I'd look at the whole of existence as being like an ocean. Upon that ocean there floats all manner of things and people latch on to their preferences to sustain them in the shifting currents and uncertain clime of the ocean. Some things are durable and will stay on the surface indefinitely. They will sustain you. Other things become water logged and then they sink. This is some shabby metaphor to be sure but... it's applicable.
In the end, it all comes down to what you value. This is what you base your life on. This is what you risk your life for. What is real and what is not real? Through all of the shifts and vicissitudes of your passing through, what you depend on is what does or does not sustain you. I know I bring this up a lot but it's what I have found to be both real and relevant. If I hadn't had more extensively perpetuating realities to shore me up I would have sunk beneath the waves some time ago.
Once again it comes back to how we see; what we look at and what our eyes simply bounce off of or inaccurately define because we attach some superficial definition to it and avoid looking deeper into the heart of things. After awhile, terms and words are only so many terms and words. We become perfunctory and spend our time in a ping pong game with the reactive mind. We glance off of truths and truths have variable levels of meaning. The surface meaning of anything is just that. If you are content to exist on the surface that is where your destiny will play out.
It is true that the theaters of existence beyond the temporary bandwidth of the senses can be a mystery; can be confusing and misleading. Very few people have any clear idea of what waits beyond. Most people are content to take the surface interpretation of it all. They get into that happy hallelujah thing with the mean old guy with the white beard, or some variant dependent on projected personalities, symbols, strictures and compendiums of rules. In some cases, when the particular system of faith has been around for awhile and... these days most of them have been around awhile AND... if you are a fundie, you got lists of rules, lists of do's and don'ts that require something like the phone book to contain them all. The reality of it all is far simpler.
I've been around teachers who were able to manifest an incredible complexity in their teachings; talking about the 18 million universes, like Guru Bawa and I've been around teachers who were extremely simplistic. However, I noted even with those who had the facility to diagram intricate blueprints of existence, like Guru Bawa, that they always came back to repeating the same thing over and over again as the essential truths to weld yourself to; 'faith, certitude and determination'. He said that over and over again. I paid attention to that. I didn't pay so much attention to the 18 million universes. I liken that to walking across a field with millions of blades of grass, or hiking a deciduous forest in the late fall, tramping over millions of fallen leaves. Sure they are there but... what have they got to do with my personal journey? Does it really matter how many there are? Does the differences between them amount to anything?
I spent a serious amount of time over the years looking into the various systems of faith; Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and every one of them contains a greater complexity than any one person could effectively study and remember. Some people have memorized the entire main book of their preferred system. Memorizing and comprehending are two different things. I've seen the size of an original Thomas Aquinas. Why would anyone read anything that size? I looked into all those Buddhist texts and there are a bunch of them and they are mindnumbingly intricate. Do I need any of that? Given the state of mind/consciousness that Buddha spoke of, how could any of that be relevant to it? Some of these books are filled with violent history and ominous portents about what to expect if you screw up or don't give a shit.
As I have moved through the Byzantine mix of conflicting philosophies, encountered via the myriad personalities, whose lives interfaced with mine; briefly or at greater length, what I remember are the degrees of annoyance and impatience experienced as people ran down their litanies of rote learning on me, insisting that this is this and that is that and this is not this and that is not that. It's not like I thought I knew better than they did. I didn't feel that way. I just wasn't interested in all that cant and dogma. What I noticed was that many of them had no greater motivation than to ascend in the pecking order and that a lot of them would prefer to be 'seen as wise' as opposed to actually being wise, given that the former is so much more easily achieved; should you be in the necessarily gullible environment. I always think about those pundits going back and forth with each other in all those convoluted arguments as, fools contending with fools. They've been haggling about those angels on a pin since there were angels to dance on pins. Words are like those leaves in the forest that I was walking through a few paragraphs earlier. They're just words and like the leaves, they have a further destiny, generally somewhat less glorious than when they were green and flowering.
If words are green and flowing, one might say they contained living truth. If words are like dead leaves, as some of them seem to me to be, when considering traditions, dogma, cant and the fundamentalist underpinings that are part of the whole picture which includes expensive embroidered robes, funny hats, gold plated statues and all kinds of other privileges and perks as well as, for whatever the reason is, an inexhaustible supply of young boys with callipygian proprietors, then they do not contain 'living truth' and I am only interested in that aspect of it. I am not attracted to the perks that come with the dead leaf cotillion. It's a poor trade off as far as I am concerned and I am not sanguine about ranks of happy faces waiting to greet me on the other side, should I go that way, when it comes to that.
Yes... on the obvious and immediate front, there's a lot more to be gained, in the temporal sense, by genuflecting and ass kissing your way up the totem pole, should you have the intellectual duplicity and ruthless capacity for that. Some portion of individuals are already streamlined for these posts by dint of birth and connections. It's similar to what you see with the system in Great Britain, with all that 'to the manor born' closed circuit system; House of Perverted Lords and House of Bought and Paid for Commons. Now and again, someone from outside the greased chutes of privilege makes it into the upper rooms. The Church of England is the same way. You have to go to the right schools. Across the water, you have to make the right deals.
Green and flowering truths are of infinitely more value than dead brown leaves. However, you can travel far and wide and see altars built exclusively to dead brown leaves and nearly none built to flowering truths. You can think about all of these old religions as being... really old. They moved out of the way of green and living truth a long time ago. Think of history as being a large clothes closet, like a wardrobe. Inside this closet, this wardrobe, are hanging a whole lot of vintage outfits that were, at one time or another, worn by one or another of the divines regents in human form who walked this Earth. The important thing to recognize is that neither the divine, nor his regents are wearing these outfits any more. That was then and this is now. Certainly, there are words to live by, stitched into these outfits, in the manner of embroidery or a wall sampler. There are truths to be gleaned from the brown leaves scuttling at the curbside of times gone by. These truths don't have any enduring currency however... unless they are green and flowering.
You can catch a lot of heat when you opt for the green and flowering because the adherents of brown leaf systems get all piqued and hot under the collar, even if you keep it to yourself because anything new is automatically competition for everything old and there's always a chance that you too will start asking for money; money they would prefer went to them.
The living truth is just that. It's alive and it's present and it can be accessed with the proper credentials. It might get you into trouble and it might not but for those sincerely in the pursuit of it, this is not a consideration for continuing to seek after it.
Some people buy Louis Vuitton and Prada because they are expensive and other vacuous people like themselves recognize the item, not because they are any better than a bag that costs far less because they are not. Some people wear Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohamed, or whatever for the same reason. The mysterious strangers move among us, without distinguishing outfits, titles or excessive swag but the roses are blooming on their cross.
End Transmission.......
