Dark Matters

Dark matter has been basically proven to exist; click here for a clear and detailed exposition of the evidence.

Cosmology and quantum cosmology have always been fascinating to me, even though I am decidedly of an un-scientific mind and have no interest in equations, proofs, and Klingon speak. What fascinates me about quantum physics applied to cosmology is that it is on such a theoretical edge that it often sounds like science fiction. It speaks of such things as black holes, parallel universes, and dark matter and energy.

I always like to consider the latest findings of quantum cosmology in a philosophical sense. What does this dark matter imply, for instance, in our daily lives? To think that there are forces, gravitational and otherwise, which are invisible and can barely be detected, yet which determine the direction and outcome of all events . . . That in fact these forces constitute the majority of pull and energy in our universe, even though we aren’t aware of them. We sense, sometimes, that there is some underlying power in the trajectory of our lives. That there are connections and fields and magnetic currents far beyond our understanding. This dark matter seems, perhaps, not so outlandish after all. The visible world, the way things appear, we all know on some level is only the tip of the iceberg. What invisible currents flow beneath all, and where does it take us?

The Battle Between I and Them

The battle, it would seem, is between inner and outer realms. Those forces representing literality and appearances are constantly attempting to destroy the representatives of the heart of matters, the inner essences of things. Because the outer world is based upon order and structure. Whereas the inner can be explosive, creative chaos. The two worlds, of course, should not be and are not really at all diametrically opposed. The tricky matter of language and the way things appear is what leads to the warfare.

I once wrote to explore the beauty of language, the flow of words, the way a sentence could be so perfectly breathed, spaced, punctuated. I don’t write that way so much anymore, because at one point the sound and form of the words overcame their meaning.

I once was so self-conscious that I could never be myself before any stranger, let alone breathe properly in public spaces. I felt as though everything within me could be visibly seen, as though every pair of eyes was a judgment of my imperfect humanity.

Now, I don’t think so much of the ways other people look at me. I think of the way I look at them, if I am going to think about it at all. It is my mind itself which is the veil to understanding. Becoming, as a Zen Buddhist might say, of No Mind is the quickest path to joy. No mind, no judgment, no fear. Things are never simply the way they appear–they become the way in which they are received. I want to be the best Host to all good things in life–selfless, serving, supportive.

Self-help books these days all talk about boosting your self-esteem, building your self-image, assuaging your battered ego. I’m talking about throwing it all away. I’m talking about getting beyond yourself, because there’s something much greater. I’m talking about bridging the inner and outer worlds completely, such that the lie that there has ever been a Them and an I can be denied. We are all of one flame, and the ashes that fall in differing shades on the earth are nothing but something to contemplate, to say a few words over, and then to mix into a mulch from which living things will grow.

Fortress Sport Utility Lives

Something I was thinking about today as I was running down the one-lane mountain road around the lake, and an SUV hurtled by: SUVs manifest a trend currently going on in the middle to upper class that is further exemplified by their houses. There is this trend of going bigger and more threatening, of creating this steel-reinforced outer shell, erecting fortress tower walls around lives that are supposedly picture perfect yet are in essence nearly psychotic. People buy SUVs not because they plan to go off-roading or because they have a lot of freight to ship around–they buy SUVs because they think it makes them safe, while at the same time still serving as a status symbol. It is a strange combination of waste and fear.

In the neighborhood where I grew up in San Diego, the houses on my street used to be fairly normal wooden structures, one or two stories, with lots of trees and a sizeable back and front yard. As the nouveau rich from other cities came flooding in during the 80s and 90s, they bought up the land and tore down the houses and erected these gigantic 3 storey mansion type edifices that take up every inch of the land and remind me more of fortresses than houses. It really perplexes me as to why they need gigantic rooms, when they could have had a beautiful backyard instead. The only reason I can think of is that they are again satisfying two needs–the urge to show off their wealth, while at the same time demonstrating their fear of other people by the subtly militant architectural style.

You’ve all seen Fahrenheit 911, and remember the scenes where Moore rather comically demonstrates the levels of fear that Americans have of one another. And it’s a catch-22, because this fear feeds into the fact that we grow increasingly more dangerous to each other. But the funny thing is that the danger comes not from serial killers. It comes from children. It comes from parents driving their Hummer SUVs. It comes from frightened people trying to protect themselves from something they can’t even recognize: their own way of life.

To Seek What Can’t Be Defined

A prevalent view of many spiritual seekers, it would seem, is that one who is truly enamoured with God must shed all worldly things–the monastic and ascetic tradition is one of self-flagellation and abstinence from physical pleasure and the love of another human being. I understand self-discipline and denial of desires and pleasures is indeed an instructive and, indeed, necessary practice in life. But to withold oneself completely from such things seems to me fanaticism that leads not to God but to masochism, which is simply another base pleasure, which was supposed to have been avoided in the first place. To accept and return the love of another human being is not a denial of God. It is a reaffirmation and mirror of divine love. To partake in worldly pleasures can surely be a distraction–but if the intention of the one who acts is pure, than the actions too are pure.

I am reminded here of the Zen tale of a master and his student who are crossing a river. The master sees a woman who is struggling to get across, and he takes her onto his back and carries her, even though a monk was not supposed to touch women, and sets her down on the other bank. The two monks continue on their way. After a while, troubled, the student finally says to his master as a rebuke, “You carried a woman!” The master chuckles and responds, “I set her down a long time ago. Yet you are the one who has been carrying her all this time!” Or something to that effect, that was my memory of the story. The meaning being that sins of the body are only sins when they are a distraction on the path to God. And they only become distractions when your intentions, the things you hold within your mind, are wrong.

The Sufi mystics of Islam discuss the purpose behind the act of prayer, where to stand, and then kneel, and then prostrate oneself completely is not simply a physical act–that in fact the physical act itself is but a hollow form–it is in the intention and focus of the person praying that the actions take on meaning. The form is but a vehicle for the inner purpose.

You can take that concept further, and see that even all religions and belief systems of the world are simply hollow forms. That all of the manifestations of this world are hollow forms, termed maya by Hindus. To be distracted by the forms, like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s cave, is to miss the whole point, the inner flame that gives all the outer forms life. People get so caught up in the game, in the nationalities and jihads and this side against that side, when really all it is is one flame, burning through all. All of the pain and suffering, simply to get to know yourself, which is everyone else. How many paths are there to the Path?

I’ve never understood how Christians, for example, can get so caught up in a name. They point to a passage in the Bible, and say that it is only through Jesus, and Jesus alone, that one can be saved. Yet what is the name Jesus to a God who is beyond name, beyond human understanding, beyond our feeble, petty, selfish definitions? What, really, is a name to any of us except as a means to understanding what is beyond names? God could be called anything and it wouldn’t mean anything because God cannot be named. The very attempt to name God is to create a separation from God, a duality that does not exist. Your very existence, as a separate entity, is a lie. All outer forms are meaningless without remembrance of the inner reality that gives them shape. These very words, attempting even to distance these ideas enough to make them words and ideas, are lies. The reality is beyond everything.

Free Dome

The greatest fear we have is of each other. How others will judge us, dependent on what we have or do not have. How wonderful it is when we see someone who is without shame in the face of the world. See, freedom isn’t just some political achievement. Freedom is that individual who dances without care, that one who speaks of the spirits, that one who is always only themself, beautiful, no matter what people may think.
The eyes of other people constitutes a powerful force. It drags down stars. It drives skilled musicians to mundanity. All of these closed, locked down perceptions. What we allow, what we perceive. This is what determines the world.

and god help you if you are a pheonix
and you dare to rise up from the ash
a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy
while you are just flying back

–ani difranco

Don’t Slip

Things slip away from you if you let them: the world, your life ebbing through a shortened breath, too many things taking away your attention–your essence fades, who you are is see-through, a facade, stilted on borrowed imagery and mediocrity. Don’t let yourself go so easily, maintain your integrity–this is life or death–every moment that you waste–that is your life! The paths of your stream diverge from where they might otherwise go dependent on your mind, dependent upon your openness to the direction of everything else.

The obstacles before you are not the pains and hardships that we must all endure–no, the biggest obstacle you face is yourself, your own cunning laziness and greed, your own dramatic lies that you create to avoid reality.

Reality has been called many things–but for sure it ain’t that shit on TV. Reality may be what you make of it, but the ultimate reality can only be one thing–love. All of the suffering in the world, all of the murder and war and hunger–it all leads to love, though it may take the destruction of the whole world to know this. Don’t wait for this. Destroy yourself first–destroy your selfishness, destroy your bitterness, destroy all of the things you hold within yourself against the world. That you may flow. That the world may flow through you.

Horus Call For Aquarius

The age of male-dominated involuted asceticism, masochism, and sadism is over. There will be no more Miles Davises, Pablo Picassos, shamans, and other prophets of loneliness. No more art drawn from the degradation of domestic life. No more science or magic used for warfare. The path forward can only be found in the laying down of weapons, magic darts, proofs, sorcery, separations and distinctions of self, power over those who are ignorant of loneliness.

Healing lies in balance, in sharing, in sacrificing yourself for others. Woman is different than man because they need each other in order to survive. Difference arises naturally from sustainable living.

Union of woman and man, union of two sides of the brain, union of past and future, union of indigenous and global, union of binaries and many dimensions.
We are global creatures, capable of understanding compromise, capable of compassion for things we can’t immediately understand.

We have been taught from birth to compete to take everything we can and keep it from others. But this is archaic teaching, bred in bloodshed and men’s struggles for power and money.

True power is to relinquish selfishness. True wealth is to share yourself with others. Who doubts these truths? It is time to put them into action. Here. Before you, around you. Not downtown, not Namibia, not in the church. In your everyday life.

Thoughts Regarding the Nature of God

I’ve been reading a book on Shamanism, as told from the evolving point of view of white westerners through history, beginning with horrified, racist missionaries, all the way to experimental anthropologists who try their hallucinogens and allow the shamans to speak (somewhat) for themselves.
For the shamans and their societies, spirits were a fact of life–spirits determined the interplay of day to day life, the success of hunts, the rains, even the inter-personal relations with one’s neighbors. Shamans were the link and guide to these spirits, influencing and bargaining with these spirits to change the everyday world.
During the 50s and 60s, westerners came to shamans to find God. But it was never the purpose of shamans to explore pearly gates and golden streets. They explored themselves, the space inside themselves to the point of death. What is God in such a place? You come close to death and there is much more than just one being there. There are many beings in other worlds beyond our own, and they don’t necessarily care about us and our fears. Although to say that they are not connected to us in any way is a lie. Their existence might be dependent, I would venture to say, as much on us as we are on them. Because time in that place isn’t the way we understand it–some of these beings are in fact us, parts of us in the future, in the past, somewhere unrelatable to anything we ever have been or will be yet crucially, painfully interconnected in some fabric of our world that we can barely even glimpse except when we die.

In a fleeting experience in Peru with a modern day shaman and an alternate universe, I gained at least the understanding that in this other, spiritual universe, inhabited by beings beyond my current understanding (even by a version of myself I couldn’t recognize), that these visions were beyond anything my conceptions of God and spirituality had been. God is not something you gain, is not a person who becomes your guardian. God is in fact a somewhat terrifying synthesis of everything that exists that extends ultimately beyond. Meaning that in God there is death, death of self, death of ethnocentrism, death of everything that is safe and contained and pure in your current conceptions. And yet wholly welcoming and beautiful at the same time.
It is really the loss of self that is terrifying. That everything which currently defines you and your world is really somewhat of a petty myth. That’s a pretty hard thing to come to terms with.
I remember back in college, I took a class on comparative religions, and in our discussion section, different representatives of different religions would present and answer questions. We had a tantra lady who came in and discussed the wonderful power we had within, the god within, in flowery new age terms. Yet she did have a quite powerful spiritual presence, and she seemed to have some wisdom. And I asked her, if we really do have this power, what if there are those of us who choose to abuse this power to hurt others? She didn’t know how to answer this question.The fact is that we do have this power, and we often do choose to hurt others. We do it by talking down others. In our minds. To our friends. By not allowing them to exist as the gods they are. By not allowing ourselves to exist as the gods we are. We destroy whole worlds.

On the road to non-being, there are many beings, and we are way out on the surface crust edge of that wheel. We talk of finding aliens on some planet out there somewhere. Aliens exist within our very minds. What is it to be a human being? We consist of parts, of pieces, cells, plasma, blood, organs, interrelationships, factions, groups, parts, all working haphazardly to create every moment this thing we call ourselves. At what point do we stop being ourselves, and at what point does the outer world begin?

At what point are we alone, and at what point are we everything?

Where is a boundary, when you can breathe?

Fusion

Yes, for even grudgingly the western world, even with its science and capitalism, must succumb to the biodiversity inevitable in cross-pollination of dilated perceptions. Minds are opening, even as quickly as commerce can flatten out spiritual planes. Yoga might be lucrative stretching for the masses, but for a few brightened minds it is a way to a deepening of life. The sounds of African djembes and talking drums mixed with electric guitars and drum kits might be old fusion tricks for the latest pop hit, but they also speak to the thirst for tradition to reinforce our future.
Fusion, mixing–the beauty that unfolds in the aftermath and sidestreets of war–the unforeseen sharing that occurs from struggles beyond the everyday, boundaries forcibly removed or erected, lines shifting what was once known into greyness, into in-between, into hyphenations of two seemingly disparate universes. Asian-American. Afro-cuban. Until differences are seen for what they are. Until separation is seen for what it is. Illusions of temporality. Circumstantial placement.
Like why do we get so attached to a baseball team, or to the name of a city we happened to be birthed in? Or to a country? To a college? To a football team of that college? Why do we choose to define ourselves so limitedly? We can mix and match ourselves dependent on what speaks to us. Who cares about if you are white or latino or if you are middle-class or ghetto, except those who would control us? You can be anything. You can be anything that is most true to yourself. The only limitations that exist are your own fears. Who can tell you what you are when no one knows themselves?

Open Your Heart to Yourself

To your open your heart, steadily, day by day–this is the toughest thing in a relationship. For some reason, we have this societal notion that men function not by exploring their emotions and coming to terms with what they feel, but by holding everything back, giving little, taking more. Yet it is the strongest of men whom are able to relax their defenses completely and give themselves to faith in love, faith in life, faith in themselves. It is the toughest of men whom are able to see their enemy within themselves, whom are able to see the god within everything, able to see all things within themselves. Men who must take out their problems on their loved ones and the world because they are keeping love pent up inside are weaklings. A true human being knows how to recognize joy–and will work ceaselessly to preserve it.

Another Sports Rant

It perplexes me, it really does, that anyone would ever watch golf on TV. I am not saying that golf is not an interesting sport; it is–when you are playing it. Although even then it seems to be more entertaining with at least a six-pack of beers, maybe even a pony keg. OK, well, let’s be honest here: it’s originally a social sport for rich people. They drive around in little white vests and gloves and go-carts and schmooze it up with each other. Then afterwards they can go over to the bar at their country club and berate one another about going over par on the 8th hole while drinking Schnapps.
And here’s another thing about golf: it takes huge resources of water to keep that grass well-groomed and golfeable. And these golf courses seem to be everywhere, most especially where they have no natural right to be–as in a water destitute area with no grass normally to found.
What we need these gigantic grassy water guzzling ritzy resorts for? In my opinion, I think golf has potential to be turned into a more down-to-earth sport by golfing on real landscapes: maybe downtown during rush hour–or boulder strewn mountain dirt–or in suburban backyards. All terrain golf. A real man’s sport. All you have to do is dig a few holes and then get started. Maybe drop some acid and chug a few Tecates.
Disc golfers have got the right idea. They do that shit anywhere there’s room to throw a disc.

Basically, I have it out for any sport that relies on abnormal, environmentally destructive practices to exist. Water skiing is another one. I’m not saying it’s not fun. I’m saying that you’re being pulled around on a string by a loud gas guzzling speed boat. It’s unnatural and pretty fucking annoying to everyone else in the vicinity. Get into a kayak. Get into a rowboat. Swim. Those are respectful sports. Not getting tugged around like a little toy, jumping off mechanically generated waves.

What’s my favorite sport? Running and hiking. It’s simple. The only acoutrements required are shoes. It’s you, your lungs, and the ground.

On Trees

“The root fungi intercede with water, soil, and atmosphere to manufacture cell nutrients for the tree, while myriad insects carry out summer pruning, decompose the surplus leaves, and activate essential soil bacteria for the tree to use for nutrient flow. The rain of insect faeces may be crucial to forest and prarie health.

What part of this assembly is the tree? Which is the body or entity of the system, and which the part? . . .[Such] separation is for simple minds; the tree can be understood only as its total entity–which, like ours, reaches out into all things . . . Life depends upon life. All forces, all elements, all life forms are the biomass of the tree.”

I finished the chapter on trees in my Permaculture book, and have picked up some new understanding. I had never really quite known just how powerful and affecting trees are on all living things around them. They create precipitation, they recycle water, they protect and nurture the soil, they break and redirect the wind–they harness the light–they cool the heat–they warm the cool–they take life into themselves with the least amount of destruction–they give back more than they take.

This brings my memory back to a time when I visited Sequoia National Park and went on a hike in its forest, and in the midst of this density of trees, far from the road where tourists would drive past the Sherman tree and eat candy bars and take pictures with their kids, stood the most immense living thing I had ever seen–an ancient grandaddy giant Sequoia tree, rising like a god above the surrounding forest. I fought an irresistable urge to prostrate myself before the tree and worship it. Because such trees deserve respect, bearing wisdom far beyond the scope of mankind’s feeble attempts at playing god. All trees are wise, and they can teach you things just by looking at them–where the most light is gathered, from where the hardest wind blows.

Studying this book on Permaculture brings me back to the wonder and mysterious pleasure I felt as a child when I would play in the wild, dense trees and bushes that I was privileged to have growing in my yard. I would lay on the branch of an oak tree directly outside of my bedroom. I would hollow out secret headquarters in thickets that still bear the shape of my childhood to this day. There is a mystery and power and beauty in growing things that is easy to forget in the midst of a city designed for convenience; this can be remembered when you venture back out into the wilderness, when you climb up mountains, walk on swaths of boulders through green trees, listen to a silence punctuated only by animals and wind and an occasional airliner. This sounds like a Sierra Club advertisement, but it is surely criminal to cut down any old growth forests. I don’t believe in religion, but I think if there is such a thing as sin, then it would be to cut down a tree needlessly. You go to the movies and watch dramas that turn morality into black and white, dioramas of good and bad. But there is no simpler and more direct drama of good and evil being played out than the real-life story of the Amazon jungle, and of how every day it’s thriving, truly wild, mysterious, beautiful life is being destroyed by gold diggers, oil drillers, drug traffickers, and short gain agriculture. Here is a story of the wickedness of shortsighted men raping and pillaging something far beyond their understanding–something powerful and wild and dangerous and so full of life in its density that you can’t hear silence, you can’t see the sun, you can’t find your way where you are going or from where you came except by sound and pattern–maps or GPS systems are rendered useless.

Human life is so interdependent on trees as to make our destinies indistinguishable. Disease, drought, and famine follow naturally from deforestation. The promise of replanting trees by loggers is useless in consideration that the trees they are cutting down are irreplaceable–for old growth forest can not simply be “replaced.” The soil will be changed. The climate will be changed. Trees are sacred, and we don’t need to revert to animism to recognize this. The evidence is there, before your eyes, in the science, in the mystery, in the living entity that breathes and dances in the wind, that fosters all creation, beauty, and life.

Searching for Life

Something I was thinking about the other night was mankind’s endless search for alien lifeforms. And it suddenly seemed kind of silly to me. What exactly will other lifeforms in the universe do for us? Save us from ourselves? Teach us how to not devastate our biosphere? Give us cool new weapons?
Chances are that if we ever did encounter new lifeforms, given our track record, we would kill them and take their resources and destroy their history.
I understand the curiosity, of how life might be on another planet. But my generation is that of the Challenger, not of the man on the moon. And it seems a waste of human time, ingenuity, and effort on dead space, when there is so much to explore here, on our earth, in our own homes, in our very hearts and minds. I understand the quest for the Final Frontier. But I think it is misguided. Look at what our government wants to do with the space program now–make lasers, make weapons. Good old boys, always excited to get some new overly expensive useless guns.
Chances are, even if there is life out there somewhere, that it will be completely different than anything we would ever expect. It won’t be ETs with giant heads and eyes and fingers. It will be some tiny amoebas that thrive in adverse conditions.
Isn’t the sun alive? Isn’t the moon and all the planets alive? The comets and the stars? Aren’t these alive? They may not breathe, but they have a beginning, a movement, and an end, a pattern and harmony in the cosmos. We are looking for something to surprise us, something new, to entertain us, to feed us the wisdom that we’ve been ignoring all around us. Like a saviour. If I ever met an alien, I’d tell him to run for it while it has still got a chance.

Timeshape

I had a revelation today of the interrelatedness of the past and the present and the future, of how they form together a shape, a changing formation of time. Of how the past is not some dead, determined thing, forever captured and unchangeable. I was thinking of our lives, of how in our human existence we begin often making many mistakes, many growing pained expressions of angst and anguish that become understood and fully grown in our later lives, when we bloom, and the struggle of our tendrils to catch the light, the fight of our roots to grasp down deep are validated and given meaning, even if at the time they caused us incredible suffering and isolation. Or sometimes events in the past or the way we manifested our personalities becomes darkened by our future actions (he was always such a quiet boy. . .).

I thought of this because a friend who I had looked up to and had many good times with a few years ago has now gone through some hardship in his life and made some bad decisions, and the aspects of him that before were quirky or passable as being weird have taken over the aspects of him that were positive and fun, and he has become, for lack of better words, extremely sketchy. And I was remembering today the good times that I had shared with him, and I realized how much they had been tainted by the negative image of him I now held. This is how the past becomes changed.

Everything that we were shifts in the light or shade of who we are becoming.

Because we make important decisions, along our individual paths, that determine whether we are growing or whether we are allowing ourselves to be blinded by our weaknesses. And of course we go both ways, struggling in our humanity to find our way. But eventually some people run into something within themselves they just can’t get their way around, and they give up and stop growing. They stop growing and then just hold on, they hold on and wither away and everyone pretends not to see what is happening to them, because what can you say?

Only a true friend will tell you when you have blinded yourself to suffering and have decided to stop growing. All the rest of the world will smile and nod their heads when you lie to them and allow you to die slowly. Only a true friend will make the effort to break through your carefully constructed walls of illusion, even if it might mean losing your friendship.

Your enemies are the ones who coddle you, who tell you what you want to hear, who comfort you to your death. Like advertisements on TV, they have no interest in seeing you grow. They want you to shut up and fit in so that they don’t have to be disturbed by you any longer.

It is those who challenge us to grow that are our friends.

But this is a tangent from what I began with. I was speaking of the intertwinement of past and future, of how time is a stream, not a disconnected progression of points. This is why it is so great to keep up with childhood friends, and with all the people that you have run into along the way to now. Who can predict what is to come? The picture that we all collectively form, with all of our varying pasts and personalities, is amazing to behold. We shift-shape, we change, we grow, we diminish, we move, we stay. And hopefully, we all are helping each other along the path to beauty, along the path to finding within ourselves the key to unlock the flow of divinity from our minds, our powerful, creative minds, our powerful, interconnected hearts.

Water Motion

Water runs in the path of least resistance, drawn simply by the unjealousy of gravity–it will find it’s source. So, too, like water runs your life. It is your mind and your fear of suffering that hinder your way, diverting your stream from that which is most easy and least apparent. Have you ever watched a mountain goat move seamlessly down a treacherous cliffside? There is no thought involved. The goat is not an enlightened being, necessarily. But there is much to learn from his movement from rock to rock. For you, too, can move in such a manner, if you were unafraid and supremely confident in each placement of your foot. The goat moves in the manner of water. Each step is part of a motion towards sublimity, some ultimate tonic key that will never be reached but that hovers soundlessly through each approaching note. He slips, he misplaces his hooves, yes, but easily corrects himself–like in jazz, there is no such thing as a wrong note while immersed within context. The love supreme, the keystone, the source guides the flow. In such a context, everything is stumbling, and everything is right. There is no fear, no retribution, no hesitation. There is death and love and struggle, yes, but these are the path, these are the wandering stones that guide your motion onwards, the hillside distinctions that will mark your passing. The sun is a sparkle in your eye. Your spine gushes with music, and gravity calls you over the lip of the unseen and it is easy, easy, easy to fall so beautifully forward into yourself.

Heat

Within you, like the center of the earth,like the center of anything, lies heat, a burning core of energy, solidified distantly by your outward form. It is funny that beauty is categorized often by what is dead. Because really what is beautiful is the manner by which movement is made, the flow of states, the unseen that is hinted at in between. All things move into one another, sharing the same core, that essential heat which is life–and yet they burn separately, forgetting themselves, thinking that when they sit alone and are lonely that there are none who may see them, who may know them and the things which may pass through their hearts. It passes through all of us, and in our struggle to know ourselves sometimes we destroy ourselves or each other, we pick apart the walls only to see that in another lays the same heat that is the burning of life to see itself, to know at last that life and death are one. To know that beauty is ours. To know that there is nothing that we can do to escape ourselves.

Embracework

I can be as lazy as the next motherfucker when there ain’t shit to do or if what I do don’t matter, but I’ve discovered the satisfaction in working hard when other people rely on me. The work itself is almost secondary, although physical labor does seem to be more fulfilling. Having evidence–a trail of effort viewed–is fulfilling–to see the fruit of toil, a growth from cultivated soil. Shoveling snow, screwing anchors into drywall, moving heavy things, organizing scattered objects into a functional shape, all things tending towards purpose.
Given a clear and achievable goal, I will work towards forging a bigger picture. The bigger picture is more important than excuses and conceits for the withholdance of myself. Beyond myself is the other, and the other is myself, only understood when served selflessly. If oneself is the other, than what lies in between? What is between is work. Work to lose one self to gain oneself.
Who is to say what one does is not good enough, or not doing anything for humanity, for the good of the world? If you can give yourself to your work, than it is good work.
The samurai of ancient Japan studied the art of serving selflessly. They gave all of themselves, all of their life, to the art and philosophy of war. One slice of an enlightened sword could unite heaven and earth. What bigger picture is there than this very moment? Complete dedication, utter devotion, to the now.
The life of a soldier is a destitute reality of the destruction of the natural world for the greed of shortsighted, manipulative men. But what is not seen by the outsider is the inner light carried by the soldier working selflessly to fulfill his given purpose. He has a function, a place in the bosom of the world. People want only to hear of war as terrible fear, senseless destruction. What civilians cannot understand is the sense of heightened clarity in the midst of battle, the purpose that carries him through terror and into tomorrow. He cannot go back home. He is a vehicle for forces well beyond control, yet these forces reside within his gut. It is not his function to question. He is empty for that which he serves.
Who am I to question his purpose and resolve? It is sad to be used for purposes that are not honorable. But the men who fulfill their tasks selflessly are blessed, even if it were to destroy whole worlds. They are blessed because they have found peace within themselves.
Whether you are an assassin or a gardener, an accountant or a nurse, you have a function, a purpose in the world. If all you do is work to make money, than you will never know what it is to live.
Living centered in the universe is to do what one must do. To act selflessly is to act beyond concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. It is simply to give all of oneself to one’s actions, completely. Because who knows if the drill will slip and the picture will be crooked? Who knows if the arrow will land in its target? We shit because we eat, and we eat because we desire to live. Every path re-affirms what has already come, and destroys a part of what could be, and creates a newness never before seen. Embrace it.

Puzzle

So you wonder just what is it that defines your world. Fragments of songs, advertisements, conversations, websites. What really separates you from the smelly old dude on the street who mumbles seemingly nonsensical bits of sentences strung from the nethersphere of thought like a tetherball of fear? He picks up things in the air like a radio on constant scan, having lost himself, having had his self submerged in definitions that he exists outside of and can never touch. What separates you, what distinguishes you, defines, denotes, demarcates? How are you different?–isn’t what you think makes you different (what you wear, what you think, what you eat), aren’t those things only the things that make you the same? Everything that would make you individual links you to a collective beehive of humanity.

Everyone always thinks they are alone, alone alone. So all of these lonely people sitting in their hotel rooms, in their offices, in their condos, on their balconies, boxed into little windows that shine buildinged and clustered into the night, sitting with their whiskeys, with their teas, their newspapers, their CDs, sitting feeling alone all together in the city. . . It boggles the mind, how disconnected we can be while living so close to one another. We look at each other and we see only ourselves.

What is the central underlying purpose to this madness of endlessly propogating humanity? You try so desperately to remain distinct, afraid of losing yourself, because you do not want to be like the crazy guy on the street, who talks to himself in fragments that he does not own. You are distinct, you are alone, you are afraid.

The hippies are rich. The dumb spoiled son finds Jesus and becomes President. Computers are no longer personal, they are interconnected, wireless, mobile. Intrapersonal. Our identities on-line, our identities at work, our identities with our family, our identities with ourselves. Why is what I deliberately project any less real than what I subconsciously manifest? We shuttle, we transgress, we dance.

I am learning

What can you write that has never been written before? What can you do that has not already been done?

Thinking in such terms leads to urges to conquer continents, to climb peaks, to scavenge oceans.

When all along, everything that is completely unique and completely new and completely beautiful resides within your heart.

All I can really write is what I feel and what I know. I am learning.

Fear as Needling of Futurity

I was beginning to think about the psychic underbelly of homogenized America, the gated communities in which the houses look all the same but not many people can relate to their own neighbors. There’s this undercurrent of steady, unspoken fear running through all of these people toting their status symbols and wearing the fasionable uniforms of first-world privilege. It’s a fear that became horribly, surreally captured by the constantly looped playbacks of 2 passenger planes slamming deliberately into the twin towers. It’s a fear, of course, fed by the nightly news and the Pentagon propaganda machine. But it also, disturbingly, seems to be a fear fed by a prescient collective awareness, a subconscious inkling of what is to come.

Think of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, walking from their parked, polished SUV down 6 city blocks to the opera house. Yes, a rather far distance to traverse by foot in this day and age–but Mr. and Mrs. Smith are fit, trim, health-conscious Californians who eat lots of fruit and vegetable based cuisines paired with red wine. The night is brisk, Mrs. Smith locks up the car and sets the alarm with a push of a button, and they stride, fashionably attired, down the sidewalk. Mr. Smith walks with his arm protectively at his wife’s back, both guiding and establishing ownership. He is afraid of the downtown streets at night, the lounging, leering homeless and drugged, the muttering alcoholics, the catcalling perverted insane. Mr. and Mrs. Smith become aware of how their appearance presents them here as targets, as possessors of objects of desire. Their status–their class–is given heightened clarification–they become uncomfortably aware of how they have set themselves apart, of how their very lives, their unconcious thoughts and habitual modes of being have set them apart. Because here on the street there is dirtiness–and they are clean. Because here there is ugliness–and they are desirable. Because here there is poverty–and they have money to spare. Their fear is palpable, an intensity in the air. They walk a little bit quicker, unspeaking, Mr. Smith’s hand at Mrs. Smith’s lower back, prodding onward, hoping to just be there, to be safe, to be enveloped by the glassed fortress walls of the opera house.

That was a re-enactment of the way it might have looked. Scanning the local section of the paper the next day, you just see another crime in the city, two murders downtown, not even very late in the night, when people are out and about and business is still mostly legit. What’s going on with this world? you wonder.

Because somehow this fear extends beyond simple paranoia. Yes, it has a lot to do with the fear of loss–because when you own something, then you also gain the fear of losing it, you’ve got to start worrying about protecting it, securing it, guarding it. But it’s more than just that. There also is an element of awareness that maybe some of these things do not belong to you in the first place. There is an element of awareness that it is not just about things at all, that it has to do with what is taken for granted. Yes–there it is:

That your very way of life subsists on what is taken for granted.