Second Chance

Category: the deep

  • surveying the dark and empty city

    lots to write about today, but I have to record this dream.
    It’s another old one. I don’t know how many times over how many years I’ve dreamt this dream. maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred. I think I might have recorded it before, maybe a decade ago. or I intended to, but never got around to it, or the dream itself planted that suggestion in my mind, so I woke up with that impression, even if I don’t have a specific recollection of the prior event. or do I? because I know sometimes in dreams the effect can preceed the cause. and something happens for a reason, as if you could imagine the opposite or perhaps the inverse of “because.”
    Anita and I are on the run. We have been for some time, and we’re tired and running ragged. We are running across the city, finally finding ourselves stumbling across some railroad tracks in an old, possibly abandoned rail yard. Night is coming on and it is getting cold. She is getting tired. I wrap her up in my coat, and we scramble up onto a loading dock. At least its covered, and out of the wind. We huddle together there, without speaking, our butts on the cold concrete, old brick walls of the warehouse at our backs, a desolate feeling in our hearts. I put my arms around her, and as she falls asleep, I gaze out across the tracks, and past the ramshackle fence that surrounds it and beyond that toward the dark and empty city.

  • Is Saul Among the Prophets?

    Is Saul among the prophets?” This is a supposed adage or snippet of a popular verse that occurs twice in 1 Samuel. First when Saul is anointed king, “God gave him another heart.” And among other things, he fell to the ground, raving and acting like mad.
    And again in 1 Samuel 19:24, wherein the people remark ironically on their king who, when the spirit of God came upon him, behaved oddly. Apparently, this happened often, and the people were surprised and astonished to find their king tearing his clothes, and speaking in tongues.
    There is so much on which to ponder in this passage. First, to see a roving band of mad prophets was not in itself that odd. They went around begging, and the people tolerated them, sustained them, and either listened to or ignored their ravings, as seemed fitting. What was odd in this case was to see their king among them. So on the face of it, “Is Saul among the prophets” probably just means “has the king gone crazy again?”
    (more…)

  • Alan Watts Blues

    Today is the seventh of July, 2011.
    Last night I got to a point where I was pretty miserable and feeling sorry for myself, and thought “I’m going to call in sick today.” I even pecked out a message on my blackberry from the dark side of the moon:
    “I feel the need to tell you that today would have been Anita’s and my 27th wedding anniversary. Sick doesn’t even begin to describe the way I feel.”
    Today would have been our anniversary. But its not, because the truth is we’re not even married any more. We both took the oath: “’til death do us part.” Even then, far in the back of my mind, I kind of knew or feared this day would come, who knew when?
    But the idea of a thing and the thing itself are not the same. (more…)

  • the big blue loop

    I’ve been struggling to write this post for a while. I have been tangled up in these powerful emotions and I’m by no means free, but there’s subjects I want to talk about other than the one that preoccupies most of my nights and days lately.
    The thought that has been rattling around in my head is that I have the strange sense that I’ve detected that life has the qualities of a loop. Or not a perfect reiteration of events, but maybe more like a spiral, with both the qualities of a loop and an arrow. Like a screw. Yeah, life will screw you, won’t it? Like James Brown said, “Money won’t change you, but time will take you on.” Uh, huh.
    This notion has grabbed a hold of me, and won’t let me go. Its related to this other idea that the concept of free will versus determinism is a false dichotomy, and that reality exhibits characteristics of both.
    But today I want to focus on this concept of cycles. They say that history repeats itself, and that there’s nothing new under the sun. For me, that seems to be true at a more personal level. Like I said, you are who you are, and it is what it is. And maybe people change, but only slowly, and not really that much.
    So our experience of life is filtered by our perceptions and responses, and so on. But what I’m talking about is coming at a different level. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye that doesn’t look right somehow. Like when you’re not looking, the tables and chairs get up and dance around. And you turn your head quick, and boom. They’re back where they were, I think. Or like these ideas I’ve had, I’ve written about elsewhere, that seem so real, I called them “future memories.” How when Anita was sick the first time, I used to tell her how we would grow old together and we’d go certain places, and do certain things, sometimes rather ordinary things, but I could describe those scenes so vividly, it was like I was actually seeing them, or recalling them, in a way like maybe recalling a dream you had. And over our nearly thirty years together, by God, one by one, those things actually came to pass, pretty much as I had “seen” them or dreamt them. And not one went undone, that I can recall, although some did surprise me.
    And now I’m sitting in my back yard by the pool, at a table in the shade, drinking a beer, idly plucking my guitar. And I’m reminded of my little apartment on Emily Road, during another really hot summer back there in 1980. We were all young and from somewhere else, and working in the big boom town, and my neighbors and I formed a little group, guys and girls, all single and mostly in our twenties, and we’d hang out down by the pool in the shade after work, drink beer and swap stories, and sometimes play guitars and sing. And to me, that whole scene could have been yesterday, or this morning. Memory is funny that way, the associations literally are adjacent in my memory banks, and not at all separated by nearly half a lifetime.
    There’s other examples, with friends and acquaintances how when you get to this phase of life, everything reminds you of something else, and everyone reminds you of someone you used to know, and damned if your relationship with this new person doesn’t follow the same arc as with that other person you knew thirty, forty, fifty years previously. And how could it not, for all the differences, and changes time brings on, you are the still the same person you were then, and this new person is just another incarnation, avatar, manifestation of the same archetype as that other one you’re reminded of.
    And then my thoughts, and my own words form a loop, and like Pam said one time, some people have like this little tape that plays over and over again, and all you have to do is punch their button, pull their string, and blattibloop, out it comes.
    So not only does everything remind you of something else, everyone reminds you of someone else, and you wind up saying the same things over and over, and every morning you forget that you’ve been having the same dreams over and over again your whole life long, and it’s just like that tape that’s playing in your head, like a big blue loop, that doesn’t ever change. and it looks like we’re moving, but we’re really standing still.

  • I'm Just Saying…

    Let me tell you of my dream.
    I dreamt that I was in contemplation of the vast mystery of the cosmos. And it was like pondering the clouds in the sky.
    And from one of the clouds emerged the hand of God and He began to write across the heavens in an angelic script.
    And the clouds were suffused with transcendental light and the writing glowed with color like gold, but with an immanence that was beyond words.
    And I was astonished that I could read the writing, and as I read, I began to laugh. I laughed heartily and I could not stop, because what God had written was:
    “I’m just saying…”
    And all at once, I understood why He had created mankind.

  • a door opens

    We’re making a very difficult passage.
    Its been a little more than a week since Anita passed away and we’re just wrecked.
    Anita and I were together for about thirty years almost exactly as it turned out.
    We were to celebrate our 27th anniversary this year. I proposed to her in bed actually. It was February of ’84, just before I moved down here to Austin to take this job I found. It was a good job and I liked Austin.
    We were living in Dallas. We met in Dallas. I wrote a song about it, and from time to time I used to sing it to her. I wrote a couple of songs for her. Its a funny life when your reality sounds like a country song: “Then one day in Dallas I met a young woman with love in her eyes and stars in her hair. I’ll never forget what I felt when I saw her, what I said to myself when we met way down there.” We had a house there together before we were married. And everything about that little exercise was wrong except for Anita and me I guess.
    I moved down to Austin, and she stayed behind and finished out the school year at DISD. We sold the house, and she came down and joined me in this crappy little duplex I had found not far from my new office. We were married in July of that year and we went and bought a house, a little nest, that fall, and started a family not long after.
    And you know, though it rained on us a lot, life shit on us a lot, but you know we were very happy together. We were good for each other and I’m gonna miss her a lot.
    But I feel now like a window opened in my life, or a door opened and then it closed again and in a way, I’m sort of back where I started. I don’t regret a thing, you know we lived life all the way. I don’t think I left any business unfinished. We both left it all out there. But I feel kind of funny. Like a loose wheel in the world, not connected to anything. Wobbly, like a wheel without an axle.
    I feel like a worry has been lifted off my shoulders actually but replaced by something else, an even heavier weight.
    Like a door opening she brought light into my life. She was a really social person. A fun person. And when the door closed it left me here in the dark.
    Now that she’s gone I’m kind of lost.
    We had that kind of relationship. We defined ourselves in terms of one another.
    I called her “beautiful princess” and she called me her “prince charming.” Her “knight in shining armor.” Her savior. She said that I had literally saved her life on more than one occasion. And the devotion and the love that goes with that is something that is impossible to describe.
    And it made me so proud when she talked like that and it kind of validated me, you know?
    “Whatever else is wrong with me,” I thought, “that is one thing that is right.”
    And toward the end, we tried to be strong for each other and focus on the diminishing strands of hope, and once I burst out crying, “Baby, please don’t leave me here alone!”
    And she consoled me and said she wouldn’t and we held each other and she rubbed my head and said “Shh. I’m still here.” She thought she was going to get better, that we’d have one more round, one more year, right up to the very end.
    But this was one thing I couldn’t fix for her, I couldn’t save her from.
    And so now all that’s in the past. And I’ll never be the same. I sit alone out by the garden as the sun goes down, and I talk to her, and I cry.
    Oh, God, why did you take her from me?

  • what's the point of tofu?

    According to Neal Stephenson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once said “[there are] two great labyrinths into which the human mind is drawn: one is the question of free will versus predestination, and the other is the nature of the divine ether”
    Addressing the first question at least, like many pairs of opposites, both free will and predestination are manifestations or imperfect perceptions of a greater whole, encompassing both. We clearly have an internal perception of the ability to choose our actions, and thus an implied responsibility for the consequences of those actions or lack thereof. At the same time, our observations of the world around us lead us to believe that the more perfect our understanding of the cosmic mechanisms and the more complete our knowledge of the state of the universe, the more successfully we might predict subsequent states into the indefinite future.
    Neither and both cases hold. We may choose to act, but our choices are driven by a complex of motivations and thought processes and environmental factors we only dimly comprehend. We are actors in a play, but we are also the playwright, and sometimes the audience and critic as well. Contemplating consciousness is like the tip of a finger trying to point at itself. Its comical, really, when you think about it.
    Or, consider: our perception of our own free will is like our perception that the sun is moving through the sky. Is it? It depends on your point of view.
    Our consciousness is a point of light riding on a wave of potentiality in a hyperdimensional space which we are incapable of comprehending, at least thus far.
    Reality exists outside our consciousness, if only in a potential, unrealized state (unrealized at least from the perspective of our own limited mentality and perception).
    But its not all just idle speculation. It matters. Because if we are free, then we must bear responsibility for our choices. Neitzsche said “men are thought of as free in order that they might become guilty.”
    Common sense tells us we must weigh our choices well against our best expectation of their results. We should not harm ourselves, one another, our environment or our fellow creatures for that matter, at least not without good reason.
    Then does our responsibility only depend on our ability to predict outcomes? Or is it intrinsic? Ask yourself: if you’re an idiot and you can’t reasonably be expected to predict the outcomes of your actions, would it be fair to hold them against you? So then, are we we only responsible to the extent we understand and recall the past and can reasonably predict the future based on our choices in the present?
    Put another way, what does the question of free will versus predestination even mean without concepts of time and memory? One of the many pairs of opposites to consider is perception versus reality. What perception of time do the inanimate stones have? What is time, or anything else for that matter, from their point of view? In other words, without a point of view, can you even formulate a meaningful question, much less an answer?
    God has so ordained it that we are beings who are required to engage in a constant struggle just to survive. If we have subdued the beasts, and to some extent the germs and diseases that plague us, we must still be vigilant against one another or even our own darker sides.
    We are wired up to desire human contact, including sex. Why then should we eschew or be ashamed of these needs? The consumption of a moderate amount of meat is normally necessary for our health and well being. Why should we eat tofu burgers, so to speak, rather than real ones? Why should we substitute a faint facsimile for genuine experience? Why should we pursue academic theories to the exclusion of the fullness of life, with humor and passion and gusto? What do we accomplish thereby? Is it not vanity to try to fight a billion years of evolution? First of all, you will fail, but in any case, to what end should you even try?
    Now, would you blame a fruit for falling off a tree?
    By the same token, its vain and pointless to attach to the object of your desires and positively self-defeating to clutch anything too tightly, for we are all in constant motion, always passing through an infinite sequence of moments, like a string of pearls, each one perfect and unique in itself.
    So, as for the question of free will versus predestination, I say mu!
    Neither fight the wave, nor succumb to it. Consciously, I and I ride the cosmic surf!
    …
    According to Wikipedia, Leibniz was one of the greatest philosophers of the 17th century, his contributions to mathematics are profound, he discovered the binary number system, and the Calculus, and his work anticipates much of modern logic and analysis.
    Leibniz made major contributions to physics, biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science. “He also wrote on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology, even occasional verse. His contributions to this vast array of subjects are scattered in journals and in tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts.” there is no complete edition of Leibniz’s writings.
    Dude! What an inspiration.

  • Richard Dawkins vs. God

    Richard Dawkins has a new book out, apparently mostly focused on debunking some of these myths we have about God. I’m sorry, but what a tragic waste of time and talent.
    First of all, I should say that Dawkins is for me himself kind of a god. Can I say that?
    His book, “The Selfish Gene” is on the short list of books I have read that have completely transformed my world view. Oh, I don’t know how short the list is, but I do know its kind of random, which in itself is probably revealing. Apropos nothing, a few other entries on it include an obscure set of reprints from Scientific American, called “Cosmology + 1”, Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols”, Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, Frazier’s “The Golden Bough”, Heinrich Zimmer’s “Philosophies of India”, an abridged version of the Mahabharata given to me by an old friend from Kashmir, and Carroll Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope.” And of course, old Number One, and in particular, The Psalms and The Book of Job. Yeah. That’s good stuff. Go off and read those, then get back to me, and we’ll talk.
    What these books have in common is a kind of mind boggling disorientation. I mean they bring you to contemplate what might otherwise be commonplaces in a way that is so far from conventional wisdom that maybe even if you thought you understood their subjects before having read them, no matter what else you think afterward, you wind up with a new perspective in spite of yourself.
    What really knocked me out when I read The Selfish Gene was the sense of the enormity of the time over which evolution has to work, and how fruitless it is to try to apply “common sense” to phenomena so far out of any context with which we have had any meaningful experience, that it sends the mind reeling.
    In “The Blind Watchmaker” Dawkins addresses this point directly, in that one argument postulated against Darwinian evolution, even in its modern modified form, is that it defies reason to think that complex entities like ourselves “merely appeared” on the face of the earth, like a pocket watch spontaneously coming into existence on the Scottish moor.
    It seems implausible to our tiny minds to imagine such a thing happening, yet our best evidence and most careful study lead us to believe something quite like that. Except there is nothing ‘spontaneous’ about it. Some of us now think we have evolved from blobs of complex molecules having certain properties of replication over the course of billions of years. It is so hard to fathom the length of time over which this evolution has occurred that scientists studying these phenomena, being human themselves, have to spend years training their minds in order to explain the facts before them in terms which they themselves can’t possibly comprehend. Think about it.
    Another wonderful book: “Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems” by John Holland approaches adaptation from a computational point of view. Its a real mind bender, check it out. In it he shows how powerful evolutionary problem solving can be, whatever you want to believe.
    What I mean is that this is complex stuff — that even our best minds are only beginning to understand. If we have given up on our priests to give us all the answers let us not merely point the fickle finger of fate at our scientists. There are no answers. At least that we are capable of comprehending. There are only hypotheses, undoubtedly vast oversimplifications that either predict events or fail to do so. That is all.
    A similar or maybe even more fundamentally disorienting experience must occur in the realms of astronomy and astrophysics, or so-called high-energy physics wherein we contemplate distances so great, or so small, and observed peculiarities of space and time so bizarre and alien to our everyday experience that we are barely capable of grasping them, much less finding them consistent with “common sense,” whatever that means.
    So, the first thing to grasp is that no one really understands any of this. Scientists study phenomena, postulate hypotheses explaining the phenomena and these theories succeed or fail more or less as they are applied to and remain consistent with additional observations. Scientists tell us what they think, and we either trust them or we don’t. That is it. We all have this desire for definiteness. We like things to be simple. Does God exist or not? Some say yes, some say no. But the truth is, no one knows. Why can’t we just leave it at that?
    What strikes me as maybe ironic is that scientists, or what may more generally be called “rationalists,” otherwise so skeptical about everything, sometimes seem to lack the ability to be skeptical, or shall we say modest, with respect to themselves. Questions about the existence of God and other imponderables like, Do we have souls? Is there life after death? Which, first of all, are entirely different questions from one another, get all muddled up together in this garbage heap of “irrationality” and absent any evidence, meaning any instrumentation with which to measure such phenomena, they are outside the realm of science. Pending the discovery or invention of such mechanisms, why can’t we just be content with that, and remain silent on the subject, then?
    I’m afraid the true answer is that we have such divergent world views competing in the realm of policy these days, that we dare not ignore these differences of opinion for fear that we might underestimate our ability to kill one another over some such arcana.
    Maybe there is something out there, some consciousness, maybe even with some of the attributes we conceive of as applying to God, omnipresence with respect to our dimensionality, omniscience with respect to our puny intelligence, something which remains hidden, and we have so far been unable to detect, like the cosmic background radiation. We can hypothesize it based on nothing more than intuition. Is that such a crime? Don’t confuse faith with fact, but it would seem prudent to approach the universe with a profound humility, just on general principles.
    I think of Job and others in the Bible, wise men, better than you and me, when they find themselves before God, they tremble in fear, cover their eyes, and fall to their knees.
    We wouldn’t expect a modern man to do anything resembling that, would we? I imagine a modern man standing there saying something like, “Now see here, God, I have a couple of questions for you.” Does that sound like a sensible attitude one should have toward the master of the universe? I’m not talking about whatever dysfunctional relationship you had with your father, with authority in general, with the man in the pulpit, or the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m not saying ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.’ What I am saying is look at the universe around you. Really look at it, and ask yourself, who are you to judge that which is beyond your comprehension? Where were you when its foundations were laid? Where were you when God said to the seas ‘thou shalt go thus far and no further’?
    So often, that’s what I hear when people like this joker John Humphrys on BBC4 trying to be profound ask questions that sound to me like nothing more than “riddle me this, batman.” Wake up, dude. The universe doesn’t owe us shit. And in particular, it doesn’t owe us an explanation. There is pain and tragedy all around you. That’s right. And it doesn’t begin and end with the sick innocent child that you claim somehow disproves the existence of God, nor does it begin and end with the tragic sadness of grief, or the sins we commit on one another. Its positively childish to put that on one plane, and forget about your scrambled eggs for breakfast, or factory farms, or a million other things you may or may not be aware of. For one example, consider the ongoing struggle for life between yourself, which you barely understand, and the microbacteria and viruses you are literally fighting with for life every moment of every day, as you sleep and wake. Wake up, you dumbass!
    What I mean is that on the one hand, its amazing that we creatures, crawling around in the mud on the surface of this rock spinning in space, are able even to contemplate the vast universe, or that part of it which we can observe, and consider the beginnings and maybe endings of time, but on the other hand, even with all that, we have the arrogance to think we have the capability to understand more of it than we proportionately should expect to be able to.
    That is as our lifespan relates to all of time, and as our travels from birth to death relate to all of space, why should not our intellectual achievement thus relate to reality?
    That is not to diminish the accomplishments of human minds greater than our own, quite on the contrary. But where’s the humility, I ask you?
    Ponder with me, if you will, the life of a man, perhaps a great man in a distant land, perhaps centuries or even millennia ago. A man who achieved great and wonderful things, who was a hero to his people, and who was known through the generations. Consider such a man to have lived in a now lost civilization, even the name of which we do not know, for example the Indus civilization, or maybe some even more obscure society of which we have no record at all.
    Now consider that time is so long, we all will share that man’s fate, no matter what we do. There will come a day when there is not a human being on the face of the earth, perhaps no life on earth at all, perhaps no humans anywhere. There will come a time when the sun will emit its matter into the void of space and finally go dark. Maybe the entire universe will collapse, and there will come an end to time and space.
    In that context, don’t all your exertions for achievement, for love, wealth, or fame or whatever it is you may choose to be chasing, seem pointless?
    How can they not?
    And that is where God comes in. God, or rather our belief in Him makes us like Daffy Duck in my favorite cartoon, “Duck Amuck.” If you’ve never seen it, look it up.
    At one point, Daffy finds himself out of the animated frame, right off the cellulose, or at least off of an image of the cellulose on which he was being drawn, and talks directly to the audience. Its at once very deep and very funny, which I think is a characteristic of many profound experiences. Its where we find ourselves, outside one box, inside another, whether we perceive it or not. Theology, philosophy and physics are all absurd, and at their best somehow approach comedy, when you think about it. But deep down we all know comedy and sex are supreme over thought. And if you have ever been lucky enough to be able to laugh with your lover after sex, I don’t have to tell you, that’s deep.
    You may say its like a dream, “and in that sleep, … what dreams may come…?” And we all step out of the “real” world into our own dream worlds, and some of us return with true insight, and some return with disturbing nightmares, and some confuse the dream for the waking existence, or vice versa, and are capable of the most shocking barbarity. Or is it the so-called civilized, rational man who is laboring under an illusion? Having evolved over the course of millions of years, surviving in large part due to genetic mechanisms we share with fish, fowl, bugs and beasts — is not the lower creature the greater part of us than this thin veneer of civilization or of rationality?
    When we look at our DNA we find we share 99% of it with the apes, perhaps nearly as much of it with dogs and so on. Are we really so different from them?
    And look at us, even so called civilized beings, constantly at war with one another, we survive by literally ripping the flesh off of other beings, which from a statistical analysis of our genetic material are largely indistinguishable from us.
    And even putting this aside, as Nietzsche says, “in times of peace, a warlike people sets upon itself.” So if we abstained from all flesh, we would still need to consume plants, which are no less alive, and even if we sat quietly, fasting, meditating, our minds yet would fill with thoughts of aggression, and even if we mastered our desire for importance and power, our jealousies and hurts, would we not yet be guilty of a form of aggression, one part of ourselves over another part?
    God, or rather our faith in God, and in a sense, God within us, allows us to step outside of all this noise, to transcend and perceive something greater, beyond the mean struggle for existence, beyond categories and names for things, beyond our ability to express. Our faith ennobles us, and as Martin Luther King said, our forgiveness for the wrongs done to us ironically frees us from the chains that bind us to the enemy. That’s a really big idea.
    Clearly, the universe produced us, as Alan Watts said, in exactly the same way that an apple tree produces an apple. Isn’t it wonderful? Or like Einstein said, to some people, nothing is a miracle. To others, everything is.
    This is a deep and profound truth, that once you can grasp it you will find encompasses and does not contradict these other truths — that even if from an egotistical point of view in the end it may all be fruitless, like the vanity of the man from a lost civilization — we can achieve progress through skeptical and rational analysis, and meanwhile doing our daily work for its own sake, putting food on the table and love in the bed, has value and is a worthwhile exercise of our energies. And if we have any juice left over at the end of the day, would it be such a waste of time to put a message in a bottle, so to speak, and let a prayer pass our lips, just in case the master of the universe might hear us, even if all we have to say is ‘thanks’, or ‘please take care of this soul now lost to us’, or whatever.
    After all, isn’t it just “pity that’s the heart of love”, as Joyce said, and similarly isn’t it just hope that’s the heart of prayer?
    And so, when confronted by the great deep, is it really so foolish and futile for us to cling to hope, the more desperate we are, the more tightly? And like a man lost at sea holding on to a bit of flotsam, it may just turn out that this irrational faith of ours will in the end save us.

  • the nature of reality

    [transcription of a recording called voice002, 3897216 bytes.  date unknown]

    I want to talk about the nature of reality and our place in it.
    Its a difficult question because its ultimately unresolvable.
    Its very difficult for a thing to contemplate itself.
    We are part of reality.
    We can’t get outside of it.
    We can’t operate on it.
    We are in it.
    And in a way its both the most important question, and an unimportant question.
    That’s the real essence of what I want to talk about:
    things can both be and not be
    things are beyond pairs of opposites
    ultimate reality lies beyond even concepts.
    And there’s an ineffable quality
    That we all experience
    About which its impossible to talk
    And its this that’s at the root of all religions and philosophies —
    This parsing out of the experience,
    That the immediate experience of the world…
    People have struggled through the ages to try to resolve their perception of the world around them with their inner sense of a different experience of the world, … of some other world.
    And this conflict is the essential human condition.
    How we come to survive whatever level of
    Resolution we come to between these different experiences
    Defines who we are — who we think we are and who we actually are.
    Now if you break things into pairs of opposites,
    You naturally try to talk about the inner and the outer as being separate and distinct.
    Right?
    But the truth is always that pairs of opposites are aspects of some other thing that we might not have direct experience with.
    I’ll show you what I mean:
    We have day and night, right?
    But the sun is always shining as far as we know, at least for the next couple of billion years.
    So the day and night are our perceptions of the sun’s continuous shining limited by our position on the surface of the planet with respect to the constancy of the sun.
    In the same way, our interior experience and our exterior experience are different manifestations of a more universal reality.
    This is a very important concept.
    Again, any time I give it a name, I part it, I take something and put it apart from other things that have different names or no names.
    And that’s what makes it impossible to talk about.
    Lao Tzu says, “the Tao which can be spoken of is not the universal Tao.”
    This is because speech breaks things down into first of all a linear pattern of thought, and individual concepts forming the words of the sentence.
    And as soon as you do that you move away from the universality of the Tao.
    So in a way its futile to even try to talk about this thing that I’m trying to talk about or at least refer to.
    And this dilemma has preoccupied Buddhist monks and Eastern philosophers for millennia.
    The way they try to teach it is usually experientially.
    They can’t actually teach you, but they can set up an environment appropriate to your state of being, that will help induce the realization within you.
    Its very inefficient and time consuming.
    Its also indefinite.
    You can’t really tell whether someone’s got it or not.
    They say you can tell, but you can’t really.
    Its like that Steven Wright joke, “everything in my apartment has been replaced by an exact replica.”
    Its a question if something is an exact replica of something else can you tell them apart?
    Well, if its a perfect enough replica…
    Its not like enlightened people have little radar that they can find each other out.
    Sometimes you can kind of tell based on a person’s comfortableness within the world I guess,
    Or you know, constant comfort and discomfort, feeling everything at the same time.
    Its very confusing.
    Because on the one hand, you have this realization of universality.
    The everything,
    The everything, the everywhere, the every-when.
    And beyond.
    Beyond even our concept of dimension.
    Not higher dimensions, no dimension, all dimensions, beyond dimensionality.
    and I ..or you know its really just a perception of it.
    In the sense of like a cave man looking at the sun: “Ugh. Sun.”
    It’s there. There’s something up there…out there..
    without understanding what it is.
    We don’t understand what it is. Its a — we really have no idea what’s going on — kind of thing.
    We pretend that we do, [because] you know “smart” people have convinced us they know what’s going on.
    That doesn’t mean we do.
    That doesn’t even mean they do.
    You know, in some sense they might know more than us.
    You know, one individual knows more than another individual.
    [its just that they claim they do and we trust them.]
    [maybe they do and maybe they don’t]
    But you know, were all just worms crawling around on this apple.
    Human beings are so arrogant!
    Of course, you know, look around yourself.
    And as far as we can tell, we’re the smartest thing in the universe, … really.
    I mean, this planet, any other planet, any other time — to the extent that we know.
    Which is exactly my point — the extent that we know is not very much.
    We think we know more than we do.
    [I guess its a question of in the absence of evidence to the contrary, do you just assume nothing, or do you keep an open mind, or do you populate the inky blackness with creatures of your imaginings?]
    And on this planet?
    Well maybe, I don’t know.
    Yeah, probably.
    But there’s other species, I mean elephants and whales,
    I mean, that appear to be smarter than we ever thought they were
    [especially when we were busy harvesting them]
    [not to mention chimpanzees and apes and so on]
    Who the hell knows?
    Maybe its staring us right in the face
    Maybe rocks are intelligent in a way we’re so dumb we cant even comprehend.
    Who the hell knows?
    [or some kind of energy being yet to be discovered living on the surface of the sun, or whatever…]
    So there’s another aspect of religion, or mysticism, or whatever you want to call it — is its a way to protect ourselves.
    Its a… the world is a terrifying place, filled with vast sorts of dangers
    In ancient times, you could imagine a primitive man in the wilderness,
    Wild beasts ready to tear him limb from limb at the slightest opportunity.
    Everything’s hungry.
    Everything’s eating on you —
    Bugs,
    Diseases,
    Microscopic things, you don’t even have a concept of,
    That will make you sick,
    Affect you in different ways,
    And kill you.
    […]
    And so we put up these structures of thought,
    I wont call them “myths” necessarily, or fables,
    Because many of the things we think of as myths today
    Were conceived of differently in their time and their cultural context.
    And my observation any way is that there is some form of truth at the bottom of practically every one.
    Everything, all the time.
    Both true and false.
    And neither.
    That’s what I’m talking about.
    And so similarly to the primitive wilderness, the perception of infinite universality is terrifying.
    It gives you vertigo,
    If it doesn’t drive you mad.
    And like the sun you can’t stare at it for too long.
    We’re not built for it.
    And this is something that you find in the ancient writings, like for example in the old testament that we lack today.
    If God showed himself to Moses or Elija
    Remember these were the leaders of their time, very important men.
    They fell to their knees, quaking in terror.
    Our modern conception is that if God came,
    We’d have some serious questions for Him.
    ..you know the arrogance of modern man..
    We’d want to understand and analyze.
    But part of that is the whole concept of Judeo-Christianity or Islam is monarchical, right?
    Its the social organization that they knew at the time.
    You had a king.
    He had total power.
    And a person came with the appropriate reverence, or else.
    And God is the king of the world, so there you have it.
    And there’s a truth to that.
    There’s an appropriate reverence for the infinite,
    That we should have,
    And very often we lack.
    Its this kind of arrogance that I despise in atheists or even let’s say the “secular agnostic,”
    Who has some concept of spirituality and at least is you know, give him credit at least he’s honest enough to say “I don’t know.”
    Our modern conception is the world just doesn’t care. If you want answers, don’t ask to be told, just seek them out yourself. In a way its harder and even more lonely and frightening.
    But the flip side of that is that very often we see a lack of fear and reverent respect.
    And when you think about pollution and global warming, or the nuclear bomb or biological weapons, its not hard to imagine that we will someday pay a terrible price for that arrogance.
    …
    that’s enough for now.
    …

    “Sun is Shining” by DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo

  • the fall fun fest

    This afternoon was the fall fun fest down at the church. It’s an annual fund raiser with a variety of activities including a homemade hot salsa taste test competition.
    Two weeks ago, Liz and I went to mass together and she persuaded me to enter the salsa competition.
    I had no idea what I was in for.
    of course, Anita was sleeping. I won’t say she hates God, although I know her very well, and that’s what I think. (and I have my reasons. …), but never mind that.
    I will say she hates The Church, and I can’t say I blame her. Some of the time, I do too. Come on, you don’t have to think about it too much, and some times its more obvious than others, but an institution that has lasted as long as the Catholic Church has, has got to be based on something more than just good feelings. And you know there’s tons of material around that. I refer you to my audio blogs of around 060923.
    But never mind any of that. What happened today has nothing to do with all that noise, its about reality, and love, and what it means to love someone, and what kind of emotional desert some people are really coming from.
    So what happened was, that one way or another I got enrolled in having my salsa judged at basically the “church picnic.” And you know I have a recurring dream about heaven being kind of like a church picnic, complete with the jealous aunties competing about who has the best fried chicken recipe, and isn’t that just the way people are? Why should you expect them to change, just because they died and went to heaven? And who do you think deserves to get to heaven if not the church going folk of the world, and don’t they just always show up at the annual fund raiser? And well, so here I am, and don’t you know the competition is fierce.
    Now the deep south might like their deep fried whatever, but here in the southwest, we kind of like our tex-mex, and there’s some good stuff that falls under that umbrella. Basically, we’re talking about Spanish and Native American cuisine filtered through an American strainer with a good dose of baby boomer. Am I making any sense?
    But never mind any of that, either.
    What happened was that when it came down to it, well, here’s the deal.
    It turned there was room for only twelve spots in one of two categories: hottest and best tasting. So if you wanted to get in the running, you had to show up at 3 o’clock, and folks would try out the different salsas and vote on their favorites.
    Now, you know how it works, there is some intrinsic value to the vote, but it doesn’t hurt to pack the ballot box with your friends voting just because they know you.
    As it turns out, I don’t have any friends. Not even my wife showed up to vote. I had to go on down there myself, and make the entry at 3pm, and hang around swapping recipes until 4, when the voting started. And I do have to mention that was kind of fun. Here were a bunch of people who had something in common, anyway, all rather proud of their salsas, and with good reason. And we got to discussing things, and I think I even made a couple of friends, what with your old “Uncle Charlie” and his roasted hatch pepper salsa, Diego with his authentic avocado and habanero salsa, and the eventual winner Susanna (her entry named “Susanna’s Secret” turned out to be the winner, a salty ranch dressing, with sour cream and jalapenos, was really good!). Susanna turned out to be entry t-1, I was t-2. So there we were.
    But you know what pretty much every other entry had, except for me? It was at least one other individual who voted for them, not necessarily because their salsa was better than anyone else’s, but just because they stuck with you. And they cared about the stuff you do, they cared enough at least just to show up. You know what I mean?
    And so I made my entry, and figured out that the tasting wouldn’t start for another hour, so what would I do? The UT football game was on, and it turns out I prefer the radio, for a number of reasons, one of them being that I consider myself free to move away from my tv or the stadium for that matter on saturday afternoons, and the radio announcer, Craig Way, who is totally awesome, in terms of facts and figures and knowing the background not only on his home team, but also the opponent, and believe me, if you’ve never heard him, when reporting on the Longhorns, you’ve never heard a better announcer reporting on any team, anywhere, in any sport. And its a whole ‘nother thing than listening to these non-entities who fly in for the game and barely know what city they’re in, and cover it for national TV. But that’s just another line of bullshit I don’t want to get into at the moment.
    So there I was, entering my salsa, all by myself. Turns out both of my kids were at that game. Monica of course, is in the band, and its kind of required that she show up, and Liz happened to have a buddy who’s parents have season tickets and couldn’t make the game, and she invited her to go, so that’s pretty cool right there, isn’t it? And with a kid who’s out there on the field, even just before the game and at half time, and as a Texas-Ex myself, don’t you think I should be there, in spades? Part of me feels like a failure all the time, just because I’m not a millionaire. You know around here, that’s pretty much the yardstick. So I should at least have season tickets, but never mind that they’re not on sale at any price, not to mention sky box tickets, and have you ever thought about the whole idea of sky boxes at a college stadium, I mean really? But on the other hand, what are these dopes doing, planning the church fund raiser to coincide with a UT football game? They must not be from around here. But never mind any of that, either.
    So there I was, entering my salsa into the contest, all by myself. Everyone else I noted had at least one companion, usually a spouse, if applicable, if you know what I mean. And there were some interesting entries. It turned out the winner of the hottest salsa category were a trio of kids who had a bunch of their friends show up to vote for them but not to mention, they also had some of the pretty damnest hot, I mean God damned hot salsa that you ever wanted to mess around with. I tried them all, and let me tell you, I had a microscopic amount of theirs, at their exuberant suggestion after we had chatted for a while, and oh, my God!
    But never mind any of that.
    So there I was, doing this thing, all by myself, just the way everything has gone my whole life long. Sometimes I wonder about that. Am I so antisocial that I have to constantly find myself in such situations? And after literally decades of pondering this topic, I have come to the conclusion that the answer is no. There’s a lot going on. Its like first of all, part of the wisdom of the ages, whereever you come from, whether you have surrendered to Islam, and believe in predestination, or you’re a Taoist, and seek a kind of unity with the way of the universe, or you come from the school of “just deal with it, motherfucker”, or whatever. Its not that I do or don’t do anything in particular to cause myself to wind up in situations like this over and over again, but what does make me different (or at least this is what I tell myself), is that not only do I have the self-awareness to even consider this question, which is in itself both a curse and a blessing, but I have the courage to get up out of my solitary existence, and experience life, even if that means I must do so solitary. I’ve given up waiting for a companion. I’ve gone out there and learned to dive, and to ski, and go golfing, and study martial arts, and whatever, and though most things would be better with a buddy, its better to do it alone than not do it at all, letting life pass you by while you’re waiting for one to show up. But on the other hand, there I was, feeling lonely, participating in an event at my church, among folks I obviously had something in common with, lonely in the middle of a crowd of people. That’s what I mean about the mysterious connection between character and destiny. The same things keep happening to you over and over for a reason. Because its your nature. Deal with it.
    What I mean is that there’s plenty of other solitaires out there in the universe, but most of them are, you know, all by themselves. Not too many of them go to restaurants, or movies, or church socials. The social pressure is just too great. The world is like one big High School cafeteria.
    And at the least we all used to have family groups we could fall back on, or so I imagine, but not so much in this mobile, post-industrial whirrld we live in. So now you might find person X goes to place Y for school or a job or whatever, and falls into social group Z or not, and if not, well then, the world just says “fuck you”. You fall through the cracks never to be seen again, and no one will even notice you’re missing, you know what I mean?
    So there I was, entering my salsa, all by myself. And so I had asked Anita to come with me just to keep me company, but she had laundry to do. Well, I thought, we had a good morning anyway, even in bed, just as always, and you might think that she’d kind of just want to stick with me, but no, never mind that.
    So there I was, entering my salsa all by myself, and after chatting briefly with “Uncle Charlie” and his lovely wife, and Susanna, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles who were responsible for Fuego del Gringo, I decided to grab a beer, and a chicken fajita, and get a taste of the competition, and sit there and eat at the long eight foot tables, all by myself. Am I making myself clear yet?
    So there I am with my two dozen blobs of salsa, and my chicken fajita and my beer, and my cell phone, so I call Anita, to tell her my story and see if she’ll come down at least for a little while, until the tasting starts, its kind of a cool energy going on here.
    No, she’s busy.
    That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?