“We can call ‘beautiful’ only that which suggests the existence of an ideal order; supra-terrestrial, harmonious and logical that yet bears within itself, like the brand of an original sin, the drop of poison, the rogue element of incoherence, the grain of sand that will foul up the entire system.” – Charles Baudelaire
Girl 013 by ZSO – Sara Blake
I wanted to share this with you tonight. It’s a piece of writing I unearthed recently, written the day after my birthday last year. I was exploring the usual Proustian and Heideggarian ruminations on being and time which tend to come through me with unrelenting stamina when in that European countryside.
I wrote it as… “the train propels through the countryside of midwestern France. I am left. I have gone. I am on my way home. I am constantly attempting to feel at home wherever I am, and yet I know this week in France has tested me, brought me to my limits. It is a relief to play my own music, to be listening to the encouragements and conversations between my own ears, to be noticing what I notice, to have the space to notice those experiences.
Last night I thanked one of my oldest school friend for coming with me on a ride with bicycles out into the paddocks and fields which surround that beehive of a house. We rode all the way out of the town and back again, before finding a dirt road and deciding to take a detour, to adventure. He spotted the sunflower field. We lay our bikes on the edge of the grass growing up on a mound beside the space and climbed into the supra-terrestrial land of sunflowers of all manner of sizes.
It seems that the unscripted moments between moments are what we all search for, long for, dream of, and even attempt to script for ourselves. To script the unscripted. How does one do that? My friend and I stood in the edges of that sunflower field as the world got cooler and the sky darkened towards a European night. It was 9:38pm and we were late for dinner on my birthday. I knew that. Just a few more minutes, please, I begged myself.
Something in me, the noticer, the watcher, wanted so very much to stay. The noticer does not force, either. The noticer asks. Just like a child, the noticer asks directly, and we either acquiesce or deny, force indifferently or lavish lovingly. It tends to depend on what we ‘feel like’, ‘should do’ or expect of ourselves. No, it is the evening of my birthday, I said to my soul. We need to return soon. No, look how beautiful it is. You want to lie down. You want to run through them. These faces, these sun flowers, you want to look into their black eyes and see the universe. You want to talk to them and lay with them and be with the crickets and the bees. You want to learn about life.
I personify my soul just as I personify my body. They are in unison to the outside observer, and yet often to the noticer, we are in conversation. No, I don’t think you should eat that. Yes, I would like to eat that. Yes, I would like a third banana. Are you serious? Yes, the noticer says calmly. Without drama, without force. We are going to have more alcoholic drinks with your parents friends, says my intellect. No, says my soul, I would rather stay at home and be alone. But you were born on this day, this is the night of your nine thousand, four hundred and ninetieth day of being alive!
9,490 days and counting, isn’t that reason enough to pour more alcohol into your body, my brain says? Not really, my soul says, but if you say so, my soul says.
Then when we’re there with the drink in the hand, the challenge is for my soul to feel at home, comfortable, in doing what it doesn’t want to do. I believe this challenge is the root of so much suffering and discomfort: the latter comes first. First we are not at home, not comfortable, we resist, we struggle, and ergo we suffer. We are shut out, we are in the storm and we want to go inside. Be here! The brain says. We are here, you must be here too. No, says the soul, I want to go to sleep, I will wait for you while you entertain yourself and the other bodies, and I will shut down, go away, switch myself off.
The last night as I slept in France, I had a dream in which I found a button on my body with which I could ‘turn myself off.’ I woke up in a hurry – quite stressed – because I was afraid I had pushed it. I checked my chest to make sure that I was okay, that the button wasn’t pushed. I’m not ready to be turned off, I said: my mind, soul and and body in unison. Is the mind separate from the soul? How do we distinguish them? The mind is the thinking thing, the intelligence, the rational brain that organizes, delineates and rules. It rules the body. The body follows this dictum. It seems too that there is a CEO of this intelligence, operating in the form of a culturally-coloured/ consumption powered information mist that permeates our habitat, and which speaks directly to our subconscious.
It is at one level completely osmotic, particularly when in relation to the habits of consumers and in correlation to their thoughts and subsequent actions. At another level however it is fixed, controlled, and highly considered. It is controlled to the degree that through advertising and popular media, we are exposed only to X, while Y is shut away. In my culture, we are (as is now almost common knowledge) predominantly exposed to a standard of beauty in the form of homogeneity: white teeth, shiny thick hair, smooth unblemished skin, rosy lips, and comfortable smiles.
We are exposed to “fun” and “happiness”, “sociability”, “pleasure” and avoidance of pain. We busy ourselves seeking the former and avoiding the latter. We are busy not experiencing pain in the form of sadness (“You made me cry. I’ll be alright. Give me a minute”) in the form of anger, or regret (“It doesn’t really matter. Everything happens for a reason”), in the form of jealousy, vulnerability, and even extreme happiness or joy. We numb ourselves from the potential of life; disconnected from the possibility to experience life in all its manifestations. We are afraid. We feel alone. We feel sad. We are angry that we are sad. We are not allowed to feel angry for we are productive and benevolent beings! We will divorce ourselves from our emotions and power on! We will advance ourselves and our civilisation because of this! We are all powerful, we can do anything!
The emotions, the family members of the soul, are renounced, expedited, evacuated from the area, given their own dwelling place out in the wilderness of our sanitized and genetically modified beings. These emotions are, however, also viewed as a spectacle in the form of entertainment. We seek to feel emotions in our television programs, our films, our books, our pop culture magazines. We watch reality television to watch the drama of other humans being: at worst to avoid our own beingness, at best to learn how other people deal with their life. This ‘life’ of show business is not altogether ‘real life’ of course – reality television is now an artifice, a construction, a creation, a farce; a glossed over, airbrushed, edited, impactful, over exaggerated ruse for the sake of entertainment, shock value, audience numbers.
Why are we so interested in being a culture, a nation, a world of watchers? Why do we create impact, trying to “be somebody” with the intention of being watched? Why is being watched or seen the ultimate goal, the ultimate jackpot, being the most watched? Why do we celebrate screens? Why is the screen so ubiquitous? In homes, in our pockets, in kitchens, on planes, on buses, on trains, in the back of taxis, in bars, in casinos, in the bars in casinos. In hospitals, in front of children, in offices.
What does the screen mean to us, what does it symbolize? Why are we projecting ourselves onto screens? Is this where we are aiming to live? And not in real life? “What is wrong with just being?” the Petal would say. “What is wrong with just being and not doing? What is so important about doing?” A human body might answer: “We must do because without doing we cannot be. The body cannot be without doing.” ”Yes,” the Petal would say, “We would decay if we sat here forever not doing. But why are you afraid of being?” she would ask. “I’m am afraid of being because I am afraid I am already nothing. I am afraid that if I look inside and stop doing, I will find nothing there. I am afraid of non-existence. I am afraid of not being important, of not having a purpose. I am afraid of not counting for anything.”
“Then we are not so dissimilar,” the emotional Spirit would say, “For the emotions are volatile and loud, and we want to be seen and heard and expressed. We want to come out and connect and reconnect. We want to be out in the world, but we have no home. We know we must live in the darkness, in the jungles and the wildernesses. We know sometimes that you feel that wilderness, that you feel our love, our pain, our vibration, our energy, our strength, our ‘is-ness’. We are. We exist. We exist by the very nature of our being,” the Spirit would explain. “Because we express, we are. But – we are still cut off, cut off from the productive world and we are afraid that if we weren’t expressive, if we just let ourselves be, we would disappear. We would disappear into the trees and into serenity. We would be quiet, and still, and we would not be spirits or souls or emotion, we would be ____________ .” The Spirit waves at existence itself.
The Petal would then ask, “What does it mean to disappear, to you? Why is it so frightful?” The body might say, “Because I am a body and I am made to work! This is my purpose! Why would I be here if I didn’t have a purpose, a purpose directly relative to the ticking of time and the segmentation of creation!”
“I don’t know. Spirit, why is it so frightening for you, to embrace disappearance?” asks the Petal.
“I am everything. Therefore, I am always here. Therefore, I must be in correlation to the rest of existence, therefore I cannot shut up.”
“If you are everything”, says the Petal, “could you not also be nothing? If you are everything, the rocks, the stars, the transport, the city, the emotion, the food, the water, the blood, the life, the death – could you also be nothing, because you are everything? You disappear into the everything. You disappear into nothing.”
The Spirit would be angry at this. It would contest this idea and dispute the idea that everything is nothing. It would explain that everything is not nothing, and that “everything is something! And something is important!”
“But why is something important?” asks the Petal.
“Because that is what seems to be.” says the Spirit.
“Yes, there is a lot that is important,” the body might say. “We bodies know that. There is a complex system of importance and we do not favor death, we do not favor idleness, we do not favor non-progression. We favor movement towards realization! We favor movement towards production! Impetus! Incremental progression towards an X we have created! Goal setting and achievement! Achievement! Achievement!”
“Did you not set that task for yourself?” the Petal would ask fiercely.”Did the world tell you that it had meaning, or did you find that out for yourself?”
(The following is from Ram Dass’ audio tape on change and aging, called ‘Conscious Aging’, which I inherited with my ipod. I transcribed this while on the train also)
“At any rate I kept trying to get high all the time to get rid of all this trippiness. Cos it all seemed so finite. And, I felt something was wrong about the direction I was going. Cos everyone was kind of doing the same thing in the 60s and early seventies. Alan Watts, I remember, tried to remind me. He was a good friend and one night we had been tasting the altar wine at a Benedictine monastery, and it was about two in the morning and he said. “Dick, your problem is, you’re too attached to emptiness.” And it was true, because form seemed so entrapping to me. I really wanted to be empty.
“I kept hearing the messages in the spiritual teachings, ‘there’s nowhere to stand.’ But I kept refuting it in my mind, because I wanted to stand out there looking down. It was so safe. It was so free of any emotional pain. And a lot of people get high in order to get out of emotional pain. I mean you look up there and you’re standing up there and you’re seeing how everything’s perfect and beautiful and you see somebody fall down and you say “karma.” See, there’s no heart in it.
“Then I met another friend whose name was Emmanuel. He’s a spook. He’s a disembodied being, everybody has them these days, they’re no big deal. They’re a dime a dozen, actually. And the thing about disembodied beings is that they’re just like embodied beings. Some of them are smart and some of them aren’t. You can’t just figure that just because somebody doesn’t have a body, that it means they know anything, cos that’s the law. Somebody who was really caught in good and evil on this plane, they figure they’ll send back a message. So they send back, “Buy can tuna and move to Oregon” and everyone goes, Ooh! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
“I have friends who are supposedly very liberal who’ll say, ‘I’d like any of your friends you’ll introduce me to,’ and they’ll take any of my weird friends. ‘How do you do, nice to meet you.’ But when I tell them I have a friend who doesn’t have a body, even my most liberal friends, it’s amazing what prejudice lurks. They’ll say, I don’t know about that. It’s very far out. I mean, can you imagine being prejudiced about somebody just because they don’t have a body? So you can’t give up your intuitive. The reason I like Emmanuel is that he agrees with me. He tells it just how I understand it to be.
“So I said to Emmanuel, I talk to him through this woman, Pat Rodegas, I don’t talk to him directly, he’s not my spook, he’s Pat’s spook. I said to Emmanuel:
“What am I doing here? Who made this error? How did I end up on Earth? Why aren’t I divine? I know I’m divine.”
And he said, “Ram Dass, you’re in school. Why don’t you try taking the curriculum.” He said “Why don’t you try being human.”
“See I’d never thought of that. See I thought that was the error. I mean this is profound by the way. It sounds simple. Because, it’s slowly been dawning on me, over the past 8-10 years, that the game wasn’t to be high, the game was to be free. And that free meant that you couldn’t push anything away and you couldn’t grab at anything. There was nowhere to stand, and there was nowhere not to stand. And that whatever this incarnation, whatever level of reality this was, I had to inhabit it impeccably to be free within it. The freedom was gonna come through my incarnation, not in spite of it. That I was gonna have to learn to be, as Christ said, in the world but not of the world. That that all the things I pushed away I was gonna have to take the curriculum sooner or later. That turned around the direction of my life a lot. Because until that time, when I was busy trying to get enlightened, trying to get high, I really begrudged the price of living on the Earth. I begrudged. And I constantly saw that I wanted to push away all the experiences of life.
“It’s interesting when you want to get high; suffering is a real drag. And you want to avoid suffering as hard as you can. When you wanna be free, you begin to hear the teachings of the Buddha about the cause of suffering being the clinging of the mind. And when something creates suffering in you, you don’t go asking for it, unless you’re really advanced, I guess, but when the suffering comes down the pike, you don’t turn away from it, because you know that only reason you’re suffering is that it’s telling you something about the clinging of your own mind. And it’s being offered to you as a gift.
“This gets very weird, because it turns the whole game around. As Rumi says, at first when you begin to awaken you go towards water and away from fire. After you’re awakened, you go towards fire, and that brings you into the cooling quality of the water. And instead of going for pleasure you go for freedom. And it’s a very different style of life. And a lot of things that you’ve avoided because they brought you down. [Now] you see that the only thing that brings you down is your own mind. It’s not the city, the city is just city-ing itself. It’s being essence city, what are you getting so upset about? It’s your reaction to the city that’s doing it to you.
“And so, like the other night I was in Des Moines, Iowa, and I came into the hall and there were people in the hall waiting for me. And they said ‘there’s Ram Dass’. And I’m like a rented Ram Dass, I have no idea who I am and I don’t even care – I’m just an awareness, and I do what I gotta do. So, since I don’t know who I am, as people project into me, I become what their projection is a lot of the time. Somebody says, ‘Ram Dass,’ and I go ‘Yeees’ [very seriously] and somebody says ‘Hi Dick’ I go ‘Hi!’, See if you’re somebody and someone says ‘Hi Dick’ and you go ‘Yeeeees’ it doesn’t work.
“So I came into the hall and everybody was Ram Dass, and I was yehhs yehhs and I was smiling and ‘being Ram Dass’ and it’s a nice role. I’m not anybody, what difference does it make to me? I mean, I’m not not all those things. It’s not like I’m phony, see, it’s not like I’m being somebody else back in there. It’s not that. It’s just that it’s a form. We’re all in forms. We can’t meet unless we’re in forms. We don’t have to get lost in them. Who will we be this time? I’ll be serious. Okay, I’ll be light.”
Photo: Sebastian Mader
Healing leads to harmony, for if we are wounded, we protect, defend, and feel anger in the face of the existence of hurt. The commitment to heal ourselves through inner work necessitates the practice of being compassionate, and this applies whether that work involves truly forgiving your mother, letting go of anger and frustration, allowing yourself to eat what you want, laying in shivasana, 
FEVER AND FAITH
“It is difficult to see the picture when you are inside of the frame.” - Author Unknown
Now the stars are gone too and I have grown up, I have kept going. I am too honest like those stars, to keep reappearing like trains and moons and rains do. I’ll make it. I know this. You know this too – whomsoever being is possessing me. I think there are many. Even the trees breathe, up and down they go, their branches rising and falling in dark peace.
And all I ask is the truth. Freedom from my own demons, the demons that allow me to work, and keep going, keep doing whatever it is that I can do. I am doing it. I want the paper and pens.
Who uses them anymore? What happened to these archaic things? People use them for grocery lists, and I use them for magic. Is there still magic in the world? The moon is big, the moans are loud, the magic is all but wasted on souls. I only want to rise higher and better. To rise better. That is my choice, with gravity. That is my moon.