Today is the Only Day--the View From Here

I ignored this blog for most of this year while I adjusted my life in ways I didn't understand very well while I was making these changes. I was trying, usually unsuccessfully, to be in the moment but I was in the moment enough to make the changes I needed to make and faced my fears. I look forward to facing them everyday now--if that happens. If not, then I have a day of joy or moments of joy interspersed with confusion, with battling thoughts with impulses to do this or that. Today, I realized that I had a lot of thoughts about all the things I should be doing; also, about what I didn't do that I should have. I should have not allowed my thoughts to distract me doing quite so many moments during meditation. I should have gotten up earlier and, in fact, had no right to feel joyful today I mean I hadn't accomplished anything, in fact, I never accomplish anything etc. You get the drift. Our minds, often become possessed by these urges to experience pain in all its variety--Eckhart Tolle calls it the "pain body", a very useful concept. This "being" is very clever, as all beings are when it comes to survival, and seeks out pain and then "handles" the pain. It causes the problem then takes the credit for "solving" the problem. I may think I "wasted" my day and feel pain but then my pain body turns around and dresses up like a sexy woman and pulls out a bag of comforts and asks me to choose one. I get the "comfort" as a reward for having allowed the pain body to live in my suffering and rather than wait for me to get fed up with it, I am offered something or other that will cause me to turn off my discriminating intelligence that would normally appear and short circuit the problem by turning myself down and/or off with escapes which would have the seeds of future suffering. I would, when the pain body had an opening the next day, become upset that I had done something escapist rather than either face my pain directly using the discriminating intelligence or hand not accomplished something "useful" instead.

We all knot ourselves up sometimes in very intricate and complex ways sometimes in very straightforward ways. Really the knots are not so hard to unravel or avoid. We need not suffer so much--it is that pain-body that seeks to come out at those times it has nothing to do with anything real. The pain-body can disappear and even die. It is not real--it is a self-perpetuating virtual being completely dependent on our attention. The more attention we give to our pain and suffering the worse it is. That doesn't mean, for example, that if we experienced suffering that we have to "forget" about it. It happened and it shaped us to some degree but it is past and gone--it is, essentially, a story or history--an interesting subject not unlike some battle in WWII but nothing that ought to involve our attention beyond that. Here right now, it might be good to give an account of that suffering, as an illustration, again as a story mental to enhance this moment we are, after all, artists of our own life. For us in the West we are blessed with this notion of "the artist" which is sometimes just full of shit but in it's essence has some great spiritual power--I leave it to you to ponder that.

There is personal suffering then there is the large stage of history. All of us are involved and the story is very hard to easily follow--we live in a deep reality that has depth in every direction. Existence itself only appears shallow because we are shallow in our awareness. I sometimes lose myself in the contemplation and in researching all kinds of things that are going on in the world--it is so rich, so astonishing, there are so many threads, tendencies, possibilities, conflicts, opportunities and, above all, paradoxes to put to shame the full collection of imaginative stories ever published or told by any human beings and it is all happening right now at this moment! To not be excited about all this is seemingly impossible.

There are some trends that appear from my vantage point to be dominant. This George Carlin routine may have it right. To be sure, Carlin is pissed off but his goal is to destroy illusions and illusions are what America is all about, i.e., "the American Dream--you have to be asleep to believe it". Carlin never was a genuine hippie in the sense that of "hipness". Hippies later came to mean spaced out and incompetent weaklings who just took drugs--that isn't what hippies were about before they became a weird kind of symbol for rebellioius youth. In fact, hippies were street smart (they had to be) and were searching for truth (in all the wrong places) but at least searching for truth and authenticity and *not* escapism. Drugs were recreational or something that was meant to open up heterfore unacknowledged states of consciousness. That some ended up addicted or using to escape was not the initial impulse.

To digress, there are two issues that show that our civilization has become highly toxic and beginning to display serious behavior problems such that almost any condemnation of it has merit:

Issue number 1 is the ongoing environmental degradation. It is irrelevant whether or not global climate changes or other looming ecological disasters will come sooner or later or will be severe or less severe--the point is that there is a strong possibility that within a generation that serious disasters could occur which could or could have been averted had there been a small adjustment in priorities and life-style. In fact the changes that could have been made would have made life more elegant perhaps slower paced and probably more interesting as attention would have shifter from large scale industrial enterprises to more knowledge intensive and creativity-intensive operations. The change could have been gradual and led by people that knew something about the world other than how to manipulate the public to buy ever increasingly mass quantities of whatever can make the highest profit. I have a reason to believe that alternative energy sources have been discouraged and deliberately suppressed in order to enrich the current people at the top.

Issue number 2 is the so-called "War on Terrorism". When there is a war usually a bunch of soldiers invade a country and conquer the land often times doing a little looting and worse (sorry kids but all soldiers do that) and it is very obvious when it happens. Not so our new "War". There is absolutely no proof that I've seen that anyone that the government claims is an enemy is an enemy. It's all based on assertions by people I know for a fact mean me no good and, in fact, hate everything about me (if they bothered with me at all) and if things continue as they have will put me in a concentration camp if I'm lucky. From my point of view as an old hipster the whole thing is a scam from beginning to end. There is little truth in it. It is like the street. Police get pressure to crack down on drugs so the cops go to the big dealers and ask them to rat on some poor patsy who all of a sudden finds out that the big-boys want to cut him into a big-time drug deal. Naturally he gets caught and the cops relish in their big bust, the dealers lay low for a few weeks and then are back in business as are the cops (I should say "some cops" or the powerful in the Department because most cops are not on the take) taking the kick-backs. That's the way it works. In the same way "terrorists" are usually intelligence assets deployed to some cut-out organization who recurit genuine "believers" who are clearly either demented or somewhat retarded like Richard Reed or Zacarias Moussaoui. Also there are the traditional patsies like Mohammed Atta and most of the other alleged 9/11 hijackers who, in fact, are intelligence assets who wander around from place to place following orders they don't understand while being supplied with lots of money for parties and whatever vices they have (they are usually required to be suggestible and morally weak) only a step above the Richard Reeds.

The tragedy of 9/11 is not only that nearly 3,000 people perished but that the American people fell for the official story. Almost everything about the official story is pathetically weak and uninspired--sort of like "my dog ate my homework" kind of story. While I believe that Jack Kennedy was not killed by a lone assassin, I also believe that a cursory look at the evidence would show that a somewhat far-fetched case could be made for Oswald being the lone-gunman (if you ignore motivation). In 9/11 there is no case at all to be made for the government's story--the story is utterly impossible because there is no there there--in short, no evidence.

I have no interest here in convincing anyone that the government is lying--you can believe the government but if you look at the evidence or lack of evidence I believe you will not longer be able to do that. I don't talk about it and avoid writing about it because it seems you are either the sort of person that believes authority or you're not. I personally wish that we could believe authority--I believe we ought to live in a social structure wherein authority and wisdom can co-exist but it just is not the case today. What saddens me most out of all this is the phenomenal lack of critical thinking that is not only in the masses but, more tragically, in the "educated" classes particularly those that identify as leftists.