Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy

There is always something to come to terms with. It is relentless and unending, our being asked/required to grow up some more again today. It appears to be a plot against us until we look closer and see that the trend can be linked directly to our addiction to wanting, desiring, having to have. It is a proven reality over time, the less we want, the happier we are. Supreme happiness is reserved for those who want nothing ever any time. We can stop being miserable the minute we stop wanting anything. The economy will crash, but we won’t care.

Being there is being here, now–which, with the right kind of emptiness, stillness and silence, is highly preferable to what passes for life most days.

Stepping into this scene in your imagination, and staying a while, provides us with a refuge from horrors of the latest headline and the absurdity/insanity Donald Trump and his idea of how things ought to be. Empty of Donald and the MAGA madness, we are prepared to receive the Buddha’s idea of how life needs to be lived: “Peaceful abiding here, now,” with an openness to “That, too, that, too” without losing our attachment to the rhythm and flow of the right thing, done in the right way, in the right place, at the right time, sitting with the creek and the wonder of “This, too. This, too.”

The following is also to be found as #157 of “Zen Thoughts” on my WordPress blog, “Jim Dollar’s Published Works:”

All living things–all sentient beings–recognize, know, respond to being received and treated lovingly. But, don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.

We make too much over love. Forget love. Forget “I love you.” Treat all of life lovingly. Treat everyone lovingly whether you love them or not. Treat everyone with such loving tenderness and thoughtfulness that they can’t tell if you don’t love them–and, even better, you can’t tell yourself!

And understand deep in your bones/body that is how our Psyche treats us: lovingly, whether we are worth being loved or not. The way the Prodigal’s father treated the Prodigal.

As you surely know by now, I have thrown God as a spiritual being quite completely away, and have declared myself to be an extension of the psychic depths of life and being, and as an expression of that, I am sworn to treating everything, living or not, lovingly throughout what remains of this experience called “being alive.” And, I invite you to join me if you feel like it for the entire remainder of all that is before us.

No one can tell us where the stillness speaks to the silence, or how to find that place and what we can expect to hear there. That is why there is theology and doctrines and dogma and dharma and sutras and all those preachers and teachers who make things worse by talking us to death about things that cannot be said. Only emptiness works. Be empty and wait. In the silence. For the stillness to reveal its secrets about the way of the drift and flow of The Way of Life and Being, and how to drift and flow with it forever.

Anything we say about something says more about ourselves than what we are talking about. How we see the thing, anything, reveals who we are. The Buddhists who say “No Duality!” also talk about taking refuge from suffering. There is refuge and there is suffering. And, they talk about enlightenment and awakening, and they talk about illusion. How is what they say a reflection of who they are? It sounds like a contradiction to me, or a non sequitur. And that says more about me than about them. I want things to flow smoothly from here to there, from this to that, and I am quick to spot things that don’t do that. And I think everybody is that way, or should be that way. And I expose that about me by being the way I am. Which leads me to suppose/project (and this paragraph is all about supposition and projection) “where this comes from about me” to what I think is a probable childhood experience where adults caught me in the act of contradicting myself and created a need to protect myself from criticism by spotting logical fallacies from afar and going after them to take attention away from me, thus calling attention unto me in the act of protesting what I take to be a failure in someone else, the Buddhists, say. We reveal who we are in diverting attention to other people, pointing to our suppositions and projections. Sigh.

This is an excerpt from Zen Thoughts, #154, on my Published Works Blog:

If prayer worked, there would be no cemeteries, hospitals, medical schools, nursing homes, funeral homes, war or standing armies. Where does that leave us? With seeing what’s what, letting be what is and doing what needs to be done about it where, when, and how it needs to be done, with the gifts that are ours to work with: Our Original Nature, Our innate Virtues — the things we do best and enjoy doing most–Our intrinsic Imagination, our inherent Intuition, when, where and how they need to be employed in each situation as it arises all our life long.

And changing our mind about what prayer is and how it works from asking/getting what we want from something called “God,” to understanding prayer as a mode of being in right relationship with all that is by seeing, hearing, understanding what’s what and how things are and doing what needs to be done about it by doing the right thing in the right way at the right time in all situations and circumstances and letting that be that no matter what, letting nature take its course and repeating this process throughout the course of our life in alignment with the drift and flow of life and being, caring only about what needs to be cared about, when, where and how all our life long.

Trump wants to be great, but he is only pitiful. The Beatles somehow channeled him with their song, “Nowhere Man”: “He’s a real nowhere man, living in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”

He is great only in his imagination.

Living in their fantasy world is what schizophrenics do best. Where do their fantasies end and reality begin? They don’t know. And that’s a problem, No?

Chief Seattle and Black Elk were two Native American spiritual leaders on par with Jesus and the Buddha according to my take on things. They had dreams and visions as accurate and valid as anyone’s ever. And they took the loss of their land and their people in as mature a way as anyone ever has. It was/is our arrogance and our shame that we have treated them and their people as ignorant savages without honor, without holiness, without commendation, without acclaim. We need a Wailing Wall on the Mall in Washington to commemorate Native American civilization and their place of honor among all the peoples of the earth, equal in every way with all the other peoples worldwide.

There is the experience of our experience and there is the observation of our experience. Observing our experience removes us from our experience and provides us with the experience of experiencing our experience–and that puts us in the position of impacting our experience by being removed from it to the extent of altering its impact through the addition of our awareness of our experience of our experience of our experience, bringing curiosity, wonder, humor, etc. to bear on our experience and freeing us to distance ourselves from what is happening by enlarging what is happening through the observation of what is happening. Which makes going to the dentist something to look forward to as a playground for awareness to explore from the vantage point of the dental chair.

Laying our desires, ambition, wants, will, idea of how things ought to be aside and living in the service of what is called for in each situation as it arises by doing what needs to be done here, now in order for that to happen, and doing it in the right way, in the right place, at the right time puts us in accord with the Tao and at one with the flow of life and being, for the wonder and joy of the experience, and the satisfaction of having done it day by day all our life long. Like a field of buttercups or a forest of long-leaf pines.