Looking up "caduceus" on Wikipedia, you will read:
"The caduceus is the traditional symbol of Hermes...
It is often used as a symbol of medicine, especially in the United States, despite its ancient and consistent associations with trade, liars, thieves, eloquence, negotiation, alchemy, and wisdom."

Which makes it a perfect symbol for me.
If you ask me to tell you who I am,
I will point you to a caduceus,
and say, "Here I am, this is me."

Hermes is the Greek name for the god
who was the messenger of the gods,
among other things, as above
(though his association with Dionysus,
wine and ecstasy is omitted).
 
"Hermes" is the origin of our word
"hermeneutics," for interpretation,
explanation, understanding, translation, etc.,
which is what preachers are paid to do,
and there are courses on Hermeneutics
in every theological seminary 
worthy of the name.

Need I bother to point out the other associations
among preachers and "liars, thieves, eloquence,
negotiation, alchemy and wisdom"?
Or, the obvious conflicts and contradictions
weaving in and through all these descriptions?

Which makes the caduceus an ideal 
representation of me--
even more-so when we take into account
that the Roman word for Hermes
is Mercury.

And, mercury is impossible to pin down,
fence in, pick up, nail in place, define,
explain, declare to be so...
Mercury cannot be said or told--
and cannot say straight out what needs to be said.
He is the Greek/Roman equivalent of the Tao,
in that "The Tao that can be said/told
is not the eternal Tao."

Clicking with me on yet another level.

And, need I say, however, that the caduceus
is also a perfect symbol of you
and all people everywhere?
For who among us is not a walking/talking
mutually exclusive
contradiction in terms?

We all are in that collection,
and if you think not, 
try this little exercise:
List all of what you consider
your pluses to be,
and alongside each plus,
note what polar minus you are
dismissing, discounting, disregarding,
denying, ignoring.

List them all.
It will rock your world
to know that you are indeed 
(And in deed)
one of us,
with contradictions aplenty.

"Om mani padme hum" translates as
"The jewel is in the lotus."
This phrase simultaneously implies 
its completion:
"The lotus is in the slime
at the bottom of the pond."

"The jewel is in the lotus,
and the lotus is in the slime
at the bottom of the pond."

Where does the slime stop
and the jewel start?

THE JEWEL IS IN THE SLIME!
THE SLIME IS IN THE JEWEL!
JEWEL/SLIME
SLIME/JEWEL
ONE THING.

A slimy jewel,
bedazzling slime.

Do you see?

There is no line.
The line is in our mind.
The line is imaginary.
The line is artificial.
The line is contrived.

What we perceive as a line
is not there in actuality.
We shift our perspective
and the line disappears.

All of our dichotomies are 
optical illusions.

Dualities are conveniences.
They are hypnotic deceptions.

The trick is to find the balance point
between opposites and live there.

Where do contraries blur/disappear?
Where is the line between love and hate?
Between good and evil?
Between right and wrong?
Between me and you? 

Find the dividing boundary.
Live there.
Not knowing love or hate,
good or evil,
right or wrong,
me or you...

When the boundaries disappear
there is allness.
There is oneness.
There is radiance.
There is the sublime.
There is the light
cradled in the darkness
(Rumi).
There is the darkness
revealed by the light.
There is the peace
of the oneness of all things
on the boundary
between contraries.

"Without contraries is no progression,"
said William Blake.
And there is no war.

Live on the boundary
between peace and war.
Between the jewel and the slime...

Aum mani padme hum...

The concept of "God's will"
comes to grief upon the realization
that if this is the best God can do,
God should be fired.
And if this is not the best God can do,
God should also be fired.

A God who wills being incapable 
of doing better than this
is a disgrace to the idea of God.

God is not who we think God is.
Our idea of God is not God.
God needs to be rethought.
We can do better than the God
we have been stuck with
for the last 4,000 years.

I like the idea of the source 
being life itself.
Life as an energy field
taking physical form,
winking into and out of 
material existence over time,
coming and going throughout
ages and eons
because that is what life does.

In its physical form,
life is a process sustaining itself
within the physical laws 
that support its survival,
producing morality and ethics
and all of the virtues and values
that provide a spiritual foundation
for material existence.

Take a couple of carbon atoms
and give them enough time
and you get something on the order
of what we have
when we look around,
through the process 
of electrons creating electrons
by crashing into electrons.

Light becoming life
returning to light.

Nothing to it.
Enough time is all it takes.

–0–

It would be easier to be a sand dune,
or a mountain range.
Nothing to do but sit there and take it.
Let the wind blow you where it will.
Nothing to strive for,
fear,
desire,
dread...

Life presents a completely different set
of problems.

We wonder when is the best time to do what?
Worry about being graded.
Tested.
Succeeding.
Failing.
What to eat?
Where to sleep?
What to do for a living?
How do we know?

Emptiness,
stillness,
silence
close some doors
and open others.

They open doors to knowing
that have nothing to do with thinking,
reasoning,
logic,
analytics,
code,
calculus,
physics,
etc.,
and everything to do with
instinct,
intuition,
body-mind,
psyche-mind,
and turning ourselves over
to that-which-knows-more-than-we-do,
like what it is time for
and what it is not time for,
and being right about it.

Are we better off there?
Better off how?
For how long?

Who do we trust our future to?
Who is guiding our boat
on its path through the sea?
Who knows more than we do?
How do we put ourselves in its service
and trust ourselves to its way
of divining the way?

–0–

It is all in what we make of it,
do with it,
do about it.
It is nothing without us.
We make it what it is.
It is what it becomes through us
and our interaction with it,
our interplay with it,
our impact upon it,
which is also its impact upon us.

And "it" is anything we want it to be.

We have the power of perspective
over "it."
"It" is exactly what we say "it" is.

And "it" turns the table on us,
by showing us exactly who we are
by the way we see/say what "it" is.
We become visible to ourselves--
transparent to ourselves--
by seeing ourselves seeing/saying
what "it" is
in everything we see.

It is us we are talking about
when we say something/anything about
something/anything.

We are our perspective.
We are our take on things.
We are the center of our world.
Our world is what it is
because of us and our perspective.

Change our perspective 
and you/we change us.
We are not the same person
when we see things differently.

Take a stone for example.
The Jews of lore were always 
stoning someone to death
because they did not have guns 
or swords,
and people needed to die,
and stones were always handy.

Stones in that case served
the same purpose
as burning people at the stake
or hanging people by the neck
until dead.

Or nailing people on a cross.

Speaking of burning people at the stake,
the Westminster Divines
were good at that.

The Westminster Divines come to mind
because if I had lived in their day,
they would have burned me at the stake.

The Romans would have nailed me to a cross.
The vigilantes would have hung me by the neck.
The Jews would have stoned me to death.

Because the way I see is not the way they see/saw.
And their way of seeing cannot/could not 
tolerate a different way of seeing.

"If you don't see like we do,
we have to kill you! See?"

We kill people,
excommunicate people,
shun people,
hate people
and make their lives miserable
because of the way they see things.

"If they don't see like we do,
they deserve to die!"

Because they are a threat to our stability,
they rock our world,
by seeing differently
and therefore calling into question
the validity of the way we see things.
And they have to die,
or we do.
Better them than us.

Death over a difference in perspective.
Because perspective is life or death,
life and death.

Which, of course, is crazy.

It is just how we see things!
And things are not the way we say things are!
Things have an independent existence
quite apart from us and how we see them.

Draw a border around anything.
That thing is more than you say it is.
We cannot say all there is to say
about anything.
There is more to everything than meets the eye.
Any eye.
All eyes.

The world would be better off,
and we would be as well,
if we said nothing about anything.
Or if we took nothing we said about anything
seriously.

If we knew it was only a temporary thing 
we said about the thing,
and had nothing of permanence at all about it.
It is just a convenience to see things as we do,
but we are free to change our mind about them
at any time.

We can see things differently with no harm done.
Try seeing things like that for a change.
Loosen up.
Relax.
Laugh.
A lot.
At the very idea that anything could be
what we say it is.
Ever.

Nothing is only what we say it is.
A lot of things are not at all 
what we say they are.

What we do about that
is up to us.

–0–

We wait to see
where it's going,
what to make of it,
what to do.

Everything shakes out
by and by,
clarifies,
comes into focus.

In the meantime, we wait.
And watch,
and listen,
taking it all in
without judgment
or opinion.

There is this,
and that,
and those things
over there,
but what needs to be done
about any of it
is just wait.

Just wait to see what is called for.
Wait to see what is asked of us.
Wait to see what we do.

We just watch,
and listen,
and wait.

And when the time comes for action,
we act.

There is never any more to it
than this.

But we want to KNOW
what it's about
and why
and why not
and what it means
and what is going to happen
and if it will be worthwhile...

Because we hate not knowing,
and we hate waiting most of all.
Particularly waiting for what
we do not know.

–0–

We surprise ourselves from time to time,
with the right action
done in the right way
at the right time
in the right place,
even when nobody notices
and life clicks right along.

Clicking right along is the point.
The wrong thing--
particularly the really wrong thing-
would have made an impact,
rocked that portion of the world,
turned things from their course,
soured everyone's day.

The right thing merely keeps things on track,
clicking right along,
and goes unnoticed.

The trick to a well-lived life
is remaining invisible,
unnoticed,
unknown,
while doing what it takes 
to smooth the way
so that things click right along.

–0–