Finding our way to The Way one situation at a time. I don't know how great it will be, but I expect it will be interesting, and I look forward to it going on past all reason because wonder is just that way. Are you coming or not?
Sea Stacks in the North Atlantic — Along the Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia
Kindlessness is Cruelty. Is Atrocity. Is Brutality. Is Abomination. Is Inhumanity.
Kindlessness at the top is Kindlessness all the way down.
Donald Trump! I'm talking to YOU!
You and your MAGA patrons are creating a culture of the inhumane and atrocious. And you don't care because that is what you intended from the start.
Fascism is a thing. A big, toothless, mindless, heartless thing. And nothing can be done about it, as Work War II shows. So, what to do? Trust no one. Assume everyone is a fascist. Give no one the benefit of the doubt. Even Communities of Innocence are hermits at heart. Leaving us to strive for "most of the time" and not "all of the time."
Most of the time we are gentle, loving, decent and kind. All of the time we are not.
On average, we can be trusted to do what is right by everyone. 100% overlooks those occasions when we are "dammed if we do and damned if we don't." Even Jesus fried the fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season.
Averaging us all out, are we mostly the kind of person we would like to be, or mostly the kind of person no one would want to be (Except those who are mean, horrendous, hateful, heinous, abhorrent, vile and disgusting, etc.)?
Midnight Hole, Big Creek — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Waterville, North Carolina Access
I think we all are, more or less, part of the dream awaiting realization. We are, in a sense, "a band of brothers and sisters," bringing each other forth, waking each other up, being what each other needs for the process of becoming who we are, doing what is ours to do.
We are one with one another to the extent that we realize that and live it out, the more consciously, the better.
This has been brought to light with me in conjunction with the serving staff in two restaurants my wife and I frequent regularly. We have become family over time, say three years. I would not be uncomfortable with the term "Coven." I would be happy to be a part of a Coven with those people. Cooking up life together, and being what each other needs over the course of our individual life together.
Sewing circles develop a similar pattern of concern and caring around the circle, and poker/bridge players, golf players... It is natural, automatic, an expression of who we are, what we need.
We do not do well alone. We are built for communion, community. Where we are close enough to know and care about one another, yet far enough apart to maintain our unique perspective, our specialties, our gifts, our Self.
I had two aunts, long dead now, who were sisters, one of whom did all the thinking/leading/directing for both of they. They dressed alike and did the same things together. One was the shadow of the other, which is not what I have in mind, or consider to be healthy. We each have to have our own way to being becoming who we are, what we are about. And we do that best in conjoint relationships with others that are close enough to be helpful and distant enough to be safe places to allow for our individual growth over time.
Which is the "whole point of being alive": Becoming who we are, doing what is ours to do.
The Dream is dreaming/realizing itself through us. We are waking up, realizing, knowing, doing, becoming, being who we are doing what is called for in each situation as it arises, as only we can, the way only we can do/be it. And, thanks to each other, this becomes possible for us all.
Price Lake Silhouettes — Blue Ridge Parkway, Blowing Rock, North Carolina
Conversation is the most important thing in our repertoire, and we generally throw it away and opt for small talk without saying anything. Better to talk to our Psyche and listen for Psyche's responses in the way of realizations moving us, guiding and directing us, and giving us things to think about as we make our way between the here, nows that comprise our life.
Writing is my favorite way of self-talk, and repeating myself is my way of working things out. And talking to Psyche in this way is great because it gives Psyche something to do in sending dreams my way for me to play with and contemplate (And Psyche just wrote that last sentence to remind me of what I am about).
Psyche writes a lot of my sentences, and keeps me alert to what we are doing with the time left for living. I am enjoying the journey and looking forward to what's next, and how we deal with what comes our way along the way. The Adventure winds on! And we are glad to have you with us through it all!
The psychological mechanism of projection is the most powerful producer of insanity/dysfunction to ever come along. To think something is what it is not and to be sure that it is what it is not is as crazy-making as can be. And then we bring gaslighting into the picture and it all goes to hell like that (snaps fingers). Where to we go to see things as they are? And to KNOW that how we see things is how things ARE?
What are our sources of verification? Of authentication? Of reality? How do we KNOW that reality is real? How sure/certain can we be about anything?
The assumption that things are whatever we take them to be is the ground of life. If we cannot take them to be what they appear to be, WHAT???
And so the importance of a community, a family, of troth and reliability. Of people being who they say they are. They confirm for us a space that is what we take it to be--and that is something we all need to find our way along the way. It should be guaranteed and not just a matter of luck.
We have been one with Psyche from the beginning. Psyche is not other than we are, but is one with us from the start.
When Jesus said, "The Father and I are one," he created a stir at the very idea. But if he had said, "The Psyche and I are one," everyone would say, "Of course! The same goes for all of us!"
The Psyche is one with us, but we don't make much of it. It doesn't mean a thing to us. We dismiss, discount, ignore this fundamental fact of life, in a "So what? Who cares? What difference does it make?" kind of way.
Nothing could change our life for the better smoother and quicker than being one with the Psyche who is one with us.
Psyche is life, and is one with all of life. Psyche is the Life Force, the power that leads and guides us all the way along the way. The Tao. That Which Knows and directs our life throughout our life--when we listen and are moved to do what we know is called for, but which we ignore because it does not jive with our ideas and desires for the life we want to live.
Look around. This is what ignoring Psyche looks like. And it gets worse the longer we play the game of Dissing Psyche all day every day.
Patching things up with Psyche is no more difficult than dropping into the emptiness, stillness and silence, saying, "Here I am. Now what?" And meaning every word--and listening for what is called for here, now, and doing what we know needs to be done, starting here, now.
There is reality and there is the experience of reality. And we do not know where one stops and the other starts.
How we think things are and how things are, are not the same thing.
We wander around in a world we create by wandering around.
Everything is our impression of all things. That it ever "works" is always amazing.
"Am I Chung-Zu dreaming I am a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am Chung-Zu?"
My recommendation is that we take things with no more seriousness than they deserve, and that we enjoy all that is to be enjoyed as fully as it is capable of being enjoyed, and that we worry about nothing, because we are only making it up, no matter what it is.
Big Creek Fall — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Waterville North Carolina Access
The relationship between the flow of life and emptiness, stillness, silence is "right there," for all of us to experience any time.
The place of silence (emptiness and stillness) in the life of the species from the beginning of consciousness until now is a topic I would like to have explored by those in position to know what they are talking about.
Silence is the ground/source of everything we know. It all comes out of the silence (etc.). Paul spent three years "in the wilderness" working out an intellectual/logical/reasonable understanding of his psychic experience on the road to Damascus, and Christianity was born there.
The Psyche is the original experience with "God." All religion, all of everything, comes out of the silence (etc.). We live best when we live knowingly "out of the silence." Which is to say, "Out of connection with the Psyche."
There is only us and our Psyche. That is all there ever has been. Exploring our connection with "our" Psyche is all we have ever had to work with throughout time.
The aborigines' "Walkabouts," the Native Americans' "Vision quests," are explorations of the Psyche.
There is no one here but us. Nothing to explore but ourselves and "our" Psyche. And it has been this way forever.
The psychological (Psyche-logical) (Psychically-logical) element of Projection is the explanation/origin of all religion everywhere. The origin of all art and all science. Of civilization. Everything is the outcome of our trying to make sense of our experience with life and being.
There is no "objective reality." It is all subjective. It is all a reflection of our reflections of ourselves and our Psyche. We are the source of everything. The "out there" and the "in here" are one thing. We do not know where the line lies between "things" and "our experience of things." All that we have been told is nothing more than someone's effort to make sense of the world they live in. And war is always a war of projections clashing with projections.
Imagination is all there is, and it is a very deadly thing.
Moon Set — Price Lake, Grandfather Mountain, Blue Ridge Parkway, Blowing Rock, North Carolina
I would like for everyone's life to be like this picture. And, I wonder how many people would hate for their life to be this way. Yet this seems to catch the contemplative, meditative manner to perfection--and is a reflection of how far the contemplative, meditative life is from those who want to tear it down and burn it up--and there be many who want just that everywhere all the time.
Anger, hatred, greed and fear generate reasons for their own existence through the long years of time. No?
Brown Pelican at Sunrise — Ocracoke Island, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Outer Banks, North Carolina
What holds us together? What makes us One? Kindness and compassion come to mind. Psyche and the ideas we share in common. Good faith in/with each other, and the desire to be soulmates along the way.
"Good faith" for me means the willing/willful intention to be who we say we are.
Integrity, sincerity, authenticity.
Beyond that, the Void. No?
I participated in a Zoom call meeting of retired ministers several weeks ago. The moderator asked us to open the meeting with a short description of where we worshiped now the we did not have "a church of our own" to oversee. He asked me to start it off and I was happy to say that since my retirement in 2011 I have not darkened the door of anything church building anywhere ever. The rest of us all answered the question differently, and no one inquired about why I have no use for worship services in churches. It would have been an interesting question to explore together, but not appropriate to the occasion.
What do we have in common? Clearly, not theology, me and the other retirees. How can any thinking, rational, reasonable person embrace theology? A God who must be "taken on faith"? Which, to me, means making something up and saying it is so. Or embracing something someone else has made up and saying it is so.
What is true to our experience and doesn't require believing in to know that it is so--as in, "I believe in God, the Father, Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in HIS only Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, born of the Virgin Mary..." What about our experience would lead us to believe/think this is so? Only somebody else telling us that it is so, and that we are hell-bound if we don't believe it ourselves, because "the Bible says..."
Well, "the Bible that says so" was crafted over 400 years between Jesus' crucifixion and the closure of the canon of scripture that says so. The Bible says so because human beings with a stake in the outcome said so and made sure that the Bible they created in those 400 years also said so.
And, in the words of R.D. Laing, "We are playing the game of not playing a game." Which anyone can see just by looking. Which leaves us where? Doing what? Well, here, now, wondering what's next.
Throw out theology and where does that leave us? With plenty of Emptiness, Silliness and Silence to sit with, experience, explore, and probe to see what it has to offer. And it has a world filled with interesting, exciting, things to offer--it only takes being quiet to know so. And I am all about being quiet and knowing what I know when I do so. And not having to believe anything, or take anything on faith. Mine is the church of the wide open spaces (the Void, no?) replete with wonders great and small. If you are not coming with me, you are on your own.
What makes this a sacred place? What keeps it from being a sacred place? How many sacred places do we have? How many does it take?
Sacred places are places of refuge. Places of refuge are off limits to all that threatens us. What threatens us? Unsettles us? Robs us of our peace? Burdens us with trouble and woe? The mere memory of a place of refuge can ease our mind and restore our balance and harmony, reuniting us with the AAUUUUMMMM of the cosmos and surrounding us with the hills from which our help comes, and delivering us from the scourge of our afflictions, or from our fear of them, which is just as bad.
Take shelter in sacred places. Seek them out and return to them often. Safe harbors within which to ride out the storms of life, and the fear that haunts us in the night.
John Deere Sunset — Concordia Parish Louisiana, Louisiana Delta
When I stopped trying to make sense of it in a reasonable, logical kind of way, and simply embraced the contradictions and dichotomies and welcomed the nonsense into my life, it all fell into place by my allowing it to not have a place.
I think nothing means anything, and we are all "just along for the ride." We listen for "Yes," and "No," in light of what is appropriate here, now, and let that be that by doing what is called for, when, where and how it is called for, trusting ourselves to the flow, balance and harmony, without having to understand or being able to explain any of it.
We are carried along by the events and circumstances of our lives like corks on the water, and it helps if we don't take anything with more seriousness than it deserves. Knowing that it doesn't mean anything and we aren't going anywhere, and nothing matters more than just doing what is called for here, now, when, where and how it is called for, trusting ourselves to the flow, balance and harmony, without having to understand, or being able to understand any of it.
Pamlico Sound Sunset 02 — Ocracoke Island, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Outer Banks, North Carolina
Knowing is a function of being open to here, now without expectation, desire, fear, greed, etc. imposing itself upon the moment. The Buddha called this "peaceful abiding, here, now."
Being free from all influences is being open to the moment and knowing what's what in the moment, and able to respond to the moment as the moment needs to be responded to.
Meditation at its best is a self-induced trance state in which we are entirely present in the moment without aims or ambition for the moment, and are open to what is called for--knowing what needs to be done without knowing how we know. We are then imposing nothing onto the moment, but are aligned with the moment, and cable of doing what is called for, when, where, and how it is called for, without intention or interest interfering with our natural, appropriate, action.
This is seeing/hearing/knowing/doing/being spontaneously out of "peaceful abiding, here, now."
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 