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?
What floats your boat? Stokes your bliss? Comforts your soul? Warms your heart? Brings peace to life? Where do you go/What do you do to take care of yourself?
I think of me as being composed of my original nature, my innate virtues (The things I do best and enjoy doing most), my inherent intuition, and my intrinsic intuition.
I drop into emptiness, stillness, silence and listen. I notice when something is trying to get my attention when I am not intentionally open to that, and am always amazed at how things break into my life with something I need to say, or do, or tend to here, now.
And how I am guided/led from here to there every day, so that I make few plans and always trust myself to be led along the way all the time.
And how things work out. How this leads to that. How "one book opens another" (A Gnostic phrase that did not die as the Gnostics were being wiped out by those who knew best and had to be pleased at no matter what the cost).
If we don't shut the guiding urges, leanings, urgencies out, we will be carried all along the way--not to wealth and fame and worldly success, but to being where we did not know we needed to be, doing what we did not know we needed to do, and being stunned by amazement and wonder and awe at the whole damned thing. And that is what life is all about. Shutting up and listening, and doing what we know needs us to do it.
We should have role models showing us how to do that from birth to death. What could be more important than that?
Wanting, getting, acquiring, amassing, having, owning, hoarding, etc. fuels our journey, provides purpose and meaning to our days. If it weren't for that, what would we do?
The emptiness of a life overflowing with stuff is reflected in, exhibited by, addictive attraction to drugs, sex, alcohol and an aimless wandering through our birthdays with nothing to indicate that we are actually alive.
What brings us to life? Where is our joy to be found?
Start with that, and stay there, needing only enough money to pay the right bills.
Want only to do what is called for in each situation as it arises. And see where it goes.
I know where to put the tripod. I have always known where to put the tripod. And that knowing is not something I can claim as having generated. It is something that I have received, recognized, acknowledged. I do not create it--I simply know it.
If you are quiet, silent, still, empty of all thoughts, emotions, memories, desires/wants, etc. you will know what you know without knowing how you know it. Dig in there. Pay attention there. Hand yourself over there. Look closer there. And see where it goes.
We have what remains of our life to foster who we are by attending what we do best and enjoy doing most. I call that our "innate Virtues." If we focus on doing that which we do best/enjoy most, in light of our original nature and our inherent intuition and our intrinsic imagination, we will be bringing ourselves to life in the time left for living.
And that is all that can be asked of any of us.
When we make us our project and our practice, by listening to ourselves and doing what we know to be called for, when, where and how it is called for in each situation as it arises, we will be doing all that can be asked of any of us.
Our life will be our hobby then, and we will be as alive as we can ever hope to be.
And this will not be about what we have or how successful we are, but who we become simply by being who we are, doing what we do best and enjoy doing most. And what's not to love about that?
Who was it who said, "It is the wave's place to realize it is the ocean"? This realization makes meditation simply a matter of relaxing into "Peaceful abiding, here, now." It can't be about achieving anything, accomplishing anything, doing anything. The wave doesn't achieve, accomplish, do anything to be the ocean. Meditation doesn't achieve, accomplish, do anything to be the Buddha. What's with striving? We already ARE! What more is there to BE? We are the wave striving to be the sea. What sense does that make? How hard could that be?
1. Orthodoxy killed Jesus. The Priests, the Elders, The Scribes and Pharisees, the Sanhedrin were all the epitome of Orthodoxy. As to their faith they were without sin. So don’t hang your hat on orthodoxy. There is nothing, Biblically speaking, to commend it.
2. Jesus was crucified for heresy and blasphemy. And he told his disciples, and all would be disciples, “Come, follow me.” We aren’t following Jesus if we aren’t being accused on a regular basis of heresy and blasphemy—and being guilty as charged.
3. The Garden of Eden did not have latitude and longitude. It did not exist. Adam and Eve did not commit the unforgivable sin and their descendants were not cursed for all eternity for the sin of their parents, and no one is guilty of a fall from grace necessitating atonement and redemption.
4. Jesus came to correct the error of purity and perfection. He did not come to tell the children of Israel to try harder. He came to tell them to stop trying at all. “If you don’t receive the Kingdom of God as a child, you will never enter it,” he said. He came to do away with guilt and shame and to usher in the age of peace and goodwill when the Temple would become the House of Prayer for all Nations. And toward that end he told the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Have you heard of that one? Why don’t we get it? It has slipped by the sentinels, the watchers, the guardians of orthodoxy all these years.
The Prodigal never said he was sorry for all he had done. He said, “If I tell my father I am sorry for all I have done, he will be forgiving and give me a better life than I have here.” So he goes home, practicing his lines all the way. And when he arrives there, his father sees him coming from a half-mile away and runs to greet him with open arms with words of welcome, “O my son, You were lost and now are found, you were dead but now, you are alive, welcome home, my son, my son.” And the Prodigal stumbles to get his speech out but his father stops him with “Get out of here with that litany of forgiveness and pardon! (Or words to that effect), “This is no place for that! You were lost but now are found! You were dead but now. You are alive!”
We talk about forgiveness, but it is mercy that we seek. Mercy that we need. That is what greeted the Prodigal. Compare his greeting with the Orthodox portrayal of Saint Peter at the gate reading from the book of life in which is recorded all the sins of those seeking entrance to heaven, and the Orthodox image does not fare well. Mercy has it all over forgiveness!
And Jesus knew what he was doing. Jesus was suggesting that God will welcome us all as the Prodigal’s father welcomed him. Jesus was saying, “Sin is not a problem with the Father!” And the Orthodox gate-keepers missed it! It got by! But we all have missed it! It continues to get by! And my question is “What would the Prodigal have to have done for his Father to tell him, “You go to hell! You are no son of mine!”? What would amount to the end of mercy? And the answer of course is “There is nothing he could have done. He would always be welcome home!”
Mercy ALWAYS WINS! Amen! And so it is. Was he a heretic? He is welcome here! He is my son, my son!” This is the God Jesus came to announce. But the early church got its hand on the script and did its best to scrub out Jesus’ message, and put his words in red to emphasize what it wanted its members to read, so that the church had the power to determine who was saved and went to heaven and who was lost forever in the molten lava lakes of hell.
Finding our niche and our schtick and our hangouts is finding ourselves. Which makes me easy to locate. I stand out like a snag on a mountain ridge. I am peculiar that way. And not particularly accessible, which is the driving idea.
On the other hand, I'm eager to talk to anyone about the things I find interesting. Why we see the way we do, for instance. How we know where we belong and where we have no business being. What guides our boat on its path through the sea. How we find our direction in life.
I think it may have been the short-lived Gnostics (I will grieve that loss forever!) who recommended letting one book open another, and people who do that naturally have a link to an inner guide who can be trusted in all matters great and small--and provides a great segue here regarding deliberately, consciously, shifting from wanting as a guide for life to knowing as the primary method of knowing what to do when, where and how.
When we live from knowing, we are at one with the inner way, with "the beam," and nothing can knock us off it. I take that to be the authentic "Gnostic Way," which was so much of a threat to the Christian mind-controlling, top down, outside in way of directing the "life of the church," that the church felt it had to murder them all because "the Gnostic Way" was such a threat to the Church's dogmatic, self-serving, manner of directing all aspects of life and being.
Which is to say that I enjoy keeping company with those who like their own company and know what they need to be doing without being lost in a crowd doing the same things.
Knowing our Inner Knower and doing what we know needs to be done, when, where and how it needs to be done, is Taoist to the core, and flows straight from our Original Nature and our Inherent Intuition and our Innate Virtues (The things we do best and enjoy doing most). And puts us in the inner-directed loop of those who are best friends with being silent, empty and still, waiting to catch their drift of soul in order to know what's what, what that calls for and what they need to do to be a part of what's going on--from the inside out, bottom up, heart/soul led all the way.
Wanting is the origin of all of our problems today, every day. Take the word "want" out of our vocabulary and our difficulties disappear like that (Snaps fingers).
The old Taoists and Buddhists and everyone who knows anything have known this from the beginning.
Speaking of the beginning, there is Adam and Eve wanting, and here we are. From the start wanting has been at the bottom of everything that is wrong with the world.
And while we are on the subject, let me remind us that the Garden of Eden never existed. There was no Adam, there was no Eve.
There was no beginning.
"Circumstances begetting circumstances" is all there ever has been, or will be. Circumstances generally fueled by somebody wanting something.
It is past time we were through with wanting forever.
In the place of wanting, we ask ourselves, "What is called for, here, now?
Doing what the situation, the circumstances, call for is putting things back on track. Back "on the beam."
Joseph Campbell said, "We know when we are on the beam and when we are off it." What does being off the beam call for? Do that and everything takes a turn for the better, like that (Ditto above).
So, when we get rid of wanting and begin living in the service of what is called for, no matter what we want, everything takes a turn toward the best of all possible worlds.
All because we quit wanting/caring about things we have no business wanting/caring about.
Just do what is called for here, now, and let the outcome be the outcome. And let nature take its course. And let things happen as they need to happen. And see what happens. Please.
Heresy is the path to truth. Is truth. Truth is not static. Frozen. The same forever. "The Spirit is like the wind that blows where it will." "The old has passed away! Behold! The new has come!" If we aren't thinking things we have never thought before, we aren't thinking. We are remembering.
To be alive is to experience things for the first time. How long has it been? Silence is never the same. Dreaming the same dream means we haven't gotten it yet. And it is very important that we get it. So, whatever we think it is about is not what it is about. So we sit down with that dream and don't get up until it has shown us what we need to see.
The same goes for everything that is the same old same old. Nothing is the same for those with eyes that see. So we sit down with the things we always think until we see them for the first time.
What is your experience of That Which Has Always Been Called God?
It dwells in the borderland between physical and psychic reality.
It may be experienced as a dream state of being, or as intuition.
A time when things just "Clicked" into place.
A series of events that came together to "arrange" an encounter that transformed your life.
A realization that came out of nowhere.
"Something that can be experienced but not understood, understood but not explained" (R.D. Laing).
We all have experiences that belong to the "idea of God," and are the origin of our idea of God--the origin of God.
The experiences are real and "God" is our explanation of them.
Exploring the reality of That Which Has Always Been Called God takes us into "the world between words," between physics and psyche. A world that can be "experienced but not understood, understood but not explained," because words cannot go there, and "God" is the best we can do.
That world has been called "Psychoid" by Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, and they saw "the Collective Unconscious" as belonging to that world, along with intuitive and paranormal experiences, the occult, the supernatural, the magical, witch-craft and sorcery, ouija boards and astrology...
Something funny is going on that we can feel, sense, know but cannot understand or talk about. "God" is as close as we can come. And "that which has always been called 'God'" is the best I can do.
What is your experience of that phenomenon? How has it impacted your life?
Think of this image as theology broadcast to thousands of people of a scene that never existed anywhere in real, actual, time.
In real, actual time, the tree in the middle is the only one that is real and actual. At the time I took its picture, it lived across the street from my house in Greensboro, NC, less than a mile from downtown. I asked Photoshop's version of AI (Called "Generative Fill") to give the real tree some fictional friends and the rest of the scene fell smoothly into place.
Theology does the same thing all the time. Filling in the scene with an imaginary forest of fabricated propaganda, asking listeners to "take it on faith that what is being said is so."
Theology is (As I have said before) a collection of opinions about hearsay. Or AI as it has developed throughout history.
Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328) and a handful of truthful risk-takers like him called theology out from time to time with little to show for it other than heresy trials, Lynch mobs and burnings at the stake. Eckhart died, or was killed, before he was sentenced for heresy, but he had been found guilty of it for saying things like, "The last leave-taking is leaving God (The God of theology) for God (The God who actually is)."
The people who created Christianity were people who had a stake in the outcome of their efforts, selling their version of the way it could have been to people who built the church as it is today out of their neediness for hope and mercy, kindness and consolation. It was propaganda. Indoctrination. Disingenuousness from the start and still going strong after all these years.
We begin dismantling the atrocity by simply realizing that there was no Garden of Eden, anywhere, ever. Only dinosaurs and then, thousands of years of "circumstances begetting circumstances," with human development coming along slowly over time. With no time ever for one man Adam and one woman Eve committing a sin worthy of hell for their millions of descendants and making the sacrificial, atoning, death of God's only son necessary for the salvation of all of those who believe it is so--making the belief in his death more important than his actual death because if we don't believe, the death is meaningless, inconsequential, and irrelevant, no?
Which leaves us with the work of understanding the world as it has developed with and around "That Which Has Always Been Called 'God'"--and how that which we experience as "God," as "Wholly Other," and "Out There," is, and always has been, the inner experience of ourselves projected outside of ourselves, to distance ourselves from the mystery of the radiance we experience as More Than Words Can Say. It is US that we cannot talk about or bring ourselves to believe that WE are!
But. The time is coming, and now is, for our realization to burst forth in a new world of overwhelming wonder that "Thou Art That"! And where we go with it. And what we do about it. Finally, at last, after all these years! May it certainly be so!
Meeting the day as the day needs to be met is all that is ever asked of any of us. What keeps that from happening varies around the room. You will have to speak for yourselves, but my excuse is a profound lack of clarity. If the day were only more obvious about what its needs are, I would be more likely to be responsive. If I got more cooperation from the day, the day would have more to be happy about from me. As things stand, the day ought to be glad to have what it gets from me. Guessing what the day wants is just not how I want to spend my time. I have my own obligations and interest to care for. I do well to remember what I'm doing in the grocery store. And there is the time I spend in silence and solitude! That would be a great opportunity for the day to break into my revere with a suggestive hint or two. I give the day plenty of time to get my attention. It has to be a lot more proactive if you ask me. An itinerary with my morning coffee would be very helpful. The days have been at this for as long as I have. If they refuse to do better, they have only themselves to thank for the outcome.
The place of the cross in our life is the place of death and resurrection.
How many times are we asked to take our place on Golgotha and die again?
Every time a "collision of duties comes along where obligation is pitted against obligation, will against will" (Carl Jung), where we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. When that is the case, up on the cross we go to be damned and be done with it, bearing, again, the agony of the damned and suffering consciously, willingly through it, dying and rising again to die and rise again-- with a gleam in our eye and a spring in our step. Understanding and embracing what the deal is, taking our place in the endless line from Calvary to the empty tomb over and over throughout the time left for living (and dying).
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 