We live to see/hear/know/do.
A life grounded in,
flowing from,
returning to
emptiness, stillness and silence
has the best chance 
of seeing/hearing/knowing what's what
and doing what needs to be done about it
in each situation as it arises
no matter what
all our life long.

A life grounded in fear/greed/hatred
has no chance at all 
of seeing/hearing/knowing anything
beyond what it wants 
and doing whatever it takes
to have its way.

–0–

Stability,
dependability,
reliability,
trustworthiness
are foundational elements
for the creation
and maintenance
of balance and harmony.

Balance and harmony
are fundamental
for integrity, 
sincerity,
spontaneity. 

Living on the edge
of uncertainty
generates anxiety
and keeps us from settling into
a safe and secure pattern of life.

Enter fascism and its love for
knocking things over
and burning things down,
and you get a sense of the absurdity
of life under fascist rule.

What percentage of the Russian population
can count on running water,
natural gas
and regular garbage pickup?

How's their balance and harmony?

Fascism is threatened to its core
by balance and harmony.
It survives by not allowing anyone
the privilege of relaxing into 
a comfortable routine.

Americans don't have a clue
about what they are asking for
in a Trump run autocracy.

How can educated people 
be so f-ing stupid?
By allowing their fear, hatred, desire/greed
direct their living
and ruin their life.

Deliver us all from wanting more
than we have any use for!
Ever and always!
Amen!

–0–

How many "Y's" constitute our life?
How many more will there be?
I don't know how you "do it,"
but here is another possibility to consider:

Empty yourself of all thoughts and emotions,
memories and judgments.
Stand at the fork as empty as the space between breaths.
And without thinking,
without resorting to reason and logic,
without "doing it" as Spock would "do it,"
wait in the emptiness, stillness and silence,
until you find yourself walking,
without having decided/chosen to walk,
to the right,
or to the left,
or turning around and walking back the way you came.

It will be better than flipping a coin twice.

Or, perhaps, just different.

–0–

Our imagination is a mirror
reflecting us to us. 

What are the themes running through
your imagination's wanderings,
which are not actually wanderings at all,
but recurring stories
to reaffirm,
entrench,
solidify
the patterns that are ingrained
in your mind's worn path of rumination?

Sex addicts think like sex addicts.
Fascists think like fascists.
Preachers think like preachers.
...
You think like you.
I think like me.

All we have to do is think about our thinking
to realize who we are
and know what matters most to us.

Then we think about what we think about that,
and what we need to do to change
the nature of our life--
or to maintain it just as it is,
if it suits our fancy just fine.

But from now on, 
we won't be kidding ourselves
about ourselves.
We will be being ourselves,
full bore all the way.

The question then becomes
"Are we being who the situations/circumstances
of our life need us to be?

Or, are we escaping the situations/circumstances
of our life with endless fantasies
about how we wish things were
and what we want things to be?

And how we might go about aligning ourselves
with the life that needs us to live it?

Do we care about the life that needs us to live it?
About being "the obedient servants"
of the life we are built/born to live?

Aligned with the Tao, the Flow,
the Source of life and being?

Or do we just want to be left alone
with our pornographic images,
our fantasies about endless wealth
or world domination?

–0–

People kill themselves
and other people
because they don't like the way
things are going.

Why don't they just change their mind
about what is important?

Changing our mind about what is important
is the solution 
to all of our problems today.
Every day.

The right kind of meditation practice
is about changing our mind about what is important.

Sitting in emptiness, stillness and silence
is a shift in emphasis
regarding what is important.

Allowing things to arise of their own accord
is so different
from forcing our will for the world upon the world.

"Thy will not mine be done,"
when the "thy" is simply the drift of circumstances,
the flow of life,
what needs to happen here/now,
and getting out of the way
in order that what needs to happen
is allowed to happen,
is the grounding foundation
of all that is meet and right.

Joseph Campbell has a wonderful meditation
on Carl Jung's term "Active Imagination,"
where he says,
"If  you take in some traditional image proposed to you by your own religious tradition, or your own society's religious lore, proposing it to yourself for active imagination, without any strict game rules defining the sort of thoughts you must bear in mind in relation to it, letting your own psyche enjoy and develop it (carrying you away into thoughts and images that arise spontaneously, of their own accord--JD), you may find yourself running into imageries, experiences, and amplifications that do not fit into the patterns of the tradition in which you have been trained. What are you going to do about that? Are you going to let yourself go, following your own activated imagination? Or, are you going to cut the run short at some critical point?"

Are we going to go with what needs to happen,
or stick with someone's idea of what is supposed to happen?
Are we going to trust ourselves to the inner thrust of our life,
or impose our will and wants on the world around us,
killing ourselves or someone else
when things don't go our way?

–0–

The joy for me is found
walking/driving through the world,
eating in the world,
being here/now in the quiet of early morning,
but not so much in the grind of heavy traffic.

I would enjoy a chat with Henry David Thoreau
and Black Elk and Chief Seattle...
and being close to water...

Away from crowds of any kind,
and noise,
and complexity,
drama,
trauma...

I enjoy the pleasure of my own company
in any setting
that doesn't include bores
(Winston Churchill said,
"A bore is someone who robs us of our solitude
without providing us with companionship").

And too many people talk
without having anything to say.
If you find me stuck in a reunion of any kind,
rescue me with an invitation to the desert bar.

I am re-reading Joseph Campbell's Thou Art That,
and finding forgotten delights on practically 
every page.

And I am reminded again that seeing is a function
of how we look, that what we see is a reflection 
of how we see, and that we cannot get away from 
how we see in order to see anything without tampering 
with it, shaping it, "reading things into it,"
in significant ways.

So the observer tampers with what is observed
in the process/act of observing it.
And we cannot see/know anything
apart from our projections/assumptions/conjectures
about it.

How we perceive the world colors what we perceive
about the world,
and we have no idea what we are talking about
when we say anything.
Knowing that requires us to take everything we say
"with a grain of salt."

Keep a salt shaker handy at all times,
for what you say 
and for what others say to you.

–0–

Jesus is the archetypal human being,
doing the right thing,
at the right time 
in the right place and way,
time after time.

So was Betty White,
Helen Wolfe,
Iris Dement,
Dolly Parton
and thousands more
through the ages.

And we all have shown 
flashes and sparks of Jesus
here and there
over the course of our life,
doing things exactly as they
needed to be done.

Rising to the occasion,
surprising everyone
including ourselves.

The surgery center
where my cataract surgery was done
is filled with people being Jesus,
with a team of people
who know what their job is 
and do it as it needs to be done
in the way it needs to be done every day.

When we live our life as it needs us to live it,
we are Jesus incarnated then and there.
Jesus couldn't do better.

Are you soaking up 
what I'm pouring out here?

Being Jesus is as easy
as doing what's called for
in the moment unfolding before us,
with nothing in it for us,
beyond the joy of doing it
and the satisfaction of having done it,
knowing no one could do it better.

We all could do it 
in each situation as it arises,
if we came into the moment
out of the right kind of emptiness,
stillness and silence.

It's automatic, instantaneous, 
natural.

It's the flow of life and being
in time and place, here and now.

Spontaneous, unplanned, unthought.

Even turtles do it.
And sea urchins.
Butterflies and apple trees...

And you,
and me.

–0–

The anesthesiologist, the nurses and the surgeon
who took care of my cataract surgery
did their jobs better than Jesus could have done them,
and the same thing applies to all the other
medical staff in the surgery center,
and to all the people everywhere
who are caring for people.

It is the Jesus thing, 
and all of us are capable of being Jesus
in the way we treat other people.
There is nothing to it.
Caring treatment happens all the time.

Jesus is among us in those who care for one another.
It is never any more complicated than that.

Surgery went fine. 
I have a plastic protector taped over my eye,
and can't get it wet for a week.
Try taking a shower without getting an eye wet.
So it's come down to the dreary details,
and when it's done it will be done,
and the new will have come
and the old will have passed away
and then we do the other eye
and repeat the process.

And I get to spend time with Jesus throughout it.
The good along with the bad. 

–0–

"God's will" is an interesting concept,
and it applies to everything that
"Amazing coincidence" would cover as well.

It also opens the way to the Grande Paradox of Life:
Everything is coincidental and nothing is.
Everything is a matter of chance and nothing is.

We walk two paths at the same time
and live with a foot in two worlds at once.
We are the bridge between transcendent reality
(Also called "The Mystery" [or "The Great Mystery"],
or "The Tao," or "The Totality," or "God,")
and personal experience
(Birth defects, accidents, wars, earthquakes, etc.),
as we try to put the experience of transcendent reality
together with the idea of ALS with the idea of "a loving God,"
for example.

And, as we look back over our life,
with all of the wrong turns,
dead ends,
disappointments,
wins and losses,
etc.
it appears that there is a thread
of cause and effect running through
all the events and experiences
that lead us to conclude
"everything worked together to bring me right here
right now,"
and "If that had not happened, 
that wouldn't have,
and that wouldn't have..."
and here I am!"

It all had to be just what it was 
to produce here/now.
And that looks like a plan,
and that implies a planner,
and "Anything can happen,
but nothing can go wrong."

But if something else had happened,
at the end, looking back, 
we would say, "Nothing can go wrong."

Yet, in truth, the end of the dinosaurs 
was quite wrong for the dinosaurs, etc.
And slavery and the genocide of indigenous people
was/is the highest form of wrong there is--
no matter what a distant outcome might be.

This is the thing about outcomes:
they never end.
Cause and effect is a false phrase
because the effects become causes
with more effects,
and things spin out in a good/bad/evil
blend so that nothing accurate can be said
about anything when everything is taken into account.

Things "just are,"
and they are good and bad and evil
depending on our point of view
throughout time.

Point of view/perspective/impression/judgment
is no way to evaluate/designate good/bad/evil
Good/bad/evil is always good for whom?
Bad for whom? Evil for whom? When? How?

Things just are
and whether they are good or not
depends on the narrow outcome we are using
to make the estimation.
Looked at from our point of view,
it appears to be "a miracle" 
that things worked out as they did.
Looked at from other points of view
(That of Native Americans, or African Americans, say),
and the outcome has a different value attached.

And "God's will" is impossible to declare
because it all is still being "worked out,"
and there is no end to the configuration 
of possibilities,
and no results are ever complete and final.

It is all process in the making,
chaos creating chaos
when looked at from far-enough away,
like galaxies being born
and black holes devouring other galaxies
eternally and forever. Amen.

–0–

Worldviews have to change over the course of our life.
We cannot see how we have always seen,
and certainly not how our ancestors have have seen,
and not even as the people we spend most of our time with see,
and expect to be able to see
what we are looking at
and comprehend what it means
and know what is called for
and do what needs to be done in response
here/now
from one situation to the next
all our life long.

We have to develop our ability to see our seeing early on,
and to ask the right questions in response:
How do I know that the way I see is the way to see?
How many different ways of seeing are there?
How does the way I see keep me from seeing?
What makes me think that the way I say things are
is the way things are?
How often have I changed my mind about what is important?
How often have the people around me changed their mind
about anything?
Who are the people I/We disagree with most vehemently?
What can they show me about what I am not seeing?
What would happen if I adopted as a basic principle,
"All people are entitled to their own point of view"?
And began to exemplify it by talking to other people 
about how they see things?
And why that way and not some other way instead?
And probing/exploring how some way they see
clashes with other ways they see--
and do the same thing with me and the way I see?
And allowing one question to lead to another
all my life long
no matter where it takes me
or what it means for the way I live my life?

–0–

I am going to have cataract surgery on my right eye tomorrow, and that may impact my writing schedule, which may mean that I write later tomorrow, or, maybe not at all. My absence should be only one day at the most, and then again in two weeks when we go for my left eye. In the meantime, fare well, question everything, “see” you soon, and better than ever!

There is what we do for a living,
and there is what we live to do.

Too much of the West
lives to make money
for/with which they have nothing to do.

"Let's go to the moon!"
"Let's go see the Titanic!"
"Let's buy the United States Government!"
"Let's destroy democracy!"
"Let's burn everything down!"

It is as though some twisted god somewhere
said, "Let's give adults at a 16-year old
maturation level billions of dollars
and see what they will do!"

When immature people have nothing to live for
that is worth living for,
we have society as it is today.

How many people do you know personally
who have something worth living for
to live for?

Who are serving a good greater than their own good
with their life?

Who are "in it" for something 
other than what they can "get out of it"?

Who have incentive,
aspiration,
ambition,
for something more important than money?

Who would give all their money
to do what they know is theirs to do?

Teaching botany, perhaps.
Or writing poetry.
Or playing a piano.
Training horses.
Tending a garden...

Who do you know who has a life
beyond making money?

–0–

We need to make things right--
as right as they can be made--
by making reparations and restitution
to indigenous people 
and descendants of slaves,
and stop talking about God and Jesus
until we do that.

God and Jesus demand/require that
reparations and restitution be made.
We make a mockery of our affiliation
with God and Jesus until we do
at least that much.

Candidates for political office
who don't make this a part of their platform
are unfit for office,
and people who go to church
without making this a part of their 
declaration of faith
are unfit to be called Christians.

And people currently in office
who want to "cleanse America of Palestinians 
and immigrants"
have to come to terms with the fact
that they, themselves, are descendants of immigrants,
which makes them immigrants,
and resign from office
for being ignorant,
stupid
and mean.

–0–