Monday, October 03, 2005

Disappearing World


*
Several times this weekend I had thoughtful, meaningful conversations with good people of significant neural firepower. Between the various conversations, we must have covered a significant slice of potential human discourse.

Friday night, I talked with friends about the systemic corruption of the government in Washington. However when pressed, they didn't seem to share my belief or impending concern that a disastrous war with Iran and ultimately China was just around the corner. Their general feeling was that this Bush bunch is finished. "He's not going to do anything as stupid as start another war when he can't even win the one he started already."

Later in the evening, I visited for three hours with one of those liberal democrats that you wish the world was full of. He had just returned from a river trip in Mexico. His gray, unshaved face and clear eyes were testament to a time well spent. We talked about the week's big news. Of course, the Delay indictment was high on the list of feel goods.

It is certainly a statement of our grotesque national condition when the happiest thing we can think of is the indictment of a national leader, no matter how despicable.

My conversation with this unshaven liberal was more than political though. We talked about all the great subjects. We talked girl friends. We talked sex. We talked Buddhism. We talked about compassion. We talked about the limitations of our subject-object consciousness, and how words imprison us as much as they free us. We talked about being in the moment and living fully, presently, with a clear understanding that we are participating in a miracle of space and time and energy.

We marveled at how so many good well meaning Christians in this country have followed their charismatic religio-political leaders in their campaigns of anti-abortion and anti-gay activism and have allowed this queer veneer of morality to blind themselves into an unabashed support of an immoral and illegal resource war opposed by Pope and Church leaders alike. We marveled how these same middle classes have come to support irrational tax gifts to the very richest at the expense of their own well being. We found it hard to understand how these well meaning professed conservatives could be conned into passing their debts onto their children with such hubris.

We talked about God.

We talked about Gurus and Shamans.

I talked about reading the words of J Krishnamurti so many years ago, and how now, after 30 years, I have come to find these words to have real meaning.

Man has built in himself images as a fence of security - religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships, and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind.

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time.

This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

We moved our attention from the table to the room around us.

We watched the faces and behaviors of the well lubricated wedding goers.

We tried hard not to do our own little superiority mind dance.

We talked about our hurts.

We talked about our hopes.

We talked about truth,

and how it generally "outs".

Man cannot come to it (truth) through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique.He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.

We saw how beautiful it all is.

And we were glad to be one with it.

Tonight, I have been listening to David Gray's new album.

Slowly the truth is loading
I'm weighted down with love
Snow lying deep and even
Strung out and dreaming of

Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world

We're threading hope like fire
Down through the desperate blood
Down through the trailing wire
Into the leafless wood.

Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world

I'll be sticking right there with it
I'll be by your side
Sailing like a silver bullet
Hit'em 'tween the eyes
Through the smoke and rising water
Cross the great divide
Baby till it all feels right

Night falling on the city
Sparkling red and gold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world
This disappearing world

David Gray

* Art Courtesy of Pam O'Connell

Home

What it is About

Earthfamily Principles

Earthfamilyalpha Content

Links

LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree that it's a sorry state of affairs when our main cause for joy is a criminal indictment. If the trial begins here they will probably go for a change of venue on the grounds that Austin is too liberal.
I am assured by a friend, an experienced lawyer, that this is not just another replay of the Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson acquital. Now there is a Texas constitutional amendment in place that allows for appeals which was not in force during that trial, and that is what derailed the Hutchinson case.
FM

10:52 PM  
Blogger Charlie Loving said...

I think that the whole world is evolving and maybe the train wreck is what is susposed to happen. As a kid in sixth grade I read SciFi and about the end of the world as we know it and was fascinated. The SciFi is now the reality that we see daily. The corruption and evil that struggles with what we think is right never seems to end. The struggle only ends with you passing on to join the worms.

When I was six I had a book about Holland and gouda cheese. The Dutch were all ducks in this book. One day a bunch of paratrooper ducks in black landed and took over the cheese factory and put all the good ducks in a concentration camp, It was one of those anti-Nazi kids books. The good ducks showed up in Brit uniforms and chased the bad Nazi ducks away. And the cheese factory was saved.

When I was six there was an antiaircraf gun in my back yard with a bunch of goofy soldiers who had access to cheese which we didn't, so I would hang out with them and get cheese and chocolates. Every night the wail of the air raid warning would send us to the cellar and the gun would start booming. For some silly reason the booming was comforting.

One day when we returned from the beach the house was gone. Only my teddy bear was left with one leg burned off. The gunners were sorry and one of the tied a stick to the missing spot.

Since then things have gotten better and worse and better and worse. I am of the opinion that things will not change much for the better. Bush will bomb Syria and Karen Hughes will be humiliated again and again as she tries to sell Democray to people that are set in their own ideals. Bush will bomb Iran or let the Isralies do it and things will just explode.

Better that we get a chunk of beach on that river in Mexico and hunker down or be prepared to hunker down.

7:17 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sounds like a nice weekend.

I remember how it was kinda a relief when I found out that Krishnamurti was just a human being, which of course he always said he was anyway, and that he had a secret mistress for 20 years or so who was his business manager's wife, and was involved in a nasty decade-long lawsuit about copyrights.

I don't think any less of him on account of it.

10:06 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

For finding moral relief from the halocaust in literature, I recommend a revealing movie that is excellent. "The Nasty Girl"
is not what the title connotes, but a true-life experience of a young woman who, as an academe, researched the history of a small minded town. I could identify.
FM

12:57 PM  
Blogger oZ said...

wow Memo, nice post.

9:22 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home