Blowing Up Bridges

It’s on! The trash talking has begun. And make no mistake, it’s being encouraged by the White House. Expect one of the dirtiest campaigns in recent history.

We are all the same. It should be easy to find common ground. It is not. Enter ideology. Ideology forces us into templates that do not fit well. It tends to pervert our true natures - to live and let live - and puts the accent on confrontation. This is generally needed in times of war - in the face of threat. In peacetime it seems a silly way to behave.

Since Barack Hussein Obama has been in office, there has been no peace. It’s almost as if, while we were living our lives, draft notices began arriving in the mail. We’ve been forced to take sides - one side being America.

Obama is a warrior alright, even if Libya doesn’t quite speak to the issue. Warriors do not compromise. They dismiss the broad range of the painter’s palette and divide the world into black and white. Again, this is only appropriate to war.

“You’re either for us, or against us.” No shades of gray even.

Who is POTUS fighting? America, of course. This has been hard for Americans to swallow. They thought he was on their side.

Similarly, it’s been difficult to square POTUS’ color scheme. The white hats have traditionally been ‘good’; the black hats, ‘bad‘. We’ve been taught this from watching John Wayne westerns. POTUS is black and tells us he’s white - while he paints us black as sin.

Something does not add up here. We’ve known it from the start. Now we’re starting to feel uncomfortable with it. We read about the soldiers in Syria who are refusing to shoot protesters being shot by their own - the worst of all fates. We wonder about how the term ‘conscientious objector’ might fare in this climate.

Voting for a black president was supposed to solve all this. We thought it would bridge the eternal divide. Instead, we find the existing bridges blown up and not enough shovel-ready jobs to build new ones. Sources tell us that China is building bridges like crazy - while we are tearing ours down. Some of us are trapped behind enemy lines.

Carlos Castaneda tells us that each life represents a complete, self-contained universe; that two people standing side by side must be seen as two such universes; that these cannot be commingled, except by event affecting both. Ideology disregards the deeper meaning of this lesson. It seeks to bridge chasms (that cannot be bridged) by hostile rhetoric, fomenting non-existent threat and, finally, by outright aggression. Thereby, the individual is lost and replaced by ordinance.

Love lost in the ashes of ritual (s)laughter.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

It Works!!! (a true story)

The following is a a reprise of a previous posting (2009):

Dateline: Summit, NJ; USA

Many years ago I read a whole series of books by Carlos Castaneda. At the time, I practically devoured them, finding them irresistible and compelling. I don’t remember much about them now. But one particular passage has always remained with me. It’s where Don Juan explains that if one looks down at the palms of one’s hands while dreaming, one can morph into a crow and fly to wherever one wants.

I tried it for a time but soon concluded it was impossible. I gave up and never thought about it again, until today …when it happened.

I had gone to lie down after lunch with the radio on. I fell asleep and started to dream. I dreamt I was in India at our apartment there. My wife was at work. The only other person in the house was her mother. I decided to go out for a walk. Outside, there were five roads leading in different directions. I chose to follow the railroad tracks.

It was a gorgeous day and I was enjoying the Indian scenery immensely. I had taken my iPod along and was listening to Rush. Eventually, the tracks ended but the track bed continued.

I walked on, and came to a stone church at another crossroads. The doors were open and there were people inside. I wanted to enter as well but stopped myself, thinking the sound from my iPod was way too loud. I tried desperately to turn it off, but none of the controls worked. So I walked around the outside of the church trying to figure out which way I had come.

It suddenly occurred to me that the reason I couldn't turn my iPod off was because I was dreaming. I remembered what Carlos Castaneda had said about looking at one’s hands. I looked down at my palms, and immediately took off like a rocket. I was not afraid. Up, up, up, I went, floating high above the earth. It was tremendous! I had perfect vision and clarity of mind. My body tingled all over. I was simply bursting with unbridled joy.

Then I remembered the second part of the exercise. I decided to fly to America to visit my mother.

Next, I heard the tea pot whistle. I was fully awake. My mother was downstairs, making tea.

What Is Not

“Earth is off the shelf of and planetary geology.” - JB

This represents the same basic argument that prevailed during Galileo’s time. Galileo essentially discovered that the earth orbits the sun. This got him into trouble with the elites of that time - philosophers and clerics - who subscribed to the view that the sun orbits the earth, thus making the earth the center of the universe. He was denounced to the Roman Inquisition. Although cleared a year later of any offence, the Catholic Church nevertheless condemned heliocentrism as heresy and Galileo was told to abandon his support for it. When he later defended his views in his most famous work, ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems’, he was tried again and forced to spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Isn’t this the same as what is going on today re ‘global warming’?

Eventually we would come to accept that our solar system itself is merely some insignificant adjunct to some insignificant galaxy on the fringes of the universe. What does that do to our considerable egos? Some say it lead to existentialism; nihilism and beyond. Let me suggest that the next (and possibly final) knot along this thread may yet emerge, namely that the true center of the universe is the human mind. This would certainly go a long way toward uprooting whole herds of sacred cows - ego for one. Alan Watts and Carlos Castaneda came tantalizingly close to articulating this concept. The scriptures of all the world’s religions allude to it.

As we strive to understand all ‘being‘, we remain largely ignorant of ‘non-being’ which cannot be measured or quantified by our senses or by the extensions thereof. The scope and significance of ‘non-being‘, some say, can only be grasped by what Zen refers to as ‘no mind’ (or ‘no thought‘).

It is ‘non-being’ within which what some call ‘God’ resides. So, even if we - who look to telescopes, rulers and scales as the ultimate test of reality - should succeed in figuring out everything there is to know about all there is, we would still fall infinitely short of figuring out what is not.

Energy Shapes

My wife and I usually go out for a walk after dinner. Along the way, we always pass by a particular house where invariably a black cat comes (literally) galloping to greet us, roll over on its back at our feet; purring uproariously and, then, getting up to follow us part way down the block.

Actually, at one time, there were two black cats - the one I just described, and another - a larger one - that stayed pretty much in the background, simply observing our daily encounters. On rare occasions, when our usual feline friend happened to be occupied elsewhere, the larger cat would deign to come out of the shadows and grudgingly permit itself to be petted.

The day would come when (suddenly) the smaller cat no longer appeared. Instead, the larger cat would come running up to us exactly as its mate had done. We asked the woman (who was watching us from the porch of the house) what had become of the little cat. She told us that he had been hit by a car and died.

We found this absolutely stunning. I don't know how else one could possibly account for it but, in dying, the smaller cat had apparently transferred its entire personality lock stock and barrel to the larger cat which now continued the antics of its now dead partner precisely to the letter.

In Hinduism, no sharp distinctions can be drawn between gods, men and animals. All these exist in an unbroken line, from the highest down to the lowest. Using Carlos Castaneda's terminology, all are essentially ‘energy shapes’, fractured only by men's minds and egos. No doubt there are other Edens out there where life can flourish. But the physical shape of whatever that life may take is largely irrelevant.
-------------------------------------------------------------
When, after an intense argument, life threatened to leave the earth, earth laughed and said, "Don't be absurd! Nowhere else will you find my bounty with which to build and power your pathetic little toys.” And life replied, "You're so wrong! Even on the dark side of the moon; even in the outer reaches of space would it be possible for me to find sufficient substance to shape and sculpt. I am infinitely more flexible than you think. I can adapt myself to any condition. I have self-determination and the desire to be. I will go anywhere I want, using whatever means available to give expression to the essence of myself.”

IT WORKS!!!

Dateline: Summit, NJ; USA

Many years ago I read a whole series of books by Carlos Castaneda. At the time, I practically devoured them, finding them irresistible and compelling. I don’t remember much about them now. But one particular passage has always remained with me. It’s where Don Juan explains that if one looks down at the palms of one’s hands while dreaming, one can morph into a crow and fly to wherever one wants.

I tried it for a time but soon concluded it was impossible. I gave up and never thought about it again, until today …when it happened.

I had gone to lie down after lunch with the radio on. I fell asleep and started to dream. I dreamt I was in India at our apartment there. My wife was at work. The only other person in the house was her mother. I decided to go out for a walk. Outside, there were five roads leading in different directions. I chose to follow the railroad tracks.

It was a gorgeous day and I was enjoying the Indian scenery immensely. I had taken my iPod along and was listening to Rush. Eventually, the tracks ended but the track bed continued.

I walked on, and came to a stone church at another crossroads. The doors were open and there were people inside. I wanted to enter as well but stopped myself, thinking the sound from my iPod was way too loud. I tried desperately to turn it off, but none of the controls worked. So I walked around the outside of the church trying to figure out which way I had come.

It suddenly occurred to me that the reason I couldn't turn my iPod off was because I was dreaming. I remembered what Carlos Castaneda had said about looking at one’s hands. I looked down at my palms, and immediately took off like a rocket. I was not afraid. Up, up, up, I went, floating high above the earth. It was tremendous! I had perfect vision and clarity of mind. My body tingled all over. I was simply bursting with unbridled joy.

Then I remembered the second part of the exercise. I decided to fly to America to visit my mother.

Next, I heard the tea pot whistle. I was fully awake. My mother was downstairs, making tea.