Pure Reason

Can one be certain at any time that one is thinking clearly?  If thought is the only measure of that, then, self-evidently, the answer is “no.”

Somewhere above thought there is a place of pure Reason, as Rumi said. Perhaps we may meet there?

Two Questions To Ask of Every Public Servant

It’s truly a marvel that we don’t speak more about the fact that our government officials, especially in Congress, in the Federal Courts, and in the white house, are mostly of wealth and privilege. Many have never lived from pay check to pay check, or had to pay for unexpected car repairs or medical needs with a credit card, unsure whether it will ever get paid off. How can they possibly relate to what most of us are going through? How could a person, secure in their comforts and influence, truly act to alleviate the suffering of many of us at the possible cost of those comforts? In all honesty, how many of us who aren’t wealthy have been, or would be, willing to risk our own comforts and advantages to help others?

So, clearly, this truly is the blatant conundrum of public service. And, although it may seem obvious, it may be time to refresh one’s active understanding on it. As Paul Simon said, “Why deny the obvious, child?”

One way to address it might be to ask two questions of every individual in office, or running for public office. Is the person truly qualified, of course, is the most basic question (although clearly there are many in office distinctly unqualified). But also, can he or she specifically relate to my problems?

The second question is one we often ask, but almost unconciously — it’s really time now to ask with greater understanding and resolve. You can bet that lobbyists ask that question and are very clear on what the answer should be. We need to be as clear and more insistant that our public servants truly serve the interests of we, the people. The evidence that they don’t has become such a towering mass of stinking filth that it is a true marvel there are not major acts of civil disobedience everywhere. It is a testimonial to the power of the doctrine of consumerism, the debilitating nature of debt and employment, and the pandering of our media to power that these things are not wide spread, and indeed that revolution is not in the air. Perhaps we have not yet suffered enough.

Wake Up Now

“Wake up now, dear traveler.  The night is almost over and the light of the stars is fading.  Your sojourn here is like one’s stay in an inn, where one’s arrival is inevitably followed by departure.  You do not even now listen to the beat of drums signaling your departure.” -Bulle Shah

Lucius Seneca Advises the Earnest

“…the minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them. So their lives vanish into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind..”

-On the Shortness of Life; Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It by Lucius Seneca (c. 4 BC – 65 AD)

[ with credit to Jeff VanderMeer and his 60 books in 60 days project]

Spinoza Was/Is Great

If men’s minds were as easily controlled as their tongues, every king would sit safely on his throne, and government by compulsion would cease; for every subject would shape his life according to the intentions of his rulers, and would esteem a thing true or false, good or evil, just or unjust, in obedience to their dictates. However,… no man’s mind can possibly lie wholly at the disposition of another, for no one can willingly transfer his natural right of free reason and judgment, or be compelled so to do. For this reason government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical, and it is considered an abuse of sovereignty and a usurpation of the rights of subjects, to seek to prescribe what shall be accepted as true, or rejected as false, or what opinions should actuate men in their worship of God. All these questions fall within a man’s natural right, which he cannot abdicate even with his own consent.

–Baruch de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, ch. xx (1670)

Winter Solstice 2008

Winter Solstice is the start of the new year.  The sun, having completed his descent toward the earth, begins to rise back heaven-ward, to look up.  And, like him, we feel renewed as the residue of the old year settles down into the sleeping grass, the cold rock, enveloped in a transformative cloak of white snow.  It becomes the fuel that feeds the living year.

But, like the Solar King, we don’t look back, we look up and we raise ourselves towards a higher goal, pushing against
the past as a counter-balance to keep our forward motion stable.  The past informs, but need not bind.

And with each year, the weighty cloak of personal history grows less troublesome, as the body of the Now grows stronger, exercising its developing skill to navigate the challenges of life while drawing from its further wisdom the power of the Philosophers’ Stone, converting all experience to Golden Grace.

Simple Sound Solution

Start with principle
     And understanding,
End in love and
     Reconciliation.

The Logos

The Logos is eternal
but men have not heard it
or men have heard it and not understood.

Through the Logos all things are understood, yet men do not understand as you shall see when you put acts and words to the test I am going to propose:

One must talk about everything according to its nature, how it comes to be and how it grows.
Men have talked about the world without paying attention to the world or to their own minds,
as if they were asleep or absent-minded.

-Heraclitus

Heraclitus is making the point, while describing the utterly profound Logos itself, that men, confined to limited perception and therefore to regressive cycles of thought, do not actually see the “nature of things,” but rather only the content of their own limited minds.  Therefore, when we talk from that limited domain of knowledge (the mind), we talk like a person asleep and vainly dreaming of things which do not actually exist.  The Logos is what delivers one from that vicious cycle. 

In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates is quoted as commenting on the tendency of men to attempt to reason out the fundamental causes behind nature:  “To trouble one’s brain in this way is to play the fool. Do these investigator’s feel their knowledge of things human so complete that they betake themselves to such lofty speculations?  Do they arrogate that they are playing their proper parts [by] rising above the basic issues of being human to speculate on the concerns of God?  Amazing they see not how far beyond mortality lives the source of nature’s law.  Even those who pride themselves most on their discussions of these points differ from each other, as do madmen.”

Here, too, a Master is pointing out not that the individual ought somehow be barred from speculating on the causes behind phenomena for moral reasons, or out of some narrow holier-than-thou attitude, he is pointing out the profound truth that one is incapable of understanding the incredibly deep reality underlying nature without first understanding the incredibly deep truth underlying one’s own being.  “Know thyself” was more than a nice idea.  Socrates put this forth as the absolute first principle of all worthwhile philosophy, and indeed, all worthy living.  It’s through knowing one’s self that one can start to see what is behind the veil and “show” of nature (assuming one even cares at that point to find out — because having achieved self realization, it may be rather trite to inquire into the mechanics of creation when you have begun to knock on the door of the Creator Itself!)

So, when Heraclitus observes that men have “not heard it,” or “hearing it have not understood,” he again is talking about the individual soul and awareness, and scoffing at the efforts of men to understand with limited awareness and thought the vastly awesome principles underlying nature.  “Through the Logos, all things are understood.”  And Socrates said, “All learning is simply remembrance.”  In other words, through one’s awareness, one gains the Logos and hence all understanding.  “The Kingdom of God is within.”

Let it All Go

You can’t write happiness or fulfillment.  You can’t write meaning or truth.  All of these words are like footprints in the mud along the great Sea of Life.  You have to dive in yourself to realize It’s All.

Ineffable, splendid, loving, all-encompassing, singular and multitudinous, melodious and silent, profound and humble, magnificent, gracious, forceful, yielding…  the words are endless to describe, description itself is from ineffible experience.  Shared internal awareness… well, that’s the goal of the writer — futile in the extreme, except for those special days when mind walks behind Soul, giddy and drunk with the fragrance of Its splendor!

Love’s Shadow is Lost in Love

Daily I marvel at the futility of my own mind’s machinations in trying to grasp understanding with the purpose of increasing its control. It’s a reflexive response of the mind. I’ve found that only when I allow myself to bathe in the Beauty of Life itself, call it Love, only then does the mind relax its constant straining for control and domination of its body, its world, the political, social, environmental milieu in which it believes itself confined, even imprisoned. It’s the ubiquitous love that frees me.

We walk through a refreshing garden of love and enlightenment, but so often the weight of one’s mind wallowing in its habits, bends the head to the dirt path, to the shadow of the great Love that enfolds one with its beauty and its affirmation of Life. That shadow exists and it must be negotiated. But it cannot be negotiated by the cunning of the mind, for thought is limited, just as is perception limited to the senses of the body unless one has reached a higher level of consciousness, above the mind itself, above the body and its mechanical nature. But the only means for escape from the shadow and into that higher level of consciousness where the fragrance of God’s flowers uplifts and inspires is through the means of Love — living, breathing, being Love.

Vigilance and effort, gentle and forgiving, is undertaken by one in a loving purpose to see everything within the light of that Love, its splendid beauty, its healing melody, and recognize that that is all of Life, that there isn’t anything else. The shadow of life, that being death and hatred, struggle and fear, is dissolved in that Love. Though the world truly struggles, its weight is an illusion. We are all free, floating in the pure breezes of boundless bliss. The task is not to understand and thus control the shadow, but instead to move awareness into the Love that passeth all understanding where the shadow is put in its place beneath one’s feet. There, we tread that shadow as the dirt path, while we walk in the free garden, breathing deeply, enjoying a bliss unknown before that makes all right and good.