My first, knee-jerk reaction was the Sermon on the Mount.
My second answer was to see The Beatles rooftop concert on top of the Apple Building at 3 Savile Row, London.
My third answer is to be there to meet Buckminsterfuller.
Todays prompt: by Buster Benson
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?
I believe that history is fiction, and that mythology is closer to the truth. By this I don’t mean to say that I think mythology is closer to the “real facts”, but that thinking in a mythological way will lead to a deeper understanding of the interior reality of any situation.
To think in mythological way, or perhaps I should say, to mythologize, is to look at situations in life, both past and current situations, as metaphors, as if they contain hidden messages put there especially for you. Also, to mythologize is to accept the Mystery as it confronts us at every turn. Myths speak to us in a mysterious way, they communicate with our souls at a very deep, non-conscious level. If we approach history, and the events that are happening around us as if they were myths, it would open the door to the Mystery just a bit more, and allow us to see truth that the moment is presenting to us.
This post is part of my commitment to #Trust30, “an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself”, being run by The Domino Project in conjunction with a new edition of Self-Reliance
Today follows the beautiful through the doorway of truth and onto the swing set, where the kids are already playing.
Buckminster Fuller said, ”When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
Andre Breton said, “Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.”
I subscribe to the idea that beauty is the ultimate criteria, that if something is useful, true, or interesting then it is also, by definition, beautiful. I also subscribe to the idea that beauty must push and make us uncomfortable, that beauty always tends toward stirring something deep in our souls, until whatever has accumulated around it is loosened up. Sometimes the only way to deal with that is, for example, to throw up.
This post is part of my commitment to #Trust30, “an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself”, being run by The Domino Project in conjunction with a new edition of Self-Reliance
Fifteen minutes of fame. Fifteen gigs of data. Fifteen bucks for lunch.
Fifteen minutes to write. Fifteen minutes to live.
The closer I look at the end of my life the more important it is to me that my grand children see the beauty and truth in the world, and that they learn to confront it with their authentic selves, that they come to understand how important it is to be real. That it is a complete waste of time to be “false, tricksey”.
In the end it doesn’t matter where we came from, it may not even matter where we are going. What does matter is where we are right now, in these 15 minutes right now, right here.
This post is part of my commitment to #Trust30, “an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself”, being run by The Domino Project in conjunction with a new edition of Self-Reliance
God speaking to discontent man:
“I never turned aside,” he said.
“I never walked away.
It was you who built the temple,
It was you who covered up my face.”
Leonard Cohen, Lover, Lover, Lover
On the surface it may seem that the ideas that concern a religious fundamentalist and a spiritual mystic are basically the same, that they simply see them from slightly different points of view. It has come to me tonight that this is absolutely not the case. When a fundamentalist looks into his Book and says, “I love God,” and when a mystic looks into her soul and says, “I love God,” they are not talking about the same thing at all. Their frame of reference is completely different. Their motivation, goals, and entire paradigm are diametrically opposite each other.
I believe that there is a Call from the Infinite to the Soul of each Individual, a call to wake up and be the Light that we truly are. I believe that both the fundamentalist and mystic hear this call. They both hear and they both respond. That is as far as the similarities go. I also believe that there is in all of us a fear, a resistance, a lizard brain that wants nothing to do with that Call. There is a part of us that will invest everything to avoid having to face up the the Mysterious reality of that Call. We drink, take drugs, make love, work, watch television, invent diseases and mental conditions, invent religions, all to avoid having to look the Mystery in the face. The Mystery that there is Call, the Mystery that there is an Us to hear that call, and the unknowable Mystery that there is a Revelation that can respond to that call.
The fundamentalist view of the world is based on this fear. It is dedicated to the pursuit of covering the Call, hiding it, and making sure everyone else does the same. The thing that makes this so difficult to see in the fundamentalist paradigm is that it openly acknowledges that there is a Call, there is a Revelation. Or I should say, there was. All fundamentalist religious movements discuss that there was once a miraculous occurrence. God revealed the true beauty of the Mystery to all. All saw it and knew that it was god. Somewhere along the line things went askew. Somehow, we all fell from the grace of that perfect time. We are all broken and we all need to get back to the garden. There is a key word here: back. It has to be about the past (or the future, but usually the past). It can’t be about the present, because as soon as you are in the present, you are face to face with the Mystery again. So, there is a book, or a Book, which has the entire revelation written down. It’s all there, the entire Mystery explained and codified. It’s a done deal, there is no more Revelation to be revealed, nothing to seek. We are off the hook! Just kick back, be nice in the meantime, and then wait for Paradise to come to us.
The mystic hears the same call, feels the same fear, tries the same tactics to hide, like Adam and Eve hiding from God. Eventually, though, the mystic realizes that they still hear the Call, still feel the pull through all the stuff they’ve managed to pile up. And once they relax their battle against the Call and pay even a little attention to the Call, they realize that the Revelation is a living thing. It is moving, not into the future, but moving within them in the moment. It cannot be ignored because it is them. The Revelation cannot be written down because it is in the very act of writing. The Revelation cannot be contained in anything because it is the container. The Revelation simply is. It can be responded to.
The fundamentalist looks to the past where the Revelation was once revealed, a very long time ago. And they also look into some unthinkable eternal future, where it will be like it once was long, long ago. The mystic looks into the present, into the eyes of all those beautiful, hideous people around them, into their own hearts, into the very heart of the Abyss, into the Mystery, and finds there no dogma, no books, no exclusions or restrictions. The fundamentalist wants to sit still and pretend there is no mystery, wants to hide from the Call of their souls. The mystic can only follow the impossible Mystery.
Even though they both use much of the same terminology the primary meanings they attribute to those words are essentially different. This is really my material point, and realizing this is what motivated me to investigate this deeper in the first place. I have allowed myself to become engaged in a number of conversations where I played the mystic and my conversational partner played the fundamentalist. As I look back it is obvious why we always came to an impasse. It was because we were using the same exact words to refer to realities that were completely different. Each person’s understanding of the meanings of these words were based on world views whose roots were so distinct. It was as if we were each on opposite sides of a mirror. Enter Alice. Or as Paul Simon said, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”
The reason all of this is so important is that the two paradigms compel each to lead a particular kind of life. One life is about shutting down, being static and rigid. It is about being eternally safe and secure. The other is about opening up, being flexible and scared. Taking risks.
I don’t think most people know this, but there’s a place on the Internet where there are cobwebs and shit in between the ones and the zeros, where the HTML tags are all kinda mildewed and stained, where the scripts aren’t quite, you know are not really nice to each other. I mean it is the kind of place that you wouldn’t even want a troll to be caught at night.
And sadly, this I think is where my blog (this very blog that you are now reading [Really!? Somebody reads this?]) has been spending its evenings and weekends, and all the rest of it’s time too.
What I’m really getting at is the fact that I have not updated this blog for eight months. That’s almost long enough to have a baby! In fact, I have had a granddaughter since then. (We’ll I didn’t exactly have her, but you know, anyway, somehow here she is.)
But in the meantime something else has happened. I didn’t want to admit this at first, but I have become an addicted reader of several blogs. Not only have I never identified myself as a blogger, but I have really never identified myself as a reader of blogs.
Hey, there must be a name for a person that reads blogs, huh? We have a hip name for the people who write the blogs, but what about those of us who consume the blogs? Blogsumer? No, that doesn’t work.
Anyway, this is a really roundabout way to talk about my favorite blogs, the ones without which my life would be a damp, dark pit, which it really isn’t.
My Absolute Number One Favorite Blog On The Planet:
The Fluent Self
This is the blog of Havi Brooks and her duck Selma. She writes about things like biggification, unstuckification, talking to monsters, and sometimes she mentions Dance of Shiva, which is really featured on another blog of hers. It’s hard to describe, so just go read it!
The Bloggess
I only discovered this blog last week but it is one of the funniest blogs I have ever read. Warning: she does sometimes use what some of you may think of as foul language, but I just think of it as real.
That’s all I got for now.
For over 15 years I worked on various Windows PCs. I still work on one at the office now. But in January of last year I bought a MacBook Pro. I am such a convert now that it is hard for me to be objective.
Let me put it this way. A few minutes ago I fired up FreeMind mind mapping software. While the program was starting and its butterfly icon on the Dashboard was bouncing up and down, I sat here with a joy rising in my heart and I said to myself, “I love my Mac. I am so grateful for this laptop.” In all my years on a WinTel PC I never once felt gratitude or joy based on the OS or the hardware or any of the programs. Don’t get me wrong, I have always been grateful to be working in the tech industry
But this is the thing. I have never met a person that was really a passionate fan of Windows, someone that was excited to boot their computer because it was running the latest version of Bill Gates’ OS. Yeah, the computer may accomplish the task at hand, pretty much, but that was in spite of the OS, not because of it. My experience with a WinTel PC is that I never once felt like it was a beautiful, aesthetic experience. Every time I use my Mac it feels like that and more.
I’ve put it like this before. A Windows PC seems like it was designed by a bunch of engineers. A Mac seems like it was designed by a few artists.
“Heaven is a place where all of the traffic lights are green all of the time, and no matter when you go through an intersection you will never hit another car.”
That is the kind thing I think about. Sad.
Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr I am going to WordCamp this weekend in SF! I have been building WordPress-based websites for years now, so I am very excited to be meeting up with a part of the WordPress community. And as part of the fun it looks like there are going to be gravatars on our conference badges. Woohoo! Very cool.
In recent months my webwork has been moving more and more into using nothing but WordPress to create websites. In fact, I can’t imagine ever creating a static html site again. The advantages of WordPress are so extreme. (I will have to post more details about that soon.)
Anyway, I will take notes and post a report after the festivities are over.
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Three kittens in a carrier on their way to a new home.
