Writing On Water, Book 5

Even within this small planetary realm there are infinite, wondrous worlds of unimaginable beauty. This planet itself sails around a small star in an immense galaxy of stars, while that galaxy floats in a vastness embracing billions of other galaxies. All of these galaxies arise within a universe which is still but a drop in the totality of infinite manifestation.

Even so, no one has ever gone anywhere, nothing has ever happened. No struggle for grace has taken place, no soul has been finally liberated, nor daunting demon cast down. No lovers have at last been united, nor bitter enemies divided. No light is shining in some mirror brightly, no darkness shadows over the land from dusk to dawn.

Not even one small drop of the rain of Bliss – what the poets refer to as Grace or This – has fallen from the Sky of Heart, nor any arrow pierced it. At any given or taken time, there is no time, nor anything to see, to feel, to acquire or to know. Seeing, feeling, grasping, knowing are figments of time, but our time ran out before it began, while we persisted in dreaming.

There are no lessons to learn, no paths to tread, no brave hero’s journey ending in a triumph reserved for the gone and grateful dead. Nothing bound, so nothing loosed, nothing to hide, so nothing to be found ahead. All that we’ve learned must be forgotten — the one who knows that can be forgotten too.

What is, is, and yet it cannot be accounted for, yielded to in ordinary or exotic sacrificial rituals, dogmatically affirmed, denied, nor even pointed to – “it” being nothing other than the pointing, pointing at itself in the exact direction of nowhere in particular yet quite specific in each case, even as it drops a coin in the jukebox slot and pushes the button, choosing a random little nothing to enhance the romance, the poignant, bittersweet dance of dreamers asleep in a dark and measureless deep, yet still dancing.

Imagine a race of beings — cold, calculating, emotionless, and super-technologically advanced — whose long-term strategy is to seek out certain worlds of perceived resource value, and then direct their considerable efforts towards assimilating them into their galaxy-spanning empire.

They might stimulate various destructive events and disasters on such a planet with the assent and even support of local intermediaries who choose to align with them based upon some promised boon and power. Such opportunistic intermediaries will have infiltrated most governments and global power structures to help clear the way for their sponsoring masters. Alternately, the would-be conquerors may simply oberve from the shadows as the ignorance, selfishness, and divisions which infect the native population take their predictable course. Perhaps some combination of the aforementioned will apply.

In any case, they bide their time until the less technologically adept species of that targeted world is overwhelmed by seemingly unsolvable problems which require external assistance. At this critical juncture, they arrive on the scene as “saviors”, as if in response to prayers, exchanging their assistance or technological resource, which is of low value to them, for eventual control over that species and its resources, based on their own long-range agenda and sense of purpose.

Imagine if they have already undermined and subjugated numerous civilizations in this manner over the course of countless centuries, with the Earth being simply another link in their chain of conquests. Sound implausible? That may be just what those other civilizations thought too, before their descent into subjugation. This planet is rich in resources, and attractive to certain powers.

Our naivite and denial, our assumption that we are at the top of the food chain, could prove to be a fatal mistake, unless we set aside our divisions and unite as one to resist such potential victimhood. There may be other friendly races willing to aid us, but first we must transcend our obsolete biases and petty nationalism, heal ourselves, repair the damage we have done to our world, and advance together as one coherent global force.

Part 2

A Lightbulb to the Blind

My research has indicated that outside races may have had a hand in the orchestration of human DNA, but in order to safeguard their status of power and control, they limited the amount of energy spectrum receptivity the biological organism could process, preventing humanity from developing higher spiritual functionality and multi-dimensional capacity. What they did allow was the development of the biological brain and other functions which would facilitate adaptation to, and eventual dominance of, the surface environment. The problem which we now face as a species is that the programmed limitation on accessing higher spiritual functionality has rendered a fatal imbalance in which our technological capacity, fueled by our drive for dominance, threatens our very existence.

Although there appears to be some promise and even evidence of a collective spiritual awakening now in progress, its likelihood of success remains in doubt, primarily due to the entrenched resistance of the Regressives who are employing their considerable power advantage to ensure their dominance, even if it results in extreme harm to the planet and the species. Moreover, any attempt to influence them, much less win them over by pointing towards higher spiritual ideals, will continue to prove frustrating, since that is a language or frequency from which they appear predisposed to remain immune. Such a futile effort would be tantamount to offering a lightbulb to the blind.

What is possible, in terms of political strategy, is to organize those who are becoming spiritually receptive, in numbers sufficient to speak truth to power in such a way as to force the hand of the current Regressive elite and their minions, to raise one united voice to halt the current planetary calamity and set a new course, based on the dawning spiritual recognition of our interdependence with and respect for all life.

On the other hand, given the alarmingly quickening pace of global ecological collapse, it may well be that we are here, not so much to avert it, but rather to bear witness to the end of this current model (experiment) of human civilization. If so, then the ones who may survive to continue some form of the human evolutionary thread may regard this lesson carefully, recognizing the dead end of predatory technocracy and all the perils accompanying the failed “self-first” paradigm, as well as the necessity of striving for a natural balance of spiritual as well as material development.

(For Charlie Gilbert)

Each body gets its own particular death, which is meant solely for it, and no other body. Each body will endure its own intimate struggle, but finally exhale, and then begin the return back to its atomic elements. Whatever inhabited that body — consciousness, life force — all of that invisible energy which saw through the eyes of the body, heard through it ears, tasted the world though the body’s mouth, its senses, all of that will have departed, so at last the body can enjoy its own disintegration. It is an impersonal process, ever so gradually flowing like a deathly river into the elemental sea of dust at last.

Regardless of the comforting beliefs offered by the human religions, those left behind may still wonder where the person has gone. It is natural to be confused. Here was a person, but now there is just a body that is suddenly and over time becoming less recognizable. Was there ever really a person, or just a cohesive bundle of thoughts, memories, perceptions, and physical components which seemed to amount to a person, but now no longer do?

In any case, this is not a question for the one who briefly hovers over the body. Whatever we may imagine it is, it has dropped off the body like last night’s dream and is now going to awaken into a new dream, a dream that is far more luminous than this dim one which we here take to be life, the world, ourselves.

We are all on the verge of walking through that door. We persist here for a while, occasionally wondering about death and the hereafter, but mostly occupying ourselves with the various arrangements we must make to navigate the relatively short interval we call “my life”. Such arrangements are no longer a concern for the voyager. They may look back fondly, in a way that we might look back on a scene from our childhood and savor its innocent poignancy, knowing what we discovered about the wounds and scars which the body will bear, just to finally arrive at this moment of liberation. Now the explorer is free of all of that, and it was a virtual adventure after all, like a movie in which we played the central character. While the credits are rolling, we drift slowly out of the theater and into the light. It is nothing like we might have imagined.

Still, the body knows nothing about any of that. It is engrossed in its own mystery. There is no sense of distance any longer from the earth it once walked upon, the cool green grass, the minute movements of the small dirt creatures who blindly feel their way through the unknown expanse, seeking only the modest nourishment necessary to persist a little longer in the forms they momentarily inhabit. The body has become food. In reality, it has always been food, but now it has become a complete meal, offered to the other parts of itself which constitute the world, life, ourselves.

We cannot account for any of this with our confined human sentiment. It is too awesome, too wild and terrible — that everything revolves beyond conception, beyond our willfulness, beyond our control. That everything turns into something else, and that we break into parts of what we thought we were, and that everything goes its own way. Perhaps we would like to have an answer, even though we are not quite sure what question to ask. Really, there are no questions. That is the answer.

A mandatory evacuation order has been issued for the procrastinating denizens of this dense mental plane of existence: ascend immediately or face the illusion of repeated samsaric incarnation for another seemingly endless time cycle.

Some readers might assume that, because I write so much about the way light changes over the course of a dreamy day in this forest where I’ve pitched my tent, I may not be that touched or concerned with the ceaseless slaughter of humans by other confused and fearful humans.

In fact, I do not hover a few feet above this body, observing causes and conditions playing themselves out, while ensconced in a kind of virtual trance brought on by reading the highly embellished hagiographies of famous dead saviors, prophets, and gurus.

Some live as if they are citizens of two different realms — this one here, and another somewhere else. When I inhabited this body, I came all the way in. Why squirm for a way out now, or some remedy to dull the raw impact of this harsh beauty?

I do not go on retreat — there is nowhere to hide. I do not fabricate lovely imaginary deities with which to consort when the fangs of this world bite down, nor will I turn away from the tears of this planet as it is beaten and poisoned and choked to death by the infestation of my own greedy species.

When the call rings out that it’s time to go, I will gather it all in my arms and carry it with me as if it were my child, my dear precious child.

They say you can’t take it with you, but I will, because I am inseparable from it, I dreamed it into form in the same way it dreamed me here, which is not a place, not an idea, not some creative projection, not a figment of feverish imagination.

With my hollow bamboo staff, I will strike the ground and nothing will be the same. Everything will change, there will be nobody to save, because we have already ascended — we are there right now, euphoric, rolling in bliss, even though it will seem that we have gone nowhere, and just as it is now, that will finally be true.

When the big fir out front fell over last year, it left a sizeable hole in the ground where its shallow roots, nestled in the soft Sierra soil, sighed and surrendered at last to fate and gravity. Were they like fish suddenly yanked unceremoniously out of the sea when they were ripped untimely from their cozy earthen nook and forced into daylight for the first time, shocked at the dawning realization of impermanence?

Of course we can’t know the answer to such questions in our present state of arboreal ignorance, but roots aside, what we can do is employ our super power of imagination to sift down into the soil that once supported the now hapless tree, down beneath several levels of dusty strata, and there come to rest at last among the small stones that have waited thousands of years to be discovered by someone, anyone, even if only in the imagination.

Here, if we listen closely, we might hear the sad seductive strains of an ancient kalimba instrument inexplicably issuing from the collective of rocks whose destiny was to endure long centuries of darkness, huddled together with only those vague harmonic tinklings strummed throughout an endless night to tick away the time. How happy they would be to welcome our companionship now, to feel the embrace of another consciousness, even one as strange and alien to them as ours would be. They’ve felt the worms moving sensuously around them, heard tales of moles and gophers too, but what a joy for them to listen in on our thoughts now, and get a direct sense about life above land — the enormity of sky, the vastness of space!

One by one we shall lovingly scoop up these living rocks, these silent stones, and take them with us to the idyllic cactus garden, and there we will carefully arrange them just so in a manner both artistic and meaningful, and here they will be happy, and the old kalimba will sing a new song.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” ~Carl Jung

If we truly wish to change the course we are currently on, we must begin by forgiving ourselves everything – we need to let that really be true — and then extend that same forgiveness to the whole world. That is just the beginning, but perhaps the most honest and important step. Sadly, such enlightened compassionate activity is not likely to manifest any time soon at the collective level, because the species is so terribly damaged now, and cannot even admit it. More than any other nation, America is a fitting mirror for our planetary-wide dilemma.

There is a feeling of unworthiness, which is really just the other side of the coin of arrogance. The bigger the outside, the bigger the inside. To the degree in which we feel a sense of internal lack, to that extent will be our determination to dominate externally. The ruined physical environment is but an external reflection of our inner contradiction, which manifests as our sense of profound interior devastation, spawned by our stubborn belief in our essential unworthiness.

Perhaps we are essentially a nation of Calvinists (regardless of nominal affiliation), convinced of our hopeless sinfulness, and thus committed to punishing the world (which is ourself) for the manifest projections of our own inner fear and horror. This is why we drop so many bombs, this is why we build so many prisons, this is why we look with disdain on pleasure and yet secretly crave it, and this is why we will fail in the end, collapsing under the weight of our own conflicted conditioned beliefs and ambivalent desires.

We call ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave, although we stole the continent we live on from its indigenous peoples. Then we built it up on the backs of another enslaved race, while slaughtering millions of each other for the sake of hatred, ignorance, envy, and greed. We didn’t stop there. Since the end of World War 2, the United States has:

• attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected;
• dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries;
• attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders;
• attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries;
• grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries;
• and has been more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world for over half a century — not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.

Our current so-called leadership is a scourge upon this world, and even more so upon its own people. The regressive and repressive core of its agenda perfectly embodies the ethic of selfishness and spiteful meanness, reminding us all of the roots of this experiment, which promised liberty, justice, and the freedom to pursue happiness for the oligarch class, while maintaining the hypocrisy of racial enslavement and patriarchal privilege for the rest.

We humans are still a rather primitive species, clever animals that will quickly resort to any manner of violence to get what we believe we want, or avoid what we don’t want. It’s not that Americans are more evil than others, although we have served as the alpha terrorist in the world for many decades now. Certainly other nations have much to account for too, but until we can thoroughly acknowledge our own shadows, self-forgiveness will always remain out of reach.

In the future, historians will reflect on these strange days, amazed at those of us who happened to live through it all, no doubt appalled at what we’ve left for our enduring legacy. When we hear the stories of times gone by, we may wonder how people managed to thrive without TV, cell phones, automobiles, guided missiles, or in-home air conditioning and central plumbing.

Somehow life finds a way, as astounding as that may seem to those of us who can’t imagine a world without texting, 500 satellite channels with which to satisfy our entertainment wishes, or produce flown in by planes from all over the globe, only to eventually rot in the back shelves of our fridges. Those future historians may scratch their heads and question what fools would poison their own farmlands, drinking water, and the very air they breathed for the sake of a momentary bit of profit, of wealth concentrated in the hands of the very few.

They might also be confused about the religions preaching love and peace which so often were the cause of the opposite, as believers threatened each other with the fires of annihilation, their children’s minds corrupted with fear, hate, and retribution. The extreme levels of collective cognitive dissonance might surprise and even shock those who review the media archives still existing from these current times, as technological progress far outstripped the peoples’ ethical and moral constraints until the inevitable and irreversible planetary collapse began — to be known forever more as the Last Great Mass Self-Extinction.

Skip a smooth stone through the clouds reflected on still water. When it sinks, the pond mirror re-assembles the sky as if nothing has happened, perfectly.

The stone drops straight to the bottom, settling in soft silt. A small cloud forms, slowly dissolving back to the pond floor as if nothing has happened, perfectly.

From your place on the bank, you were a boy or girl, but now you know nothing about that. Your free gaze lifts skyward, you become a drifting cloud, Ah . . .

Wherever your attention wanders, you are that, that awareness, nor is any sensation other than you, Mahatma — sight, taste, smell, sound, touch, thought, memory — all is your own perfect display.

Wherever you travel, we all go there with you. Everything that is, has ever been, or will be, is alive here within you, just as you are within that. All that is, is not other than you — perfection.

“This is perfect, that is perfect.
From the perfect comes the perfect.
Take the perfect from the perfect,
and only the perfect remains.”

~ Invocatory verse of Isha Upanishad

There comes a time when the living light, the conscious light of the source divine, shatters itself into countless shards and casts these fractals of itself into a vast dark sea of pure potentiality. The sea is above us, like the night, it swirls around us in our dreaming. Sometimes it may pour down, wash over us, and perhaps even sweep us away. Until then, like children, we’ll play.

We all love the sea like our ancient mother. We want to return to her and rest, but we cannot yet, that ship does not yet sail. We must bear the light on our own. The sea is dark, it swirls below us. We drift along on soft threads of air breathed out by the sleeping sea gods as clouds, like drifting clouds in a dream of clouds above the sparkling sea, all filled with stars, and the starry stuff of dreams that we are, and ever so shall be.

Just so, there is something we have inherited from the sea. It is a kind of cloudy melancholy that we sometimes feel at night when we close our eyes and softly slide into the clouds of our dreams, a child in search of their mother. Here’s how it shall be:

Each piece of shattered light becomes like a beacon in the night, illuminating our journey through the trackless dark, the infinite unknown of our own dark sea, eternal home, womb of emptiness. Every fragment becomes its own living light, its own supreme godhood which sacrifices itself into countless more luminous pieces of light, swirling out deeper into that ebony sea, filling it with radiance and even a tender kiss of melancholy, until all our lights are drawn back into itself at last, and child and mother embrace.

I want to be Sylvia Plath again. I want to pull my head out of that oven and, as if it had all been a sort of strange waking dream, an astonishing conjunction of sepulchral happenstance, I will emerge, yawning, from the womb of mortal memory, a withered babe from the tomb of an ashy oven.

I will turn off the gas and pick up the pen where I left off, writing my own living epitaph. Barefoot perhaps, and no longer in a toxic swoon to the ghostly trance, but now become that death itself, I’ll star again as Sylvia Plath, pathfinder to oblivion, come back in form to share my poems with you, poems that won’t be understood unless good death has favored you with its own dear kiss of spectral benediction.

In any case they’ll read quite well, since death is eloquence itself, and thus I’ll speak unspoken things in words which yet will shock the sheep, un-shackling them from their own mind wool with a shearing kiss that reaches deep, till they pour out of their own lamb skins and tumble softly through their sleep.

In this return I’ll know what I am, neither woman nor man, serenely opening out of death into that bright inviting light which suicide-drunk poets seek, and with the restless music of your own confounded longing I’ll adorn your morbid sleep, your pallid dreams, for I have slept and I have dreamed, and as I waken into this, the life I never could resist, both hope and fear wash clear of themselves, and what’s revealed about the tulips shall endlessly amaze you: so softly, silently opening .