A NEW LEAF

Life happens, so it is said. It passes; we pass with it. We believe we're "taking it as it is" until it changes abruptly. Only then do we realize that we had no idea "how it is." Only then do we realize how uncertain life is, how uncertain even we are. We believe we "know ourselves," know "who we are," "how we are." But then something happens and we find that we actually know very little, much less "who we are." At such times we may come to a point at which we make conscious choices about "doing what is called for in the moment," or we may just "do it" seemingly instinctively because it is what "must be done." But this generally only happens after we are first devastated by reality, by "what is." Some stay devastated; others get through it. One must certainly "get over oneself" if they are to get through it. But to "get over oneself," one must "get under oneself," which is to say, be able to "see through oneself," to understand how one is, how one lives in a false world of his or her own making.

We are not what we think we are, how we think we are. Rather, we are as we actually are. There is always more to us. We are every step of the journey we take in life, from beginning to end. We are the next step we take. We unfold, unwrinkle, unravel. There is no magic, no miracle, no god, no "way"; there is ourselves. There is what is. But "what is" is not static or defined and is as flowing water. And how can one possibly  "know" flowing water? One cannot. We can only become as flowing water ourselves. Does flowing water "know itself"? I don't think so; it can only be itself, even though it has no solid form, no "self" as such, but only an appearance of self, of form. I think this is how it is, how we "are." Why do I think that? Because I know there is the wind blowing the trees outside my windown and I cannot see it but know it is present as it is. Because I know the ocean, just a mile away, undulates, ebbs, and flows; I can hear the crashing surf as well. Sometimes I am very aware that I am alive within this aging flesh and making motions through this body, knowing it is temporary, an important phase, holding many clues from which something is to be learned, gleaned, realized, applied. 

My focus, my thoughts, for most of my life, have been as they are now. I watch leaves fall from trees now with much the same wonder as I did as a baby from my carriage. This is "seeing yourself through." But to be able to wonder as a child wonders is to allow oneself to be devastated by reality, by what is. For all we do is constantly and perpetually build up a version of being in the world that insulates us enough that we can live with it. There are always "final straws" that break our backs, as it were, but after picking up the pieces, we reestablish and rebuild our "self-realities" once again that we might once again be "functional" in a dysfunctional existence. None of this is "good" or "bad"; it is just the way it is, until, of course, it isn't. I would love to digress into wonderfully poetic metaphors but will restrain myself.

A BIT OF CLEAR THOUGHT

“God,” i.e. the belief “in God” only gets in the way of one with oneself, is a convenient impediment used throughout history, to allow people to not have to be responsible for themselves. Thus, if it goes your way, it is a “miracle,” and, if not, “God’s will.” Individual never has to take responsibility for themselves as the agents of their own lives. If one relies on “God saving them,” when one gets oneself into a pickle, one never experiences the ability and agency of “saving oneself.” “God” is the “Great Enabler in the Sky.” All drowning men want a Rescuer but those who live do it because they got to the point where they had to save themselves. This may be the true “way of the Lord.” The scales of blind faith have fallen from my eyes. One is tossed back upon oneself; this is life’s way. It is better to learn to be oneself than to believe that oneself is insufficient. Self-sufficiency, even if flawed, is better than self-deceit, even if group, social, or cultural self-deceit. This may sound overly simplistic but it is nevertheless true.

TO JOSEPH, AGE 8, BEWILDERED

Dear Joseph,

Given the way you are, your life will tend to be an adventure and a dangerous one at that, since you have no inherent real idea of “normality” or “conventionality.” And though you may feel fear; that in itself does not inhibit you from going to the edge or even over at times. “The way you are” may be the result of your last lifetime in which you were killed as a rabbi in a concentration camp, to be brief: all your “convention” and “obedience” led you nowhere, got you nothing, and was the downfall of your people. Then you were born premature in this lifetime and bonded with no living beings, setting you immediately outside, making you inherently “outcast.” You were attacked by the Richman boys at an early age, then you were beaten by your father not soon after, and noticed that you naturally could move outside of your own body. Soon enough the ghost in your room appeared and opened your eyes to absolutely different realities and stuck around a while as well. Then finally, at age seven, you got very sick and vanished before your own eyes; you learned that you could cease to exist just like that. You may have taken after your father who was impulsive and willful, as well as your mother, who had the “sight” of her Indian blood and its Buddhist-like outlook, though with much of an inherent sense of magic powers, combined with the rousing Irish fiddle and poetic thrust. Your Scots-Irish Cherokee Choctaw grandfather dropped dead rollicking his Irish fiddle in front of his corn liquor still. The fearless love of adventure of your ancient Viking ancestors via your grandfather’s italian “lion” heritage still stirs in your blood along with the blind faith of your great-grandfather who fought with Garabaldi. And so your life will prove to be an adventure often fraught with too much danger. But both the Lord and the Gods will hold you close enough that you may finally come to realize your place in the world and in the context of the Heavens, though, at the same time, it may never come to fruition in this lifetime. Reincarnation is as a “serial adventure,” causing us to return so as not to miss the next episode. And life is Saturday morning 1950s black and white TV for children. All daring adventure mixed with absurd cartoons and craving for cookies and more cereal. However, life is not so simple as watching action series and cartoons on Saturday morning: there is the matter of your fate and your destiny, which are interwoven. Your destiny are the choices you make and the directions you take within the context of your fate, for you are part and parcel of your own fate, that is , of what happens in your life. 

IN A DARK, COLD, DAMP CAVERN WITH NO IMAGES

The cultural and societal directions of this country and the world seem to be regressing, becoming more tribal and defensive and fearful, and dangerous as a result. People cannot adapt or assimilate to new and different cultures and societies, unwilling and unable to adapt themselves. I have become strangely more religious these days. It could be because I can no longer see how I or anyone else can possibly make life better for myself or my world. The fact that too many people suffer “out there” becomes less and less bearable for me. On one hand, I live in Heaven; on the other, I live in Hell. One must be able to live in both worlds.

His moments of life were passing before him so utterly clearly, like water flowing in an icy mountain stream. But he could not sense either the gods or the God speaking to him or to anyone in any way. Time was slipping like sand out of his grip and all he could do was sit and wait—and die more as each moment passed. He waited, not patiently--desperately. It was no wonder existence had become so meaningless and absurd to him; God no longer spoke nor cared and he was utterly alone. Only in his dreams was there any hope, but they too were as empty as himself. He was a shadow; it was as if he no longer existed. And yet he wanted to exist; he wanted so much to be. He was as a voyeur spying upon himself, waiting for a sign of life, waiting for God to notice him that he may notice himself, waiting for the slightest word that he may hear himself. 

The room had not changed but the shadows were not the same. He could not find words; there was only dark oily smoke in the cold cavern; he held cold coals in his hand but his mind was empty of any image. He was a blank and, though he stood there in the smoky, dark coldness, he was nothing. He might as well not exist at all; the embers were barely burning under a deep cover of ashes. All he needed was fresh fuel for the fire and the whistling cavernous wind would cause him to burst into flame once again. What purpose could he burn for now? 

His writing was hopeless, literally and figuratively. People might read it, but he would see that they could only shake their heads in pity at his inability, his pathetic grasping at straws as he sank down drowning in his own hopelessness. His anger came from his last grasps and gasps; he had to pretend that he “had something,” knowing that whatever it might be would never be apparent to him or anyone else. He could only see that he had grasped nothing at all after a lifetime of hoping and praying and grasping. He recalled the words of Leonard Cohen: “Only drowning men could see him.” And here he was drowning, yet still could not see him. Drowning in aloneness, standing in the cold, dark, smoky cavern staring at blank rock face with dumb, frozen fingers and no thought to warm them, much less move them. There was no voice in his soul, no art in his heart, no sign in his mind. He had ceased to exist.

If he attempted to “sit,” he would doze off. He might sit in the hot tub and gaze up at the stars, which were faintly visible. He hated being faced with nothing possible to do or be. He had the thought that this place he was in might be Hell itself, though he knew that the physical pain could make it much, much worse. He was grateful that, comparatively, his life was very “blessed” and that he was in fact very “lucky.” Yet there was a profound sense of sadness and incompletion that weighed heavily upon him. “Next lifetime I’ll be a scale,” he thought, “so that people can weigh heavily upon me.” Such humor. Philosophers and scales share this same fate.

THROUGH LOVING FLOWS "WISDOM"

People do not “find” the Truth or Reality, nor can they “define” it as an understanding of what it is. They can only “be” it, i.e., live it as their lives, but when that occurs, this moment, even in all its heartache and pain, is us, is our life, is me, is my life. We want it not to be so; we want it different; we want it the way it “should” be. When I have said that “wisdom comes through me,” I meant it, in spite of the self-effacing comparison of my wisdom to a “miniscule divine fart.” That was probably a bit too self-effacing. But let’s face it: all we really have is our selves and that which is seen as the Self, the greater component or being of all of us. Whatever we may name that, many of us hold it to be true, some from traditional belief, some from a kind of logic and common sense, and some from both. We as ourselves are not unaware of the existence of many selves, but we know it all only through this one that is our self. This is necessarily true; “ego” is not bad, though it must be aware of itself as part of the body of many selves if it is to function in reality. In truth, we are not separate from each other on most levels, though we are definitely separated on the physical and in the way the physical acts on the emotional and mental “bodies” which we also include; so we may feel and think quite differently from each other, but my own sense and belief is that we are far more similar emotionally than we are different. It’s just that some of us have more of a mental control of our emotional component than others. This may be necessary in a controlled social environment but such events as “falling in love” or as mass anger as a consequence of mass injustice may easily overcome any social inertia or blindness.

In truth, I think I do know how wisdom comes to one. It is never through choice, for the “initiation” into its truth is not one most people would choose at all. I didn’t, but it happened anyway. One could say it was my “fate” or that I was “blessed by God” if one had such an imagination, or simply that it “happened as it happened,” and I “stepped up" to it. One could even say that it really was a blessing sent to change me if I could but accept the responsibility and seize the opportunity, in the awareness to see it as such. As a most self-centered person, I had been pretty much oblivious to others. I was amiable enough, friendly and kind, but my life revolved around me, my wants, my visions, my hopes, my beliefs, which were very overbalanced on the “me side.” I hardly even noticed that my first wife was there. She was a beautiful, kind, intelligent, and loving woman whom I mostly ignored, engaged in my own intense spiritual quest. We went through a lot together but I never talked with her or touched her. I broke her heart, her inherent faith. I never bothered to know who she was; I was more important in the “great scheme of things.” I read so much “wisdom” and meditated upon so much “wisdom” but it never even dawned on me what wisdom even was; I thought it was so much “arcane knowledge.”

In time I had a daughter who was born with severe autism. She became the center of my life. My life revolved around her, not me. For twenty years I took care of her and supervised others who did so, the later time being pretty much just her and me, before she moved into the care of a supported living agency at age twenty. Caring for someone other than myself as I did for a long time changed me. It was my choice; I left my work to see if I could improve her condition, and even if I did help in some way, it certainly improved my condition. Putting someone else first was not hard for me. It was the natural result and expression of my great love for her. I finally recognized that there are others people than just myself. In this time I began to notice in my writing to myself, which I had been doing for years, began to flow with a kind of “wisdom,” a love for all beings, a profound appreciation of life and others, a sense of beauty and kindness that I had never experienced before. She “opened up my heart,” as it were, which still had a long way to go. Then, I remarried, and very quickly, my wife had an accident in which she became disabled and in excruciating chronic pain of fibromyalgia. And again I found my normally quite self-centered life revolving around the love and care of another. I had to learn and am still learning how she feels and how it is to be trapped in a suffering body. I willingly took much of this pain upon myself in hopes that it might alleviate her level of pain. I believe that this is possible but that pain begets pain also. I had to be able to “bear up” under it weight and not be crushed by it, which still remains a rather daunting task after eight years. My wife opened my heart in a different way: I learned what love is. Kahill Gibran’s words on love in The Prophet come to mind:

When love beckons you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you, yield to him

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.

Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun.

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.

He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks.

He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart,

And in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s     pleasure,

Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,

Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,

And weep, but not all of your tears.

If we can learn what love is, which can only be by our own experience of loving and of being loved, wisdom comes of its own accord, not ours. Love opens us to all of life, which can be most devastating, yet also with overwhelming joy and beauty.  

WE ARE STORIES THAT SPEAK OURSELVES, OUR LIVES

We like “beginnings.” We not only tell stories of beginnings but are stories of beginnings. We may remember and know endings but they are usually not what we aimed for. Our lives are our stories. Our life is our story. We may even see it as a story “about life” but it is from our own eyes. We are stories to be told and each of us wants to tell our story. Some of us even do, but we make the mistake of thinking it is “for others” when it is actually for ourselves. If we can’t hear and don’t know our own story, no one else can hear it. And others will not know how it is to be me or you except through their own veils and filters of understanding and interpretation. We tell our story that we may listen and come to know ourselves in some way. And telling your story is not easy for our current mind and way of seeing things is quite different from the mind that was there almost in another world and another time, another place. Every story we tell of ourselves starts somewhere that is somehow “new”; we “begin anew” with each story, which is more than a memory, for we are telling it as if we were someone else we are now observing, and as if we want to make it more or less intelligible to others than ourselves. We tell it as if others are listening to us, which is to say that we are performing the story for others, which is true if we but realize that we are not just ourselves but are closely interwoven and intertwined with others and vice-versa. In fact others may listen if we are able to find the interwoven threads of this great tapestry of which we are all a part in time and in space.

"WISDOM" AND ITS FOOLISH WAYS

There is "wisdom" coming forth from me. How is wisdom to be "transmitted"? Is it even transmittable? Is it meant to be transmitted? I have a perception that what happens is meant to happen as it does and holds valuable lessons for each of us in that respect. It is up to us to accept and to understand such things. The traditional term for it would be akin to "God's will," which consequently attends to a kind of fatedness and the notion that "God watches over all." This does not diminish our power as ourselves in the world at all; rather, it denotes that this power of ours exists within the context of both fate and God.

I have "dreams" before I awaken which amount to "wisdom to be shared." Sometimes I do though probably more often I am distracted by my life and don't get around to it. My "sharing" is simply writing it down as best I can as I am attempting to do now, or less so, it may make its way to my blog (here!) where it may be read by the number of people I can count on one finger. So my words and thoughts, as "wise and earth-shaking" as they may be, reach essentially no one in this form. However, the thoughts are "out there" and "in the air" more than they were before they reached me. That may be a good thing; it may help the "general mind" ever so imperceptibly slightly, like a very faint breeze that moves two leaves in one distant, never-seen tree. My "wisdom" may attain to a miniscule divine fart.

Wisdom, however, exists for itself, not for the one through whom it may flow. It is the "metaphysical force" for which this blog is named. We exist for it, not it for us, though to live by wisdom's dictates, if you will, does enhance our own existence to the extent that we realize that there is no such thing, that we are but nothing at all, that all our identification with that which we believe ourselves to be is for nothing. This does not mean that we are worthless and our lives are pointless, for that is not true until, of course, we realize that we don't exist as we believe we do. Obviously, there is an irony, a paradox, but until we are able to actually understand it and be with it, TOO MUCH IRONY MAKES ONE OVERWROUGHT.

One of my purposes is to bring about an ability to accept and understand what we still call "ourselves," to the point that we can see and be beyond this which we define as and "know" to be ourselves. I am old enough and do know enough that I no longer care so much "what people think," as if they are even able to think, and as if even if they were able to think, that they would have any awareness of it whatsoever. Even at this point in the process, people only believe that they are thinking, when in fact they are more "being thought" than actually thinking. Witness the recent presidential election as one sure proof of this.

The real goal of existence is to get to the point at which you are FREE, which is to say that you realize that YOU do not exist but are essentially a figment of the imagination, not YOUR imagination. The ancient Greek notion that humans are as "playthings of the gods" is rather accurate, for we are as pieces upon a playing board, each believing that we are a specific piece and making our own consequential moves. But we don't, fate does, at least until we realize that we ourselves are integral to fate itself and the workings of fate. Tibetan Buddhists say, "We hold the lotus in our hands." I use the word "fate" rather than "God" so as not to ruffle feathers; feathers do not fly, the bird flies, though the bird does have feathers. But once we realize our place or even non-place in the process, we begin to get some kind of a grip on what is happening: Metaphysical Forces in Flux: What on Earth is Happening? We are able to find ourselves, that is, our absence of self, and therefore freedom within the process of existence. I do not "play with words" here: I am being most specific (though, admittedly, the words may be playing with me). And at the same time, I'm not sure if we can or are meant to "master" this kind of being. I surely haven't but that may be simply because I still see myself too much as an "I." "I" inherently is an obstacles to freedom, for "I" is inherent boundary and limitation; not evil or bad but inherent to existence in the body. We are "bound" and do need to realize this as well, to the point of appreciating and even enjoying to the utmost our "bounds" and our "prison." Realizing that this is all sound rather too Gnostic at this point, I'll give it a rest.