FIGMENTS OF OUR OWN IMAGINATIONS

 

We live our lives. We follow our stories as they unfold and unravel. The story of oneself is the web we weave, like the spider, from our body, from our notions of ourself. Our living is the very path we make of ourselves. It a circle that continually flows from itself into itself. And we spin seemingly eternally. It is the story of ourself, of our life. We follow it, we are it; it flows from us. It reflects us to ourselves and we reflect it back as ourselves, like two mirrors reflecting their images back and forth perpetually, but the images arise only in the reflecting mirrors, reflecting nothing but the mirror image which has no actual substance. We are images produced as such in our own imaginations, which go so far back as to be solidified, substantialized as memory, even as experience. We attempt to define “ourselves” as “something,” as a substantial thing. As we either fail in that, if we are honest, or invent a character to star in our story, we may also find that we can be satisfied with “an idea of ourselves,” as if such an idea were actually real rather than imagined. And we find others who think similarly and with similar kinds of images, and then “imagine a greater image” agreed up by a group, which provides a solidity, a path, a story one can sink one’s teeth into and gather sustenance from it as if it were real. And this is what we do, even who we are: figments of our own imaginations.

 

 

I Like the Idea..

I like the idea that there is a God who rules the world and the heavens. I like the idea that bad people go to Hell -- forever. And that good people go to Heaven. I like the idea that God is punishing me for my sins. This makes all my pain purposeful, meaningful. I like the idea that God is vengeful enough that he actually thinks about ME and MY sins enough to give me extreme, tortuous pain to make me pay for my wrongs now while I'm still alive. That's compassionate rather than sending me to Hell with its eternal pain. I like the idea of angels and demons, of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, but mostly of the fact that stories are MEANT to be told and heard. Because for some reason I am just FULL of stories; utterly melodramatic stories that make me laugh and cry and inspire me. 

I have been doing Buddhist zazen for forty years and I am now realizing that I DON'T LIKE ZEN OR BUDDHISM because they don't appreciate melodrama or good or bad people and really don't tell stories. For them it is all just phenomena and illusion and samsara. So when I die, I just vanish. Buddhism does teach reincarnation, which makes total sense to me and which I can attest to as being real and true. But Zen is very unconcerned with reincarnation or time or being, leaning more towards none of that, Emptiness. 

Can I possibly swallow the B.S. of belief and superstition and stories and melodrama as presented in good religious traditions? You're darn tooten' I can! I can enjoy a good pretending that makes me happy, a nice story that Jesus loves ME! I may know it's absurd but life is absurd, humans are absurd as well as insane (though a real Believer doesn't think such things or even hold those opinions). Can I even pray to Jesus? I may always have to preface my prayer with, "Lord, I'm not a believer but I can pretend well enough. So perhaps, even though you don't exist and God doesn't exist, you can still listen and answer." 

I like the idea of being "righteous" and feeling it. I know someone who has completely duped himself into believing his own B.S.. He quotes from the Bible as though he personally knows God who wrote it and believes he does. I don't think I could deceive myself so well as that, but I can play along and feel good and be good and go to Heaven when I die. I like the idea of a God who punishes my ass for my sins and makes me whole again after I suffer. And, believe me, I do suffer in this poor old body. And, what's more important, I count my fucking blessings.

What If the Southern States Had Seceded from the Union? What would have happened?

The southern states were allowed to secede from the United States in 1861 without causing a Civil War with its immense loss of life. The Union tried to bribe the border states who had slaves not to join the southern Confederacy but failed. Most of the Western states and territories who had slaves also seceded and joined the Confederacy, though the northern states still had twice the population of the Confederacy and almost all of the heavy industry in America. The Confederate States of America still had cotton and tobacco, and traded primarily with Britain who profited from its own cotton-weaving mills throughout England.

The North had its heavy industry and its population largely of European immigrants. Some Western states, such as California and Oregon, with few slaves, sided with the North, whereas the mid-western and southern states with slaves sided with the South. The Confederacy planned on invading and occupying its southern neighbors, such as Mexico and the Caribbean, though there were few resources in those areas, and the Confederacy would have to purchase all its machinery and weapons from England or from the North, though the North would sell them no armaments. However, the South did have some shipyards to construct a navy and merchant vessels. The South held its millions of slaves for the production primarily of cotton. The South did not thrive; they had to support their slaves and they possessed a large population of poor, uneducated, unemployed and often unemployable whites numbering up to five million. These whites were not allowed to migrate across the borders to the North, so many of them began to move to the mid-west and western areas, putting great stress on those economies in addition to the stress they created in the South. The North continued to thrive with its well-established industries, which included cloth mills which were sold much of the cotton from the South. So the North as well as Britain were profiting from slavery which lowered the cost of cotton to them.

The North didn't want the slaves to come North; they didn't want to support them and were themselves racist. Lincoln had proposed to the Blacks in the North that they have their own country to be purchased by the United States somewhere in South America to which all the free Blacks would be sent, but the Blacks had balked at this, stating that they were more American than the white Americans, for their families had been in America for three hundred years. Lincoln knew that the slaves of the South were its primary resource and that cotton would die without their labor. The North sent Blacks into the South to preach rebellion among the slaves and also secreted arms to be used in such a rebellion.

But very soon, within five years, the Southern production of cotton began to fall drastically due to overused land that was no longer productive and also to drought, as well as a restive slave population that had on occasion turned on its masters and burned plantations. The Confederacy was imploding. And then the border states of the Confederacy petitioned for reentry into the Union. And states in the Confederacy began to rebel against their government led by Jefferson Davis and the plantation owners. The plantation owners began fighting among themselves. As their need for slaves diminished as their cotton diminished, they tried selling their slaves, whose value became nil. But they were afraid to send their slaves to the North, rightfully fearing the vengeance and violence of hundreds of thousands of slaves freed from their plantations. Within five years the Confederacy folded. Britain, with no reason to support them without cotton, rekindled friendships with the North. The South became worse than a third-world nation: deadly family feuds, religious wars, culture wars erupted everywhere; people starved. The mid-western states became battlegrounds for these same warring groups. Every southern state now turned to the North for help, for food.

The North eventually allowed all the Confederate States back in the Union. The slaves had all found their own freedom when the plantations failed and they became obsolete as human property. The North broke up the plantations and gave land to the Blacks, which was greatly resented by the large population of poor southern whites, who were eventually coopted by the old powerful families of the South, and were willingly used to "put the Blacks in their place" via the Jim Crow laws. This became much easier as the southerners again took control of the American Congress and Senate and pushed their racist policies. And so it remains to this day as is evident in the Republican Party.

The Future of Technological Humanity

At a certain point, though it started out gradually enough, humans got the idea that they could be like machines. They could replace all parts and organs and even computerize their brains. They would still be able to simulate pleasure and a kind of satisfaction, as if they were very fulfilled and successful humans, but would be able to pretty much do away with pain, including the pain of death, because the machine could last indefinitely and any thoughts of death or of pain in general could be programmed out or simply erased before they consciously registered in what was still called human consciousness. There were problems with this idea of computerizing and robotizing themselves, of course. Though living became convenient, as if one were a kind of temperature-controlled, automatically defrosting refrigerator, the elements of love and truth had to be included in the human algorithm. And humans still had to be organic enough to reproduce and consume food, and, more importantly, to want to reproduce and eat. Interestingly, there were adjustments that could be made so that eliminating food was more or less mechanical, like switching the bags in a vacuum cleaner. But something vital to humans was lost in the process; the ability to give birth stopped, at least in the "technologically advanced" areas of the world. It was then that the less technologically developed areas were adapted to reproduction; the females were fed well and kept virginal as long as possible and were then impregnated by sperm from males of the technologically developed parts of the world. This worked for perhaps twenty years but due to the mechanization of the males and to their lack of interest in having actual families, the sperm count diminished substantially. By this time the adult male population in the lesser developed areas had been removed to do manual labor elsewhere, and the global birth rate fell dramatically. So it became expedient to further the race through purely technological means. Humans were so technologized and computerized that they were now clones who were programmed to believe they were in fact human, even with so-called hearts and so-called blood in their veins. The human race had actually ceased organically and then the clone human robotic race ended with the great solar storm in 2087 that destroyed all satellites and shut down Earth's electronic grid which, at that point, powered every human. Some had prepared batteries and underground nuclear energy for such an emergency but all systems were so interlocked that nothing survived.

Knowledge is NOT Wisdom (Beingness)

 

There are so many profoundly interesting sources of knowledge that really do draw my interest to an amazing degree. There is so much knowledge to be had. It draws me incredibly. Yet, as I recently read in the book of Aboriginal truth, knowledge is NOT wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to live wisely, to be able to apply such knowledge in living. My way, which is closer to zen Buddhism is not so much a way of knowledge but a way of being. Knowledge is helpful to understanding which is helpful to being, but is not central to being. So what if we know our true history? It does lead us in the direction of our true being, I believe, but it can also became a false pursuit, a distraction to being, even an obstacle. I have pursued it and still do actually but now I see that knowing the true history and development of life and human life, though absolutely of interest and even importance to me, is not the essence of being. In zen practice, it would be considered simply “phenonema” to be recognized and not pursued. Now I can study it as an interest without pursuing it as “the way.” I prefer to simply “observe what is” here and now as it presents itself through the focus of “my” being. If “my being” happens to expand in the process, fine, but I feel I should trust myself in this matter, rather than trying to force some kind of expectation upon myself to be something other than I am. This may reflect and even be my own shortcoming, my own lack of vision and expansiveness, but it is my own mistake which I will come to recognize as my own. It is not someone else’s whom I may follow and cannot necessarily undue or correct within myself. I believe I can untie a knot that I have made but not necessarily someone else’s that I have taken upon myself. I already have enough knots within myself tied by others who I have taken into myself that I have to learn how to untie. Such knots become so integral to one’s own being that to simply sever them is to sever a part of oneself. So unlearning is a painstaking, conscious, careful undertaking. We cannot throw the baby, i.e. ourselves, out with the bathwater no matter how dirty and polluted it is. I tried to throw out Catholicism within myself but it will always remain embedded within me, like an old wire fence embedded within the layers of bark on a tree. I cannot cut it out but I can be very aware of its continuing presence and even learn to hold a reverence for it and understanding of it, and of myself.

How we decide to see ourselves

 

It’s as though I have been possessed by very different entities with very different minds throughout my life. Some of them I can recall, i.e. I can remember how they felt, what they thought. Others I can only see and watch in a kind of wonder that I could have been that person. But I was. I sit here remembering such things, trying to somehow put it all together as me, as my life. Some memories are absolutely pleasant, while others are surreal. Like Nikki and I played together in an innocence, though we could never have related, or I could never have related as one in a marriage relationship. I just wasn’t there yet; I was fully within what could be called spiritual fantasies, the archetype of the mystic monk or even the fool, the simpleton.

 

I sit here hoping to glimpse “my true nature,” in which I want to be “at ease with myself” since this is what I “really am.” Too often, I experience an enormous, overpowering underflow of sorrow or rage or sheer lostness and disconnectedness, though not chaos. And I think that this must be “me.” But it is not. I am something other than that; I am a thread of awareness that extends out beyond the boundaries of the universe itself. I am elementized as a characteristic peace that is universal, permeating all things. Sometimes I discover myself within this great contextual matrix of peace. It is not an oppositional, dualistic quality to be held in contrast to “war or chaos.” I do not know if it is any kind of “order.” It seems to simply hold everything there is within itself, the best and the worst. When I sit here sometimes, seeking to experience my “true nature,” I find myself “at peace and ease,” and then determine that this much be “it.” I figure that the problem with that is that the whole series of appearances of “true nature” runs before me like a moving picture and then I pick the few cuts from the film that I would like to identify “my true self” with and as, leaving the rest on the editing room floor, as it were; as if they were underserving of being recognized as part of “the show of my true nature.” I had forgotten how Nikki and I played together all the time like little kids sharing the fantastic moment, though in a kind of never-never land, which is problematic in the world of ever-ever land. I never considered that all my “negative” thoughts were part and parcel of the whole program of my life. One wants to choose only the good parts to see and identify with; never the embarrassing, shameful, regretful parts. And we have to create a God to forgive us those parts since we won’t even accept them as part and parcel of ourselves, our actual lives. We imprison ourselves by walling ourselves away from all our mistakes, which makes us smaller and smaller and smaller.

On being "left to oneself"

 

Left to ourselves, we may see more. Left to myself, I see my unsettled mind, my disbelief of “answers,” and my own need to “make sense” frustrated. Yet I remain in the world that must make sense. One pretends that “it all makes sense” if one is to be able to cope—and survive—in the world. We close our eyes to our own inner protest perpetually. We “do what must be done” relentlessly, and, as it turns out, ruthlessly. And we suffer for it internally, if not externally. It is better to be “off the wheel” from the start rather than to “keep on rolling” endlessly in distraction. It may take a lifetime to realize this, which is to say, admit it. When one is in it and “on the ride,” the folly of “getting off it” seems obvious. One does not jump off the roller coaster at any point until it stops and the ride is over. It may be only then that one realizes just how unsettled one’s mind actually is, or all mind actually is. Where does “my mind” begin and the collective mind end? Are there no boundaries or are they already rather set?

Most of us never quite get to the point at which we decide that our life is to be left up to ourselves. I’m just about 74 and I have finally gotten to that point. I followed many paths in my life. I’m referring to what are called “spiritual paths.” I got as far away from doctrine as I could with Zen Buddhism mixed with a hefty dose of Daoism for the last 30 years, though I still certainly “followed” rigorously. When I stopped following and founded my own religion with its one and only member, I was no longer compelled to do anything, though I chose to still simply “observe” this person whom I call myself. “Choosing for oneself” is much different than following another, no matter how “true” or “well-established.” I would rather learn from my own mis-takes (purposely hyphenated) than blame someone else for misleading me. It only took almost 74 years to realize this, God (or no-God) forbid. I also realized that the phrase, “The truth shall make you free,” should be altered a bit to read: “The truth shall make you free—for the first five seconds anyway.” The truth is neither a formula nor a magazine subscription; one must have it in the moment, each moment, or it is but mere imaginal fantasy. It is not conceptual, but experiential, and experiential prior to any interpretation of the experience at that. So how does one experience without thinking, without defining the experience to oneself? That would be the unanswerable question.