Racing Against The Cloud

Watchman, tell us of the night.
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Do you want to know what I hear? I hear the unheard.

Ssu-Hsin
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Hello Frosty
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Any serious imaginative thinker, any serious creative thinker must inevitably face the primal source of everything. The true thinker must listen to the silence, seek the invisible and know the word which is neither written nor spoken. All the music of the world, all the buildings of the world, all the forests surround it. It may be known but can it be understood? Any awareness is gained only through metaphor, parable or fable. It moves through our lives and never touches us. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is what is between the tip of the brush and the canvas, between the pianist's finger and the key It is what is between the words and the notes.

Most people see a cloud. A very few, the daring, consecrated thinkers, see a Shekinah of spirituality in the temple.

In the Aesop fable of the race between the tortoise and the hare where the tortoise wins because the hare stopped to rest, we are amused by the obvious lessons: don't stop to rest just because you are way ahead and never underestimate your opponent. And we leave it at that.

But Aesop was a brilliant man. There are questions in that story that aren't easily answered. Why did the tortoise enter the race in the first place when he was clearly not going to win it? What kept him going? And the most important question of all. What grabbed hold of the hare and made him stop. That's a question that has no easy answer. One can make up human answers, laziness, exhaustion, pride, self indulgence. None of them work, because they are all labels, excuses, justifications for the real reason to hang itself on. That is the invisible culprit that will run and ruin our lives if we aren't aware of it's presence.

It doesn't have a name. You can't kick it, punch it or stick a knife in it. It has no shape but will assume many. It likes to pretend it's the voice of God.

The other day I was talking with a few people and they mentioned a woman in this town who smothered her two children and tried to kill herself. She survived, her children did not. I said "Oh, that poor woman." Someone said scornfully "Poor woman? What about the children?" I said that it was tragic about the children but when that woman finally gets a clear head what remorse is she going to have to face for the rest of her life and how will she ever identify what it was that grabbed hold of her to make her do such a desperate act. Someone will give it a reason, but it will only be a label.

The primal sorce of everything is a benevolent power. It does not cause people to lose or murder, but when it is absent, when it is not sought and listened to, when it is not acknowledged and believe in, true sight becomes a cloud and darkness takes over.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up

Humble Homilies

Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth?

Job 39:1
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A few days ago I wrote an entry entitled "Spring Cleaning" and in it I put the following metaphor:

"If you bought a dozen apples and when you got home you found thirteen in the bag and one of them was full of worms, would you hold on to it because maybe it was one of those you paid for? Would you not send it immediately into the garbage? And then wouldn't you carefully examine the other twelve, and if you found another one with worms would you hold on to it because you know you paid for it? Wouldn't you rather trash it?

We should carefully examine, under the clear light of reason, all the thoughts we carry in the bag of our own thinking and quickly dispense with the wormy ones. Then we should go into the corners and closed up places of our minds and find the things that may have been there for years but need to be vacuumed up and thrown out."

When I lived in New York I would sometimes visit a Catholic church. I'm neither a Catholic nor a church goer, but it was the nearest church, one block away from where I lived. It was a quiet, serene place where I could sit and meditate about things, away from the noise of Manhattan.

It was a big old building with about a half dozen priests residing there. There was a zealous Latino whom everyone loved. There was a bumbler, a nice man but one who had trouble with his homilies. There was a lazy man who gave no homilies at all, but rushed through the service as fast as he could to get back to his poker game, or his stamp collection, or whatever his real passion was.

But thee was one old priest who was an inspiration. He was a gentle, intelligent, compassionate man with a sense of humor. (Because of his age he would sometimes have another priest assisting him. One day he introduced the second priest as the saint they were celebrating that day.) I soon discovered that he was the officiating priest every Thursday evening, so I made it a point to be there when I wasn't working.

When he sermonized it was from deep experience. He had seen everything and heard everything and hence was not stuck in the dogmatic world of religion. His main topic was on how important it is to allow oneself the freedom to pursue one's own spirituality even in the face of all the dangers and distraction of life. Referring to the scripture he would ask what good is it to gain all the riches of the world if one loses one's own soul. He identified some of those dangers as temptations to believe things that aren't true, to hold on to religion as an unsubstantial habitual practice or scripture as a lifeless reference manual without searching for the real meaning of things.

He spoke of great sacred writings from the world over and though he held to his conviction of what Christ meant to him, he didn't deny the existence of God's love in every corner of the world and in other traditions.

Simply put he wanted his congregation to watch and learn from life the true things from the false, that the (devil) will tell you lies and make you believe them and you'll never know where those lies come from. Those are the wild goats.

DB - The Vagabond
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WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

What was the most significant event that happened in 2010?

dbdacoba@aol.com

Only 7 responses so far

I await your answer.
DB
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Wake Up

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.

Stephen Covey
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Years ago I went to visit a very wise man. I was seeking his advice. My acting career was going fairly well. But I was also doing a lot of broadcasting work and could drop everything and stay with that full time. I had also been doing some teaching and wanted to do more. My drawings and paintings were becoming better known. I was confused about which direction I ought to go with my life and just wanted to talk it out with him. I spelled it all out and said I was uncertain about which of those activities I should focus on. His reply, which I've never forgotten, was "The answer is none of the above. What you should be doing is waking up."

That remark has stayed with me all these years as one of the touchstones of my life, something to test all fundamental questions against. I once wrote isn't it odd that we spend most of our adult lives somewhere between asleep and awake?

These are some of those fundamental questions. Why aren't we fully awake yet? Why do we see "through a glass darkly"? and are unable to view reality face to face? Is the glass dark, or is it our own darkness that obscures the view? Is the glass a window, or a mirror, a telescope, a microscope, or all of those? Is the truth in the image on the glass or in the one behind it?

I used to take a train from Westchester into New York City. That route is a particularly busy one for trains going in many directions. Out the window I would see other tracks as they slid in under the train or fanned out from beneath it, and feel the rumble and bump as those tracks moved under the train. Eventually the ride would smooth out as we made it on to the main track and shortly after that into the tunnel which took us to Grand Central Station.

It is necessary and important for humans to make a lot of changes on their journeys. There are changes in schools, jobs and careers, in dwellings and neighborhoods, family and friends and changes in experiences, beliefs, opinions and understanding. At a certain point some people click on to the final track and know that the destination is enlightenment and spirituality. But is spiritual evolution simply a matter of waking up? Are all the choices, changes, bumps and rumbles along the journey happening in our sleep? "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" said Shakespeare.

"Know thyself" is another one of those vital touchstones of life. I have a lot of questions and some of them are fundamental and have cosmic importance to my life and to the world. But I won't have many answers until after I wake up. "Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." When I truly understand myself I can wake up, become enlightened, cease looking for myself through a glass, know myself as a spiritual being and find my place on the journey.
(I Cor. 13)

DB - The Vagabond
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WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

What was the most significant event that happened in 2010?

dbdacoba@aol.com

Only 5 responses so far

I await your answer.
DB
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