"Every man and every woman is a star."
-Aleister Crowley
"Everything about us is true. Everything about us is false. Everything about us is both."
-Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
"The life force is not blind. We are."
-Austin Osman Spare
Sometimes it's better to be an adjective or a preposition than being either a noun or a verb, for those of you who like your parts of speech metaphors. For those of you that don't, perhaps there's nothing that can be done. After all, even Bob has to put down His pipe every now and then (especially when he is busy convincing the Wiccans that He is the Horned God). Thus, even I know when I have tortured a poor metaphor beyond endurance. (That's my story and I am sticking to it so I can maintain my air of contradictory pseudo-erudition and cut-up news paper clipping wits.) Even I need a break from the longwindedness (or rather the endless tapping of this poor keyboard which is screaming for a break).
When was the last time you actually enjoyed doing all those little things you do to get you though your day? (Or night, if you prefer.) If it has been a long time, or if you can't even remember (and the memory holes didn't attack you), you may need to reflect on this for moment. Why are you not enjoying all of those little things? Is it because you are trapped into the fragmented mentality of constantly grasping at things that can give you more pleasure and of pushing away at things that will give you more pain? (While you ignore everything else?) There is more to existence than just grasping and aversion. Perhaps realizing that, no matter what you do, everything including your "self" is impermanent will help you to once again enjoy the little things that get you through your day. Like a dream, everything that you now enjoy, or everything that may now be causing you pain, will disappear. You may want to look again at the things you take for granted that may be able to give you more joy than you thought. Conversely, you can also not get so caught up in the things that cause you pain. This letting go is not an avoidance of anything. It is simply the willingness to be able to no longer participate in the building of identity sandcastles. A Vajrayana Buddhist teacher once said that to be awake was to be in a constant state of amazement. In this view, awakening is the maturation of the human being, much as adulthood is the maturation of the child.
We human beings have an impressive sensory system. Evolution, both physical and mental, has accorded our species a degree of perceptive ability and sensitivity that has no equal among any other classes of being. Yet how many of us can truly say that we taste life's flavor? Instead, what do we do? We limit our sensitivity to either rehashing old patterns from past hurts and joys or to the bland numbness that passes for sensation in today's commercial society. We close off ourselves in such habitual ways that our psychic defense mechanisms are working as if autonomously and these defense mechanisms, which have appropriate places, are allowed to run amok and control every one of our reactions. And then we are foolish enough to equate them with "personality." What? You thought that the hardest mental manacles to break were the ones that society or some others have imposed upon you? Sorry, fellow travelers, but the most severe prison guard that you have to worry about is yourself. You have made for yourself a giant horde of fnords. How can you be sure that the attention you are paying to reality is worth anything if you don't even know how to pay attention to the ways in which your own perception twists and distorts that reality?
You can take a position. Or hold to an ideal. Or even believe in some gaseous or embodied identity ideal, such as a god or an abstraction (like 'justice' or 'freedom' which used to be considered gods in earlier times) or even in this fiction known as the "self" that we all get so worked up over. You can say that having faith in one's self is the best thing one can do....but any sort of faith is a miscalculation you are not able to afford to make in this multiverse. Unless by faith you mean "reliance." But even then, you are mistaken. To paraphrase the Buddhist chant, "no conditions are permanent, no conditions are reliable, no conditions are self." Everything you can point to in an attempt to claim as a unique identifier and bedrock of "self" is merely made up of more conditions that are likewise impermanent and ultimately not reliable. Attaching to them as if they were essentially true or rejecting them as if they were essentially false only causes you to spin out and slide across the asphalt of anguish. It may be all that you can do in this realization is to allow yourself the license to let go of things. To abandon projects and schemes and identity assemblage points that are getting in the way of further realizations. Much like an adult who doesn't hate certain children's toys, but just no longer has any interest in them.
The path of inconspicuous joys is the oldest form and the highest practice of tantra which has inspired all of the alchemists and various hermetic groups in the history of Western heresy. You can say that it is impossible to let go or to learn to be at ease or happy with existence, but have you practiced it? It doesn't get handed to anyone on a silver platter, except when we are small children. But inculcation and cognitive patterns begin to influence as deeply as we grow up into adulthood. It's almost as if society is in conspiracy to place manacles on everyone's spiritual freedom. The remedy is to be like an artist and to create, almost from scratch if you have to, a lifestyle conducive to being at ease and being happy. You do have a choice. In fact you have many choices throughout your lifetime.
Some of you have asserted in the past few months that belief in a deity such as Eris is a symptom of superstition or an inability to have faith in oneself. However that is just childish thinking. In my own case, after years of practicing in a difficult stream of Buddhism (which is nontheistic and therefore cares nothing for the ideological traps of either belief or disbelief in gods or whatever the proper term is these days), I can only say that if you want to get somewhere in this life of yours then you should give up both extremes of belief and disbelief. Neither of the two ways of thinking lead one any way except around in circles. Belief in gods, to the extant that it is a mirroring or projection of parts of one's ego, should be let go of. But so should disbelief. And neither of these two approaches are valid for all circumstances. They should be relegated to one's mental/emotional toolbox as mere items to be used under fitting circumstances. The Buddhist approach to the "self" or "ego" is in the same vein. (And likewise, all phenomena, whether of the mind or of the material world...which are not as separate and distinct as our words and ideas often trick us into thinking.)
Remember that you have either created your metaphors and your habitual mental maps of the world around you, or someone else has given them to you. But they are still just creations. You need be loyal to none of them. The fools who want to appear brave or industrious choose anguish, falsely believing that anguish is the path to happiness. The damned fools choose things that give them some happiness but at the expense of feeling anguish later on. Those who want to become aware choose happiness directly and look to avoid anguish, refusing to sacrifice anything of beauty, but letting things go when their time has passed.
-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Under the influence of various Dzogchen exercises.)
July 28th, 2005