Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

The collective mind, especially here in the south, seems to run on the two rails (R&R) of race and religion. A friend was here today who works in the wider world, and whenever he comes home to Blackstone, this birth place of his first knowledge of the world, he gets irritated with the same old tracks of R&R he finds here. Each year when he comes home he encounters the old prejudices and judgments that travel through time like a toy train on a circular track—lots of smoke and whistles, but going nowhere. He lives in a world where the track is straight, always going over the horizon to discover the unknowns in life; but here thought runs in circles, and nothing ever changes. But this experience is circular and never changing.

I tried to help my friend expand his vision a little. I live here and I don’t see Blackstone or the south with irritation because it doesn’t match my expectations of what it should be. In fact, not accepting the world as it is runs the R&R tracks right through your own mind. Race and Religion are the twin rails that people use to build their little self-identity. But with any conceptual identity, no matter if its built in Blackstone or New York, it is limited the same way a train set is limited. Some train sets are just a little circle of tracks with a choo choo, while others are maize of trains with all kinds of environments for the trains to pass through. But in the end, all toy trains go in circles, and life eventually becomes conditioned, stale, and quite dull. We know it is circular and we get irritated.

So to be irritated with R&R is a great way to straighten out your tracks because that irritation is but a mirror of one’s own hidden self-image. When you are irritated with someone for not being what we think they should be, then that very irritation is the edge of your self-concept of who you are and what the world should be—they are the same. It is there in that burning edge that you draw the line and say I am right, they are wrong. I am better, more enlightened, more spiritual or whatever.

Irritation and anger with existence is the fuel that runs the toy trains of thought in our concept of our world. Think about it. The world goes on not caring one whit that we are burning. The world is what it is; the tracks of conditioned thinking are always in the eyes of the perceiver. The goal is to be free of thought that runs on a track. See that and you are free.

Posted under meditation help

The end of the year is always memorable, and one of its many gifts that I can count is a visit from Cory Wright, a Blackstone native who has a good shot at becoming our first Internet success story. His ladder leads straight to the top. You’ve heard it before: a small group of skilled Internet surfers dream of catching a big wave; they work and they work creating the board that will ride the rolling wave of Internet technology; and they have a feel for what people need at this time for their own surfing of the web. Cory is in the business of empowering people. You can’t help but get rich doing that!

Here’s how their current project works. The web site is natuba.com, and while Cory was here he took a picture of us in the kitchen with his iphone, emailed it to the website, then pulled up the website and there we were, Ed & Tilly. “So does that mean if in 20 years someone googles Ed & Tilly, or just Tilly, that picture will come up? Wow. You have immortalized us!”

Natuba.com is a photo sharing site in the vein of youtube, which is a video sharing site. But what’s interesting is that it groups similar pictures. Key in Blackstone and all the pictures on the Internet related to Blackstone come up. I wonder how many Ed & Tillys there are?

Today’s insight. What happens when the pond is still?

Posted under current events, General Observations

We saw Dr. Harris at the Rotary Christmas dinner earlier this month when he brought his daughter. He had wanted to bring some pictures to me for restoration, and I reminded him to bring them by. He certainly looked and sounded like he had all the time in the world.

But death never promised us a warning. Like God, death walks in silence and touches us unexpectedly, sometimes in the midst of conversation or a trip, and we turn in recognition of our very old friend—that we knew before we were born— who has come to remind us of who we really are. Like his brother, Dr. Harris was away from home on a trip, and like his brother, he now takes his place in Blackstone’s pantheon of great souls that have shaped the town they loved by giving it their character.

James was a healer, not only of the body but also of the troubled and conflicted spirit. Whenever you met Dr. Harris, you felt better, whether he gave you a pill or not.

Great souls have great power. And in their presence you feel your own presence reflected by them. In their shadow you feel lighter, in their smile you feel happier. Blackstone has not lost a light with the death of its doctor and long-time mayor, because he is now part of this town and its people. Death cannot subdue life. Darkness cannot overcome light.

Unlike the Christmas lights he for so many years turned on in Seay Park, Jimmy Harris’s light has no season. And his death is not the ending of a season either. There will always be Christmas lights in Blackstone, and there will always be Dr. James Harris.

James Harris loved Blackstone, and Blackstone loved its ”Dr. James.” When you take love from love, only love remains.

Posted under current events

Today a cold has invaded my body
and the rain has brought a light fog
and the sound of drops hitting the windows.

A perfect day to do nothing.

If my nose wants to blow itself,
it will do that,
but I am going to do nothing.

If my body wants to eat eggs and French toast,
it can do that,
but I am going to do nothing.

If my mind want to think
and let various bands of thoughts
parade like caravans through the space of consciousness,
it can do that,
but I am going to do nothing.

If my heart wants to beat
and my lungs breathe,
they are allowed,
but I am going to do nothing.

If the cat walks into the room
and my eyes follow it across the floor
to scratch on the welcome mat by my chair
that says Wipe you Paws,
they can do that,
but I am going to do nothing.

If the intellect wants to write this poem,
go ahead,
but I am going to do nothing.

Today is a great day to do nothing.

Check today’s insight.

Posted under General Observations

As the black and white images and exuberant Greek music of the 1964 classic Zorba the Greek filled my living room last night, I noticed how dated the movie seemed. Oh, the movie was still great, and I had forgotten much of the story that filled in between the unforgettable scenes of the beautiful widow being killed by the men of her village, but it didn’t have the same punch it had back in the 60’s when its message resonated with the cultural revolution going on without and within me.

Zorba to me was the whole man, the mind/body man, and the man who lived by the heart instead of the mind. Zorba was the liberated man, and I was the intellectual Englishman who had come to Crete to reopen a mine he had inherited and discover the freedom and joy that was missing from his life. He found life in Zorba and so did I.

I bought the Zorba sound track, memorized the bits of Zorba wisdom that filled the spaces between the music, and let the slowly building instrumental fill the background of my mind. Zorba was teaching me to dance.

Zorba lived in the moment, passionately; that’s what came across through this great performance by Anthony Quinn. He was always my Zorba after that movie. He was the door out of my dry intellect that weighed every action, that debated every move, and hung over my shoulder in every moment to see if I was doing everything just right. “I spit on that agony,” Zorba said when the Englishman bemoaned the suffering of man’s intellect.

While the intellect hesitated, Zobra acted. While the intellect gathered enough courage to love, Zorba hopped into bed. While the intellect feared failure, Zorba danced to failure’s music. When the intellect agonized over truth, Zorba fell asleep.

Back in the late 60s, Zorba was life itself. And he still is.

What’s in a face? Today’s insight. 

Posted under reviews

“I love that necklace,” the clerk in Costco said, reaching out to touch it. And I happily respond by telling her the story of my friend finding this piece of carved jade in the dirt behind a Buddhist monastery on the edge of Tibet. But it wasn’t until just yesterday, after telling the story many times, that I realized the meaning of the Buddha in the cave.

Meaning that means something must always be discovered. Then it is your meaning. If someone tells you the meaning of something, then it is his or hers and you have just borrowed it, and, most often, you’ll give up looking for your own meaning. Not that you can find it by looking. Meaning has to be given to the mind. Meaning in is true sense is a grasp of the whole that is greater than its parts.

The Buddha in the cave is the Buddha in the heart, the awakened light of awareness that supports the minds above it, like the vast ocean supports the waves. When the mind looks for the Buddha in the heart, all it sees is stone; nothing is there. But when the Buddha awakens, then the mind doesn’t have to look. It knows the Buddha is there.

When the Buddha awakens in your heart you will also know he has always been there, sending light through the cracks in the mind, insights that solve your problems, a gentle breeze of peace when you don’t expect it, and a great surge of love for someone without any reason. The Buddha has guided you to the place in your life where you can feel the life stirring there.

The Buddha has always been there from the beginning of time and before that. The Buddha is pure consciousness, awareness before it becomes identified with form. The Bible puts it best: “I am that I am,” said God and the Buddha.

There is no difference. When you go beyond thought, there are no differences because all the rulers have been left behind. Space, who can say what it is and what it is not? Only the Buddha can say, and he’s not speaking.

Why leave your palace? Today’s insight.

Posted under up lifting

Passing through Victoria this morning on a photo shoot, I saw the abandoned garage of Millican Transfer, a meat trucking company that I drove for in the 70s for three years. Imagine, a vegetarian yogi (at least I thought I was) driving a meat truck. I had left Cleveland where I moved to practice yoga and reach enlightenment after a few disappointing years. Back in Virginia, there was no work in the rural area, so I ended up driving a meat truck. My yoga teacher back in Cleveland could only shake her head.

Looking back now, those three years alone, delivering my truck full of meat every day, was just what I needed to lighten my load and point me in the right direction. Of course, the truth is that when one seeks God, every direction is the right direction. But then I didn’t know that, so sitting in the truck alone with my demons was a kind of hell.

I started smoking again and fighting the desire and the guilt of being fallen, buying cigarettes with one hand and throwing them out the window with the other. And, wouldn’t you know, I started eating meat again too, something that had left so effortlessly when I started my yoga practice. But this time, I didn’t just eat meat. I brought the outdated meat home to my family. “Here, these hotdogs look okay.” They didn’t taste all that bad with a couple of martinis to wash it down with.

It took about three years of driving through my interior hell until I realized that I had a choice. It was a mythic journey as each day was faced with its floor to ceiling load of boxed meat, with a few quarter cows thrown in. My meager 140-pound body knew it was going to be challenged when I saw a steer’s leg protruding from the stack of boxes.

Perhaps I was working off some karma. Perhaps I just needed to sit in my raging desires until I had had enough. Perhaps my soul needed to feel the pull of light from its darkness. When I decided to return to Cleveland to pick up my yoga path where I had left off, the meat, the cigarettes and the booze just fell off, left in the dust as my spirit broke loose from the meat route and was free.

Posted under General Observations

As we inch our way to the brink of the New Year where we watch the final moments count down like a atom bomb about to go off, it is good to reflect on the meaning of time as we use it in our civilization—which is another word for our mind. We forget that connection most of the time or all of the time. Our civilization, our world, is our mind. We live in the mind, our individual and our collective mind—both the same. But our collective mind is much, much stronger and powerful in the electronic age because of its success in obliterating time.

When it used to take George Washington 8 days to go from Virginia to New York, now we can be in New York watching the ball drop instantly. Or when someone is shot in Pakistan, we are on the streets feeling the heat from the fear a few moments after it happened, or even when it happened if the cameras are on. With the speed of the electron, the distance of the means to the end gets cut every day. We want everything in real time. Waiting is somehow something negative to be eliminated, and whole new industries are created that declares war on waiting.

Here in my photography studio it used to take a week for film proofs to return, and now the customer has a finished digital print in five minutes, and still we have to wait. I apologize and wonder when is that faster printer coming out? Five minutes is too long.

I’m old enough (71) to remember when consumer technology promised to kill time back in the 50s. The idea was that through technology the wait time would be shortened, thereby saving time for fun things. Work and waiting was considered painful, while non-work was thought to be pleasure. We were slaves to time, and a faster washing machine and toaster were going to set us free.

Well, here we are 60 years later. Are we free from the pain of work and waiting? If you look at our airports and the traffic jams, one might envy George Washington.

Assumptions are our original sin. Today’s insight

Posted under General Observations

One has to work ones way through the tunnel of the world, which is like a long subway tube whose walls are flashing with scenes and people and our car goes by so fast, we hardly have time to enjoy it. We are rocketed into the future and our present becomes history just as fast. The world goes by in 3D images, full of sound and smells, and we wonder, as we sit in our subway car, rocking to the rhythm of the rails, what it all means. What time is it, anyway? Time for me to get off? Time to changes cars? Time to sleep? Time to wake up? Have I arrived? And where was I going when I got on this car?

How can you wake up on your subway of life, remember who you are and get off? Meditate. To those on the subway, to the minds all sitting there looking out at their life going by, meditation looks like sleep, but to those who are off the subway looking in, it is only the meditator who is awake, and all those faces staring out the window at the passing walls are asleep in their minds.

Why is that? When you meditate, you are dropping out of the mind that looks outward at the subway walls, and dipping into the silent pool of grace that lies beneath the mind, beneath the subway tunnels like a huge interior lake. Meditation is the hole in the floor of the tunnel of the world through which this amazing grace can come to the surface. One drop into the mind and something stirs. Like a womb feeling its fist kick of the fetus, the mind jerks up and says, “Something is moving. I feel….life!”

We could tell the mind, but it has to discover this for itself. That kick—that drop of a tear—is the goddess who has been buried under thought for so long. The mind can read all the books in the world, bow before all the gurus, but all that is still shadows and memories flashing by on the subway walls. There are no thoughts that describe the tear of the goddess, and thre are no words that can tell you what she says. She comes in silence, like the presence of a mountain behind your back. She moves in stillness like the night sky swept clean of stars. She is love.

She is not in relationship or career. She is not in the past or in the future. She is here. Find her and relationship will take care of itself, because without her there is no relationship. Without her, there only shadows, hopes, dreams, and suffering. Without her, life is just a long subway ride going nowhere, and when death comes, there is only the end of the line at 4 am in an empty car.

She is easy to find—because she is always here, always beyond time. She wears time on her wrist. She puts on your mind like makeup; thoughts are her clothes; emotions are her jewelry. Behind every worry, underneath all your fears, she is smiling and her heart is filled with compassion. She reaches out in front of your mind and opens doors for you in the world; she arranges circumstance so you keep your schedules; and she holds you when you are upset or afraid.

She is your being and she holds your little mind like it was a mere tear in the palm of her hand. She is god….She is the cosmos and all that ever was and ever will be. She is you.

Stars in our minds. Today’s insight.

Posted under up lifting

Christmas along with the New Year hangover has become quite a mind storm in our culture. The first waves of fear and desire come rolling in at Thanksgiving and build until the crest comes crashing down on Christmas Eve. Then, if there is any strength in the mind left, we play in the quiet ripples and dissipating foam of Christmas morning. Ah, it’s finally over. And we collapse on the beach and sleep.

In this huge tsunami we call Christmas we are now struggling to keep our feet on the spiritual ground of silent night and the birth of God within us—the awakening of the light of awareness in the human mind. The desire for more and more, and the fear of not having enough, is great for the economy but bad for the soul.

The whole point of Christmas and the descent of God into man is to bring peace and light to the human mind; yet, Christmas, as we are discovering, is becoming just the opposite. Instead of communion, we have the orgy of consumerism. Instead of saving grace, we have stress. And we are making this economic engine the driving force of our culture. We have to buy more in order to stay on top of the rising wave. If we consumers don’t consume more, our country will fall into repression, and we into depression. At some point, as every surfer knows, there will be a wipe out. Ah, more fear.

Now that the big wave has passed, reflect on what it did to your mind. How did you ride the wave this year? Did you ride the wave or did the wave ride you? See yourself in Christmas, find awareness in the attacks and demands of the buying season, and look to expand your moments of joy and peace. Here’s the question: Did I do Christmas, or did Christmas do me?

Thoughts are things. Today’s insight.

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Posted under General Observations