The first thing I find myself confronted with is the absurd beauty of the world. Virtually everything I can see, whether natural or man made, is remarkably beautiful. My eye rejoices in all the phenomenon of day and night.
Remarkably, this aesthetic pleasure instantly corresponds to a joy in my heart. When I see a cloud formation or a budding tree or a dog or a cat or a bottle of febreeze, my eye and my heart rejoice in tandem. The deeper, the longer I look, the greater my pleasure and my joy.
The next thing I find myself aware of is the novelty, the strangeness, and the dynamism of life. Life is always new and different, on all sides, both my self and my reality change constantly. Life is therefore an eternal fountain of novelty, of newness, and therefore of excitement. Life is dynamic, it is ever in motion.
I also find life to have a very high content of meaning and purpose and intelligence. My day to day life consists of experiences that are highly refined by awareness. That is, I listen to music that is the product of a human soul’s imagination; I read a paper that is the interpretation of human events by human minds, the clothes I wear began as thoughts in some human’s brain, even the hair on my head is shaped by human thought.
The way I experience the world is equally molded by the mighty forces of the human mind. Everywhere I turn I feel enveloped in human thought. I find this comforting, like being in a womb, I find myself absorbed in the collective human experience. I am never, ever alone. At any time and in any place, a million lives touch me and I touch a million lives.
And so at this point I have found life to be beautiful and novel, but also largely meaningful. I also find life characterized by experiences of unity and relationship. In a million ways each day I touch the lives of other living things, and nearly always these experiences are positive. A shared smile, a gentle word, a hug, a confessed fear, a comforting gesture, or an intimate session of physical lovemaking… these things are not anomalies or rarities but the very bread and butter of life.

I find this frankly remarkable. At each moment I feel like the whole human enterprise, and thus the whole universal process, has conspired at unfathomable expense to provide me with a life that is full of beauty, meaning, companionship, and yes, love, love in abundance.
I have known love every day of my life, and each day I breathe love in from those around me and give it back to those that I can, and this I find to be the very meaning and purpose and essence of the life experience.
I find myself naturally empathic. Ever sense I was a child I understood, or felt, that the pain of another was akin to and fundamentally connected with my own pain. I wept at sad stories, I wept at real life, and I wept for the suffering of others. I was born with this tendency…
I observe that life is full of play, and compassion and fun, and tenderness. Animals play. They care for their young. They exhibit cooperation and tenderness to one another. I find that people come together, cooperate, and collaborate to produce better futures for themselves and their loved ones.
I see that there is much sadness in life, and that even our most cherished stories and dreams can be shattered in an instant by the random acts of a capricious universe.
And yet, I find this somewhat exhilarating. I consider all the movies we watch, the games we play… we correlate danger with interest, excitement and fun. All novels, all movies, all fantasies and all stories seem to involve some form of danger, some threat of violence or death. We thrive on it.
I consider that I would not choose to play a safe and non threatening game like, say, Tetris, nor would I play Pac man without the ghosts. Without risk, without uncertainty, success and attainment lose their pleasure.
And so I intuit that in some way, even those aspects of life that most frighten me, most confuse me and most threaten me, nevertheless seem to meet a fundamental personal need… to be in some strange way what I want, what I need.
I find my life to be so full of wonder and beauty and goodness and mercy that I am simply unable to stifle my natural reaction of praise and gratitude. I am moved to tears and shaking by the simple pleasure of my life, and in these moments my heart naturally cries out “thank you god! I love you god! Thank you for all of this!”
And so I see that reality is overwhelmingly beautiful. I see that it is full of love and relationship and meaning and novelty and therefore excitement. I see that even its most terrifying facets correspond to aspects of my internal being or self/soul/mind and so even those frightening parts of life in some way meet my needs or desires.
And I find that I am naturally inclined to believe that the suffering of others, and therefore there pleasure, is intimately important to me. That we are not separate, divided beings but rather we are all self, and we must care for ourselves and each other…
And I acknowledge that my own natural inclination or impulse is to praise god and thank it … when I say god it is a blind articulation, a grasping at an unfathomable concept. I am thanking the universe, thanking reality, thanking chance, thanking the present moment, thanking myself and thanking all the people that contributed to making me what I am and my life what it is. Unable to summarize all this, I say “god! Thank you god!”
I find again and again that truth in any mental or cognitive sense is meaningless. I have abandoned the search for truth. I have abandoned the belief in reason, rationality, philosophical deduction, etc… now I search instead for a direct perception of mystery, and an appreciation of beauty, and an immediacy of experience.
I seek not answers, nor respect, nor the thrill of “outwitting” another in a philosophical debate, or “disproving” a rival concept.
Rather I seek to each day cultivate love in my heart, and to express love mindfully to those around me at every opportunity.
I seek to embrace my will to life and make peace also with my will to death.
I accept with open eyes the vastness of my shamanic landscape. I have become accustomed to my human capability to move between worlds and realities and to access a broad spectrum of consciousness modalities. I have explored at some length the strange worlds beyond the waking life, and I have found that these worlds too share the characteristics of beauty, meaning, wonder, joy, even companionship.
However, I never find answers. And so I stop looking. I am a visionary with no quest, a shaman with no destination in mind.
I have abandoned magical techniques in favor of one single operation, called the open handed gesture. The principle is that by emptying oneself of desire, expectation, entitlement, etc, one creates a space into which flows an endless stream of pleasure, love and joy.

It is effortless. One simply makes of oneself a place where goodness can flow. Then one enjoys, truly enjoys, with unbridled and unsuppressed wonder and thanksgiving, the endless parade of pleasure that proceeds from this decision.
I seek to become simple, like a child, and to soften my words so that none shall be offended. I seek practical invisibility, potency in my ability to change the world but obscurity also.
I believe strongly in the Taoist principle of non action. Recognizing the unity of my self and the cosmic expanse, I simply allow the world to do my work for me. Vast forces conspire to fulfill my needs and fleeting desires. Nearly always I have exactly what I most want, but part of this is learning to want and appreciate what you have.
I recognize dancing as a supreme magical and shamanic act. A single heartfelt dance dwarfs in importance the most monumental achievement of mental inquiry.
I believe that love is a sacred thing, an important thing, and that it is as close as I can find to a universal ruler by which to measure the importance, or truth, of a given thing. Love makes me believe impossible things. If I am in love, I believe in past lives, in souls, in heaven and eternity.
And I think that love, being illogical and irrational by its nature, is nevertheless a superior state of mind to loveless rationality. I believe everything is miraculous. I do not state this as an opinion to be defended; it is simply an observation about the state of my existence.
I do not believe in love, miracles, souls and god as a result of an inquiry or particular train of thought. I simple accept that my nature is what it is, namely that I am by nature a loving, god worshiping being who is fundamentally moral, pious, and erotic.
Try as I might, I am unable to divorce myself from the momentary realization of extreme intelligence, benevolence, meaning and glory in the world. In all things I see cause for wonder and thanksgiving.
Even my own suffering is dear to me.
All that we endure is a small price to pay for the fleeting illusion of independence which we now enjoy. But we are all waves cresting on a sea of Self.
I rejoice in this. I rejoice in my finitude and my infinity, in my mortality and my eternity. I embrace my darkness and my light. I revel in my evil even as I affirm the ultimate triumph of good.
I believe the universe is fundamentally psychedelic, which means not only strange and trippy, but mind manifesting.
All of this is merely extrapolation on three central beliefs
1. life is good 2. life is mysterious 3. life is unified
Well, that’s all for now.
I guess I just wish you all a wonderful day. I hope you all find a richness of meaning and love in your lives, and I hope not a day goes by that doesn’t inspire you to give thanks and feel joy. I wish for all who live to have their eyes open to the magnificent beauty and wonder of creation, and for all to realize that the perception of this beauty and this wonder is something infinitely beyond the realm of thought or concept.
you and I may not agree on anything but there is no reason we can’t sit together and watch the sunrise.
Enjoy the ride.
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Everything I post is fiction.
Edited by Moonshoe (06/23/07 08:23 PM)
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