How We Fool Ourselves.

The form side and the essence; when one hears that the word ‘messiah’ and the word ‘serpent’ are the same according to their numbers or that God and the Devil are parts of the same process we think the one who says it blasphemous or mad. When we hear that what confuses us is what liberates us we find it difficult to comprehend. Hearing that the tempter and the savior are one mysterious interplay; being told that the Devil is the way that the wicked see God- or to be told that the fearsome shadow has the outline of the luminous angel behind it... what are we to make of such things or the people who say them? You are not likely to find too many people saying them. You may have never heard these things.

Look at the world. Look closely. Consider the Sphinx. Consider the myths and the legends and the scriptures. Consider yourself for that matter. The deeper you go into a mystery... you go until it unravels into nothing. It’s just a presentation of jungle flowers and waving fronds with more behind them waving and beckoning. Once the mystery outside has revealed that it conceals nothing, the mind is immediately drawn within; this is not to say that many wonders and mysteries do not exist in nature but it would still take a particular eye to see them. The beauty of a young woman, or a woman of any age who has kept that beauty- or the eye that can see beauty regardless; what does it worship in it’s attraction for it; in it’s attention upon it? What does it think its desire is composed of? This beauty pulls the essence forth to create more form. Endless forms are created by the desire for forms. The world is composed of forms. The artifice of nature and the artifice of the mind upon nature in adapting the same substance into all the infinite varieties that we see, goes on and on, over and over- always making more. In all of this making, what is the result? The result is the re-occurring mortality of the form. We suffer in our desire for the possession of forms and we suffer from the loss of them. We suffer from our disappointment in them. They are dissolving even as we perceive them.

Is this what you want? How about this? What about this? Try this, taste this. Hunger has memory. Imagination creates ever new ideas of forms for the enjoyment of them. Tempting? Is it what it was advertised to be? If they are disappearing and fading then what has the mind or the heart gained in its experience of them? Sorrow and loss... Poignant regret... temporary happiness and disappointment... the expense of the self on behalf of experience. Wisdom may come and it may not.

Why are these people fighting, wounding, treacherous and lying, conspiring... dreaming of what? What is the object of these efforts and what is the result?

It’s a tricky thing and no mistake. It seems that the key is in knowing what to desire because you will surely get it, sooner or later. There is also the consideration of what you are willing to do and give up for the possession of what you seek. The whole world is going in a certain direction. You can see it everywhere. You can see the effect of it in the eyes of those you pass in the street. You can observe the eyes of those you pass at their every age as they move through time. The power of the world is strong. The hypnotic cloud maintains the drama of minds magnetized by dust. It seems real.

Things glitter and dance in the music. Goblets appear with fantastic shapes emerging from them. Jewels and gold and beautiful forms emerge and they turn and catch the light and they are jungle flowers and waving fronds.

How does one stand against the immensity of the cities and the omnipresent media and the countless forms and distractions that wave like the fronds? They call your name like the sirens on the rocks. They call you to war and to business and they call you to make your mark upon the attention of the world. Ships and planes traverse the world into all of the cultures and marketplaces. All of the movies and books and songs... they rouse and inflame and fire the imagination with dreams of accomplishment that accomplishes nothing but more of the same. It is like the idea that business must always make more money, that there should always be bigger markets and more customers so that things can grow bigger and bigger. GROWTH! ...More and more and more. There can never be enough. Those who understand what is going on are judged insane. Those who define and explain what is going on are called enemies of the state.

The wars of business and fashion, the wars of the elements and the competition of colors and the conflict of perceptions lead naturally to actual war. The arguments in the mind and the arguments in speech over conflicts of perception inevitably find their way to the battlefield. Commerce demands war. Merchants and bankers require it.

For those who are of and in this world there is one set of priorities and for those who are passing through it there is another. The hard men and women of the world cannot be convinced of anything but that the world must be shaped according to their needs. You cross them at your peril. Just as one who is caught up in the thrall of a nightmare will cry out and lash about them; so will those caught up in the dreams of merchants and banks and forms lash out from the fear of loss.

All of the events of this world and any world take place within a single mind. This mind resolves everything in it according to its relationships. Everything has a destiny. Do not think that some portion of the hard men and women of the world do not know about this. They do.

Some say the world is shit and you should have nothing to do with it. Some say we are all sinful. Some say good and evil are just constructs of the mind. Some say this and some say that. Some say you must surrender and some say you must strive. Whatever they say, here you are. So, where are you going and what do you want? William Blake said, “He who binds to himself a joy, does the winged life destroy, but he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternities sunrise.”

There are differences between saints and prophets and sages and mystics, just as there are between burglars and armed robbers and murderers; between wholesale and retail and second hand. Those who know very little, if anything, about these things believe that they are in a position to define and judge them. Often the hard men and women of the world point to those who would point the way ‘out’ and measure their behavior against standards of conformity; against dogma and doctrine and whatever. If they understood such things they would have little to say. They sneer at these things because the message in them compromises their justifications for the things they do. They are exposed by these things, so they make the truth an outlaw. They incite mobs and manufacture laws. All of what they do is to insure their own profit. The truth is your enemy if you are the enemy of truth.

So many systems of government and commerce have evolved out of the efforts of those who have engineered them for their own profit and sometimes to improve conditions for everyone. We all need to eat and somehow we need to get to the food and all of the things that contribute to the amenities of existence; therefore the markets and all of the shake and bake industries of form making and all of the industries that work within the many operations that spin in the realm of temporary wonder.

We fool ourselves and we fool each other for many different reasons that all have to do with what we think we want and the possibility that someone may keep us from it or get there before we do or take it away from us. The urgency and impatience of life are actual forces just like the invisible entities that haunt the highways and feed on the accidents, that haunt the battlefields and feed on the suffering and the blood, like the spirits in the bars that live in the bottles and the minds of the drunks, like the creatures that feed on the sexual fire and fluids that are the fuel of existence for them.

We are not who we think we are and things are not what we think they are and we will suffer for just as long as it takes us to find that out.