Sunbathing on the Rocks of Time.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there and just because you can doesn’t mean it is. We depend on what we see and hear. But we don’t actually see and we don’t actually hear. So we survive according to the accuracy of our assumptions until a lack of attention, a misperception, excess, want or attrition finally put our garments back into the Earth. Time to call your tailor.

All day, every day, it goes on. Reports of misadventure, loss, betrayal and the pursuit of booty in all its forms, organize themselves as signposts along the highway. This happened here. That happened there. It’s obvious and it repeats and repeats. There’s nothing strange about it. What is strange is the way it gets understood. What is strange is the way we explain it to ourselves and stand as a thing apart from our observations until it happens to us.

It’s fascinating to watch it go by and to see its reflection in the mirror as if the mirror were a thing apart. In some ways people are very fortunate and terribly unlucky at the same time. They are fortunate that they don’t see the real face of what is taking place. It’s kind of like the difference between The Virgin Mary and Smashin Tara. Things are hidden from us, like the journey of your personal hamburger from the cow to your plate. But that’s just a part of the journey. It started before that. It started in the grass and before that in the sun. I wonder what happened before that? It continued on after as well. The same hamburger may go on forever. There’s this maxim about energy being created and destroyed but it doesn’t have to be written out here to be true.

The unlucky part is living in a fixed equation with the idea that somehow chance and hope and dreams will conspire to let you out through the side door before the notes come due. Just about every human mind; what is incorrectly defined as a mind, thinks that it will avoid the common fate. In the meantime this mind moves ceaselessly in all directions away from reality and at the same time compromises the salvation of its host while in the very presence of what saves it. The fix is in, has always been, yet this mind works relentlessly to destroy what is beautiful beyond its comprehension for the precise reason that it is beyond its comprehension.

Philosophers have tied it into sailor’s knots in the struggle to be free.

Dreamers yearn after half formed pictures that keep rearranging themselves before the image can come into focus. The post man comes to the house with a package for the man who moved with no forwarding address. Angels appear in disguise and are shown the door. We make phone calls and cannot tell that anyone is listening because they do not reply while the information is being processed. Later someone appears in an empty room and says, “You rang?”

Frustration storms down the street enraged that someone somewhere wouldn’t provide them with what they wanted because they thought there was more than one will at work. They thought there could be more than one will.

Time passes. Perspectives widen. Perspectives narrow. Tunnels to nowhere end nowhere. Empty meadows go about their business. Humanity presses itself together in confined spaces. Millions add to millions and most of the world lives in a tight and unpleasant embrace. Heat builds. This is simple physics. Pressure makes heat. The whole nature of explosives and resistance, the science of electricity and those parts of the chains of events, the parts we can see in the little we understand about the laws of various applications are presenting irrefutable evidence of what we won’t accept and refuse to see. It’s a puzzle. It’s a real puzzle when what you think you want comes up against the reality of what you are.

Nothing is something. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something is nothing. Someone once said that the key to serenity is to cut down on useless craving.

We are most exposed when we feel denied the thing we want. We don’t know who our enemies are and we certainly can’t recognize our friends. We are easily led and a liability to follow. One of the difficulties that a child experiences in learning to walk is that it starts out its life seeing things upside down. In learning to walk they turn their vision around; think old time cameras. Think of nature’s reflecting surfaces. There are powerful forces hiding in plain sight. We just don’t know how to use them.

Advertising is a revealing thing. Note how often a product is presented as being God? Note how often God is presented as the answer to an appetite? The message isn’t wrong. The product is just mislabeled and not the item you intrinsically want. The outside is claiming to be the inside. Here is why the world ALWAYS goes astray. The nature of the manifest world is to deceive you into believing that what you want is outside. You’ve got a long walk ahead of you, or maybe not, but probably as long as it takes to stop walking anyway.

The world isn’t wrong to be the way it is. It’s doing exactly what it is supposed to do. You can’t have a movie. You can’t have an epic drama without a stage to have it on. You can’t have it without deception because without deception you can’t get sucked into it. At no point is anything going to be profitable except to find this out. At no point will anyone have anything worth having that will put an end to them wanting to have something until they put an end to wanting.

Just as the answer is simple, so is the procedure. Simple, in fact, is the answer. All through history, certain wise men and women presented themselves as fools for a very good reason. The answer is not to want anything. The answer is to value nothing. Nothing is extremely valuable. Who possesses nothing is rich beyond counting. Quietude. But we don’t want quietude do we? The saddest tragedy is the idea that we will miss out on something. As far as that goes you are more right than you know.

Controlling anything begins with understanding that everything is under control. You experience the downside when you contend against this. Any problem anyone thinks they have is based on this alone. Do not contend. Suspending thought is a key ingredient but it isn’t the end of the matter. Awareness has to become aware of itself. Since awareness is in place, whether you are aware or not, it is always there whether you are there or not. Awareness expands and deepens in relation to your awareness of it. Some things are past description and this is one of them.

There’s nothing complicated about this. It is the simplicity that provokes the mind to elaborate on it and then produces a confusion of thoughts followed by weights and measures, followed by angels dancing on the head of a pin, followed by philosophies and technologies that make the argument that you must continue on through the tunnel to nowhere until you have warmed and illuminated the space outside you.

Quo vadis? ...And my favorite- cui bono? Well, sooner or later right? Of course, sooner or later only applies in the dimension of time but, what the heck, it’s all relative. You’ll note the applause sign just lit up for our studio audience so, give yourselves a big hand.