Loss and Recovery in the Stream of Life

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

May your noses always be cold and wet.

This posting is for all of you who have lost someone in recent times.

Another strange morning for me; they're all pretty strange these days. They're all pretty good too. Most of my mornings are influenced by the dreams that precede them. Those are also pretty strange. This morning I came to after a dream with a young lion. It just kind of appeared in an otherwise interpersonal scenario between me and people I've never met. I seldom dream about people I know. This lion was following me around and we would roughhouse a little. I was always aware that the lion had a certain power to harm me but it was nothing overt, just the sense of potential. It was around a year old and I was a mixture of delighted and apprehensive that it had keyed on me. I didn't know what it meant and I was aware of that. In any case, I woke up feeling the way I remember feeling years ago, when I would awaken to a world I hadn't had all that much to do with yet and there was this sense of all that possibility and promise that was out there somewhere. It's an odd thing when you suddenly find yourself feeling in ways you had forgotten over the passage of time.

Yet another wonderful person has passed on. There seems to be a lot of that recently. My friend David lost his Svetlana. Jabar and Marilyn lost Nastatia, Homer lost Frank. Esteban lost his mother. I lost Lily, who was more of a person than a pet to me and a teacher as well. Others have had pet friends departing of late too. It seems to me that we now approach a time of trial and tribulation on a grand scale. I do not expect the trial and tribulation to be that present in the lives of those who are more rooted in spiritual nature. I expect it more for those rioting over plastic garbage in big stores and those beating old people into the ground, sometimes killing them. I do expect some trial among us but that is a necessary testing. You can't grow strong without testing and trial. It doesn't happen any other way. So I think some of those who are leaving us now are a portion of a particular wave of departures. They are going to the bright side to await our eventual passing on as well.

This coming winter is going to prove to be off the charts in terms of change and transformation; fantastic change for those embracing the higher arc of it and devastating change for those magnetized by dust and the glimmer of fool's gold behind plastic wrap. It is as if there are two spirals going in opposite directions and pulling away from each other, as two separate planes of existence come more and more into view.

I do not subscribe to the idea that there will be global devastation or that most of us will be gone in a short time. I don't subscribe to most of what I hear being predicted by people. I don't know in a pretty deep way and that keeps me away from the prevaricating Ouija board of the susceptible side of the mind. It's enough for me to come into each day, looking to be informed and shown something within the events and conditions of what comes and goes within and without.

I find it amusing that I can make tentative plans to do certain things, while the whole planet teeters on a knife edge. It's times like this that a faith in the divine is a greater possession than anything I could imagine being in its place. I hunger for the qualities of the ineffable because of the ever present evidence of my shortcomings. I know they are kept in place now for a reason, even though I have seen a real diminishment in them over recent months. Some things are hard to lose and it isn't always about ourselves what causes them to remain. Sometimes they are a part of a larger drama and sometimes, often, they are for the purpose of demonstration.

Tying yourself to the ineffable comes with a certain order of complexity, until you can grasp the essential simplicity. We're condemned to make efforts on our own behalf, when the whole point of relying on the ineffable is to be free of that. Old habits die hard. The old and persistent, personal self that owns them, dies hard because we labor through a continuum of time. Time and gravity are siblings. Time varies due to location and perceptions. It's one thing watching a movie. It's another thing being in line at the DMV. It's one thing at a rave and another thing in a prison cell. It can vary in both directions, depending on the person involved; two different people in the same classroom, where one has a deep interest in the subject and the other has none. You can extend this concept on your own.

Love is the deepest and most primary generator of interest and that is why Love should be your singular and most important companion. In the deepest and most enduring part of ourselves, we are indistinguishable from Love. This is an extremely important thing to grasp. A part of us is separated from another part of us by veils that are composed of self interest, false self awareness and shortcomings we have embraced, to move through what we have allowed to become familiar to us. You might say we are hanging out with the wrong crowd. The terrible irony is that we sacrifice the priceless for the temporary and tawdry ...and fear... fear and its friends are a big part of the root cause. Some of those friends are; insecurity, uncertainty, lack of faith, AKA- doubt and you can probably extend that on your own too, because there are others.

People who dabble in philosophy and metaphysics are like part time lovers. Most of them arrive at one place or another with a relative comprehension of how things work and at that point they personalize it. Many of them like Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Hume and other word jugglers, create hopeless morasses of confusion. They'll have some grasp of a few things, along the lines of; just enough information to be dangerous and then they'll become pimps for their own celebrity, sunbathing in the admiration of their fellows and those fools who measure their own value and intelligence, according to their ability to expound upon and interpret them. All of them go to the grave, knowing less than they did when they started.

Some things you can't dabble in and be a part time lover about because you get exactly what you put into it. If you put your whole self into it that is precisely what you will get back, in more ways than one. You will also get your whole self, if you catch my drift. Certain sciences and fields of inquiry, as well as entities, where devotion is the measure of success ...are attended by angels who test the sincerity of the applicant. Without certain credentials at the onset (or gaining them as you go), you will only get so much and curiously, the majority of those, assume they got it all. There is ALWAYS something deeper than what you found and something deeper than that and that and that and that. This is what my friend, Mehemet Karagoz said and I doubt you can find much about him, if anything at all. He once lifted the top off of a mountain to make a point to some caliph or other. Once he was kidnapped by bandits in the mountains and he told the head of the gang that if he would release him then all would be well but if he did not release him he would be gone in the morning and the bandit chief would die at the hands of one of his own men before the next full moon. So it was.

There are people like Mehemet walking around today but you wouldn't know them unless they felt like getting your attention, which might happen if, let's say... you got their attention. I've got a certain amount of experience in respect of this so I can assure you it happens. In my experience, no one gets very far, in real terms, without the good offices of someone further on the way, so it behooves you to get in their way and that is easily done, or done with great difficulty, depending on how you understand it. Most of us see within the confines of a limited bandwidth. That is not the case with everyone. There are some who see us much more clearly than we see ourselves and others ...and there are things we can do to attract their attention. Sincere aspiration is one of them and you can also extend the list on your own.

There is a reason why all true teachers are possessed of a natural and true humility and that is not because they know it is the proper way to present themselves. It is because of what they have encountered and been shown. One would be hard pressed to be otherwise, afterward. None of us with any real talent, accomplish what we do on our own. We may have earned the right to do it but we don't actually do it. We have learned to get out of the way. There is only one real teacher and that teacher is highly selective about who hosts the presence. The classic relationship of Krishna and Arjuna should be taken for the cosmic guide. Of all the things we read and comprehend, no matter how much of that there may be, there is always far, far more that is unsaid and still to be comprehended. The journey does not end. It may plateau for a time but it does not end. I know there are those who become way stations and who may occupy positions for hundreds of millions of years but... you can extend on that concept also on your own.

For me, the highest and most desirable possibility is to be a friend of God and to have his/her favor. Each relationship with the divine involves things and conditions peculiar to it. You may not know that God often travels and walks about. Often he does this in the company of his friends and a great deal of teaching and fellowship occurs at these times. Can you imagine what it must be like to be named a friend of God? Can you imagine! Can you imagine what kind of a friend God is, in respect of what you know about friendship? Since this is a possibility, why would anyone be in pursuit of anything else? That is a real definition of insanity and... anything and everything you seek can be conferred on you by the divine, including all kinds of things you have no knowledge of and including the awareness of the PROPER USE AND ENJOYMENT OF THEM, without which, most of the time, it is a curse. Why is anyone doing anything else.

People have opinions on Rosicrucians who have never met one and there are many that pass themselves off as this or that. It's unlikely that a real one will claim to be one, except under certain circumstances for a 'very good reason'. People have opinions on different teachers and their relative position in respect of other teachers, without ever having met them. It is altogether possible that the greatest teacher of the last hundred years was someone's mother and no one even knows her name. The greatest teacher may be washing dishes in a diner and moving from one restaurant to another, or on to a warehouse or a library, serving as he goes. The idea of celebrity is lost on them. They know who the real celebrity is and have some idea of how that celebrity conducts itself, which is why The One is so choosy about where the presence goes. There is nothing more agonizing than to lose the presence, once you have experienced it. Sometimes this loss is not a punishment but only serves to accelerate the aspiration and longing to make it permanent because- and trust me on this- nothing compares, not even close. You can't even see the next thing from there.

For all those who have lost someone recently (and this is not limited to what we call death), or at any time, Know this, all separation of this kind is temporary. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. There are bright and shining worlds of reunion and that should be further inspiration to do our best. Of course we will fail time and time again but that is not the true marker of our enduringsuccess.


End Transmission.......

Visible sings: ♫ Listening to God in the Morning ♫
'Listening to God in the Morning' is track no. 13 of 13 on Visible's 2007 album
'The Sacred and The Profane'
Lyrics (pops up)



There will be radio show Sunday night.


In the spirit of this post, perhaps some of you might like to read this one. I will be reading it on the radio show tomorrow night, without a particular word that reoccurred a few times in the print version (grin). "Thank you for that", says James Jancik.