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July 11th, 2005
02:27 am
maybe freedom is a feeling
maybe thinking is a trap
maybe lying is a game we play
to keep ourselves intact
maybe singing is the way we're supposed to talk
maybe laughing is the way we're supposed to cry
how come dancing isn't taught at school
how come disappointment is
how come life feels so much easier
when you're not there
when will i become exactly what i have always been
when will dreams return to rouse me from my bed
what if freedom was a feeling
would you have it on your mind
would you run amok not thinking of the time
would you shout out loud that life was so sublime
setting sail so very long ago on a distant journey to find our soul
now, where did it go
so if freedom is a feeling
why am i still stuck
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February 7th, 2005
02:26 pm - What the hell is this all about anyways?
Why do people write in this thing? What's it for? What do we get out of it? Is it a substitute for something we can no longer have in reality? Is it an addiction? Is it even fun?
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February 4th, 2005
06:07 pm
I have this strange idea stuck in the back of my head and it just won't let go of me. I can't seem to shake it off. When I try to pick at it, memories of being trained to walk in a straight line through the halls toward lunch with my 2nd grade class at 11:35 AM each day come back to me. No running, no talking, no horsing around. Just march.
Once, in kindergarten, we were all sitting indian style on the carpet in front of my teacher who was telling us about some homework assignment she wanted us to do. I had no idea what it was because, at the time, I was thinking of rolling down a hill to the rhythm of Free Fallin' by Tom Petty (my dad used to play Tom Petty and Bob Dylan at home all the time). I woke up from my day dream and lifted my head up from my fist after my teacher mentioned my name. As an example to the rest of the class, she said, "Now look at Matthew, already thinking about the assignment before class has even ended!"
I still don't know what the assignment was.
In the Math and Physics building there's a reproduction of Foucault's Pendulum. It never changes its plane of oscillation, always swaying back and forth along the same line, but it appears to circle around the floor like the hand on a clock. Physicists say this is an illusion created by the rotation of the Earth about its axis.
The Earth in turn (pardon the pun) spins around the Sun, which spins around a galactic nucleus, which probably spins around something larger than our telescopes can fathom. And of course there are uncountable numbers of other planets and stars and galaxies all doing the same dance with nearly infinite expanses of emptiness between them.
The fact that a swinging bob on the end of a long wire can maintain a steady and unchanging path amid all that dizzy spinning seems crazy. How can order maintain itself so freely when it's surrounded by complete chaos?
Let's look at the bob and try to find out. It's some type of metal made up of tiny atoms held together by electromagnetic force. Those atoms are made up of a tiny center called a nucleus that electrons are said to spin around. The nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, which themselves are composed of even smaller tendencies of spinning energy called quarks, which are made up of something beyond the capability of our conceptual imagination. So the great expanses of space aren't that different from the smallest bits of matter here on Earth.
So much for the bob. What's left?
Maybe the bob isn't a bob at all. Maybe the bob is just an idea. In reality, what we call a bob is just an expression created by all that spinning, kind of like a whirl pool in a fast moving stream. So the bob is not surrounded by chaos nor is chaos surrounding the bob. They are both connected, both part of the same stream of energy.
We too must be a part of this one stream. The rhythm of energy is running through us, and in fact, is us. Why then are we constantly fighting ourselves to stand in line and behave? If a bob can do it all by itself, surely a human being is capable of the same thing. So much fuss and hard work is dedicated to training ourselves to be what we already are. And this tight-assed process of rigid training ends up confusing us all beyond belief about what we're all really supposed to be doing here.
Why not skip all the frustration and just be yourself to begin with? There are no instructions for life. There's no assembly required. We come fully operational and capable of living in complete ecstasy for an entire lifetime. It's our insistence upon following any number of various instruction booklets (and feeling guilty when we deviate from the rules laid out within them) that causes us pain.
That idea stuck in the back of my head is the guilt I feel for the assignment I'll never remember to do.
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February 2nd, 2005
05:43 pm - The Drama of it All by Alan Watts
Suppose you're God. Suppose you have all time, eternity, and all power at your disposal. What would you say to yourself after a while, "Man, get lost." It's like asking another question which amounts to supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time---and it could be anything you wanted---because you make up your mind before you go to sleep. "Tonight I'm going to dream of so-and-so." Naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys; you could listen to music such as no mortal has heard, and see landscapes beyond your wildest dreams.
And for several nights, oh maybe for a whole month of nights, you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you would begin to think, "Well, I've seen quite a bit, let's spice it up, let's have a little adventure." And you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero! And then as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things, and at some point in the game you would say, "Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don't know that I'm dreaming," and by so doing you would take the experience of the drama for complete reality. What a shock when you woke up! You could really scare yourself!
And then on successive nights you might dare yourself to experience even more extraordinary things just for the contrast when you woke up. You could , for example, dream yourself in situation of extreme poverty, disease, agony. You could, as it were, live the essence of suffering to its most intense point, and then suddely, wake up and find it was after all nothing but a dream and everything's perfectly OK.
Well, how do you know that's not what you're doing already. You reading, sitting there with all your problems, with all your whole complicated life situation, it may just be the very dream you decided to get into.
If you don't like it, what fun it'll be when you wake up!
This is the essence of drama. In drama all the people who see it know it's only a play. The proscenium arch, the cinema screen tells us, "Well, this is an illusion, it is not for real." In other words, they are going to act their parts so convincingly that they're going to have us sitting on the edge of our seats in anxiety, they're going to make us laugh, they're going to make us cry, they're going to make us feel horror. And all the time, in the back of our minds we have what Germans call hintergedanken, which is a thought way, way way in the back of our minds, that we're hardly aware of but really know all the time. In the theater, we have a hintergedanken that it's only a play. But the mastery of the actors is going to almost convince us that it's real.
And so, imagine a situation in which you have the best of all possible actors, namely God, and the best of all possible audiences ready to be taken in and convinced that it's real, namely God, and that you are all many many masks which the basic consciousness, the basic mind of the universe, is assuming. To use a verse from G.K. Chesterton:
But now a great thing is in the street
Seems any human nod
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.
It is like the mask of Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, a multiple mask which illustrates the fact that the one who looks out of my eyes and out of everyone's eyes is the same center. So, when I look at another human being, and I look straight into their eyes, I don't like doing that, there's something embarrassing about looking into someone's eyes too closely. Don't look at me that closely because I might give myself away! You might find out who I really am! And what do you suppose that would be? Do you suppose that another person who looks deeply into your eyes will read all the things you're ashamed of, all your faults, all the things you are guilty of? Or is there some deeper secret that that?
The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that's the universe looking at you. We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're looking deeply into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which, many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, on energy playing myriads of different parts. Why?
It's perfectly obvious, because if you were God, and you knew everything and were in control of everything, you would be bored to death. It would be like making love to a plastic woman. Everything would be completely predictable, completely known, completely clear, no mystery, no surprise whatever.
Look at it another way. The object of our technology is to control the world, to have a super electronic push-button universe, where we can get anything we want, fulfill any desire simply by pushing a button. You're Aladdin with the lamp, you rub it, the jinni comes and says "Salaam, I'm your humble servant, what do you wish? Anything you want."
And after a while, just as in those dreams I described, you would decide one day to forget that you were dreaming, you would say to the jinni of the lamp, "I would like a surprise." Or God, in the Court of Heaven, might turn to his vizier and say, "Oh Commander of the Faithful, we are bored." And the vizier of the Court would reply, "Oh King, live forever, surely out of the infinitude of your wisdom you can discover some way of not being bored." And the King would reply, "Oh vizier, give us a surprise." That's the whole basis of the story of the Arabian Nights.
Here was a very powerful sultan who was bored. And therefore he challenged Schecherazade to tell him a new story every night so that the telling of the tales, getting involved in adventure, would never, never end.
Isn't that the reason why we go to the theater, why we go the the movies because we want to get out of ourselves? We want a surprise; and a surprise means that you have to be other than yourself. That is to say, there has to enter into your experience some element that is not under your control.
So if our technology were to succeed completely, and everything were to be under our control, we should eventually say, "We need a new button."
" With whatever motive people worship Me,
I fulfill their desires accordingly.
People worship Me with different motives."
(Lord Krishna - The Bhagavad-Gita 4.11)
With all these control buttons, we always have to have a button labeled SURPRISE, and just so it doesn't become too dangerous, we'll put a time limit on it--surprise for 15 minute, for an hour, for a day, for a month, a year, a lifetime. That , in the end when the surprise circuit is finished, we'll be back in control and we'll all know where we are. And we'll be back in control and we'll all know where we are. And we'll heave a sigh of relief, but , after a while, we'll press the button labeled SURPRISE once more.
You will notice a curious rhythm to what I have been explaining, and this rhythm corresponds to the Hindu idea of the course of time and the way evolution works, and idea drastically different from ours. First of all, Hindus think of time as circular, as going round--look at your watch, it does round. But Westerners tend to think of time in a straight line, a one-way street, and we got that idea from Hebrew religion, and from St. Augustine.
There is a time of creation, then a course of history which lead up to final, eschatological catastrophe, the end of the world, and after that, the judgment, in which all things will be put to right, all questions answered, and justice dealt out to everyone according to his merits. And that'll be that! Thereafter the universe will be, in a way static; there will be the eternally saved and the eternally damned.
Now, many people may not believe that today, but that has been a dominating belief throughout the course of Western history, and it has had a tremendously powerful influence on our culture. But the Hindus think half of the world as going round and round for always, in a rhythm. They calculate the rounds in periods that in Sanskrit are called kalpas, and each kalpa lasts for 4,320,000 years. And so a kalpa is the period of anvantara during which the world as we know it is manifested. And it is followed by a period, also a kalpa long, 4,320,000 years, which is called a pralaya, and this means when the world is not manifested anymore.
And these are the days and nights of Brahma, the godhead. During the manvantara, when the world is manifested, Brahma is asleep, dreaming that he is all of us and everything that's going on, during the pralaya, which is his day, he's awake, and knows himself, or itself (because it's beyond sex), for who and what he/she/it is. And then, once again, presses the button--surprise! As in the course of our dreaming, we would very naturally dream the most pleasant and rapturous dreams first and then get more adventurous, and experience and explore the more venturesome dimensions of experience, in the same way, the Hindus think of a kalpa of the manifested universe manvantara as divided into four periods.
These four periods are of different lengths. The first is the longest, and the last is the shortest. They are named in accordance with the throws in the Hindu game of dice. There are four throws and the throw of four is always the best throw, like the six in our game, the throw of one, the worst throw.
Now, therefore, the first throw is called krita and the epoch, the long, long period for which the throw lasts, is call a yurga So we will translate yurga as an "epoc" and we will translate kalpa as an "eon." Now the word krita means "done," as when we say, "well done," and that is a period of the world's existence that we call the Golden Age when everything is perfect, done to perfection. When it comes to an end, we get treta-yurga that means "the throw of three," and in this period of manifestation there's an element of uncertainty, and element of insecurity an element of adventure in things. It's like a three-legged stool is not as secure as a four-legged one--you're a little more liable to be thrown off balance.
That lasts for a very long time, too, but then we get next what is called duapara-yurga. In this period, the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful, are equally balance. But, finally, there comes kali-yurga. Kalimeans "the worst throw," and this lasts for the shortest time. This is the period of manifestation in which the unpleasurable, painful, diabolical principle finally takes over--but it has the shortest innings.
And at the end of the kali-yurga, the great destroyer of the worlds, God manifested as the destructive principle Shiva does a dance called the tandava and he appears, blue-bodied with ten arms, with lightning and fire appearing from every pore in his skin, and does a dance in which the universe is finally destroyed. The moment of cosmic death is the waking up of Brahma, the creator, for as Shiva turns round an walks off the stage, seen from behind, he is Brahma, the creator, the beginning of it all again. And Vishnu is the preserver, that is to say, the going on of it all, the whole state of the godhead being manifested as many, many faces. So you see, this is a philosophy of the role of evil in life which is rational and merciful.
I (we) think God is playing with the world, has created it for his pleasure, and has created all these other beings and they go through the most horrible torments--terminal cancer, children being burned with napalm, concentration camps, the Inquisition, the horrors that human beings go through--how is that possible justifiable? We try by saying, "Well, some God must have created it; if a God didn't create it, there's nobody in charge and there's no rationality to the whole thing. It's just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. It's a ridiculous system and the only out is suicide."
But suppose it's the kind of thing I've described to you, supposing it isn't that God is pleasing himself with all these victims showing off his justice by either rewarding them or punishing them---supposing it's quite different from that. Suppose that God is the one playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm. There is no victim except the victor. All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt, are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills to go into that very situation.
Curiously enough, there is something parallel to this in Christianity. There's a passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians in which he says a very curious thing: "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not think identity with God a thing to be clung to, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation, and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross." Here you have exactly the same idea, the idea of God becoming human, suffering all that human beings can suffer, even death. And St. Paul is saying, "Let this mind be in you." that is to say, let the same kind of consciousness be in you that was in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ knew he was God.
Wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture of course, they'll say you're crazy or you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in the nut house (which is the same thing). But if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, "My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God," they'll laugh and say, "Oh, congratulations, at last you found out."
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January 31st, 2005
12:11 am - travel
Who can tell me anything about Lhasa?
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January 26th, 2005
04:20 pm - 10-year old Students Arrested Over 'Violent' Stick Figure Drawings
http://www.local6.com/news/4130302/detail.html
how many of us have never thought about killing somebody else before? are we all criminals?
the thought police are out in full force, beware.
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January 17th, 2005
06:32 pm
If math is really anything more than a myth, please tell me what the square root of 2 is.
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January 12th, 2005
07:55 pm
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
--Carl Jung
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January 10th, 2005
03:54 am - object?
If they don't already say that the toughest questions are the most familiar then they should. Who are you? Who am I?
Somebody asked me what I was doing. They caught me off guard so I thought about it. All I could come up with was, whatever I'm not.
What did the serpent say after God scolded Eve for eating from the Tree of Knowledge?
Nothing, he didn't want to spoil the show!
I guess that's the whole idea here. We shouldn't take the impossible questions seriously. It leads to all kinds of silly troubles, like religion or high school graduation ceremonies.
So I guess what's really most important to remember is not to put yourself up higher than anyone else. Don't try to be the star of the show, unless thats your role of course. Haha, well if you're playing it at all then it must just be another part of the show! So if you DO happen to try to be the star of the show, at least don't take it seriously! Unless you have to pretend to, then go ahead, but still don't take it seriously on the inside. How confusing. How wonderful.
Going back to school now feels strange. It's an epic drama. A 40,000 person cast. A couple hundred for a crew. Way over budget. And everybody is really terrible at acting. A lot of the "student" characters don't even try to hide the fact that they cheat, and even fewer of them pretend to care about anything other than what's on the test. It's easy to tell they aren't students. No imagination. Same goes for the "professors." Who are they trying to kid? I suppose the one source of pride this whole frenzy has is that almost all the characters are fully convinced of themselves. Ya know, I'm me. You're you. He's he. She's she. Steve is Steve. Jen is Jen. Students learn. Professors teach. Pick a name, any name. Then play that role.
Don't spoil all the fun. Just smile and act like a fool. You'll fit right in.
Or... not?
I'm a this. You're a that. She's one of those. He's the other thing. Where did all these nouns come from in the first place? Or a more important question: where are all these nouns going?! Obviously nowhere, they are things and things can't do anything at all. They'd need verbs for that. If I am "Matt running" when I run, what is it that is the running if it can't possibly be the me who is responsible for the separate "running"? Where did this whole "running" motion come from?? Very strange.
I am running. Running. Me. So when I run I turn into running? What the fuck.
The hardest questions are the most familiar ones. They definitely say that.
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December 29th, 2004
11:21 am - tsunami
Human death toll up to 100,000. It will rise. But they say they have found few if any dead animals... they went to higher ground, they knew it was coming. Are we that out of touch? And this was India! I thought the East was closer to the Earth. Imagine if that volcano in the Atlantic erupts and a wave heads our way. Is that a good enough reason to pay more attention to your dog?
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