Dialogue Part One: Reaching Out To Say Hello
Alright. I have a confession to make. A normal, slightly ironic, very obvious, completely understandable sidenote about myself. For as much as I love thinking about all of these things, you know, life stuff: where I “am” in the continual journey of my being, how I relate to others, how I am the same as they are, how I am loved by an awesome and brilliant creative love that suffuses and informs all things...I forget this fact. A lot. I have days all the time where I feel anxious, agitated, bored, lonely, where I wonder how I got to where I am, waiting for my life to really begin, and frustrated by the lack of other people to communicate with. Frustrated that I manifest my ideas in an intense way, and that this energy has often alienated me from others. It doesn't matter how many times you say, “no really, I'm normal I swear,” (actually you'd be surprised how quickly the law of diminishing returns kicks in on that one, hah) once you open your mouth and start talking about Looooove and Liiiight and Muuuuusic...!, most of the time you just come off sounding like a pretentious ass. Worse, when I do find anyone who is already looking (or willing to consider looking) at things this way, it is often times the case that in my excitement! and exhuberence! at opening a line of communication!! with them that I will come across as just a little...too much, and basically give them that weird vibe of wanting to get way too close, too fast, and THAT WILL BE THAT. Add 'em to the “not comfortable hanging out with you anymore dude” list and call it a day. Because I am looking for the best in people, and because I essentially see no difference between myself and others, I mean not really, it is extremely easy and natural for me to want to treat everyone as my long-lost companions, as friends, or even perhaps as one would a lover, whereas the reality is that I may have just met them and only known them a short time. I get too close to people way too quickly because I do not see the need for the normal progression of relationship-building experience that usually occurs. I kinda just love everyone for whoever they are—a fact which does not make my connections with individuals less valid, but rather, I believe, in fact MORE valid, more on that later—and once I attempt to convey this fact, and the reasons behind it, however subtly or good-naturedly, it tends to freak people out. I mean, understandably. I'm also a professional knife sharpener, and I have a penchant for lurking in parking garages late at night playing Bach sonatas on flute cause of the acoustics. I figure I'm unique, but more or less extremely normal, extremely me. Other people however have lots of random stuff to point to about me and go, “dude. Are you for reaL?”
Therefore, as you might imagine, I have had to hide my true feelings of warmth and wellbeing from many people, and surely I have been met with mixed sucess, often allowing myself to seem much too eager to connect, to the point of what I'm sure looks a lot like desperation from the perspective of those I am engaging with. However, it is only by allowing myself to reach out towards other consciousness, acknowledging it as my equal, and more than this, seeing no real boundary between where one person's feelings and emotions end and my own begin, that I am able to learn and experience the kind of oneness, the kind of delight and bouyancy of my own spirit that I'm really seeking after. Hear me out for a minute, yo. I just really love people. I am, admittedly, too much for most people to accept at face value. No one wants a heavy emotional commitment with someone they've only just met. And I tend to want to commit to an honest attempt at nothing less than true spiritual communion with nearly everyone I meet.
Sigh. I need an aside. This is getting a little discouraging.
Aside: In school I was taught never to write using the first person. Rather, I should say I was scolded, strongarmed, and forced by a gaggle of badly-dressed mobsters posing as teachers who threatened to fail me and thus doom my future prospects for a fulfilling life if I ever should dare to question their instructions or chose not to take their word as doctrine—never use 'I', was the rule. Why not, I would argue. Isn't my entire life a subjective experience, wholly unique to me? By extension then, everything I know must be an “I” thing. How can I write about things that I know or don't know unless I'm the one writing about them? So really, just about everything that was written by anyone is in the first person...cause they wrote it! That's just the way our lives work. So it's not like if I refer to myself in the equation I suddenly give it away and remind my dear readers that what they are reading was written by someone else. I always just figured they were smart enough to fingure that out for themselves. But, my erudite overlords remained firm. “It's in the book,” they would remind me. “It says right here that this is how to teach the curriculum. You see, it cannot be questioned! It's in print, for God's sake! There can be no first person in an analytical essay! And stop turning in 87 pages when I asked for three, damn it all!”
“Well, who wrote the book?” I would ask in response. “Surely someone must have. Surely they expressed these letters of the academic law based on some understanding they had gained for themselves. I know it was they who wrote this nonsense down in the first place. Or did this all just exist long before people ever began to practice using written language? Is that just the way it is? Isn't the critical thinking skillset you're endeavoring to teach me by way of writing these stupid essays made real by my efforts to question and understand the Machiavellian nightmare you're putting me through? I'm only 15 for crying out loud!” And to reinforce my point I grew fond of playing the Bruce Hornsby song through a small set of speakers and a portable CD player.
Bruce, along with my CD player, was often impounded by the one-dimentional blaggards. They could not understand my explanation of their doublethink and labeled me, as so many do when confronted with new ideas, a heretic. Public school is a cruel and confusing place for anyone to grow up in. One must learn to fake the required odiousness and banality required to succeed, all the while keeping the real life lessons to oneself. We are therefore required to develop two distinct selves: one for us, and one for the world. So it is that we begin our indoctrination into the perversity of this life. But I digress. We were speaking of my continued desire to break the damnable fourth wall and reach out directly to my readers. We were talking about the blessed quality of the first person.
When I say, “I feel this or that,” then someone else has the opportunity to say, “well gee, me too,” or “nope, no way, Bud.” Either way, a dialogue has begun, and in doing so, it is my own projected sense of self that is the foothold with which we can know one another, and therefore know ourselves. We're all just mirrors, after all. To make any attempt to remove this essential quality from the equation is a folly. As I write, and say, “often times I feel sad,” anyone reading my words is then given an opportunity to think, “I may be able to relate to this other person, as I, too, have felt this way in my own life, at times.” There is nothing wrong with writing about one's experiences from the perspective of one's own experience. And as I write to you now, that I am lonely, that I am frustrated, that I am disappointed in many aspects of my social experiences, disappointed in both the lack of critical thinking I note in many of my peers and in our collective cultural mode of expression that often marginalizes and dismisses real emotion and experience as “crazy” and “not normal,” if it in any way strays from the social party line—a common and troubling perception that sees love as a ball and chain, an obligation, a trap, and not the wild and unexpected gift that it is, a thrilling raison d'etre—so anyway, here I speak to you of all this, and you are then able to take my words, think them over, and decide for yourself if they ring true with your own experience. Or not. So it is that our words become time travelers, so they reach out beyond time and space to carry meaning straight through the hearts and bones of all that know them. So we talk now, candidly, in earnest. Though separated as we may be by great distance, by the ages, our hearts know one another well.
I am writing to you, whoever you are, for I am not with you now, but the message I have is every bit as alive now as it would be had we met “by chance” out there in the world. The message is an opportunity for you, my beloved human brother or sister, to take to heart or discard completely as you will. I believe it is a gift to be allowed to choose to feel empathy with another being, to hear their voice and choose to stand with them in spirit, to feel as they feel, this “other” consciousness which perhaps is not so “other” after all, to know them by their experience and love them, and love oneself, by the message they bring. Surely, we have a responsibility to love, but that love is an endless source of inspiration and joy, and never a weakness, as our twisted society would teach us. Our love is empowering, freeing: a holy, vibrant, living thing.
I love you, that's a fact. Perhaps a better means of expressing this love is to say, we love ourselves. A profound togetherness: we love ourself. Though I may have never met you, who am I to say that our paths have not crossed and will never do so? Are they not crossing even now? Do we not live in a world where every energetic intention ripples outward to affect all things? Why attempt to limit the reality of what is with a learned prejudice of what “cannot possibly be!” and whose influence reeks of a divide-and-conquer mentality? Why do we do this to ourselves? We are all made of the same thing, part of the same thing, part of one another, moving forever forward and we have the opportunity to choose to align our intentions with this phenomenon—the thing we call “love”—or to reject it and go our “own” way—walking instead a path of false separateness, fear, and death. That's it. We get a choice to make, every instant of every moment, and there are only two real choices. Yes, I know life is more complicated than that. Yes, it's not always easy. As with all things, it gets easier as it gets more familiar. Just as taking a life is an abomination that generally results in feelings of sickness and horror, yet over time settles into a numbness that barely registers—here's looking at you Luca Brasi—so too giving life, in the form of kindness, generosity, respect, and openness towards others gets easier to do. Not by registering it less, as is the case for fearful actions, but by registering and feeling more our own capacity to enrich and bless one another's lives. Giving people your genuine love feels good, because it triggers in them a response of gratitude and reverence. And that shit is potent AF.
Yes, I know it doesn't always do this. And I know that it feels terrible to put oneself out there, to care for and love others and receive nothing, or receive even negative feedback, for one's effort. It sucks to write letters and never get one in return. It sucks to arrange a meeting and be stood up. It sucks to be ignored, to be viewed as needy, to be seen as dramatic, desparate, or unwilling to acknowledge another person's negative views of reality. How many times have you seemed to other people to be foolish, to be a dreamer, to have your head in the clouds and no basis in the cold, hard reality that is this world? How often do parents, teachers, policemen, bosses, collegues, friends, spouses or lovers say to us that we are off-base, that we are wrong, that the way in which we view the world is wrong? How many times does it take until we learn not to open our mouths? How many times until we start believing it, first with our minds, then, sadly, with our hearts? We are not wrong. We never were. Sure, we had ideas that were different. Sure, they were a little weird. We've all been weird before. We've all experimented, or wanted to. We all seek the same thing. To learn: about ourselves, our world, and the connection we all share with it and each other. We want to love and be loved. We want to be happy. We all do. It's only from a state of depression and repression that we begin to become numb, that we lose our hope and stop caring about ourselves and one another. Sometimes it's almost impossible not to react in this way. But it's never too late to find redemption. We are all worth it. So many people, billions of us—imagine!—are born into lives, born into homes where fear, brutality, and hatred are given freedom to shape and teach them what end is up. They learn to hate themselves, hate one another; they come from abuse, and turn to abuse, whether that be of drugs and other substances, of themselves, their peers, or of their perceived place in the world. No one has the power quite like each of us, to choose how we see the world. We can talk about it, talk about discrimination, about fear, about another magical way to live our lives, free from all the pain and suffering we've known for so long, describe what hope looks and feels like. We say love: love, the word, is pointless. Just as Rene Megritte warned us with his Deception of Images, “this is not a [real] pipe”, love—the word—is a cheap, rather one-dimentional imitation. Remember, love is not a word. Perceived as such, it cannot be known by anyone. Love, as we do know it here in this place, this shared reality we inhabit, is a feeling. It is a want, a memory, a desire, a great relief, a safety, a possibility, an open doorway, a comforting warmth, a togetherness, love is a surprise, a passion, a fierce companion—patient and kind, sure, ok, but powerful, tremendous and awesome in its execution—love is final and lasting in the sweep of its influence; love is a tide, a great wave, bottomless, fathomless, beyond comprehension, it is God and life and all meaning, it is redemption, it is the answer to our ghettos and our pain and all our desperation, it is the answer to our wars, our murder, our hatred, our devaluation of ourselves, love is more than anything we could ever know, and yet essential, it is kindness in the way that saving a life is a thoughtful thing to do, in the way the feeding and sustaining a starving mother and her family is a “nice touch,” in the way that saving a child from human trafficking is “sweet.” Love does not get enough respect because we forget, we are drawn into the deception of the image and we think of it as a word, a rather quaint and trite outdated little idea—and not the very real fabric of our reality. L-O-V-E, a cute song; a sweet, tender look between couples; a trip past the florist on a Tuesday to surprise the Mrs. (or Mr.) on the way home from work. But the power of love turns the wheel of all creation: there is no greater force, nothing more real and more lasting. Love is not so many things we tend to think it is: it is equality, not ownership—even the way we describe a married woman as being the property of her man: “Mr's,” paid for with her father's dowry, newly owned in the eyes of our society by her husband, implies inequality. Marriage, or the commitment of love that two people agree to together, is quite beautiful a concept. Trust is a valuable and indeed, essential thing. An open heart is an essential thing. But we forget that love, the actual state of being attuned to love, is the great equalizing force. Love is not a finish line. It is not a goal. It can never be checked off the list, and in fact it demands everything we have, pretty much all the time. It challenges us to broaden our understanding. It beckons us to continue to seek it out, to see opportunity and equality where others see anger, offense, and impasse. It is altogether our God, ourselves, our purpose and our gift, in whom we ought to trust, because as choices go the alternative is a poor substitute.
I guess I'm starting to rant a little. Is any of this making sense out there? If I had somebody to go with, honestly, I'd rather be bowling. But in lieu of a perfect 300 I'll just chill out here and think about some of the strange phenomena that are present, and yet so often ignored, in our world.
How do we start over? Each moment. How do we change our behaviors? With effort. How can we learn to walk a new path? With endless practice. Why should we consider doing this? Because there is nothing greater than the reverence of love. Because untold beauty and pleasure and joy awaits us in each moment we choose to make love our everything's everything, as my friend Nichole would say (sadly, she's in Spain and cannot readily go bowling with me.) Really, we owe it to ourselves to experience this reality. We deserve it; we were in fact made for it.
We can end the cycle of not-love we've fallen into, each one of us. All the fear in the world never had a chance when you begin to think about the potency of what it's up against. Love is now, the moment, and it is experienced by us in the present tense. It is immediate, wonderful, and self-fulfilling. Fear is the future, the what if; it is a prediction, an illusion—it isn't real for crying out loud! It doesn't actually exist. How can a no-thing ever hope to overcome a real-thing? Especially not when we've got all the music we could ever hope to enjoy at our fingertips!
Here on Earth, it's taken a tremendous amount of effort to hide the natural love-reality from us and replace it with the fear-reality. But it also takes tremendous effort to continue the lie, as we are going against the natural flow of creation. It will take effort for each one of us to begin to reverse this phenomenon in our lives, however, far less than it took in the first place for us to get here.
Terrorism!—religious and political opportunism!—nuclear war!—mass extinction!—death!—the End!—okay, I get it, already. Yes, the Islamic State. Holy crap. Yes, war with Russia, war with China, war with North Korea, war with Iran, war with everybody, lots of deadly war, democracy is the only way...ugh. Man, we don't even know what that is. Demos-kratos. People power. Well, fine. But what about agape-kratos? Love power, baby. What's our word for that? Agapcracy? Imagine if we ruled with that. Imagine if the news didn't serve as a whip to flog our hearts and fill us with fear of each other and ourselves, fear of foreigners and foreign ideas, fear of every conceivable thing on this planet. “Do this to save a few extra bucks! Be afraid of your neighbors! Eat more crap and poison yourselves extra hard this month! The jihadists are coming for you and your family! Take our toxic medicine for all the toxic disease we created with our toxic air and food and water and smart meters and cell phones and then watch more TV! Get one in every room! Then get more rooms for even more TV! Go to work! Do stuff you hate! Be angry and depressed all the time! Drive a Mercedes to prove how successful you are! Be a jerk, everybody else is and otherwise you'll just get screwed out of your new Mercedes you dope! Screw everyone else out of everything before they screw you first! Support your troops—I mean our wars! Forget the troops! They just get mutilated and massacred anyway! War is glorious! It's great! Forget about your veterans! Forget about your humility! Your humanity! You don't have time! You're out of time! Can't you see how there JUSTISN'TENOUGHTIME...!”
One thing I know. David Byrne and the Talking Heads spelled it out for us: “Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us.” Time doesn't exist at all, actually. We all have more than enough time. Maybe not if Netflix, Facebook, InstaSnapchatOgram takes over our every waking moment. We have so much opportunity to use our time to love, to maintain friendships, to heal one another, to find one another, to find ourselves, it's amazing. I'm humbled by the profundity of the opportunity we are given in our lives to reach out and connect to one another, and not with cell phones.
Don't get me wrong. Take lots of personal time to yourself. Be alone. You don't have to be out there connecting and loving everyone all the time, forever and ever. People need space. They need rest. But let's remember that people need people, and there's nothing worse than seeing our sacred connectedness being smeared over by a torrent of meaningless, wasteful, ego-centric garbage.
Go write a letter. Write it to yourself if you want. Actually use a pen. Care for a minute. What would you say? What is important enough to commit to paper? Go outside at night. Look up. Do that for a while. I don't care if it's cold. Do it with other people. Hell, do it with me. It's cold by yourself, dammit. Make yourself dinner, with real plants, and love it. If you don't love it it's because it's not very good. Practice until you get something going. Buy organic food. Save up if you need to. Treat yourself. Stop eating poison. Stop consuming all the garbage you see on TV. Quit soda—all of it. Phosphoric acid in Coke, for example, is used very successfully to clean car engines. Never touch fast food again. I don't think I need to explain that one. Stay away from all genetically modified foods—they're trying to kill you and they will if you let them. Don't use your microwave anymore—it's also trying to kill you and we now in fact have used the same technology to develope weapons that we point at people to fry them and make them suffer. Microwave radiation destroys over 95% of the vital nutrients in food anyway, don't argue with me. Take it up with science. If you still don't believe me then let me take YOU out for dinner and convince you. I'm not kidding. Don't be stupid; don't fry your food and make it poison you. Care about yourself again. Care about your health and the health of your loved ones and friends and enemies alike. Don't be mindless. Be the opposite. Take pride in yourself and your work. If your job doesn't let you do this, find a way to get one that does. Pray for people. If you hate your boss or your coworkers, pray for them. If you hate your family or your in-laws, pray for them. Pray for people in need. Nothing is an inconvenience to you. It is an opportunity. You won't be able to do this all the time. It's hard to remember to do, I told you I struggle with it all the time, and it's even harder to have the willpower to change your thinking. Try anyway. Don't waste anything. Don't waste food, don't waste time, and don't waste words, don't waste your energy trying to convince anyone they're wrong or that “there is a better way!” if you can tell they're not getting it. Pray for them, move on. If you happen to be married to them, pray harder. If it doesn't work, don't confine yourself to a life of misery and regret. Love is sacred, yes. Marriage is sacred—sorry, no. Marriage is a contract representing love, that's the only thing that makes it special. Living with someone you cannot stand, who cannot understand you, is not sacred. It is folly. Put on the Paul Simon tune and walk out the door. Try and forget about stuff. Forget about taking from other people. Find a way not to. Do whatever you need to to be happy. Get motivated. Get in shape. Run around. Find other people to do this with, it's much easier that way. Try harder. What else can I say? Caveat ego. Beware the self. Beware self-importance and self-entitlement. Curate self-love and self-esteem. Be confident. Approach people, places, and things with openness, with a warm heart. Be careful. Spend your time where it's most needed. Pull out from the Babylonian system of worldly wealth and desire as much as you can. Be thankful. Be gracious and be graceful. Be yourself, but don't seek to offend. Be humble. Actually check to make sure you're really doing this, even if you think you are. Ask your friends to double check for you. Look, I'm one person at one moment in one life. Hello there. I'm just working with what I've been given over here. I don't want to sound preachy. But when I look at the world, when I go out at night and talk to my peers, when I see the frustration and disillusionment of a world that's lost its way on the faces of others, I think one thing. That there's another way. Castaneda's message of “breaking the world” means to simply opt out. “No thanks, I choose not to throw my chips in anymore. I choose to go back to the way that I remember in my heart. I choose my own connection with the Source, which I call love”—you can call it anything you want or nothing at all, really—“and I choose to surround myself with people and ideas that reinforce this specific, deeply-rooted understanding of my love-based reality.”
The strangest thing about this place is by far our ego, our sense of self. From it comes such evil, and yet it does not define who we are. I have learned not to label myself by saying “I am a travelling knife sharpener,” or “I am a crazy flute-playing parking garage creeper” when the reality is that I am one who does these things. How much we limit ourselves with our words! We are not limited by and to the things that we do. Our value does not depend on them. It never did. Our car and our job and our house and our relationships do not lend meaning or validity to us. We already have all the value we can ever have, and it is so great that we ourselves cannot ever comprehend it. It is simply a question of how we choose to see our world.
I invite you as humbly as I know how to consider my words and then do what you will. And if you're ever walking back to your car late at night and hear the eerie lurid tones of a flute sonata drifting slowly over the concrete barriers towards your Honda civic then do me a favor and go tip me, seriously. I freakin' went to school for this, twice, and it turns out Discover doesn't take creepy Bach tunes as a legit form of payment. You have to actually convince other people to sit and listen to you first, then pay you, THEN you can pay your bills with their money! Sheesh.