The Attitude

“To be able to preserve joyousness of heart and yet to be concerned in thought: in this way we can determine good fortune and misfortune on earth, and bring to perfection everything on earth.” – the I Ching

It has recently come to my attention that strange wonders are afoot. Lofty transitions of the strangest and deepest and most integral kind. Sparkling moments that mean nothing at all, and yet everything, because you saw that tiny little meaningless thing I thought was so meaningless nobody else would even bother to single it out in their conscious experience for even a moment, too. You saw it too. Tiny things, tiny absurdly arbitrary incredibly mystical dual moments of experience, in a single moment, or an infinite moment, I haven’t quite figured that out yet, but it delights me to know the jury is still out. Wondering gets me through bumper to bumper traffic better than anything else i've found (I’ve learned to avoid traffic altogether when at all possible, but I don’t get upset when I find myself waiting.)
So what is one to do when they refuse to ignore all these strange karmic comeuppances? How do I refuse to be systematically forgetful and addicted to comfortable thought patterns? Is there a rehab for these sorts of things? Can you send an entire city to a place where they can change individually and collectively, all for the better of course, at once? I mean everybody in their own time coming together at once, to form once once, for a moment that has lasting impressions? Impressions for the better? But that brings to mind, what is the better? How can we change? And farther yet if we do change, how can we be sure we are changing for the better? Changing towards something more ideal? How do I know there is an ideal to stretch for in the first place? What about all those people that argue religion is a type or neurosis? "Opium of the masses" types?
These are all great questions, and I’ve been there, and a part of my mind has tried to paralyze myself from thinking through these things, through all the way to the end and then living my life adjusted to their implications, based on what I determine to the best of my capability to be the Good? Not a rash adjustment, a well thought out, planned for a lifetime, solid shift towards the “good.” You can waste a lot of time asking yourself “how can I know for sure?” but if you really take the time to sift through all that bullshit excess rationalism and ask yourself to tell yourself, without words, “how do I know what the good is?” I can almost promise you you know. Only a few of you are probably gifted enough to explain to yourself with words what it means to know and what it feels like to know, but everyone by nature of their divine nature, can feel what it feels like to know there’s something bigger going on here. There is most definitely something weird going on here. I don’t know how you know, and I could speculate with you if you wanted me to, but I know you know. Hell, we could sit down and think up some fantastic stories about fantastic things that no one will ever know “for sure”, (except that they already know) and I can become intoxicated with joy and bliss and laughter living in the creation of those beautiful stories. That is enough for me because it is a miracle that I can do it at all. Whether or not I’m going to be snooty about my definition of a miracle or not is up to me, and that is the neurosis part of religion. Still, whatever colors and situations and characters I use to tell the story about the Truth, the truth it never changes. The Truth is a holographic whole we are all looking at from different angles, but the whole is whole, and underneath it all none of us are separated in any way from the whole, but the dream continues. Maya works its sweet and sour magic and my ignorant ego continues to sand itself either into a sword or a beautifully smooth round rock. Which do you think is better? Whether a person realizes that everything they think they know they already knew before they thought they knew it or not, they know.
So my advice is go ahead with the “how do I know for sure?” discourse for a while. Float around that thought stream and take that approach towards finding the good until it nearly runs you into the ground with frustration, until life gives you not one but a few swift kicks in the nuts, and you’re almost about to give up on the whole things, and one more straw is going to break your back- and then you get it. Just before you crash into the ground you laugh at yourself and you remember that you know and you knew all along all this whole uncomfortable situation is part of the illusion and theirs is a customized lesson we’re all supposed to learn from our own plots in this one yard. You even know, to a certain degree, why you think you don’t know the things you really do know. The important thing to remember is to never take yourself too seriously. But you also need to be sure you don’t obliterate your ability to know how aware you are of the things you know, the important things you know, the eternal, blessed, spiritual “knowing” you’ve brushed up against during those special times in your life. You have to know what the good is and you have to know where you are on your approach to the good so you can know how far you’ve come and how far you’ve got to go. When shit gets tough, perserverance furthers.
How can “it” be so personal and so universal at the same time? How can “it” be talking to all of us at once but in all our own little personal languages? Our own infinitely unique snowflake pattern?
I don’t know- but it does. THINK ABOUT THAT!