THE VOIDANCE DENIZEN

Gandhi had a beautiful definition for RELIGION--and believer is not it, & SCience either--maybe?, you decide! HE said RELIGION is SELF REalization. What is wrong with that? Many folks are tending to lump literalist conventions with religion proponets. The propitiation one does, as long as it is not advancing miracles, allows then an imaginative narrative indicating ones' self making an ideal of self-actualization. THAT would be good, NOt BAD. In my opinion, there are a lot of folks running from traditionalist habit because they are afraid that THAT language is ALL used up... I have a shirt saying something case & point: IN Hebrew it says, The People Of Israel Are One. Now that sounds stupid in MY acts toward ascetic fulfillment. BUT, the definition of "Israel"--is He Who Struggles With G-d. And Not Just G-d, but THE HIGH G-d. So, now we see that a High G-d is in a distant pleroma. THat distance equals relationship is a concession we all have in the Human condition. G-d as Higher Ground?--Higher Ground is all of our intent where we would want to be received in a sense that thru our humility we might be identified with that THING that has Consciousness as a Goal. This is all very Rational, you see. So science may equal Religion.
There is a Talmudic anecdote that says, "entering the ocean from one of its corners, you take in the essense of its whole." This is from Pirkey Avoth, The Works of Our Fathers. **I brought that book up into the Catskills Mts, while on vacation, at about age 15--probably 1981. It is a Jewish environment. --It is a Moralist Tome. And the corner I want to look out from, back against the wall of hindsight, was the mood of the philo-air I would & could seek then all around me, consumated with a motive to look at this doctrine. I thought about identity (the INNER-SELF), like nothing could possibly affect the biologic reality that we are in a sea of cultures, in a paradoxy--(seemingly two very at-odd realities). Any one of those Ideals as important as the next. The apparent sense that I'd grow up in proximity to "this" version of the Human Condition--I thought, alright I'd concede (it is before me after all, Rt?), I'll look into it--with no guide in fact but drinking in One Drop of the Ocean at a time. Try to drink it all at once, and you get poisoned, as the Buddhists say. So, the fire of resolve to ME, speaking of my intent, has everything to do with not conceding to the Impute of Fidelity one assumes from "loyalties--I knew rather there were flaws, & thru those doctrinal realities would I be "subject" to the Deep, as the Ocean/Void is called in Bereshit (Genesis). Sometimes you can only take the path to the ocean's edge, but not get in--a commentary on the Compassionate Void, in Buddhist thought as Alan Watts related. And how ineffective it is to think we meet Ultimate Reality, think The Ineffable (do we get IN the Ocean?)--as in Job where G-d doesn't come to court EVER--is where we attempt to define relationship as if immediacy is detained. (immediacy = inner self)

I think it is somewhat illuminating.
This idea my cousin conveyed about the randomness of our enduring mind, is in fact exactly how I'd describe, well w/o being dismissive of his resolute ideation, almost exactly, that is. But as we say, a young mind, green, creates these avenues which through our growing older, we no longer diverge into new paths. And the immediacy of knowledge, its alliterative potential, is in the eye of the beholder, wouldn't you agree? Our moral choices can be to a lesser extent poorly adhered toward, because to the effect that we think this is a choice, we wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees. IT is these value statements that would make accessible OR not the open-ness to new wisdom or the subject under a new teacher. Does that make sense? Now make the leap: We are entering a dialogue about "thought." And thought is fear. If we fear it, we hate it--& if we hate, don't we in effect LOVE it? Because as Bob Marley says the thing we refuse, is the thing we can use. (the promise of the head cornerstone) So what of thought: if we refuse thought, then we use its catalyst i.e. the outward fact. But this means creating centers from without, not within. And within, if at all possible, is only a potential, a half-light, a question in our nerve that is lit, and lastly as a half thought while the answer is always outside the box. Which we had better get really used to, because there is nothing on top but a bucket & a mop & an illustrated book about birds. Lastly, again we are random, fragmented, so we fulfill this desire for constancy by projecting in the moment=process=impermanence.
"Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
This much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream." Edgar Allen POe ***sounds like Kerouac residing near Mt Hozomeen as a park ranger, fire-watcher. He says to the effect, Avalokiteshvara lay your diamond hand upon my brow--then something which now I only can claim as my reasoning in perspective over the illustration I conjure like I lay under the same midnight sky, which is, Avalokiteshvara when asked to get this dross materiality jettisoned so we can evade the prison of senses. "Is but a dream within a dream." as Poe relates, has us deliberate... The walk we walked on ice, the hell where a clarified bell was rung--reminding us it was not made for us, the foot in another's shoe, all not for nothing... WE dream, thereby we exist. It is the principal.

If there is thought, then there is the principal to thought, the simple beginnings. If there is intelligence in the world then there is its beginning, the intellect. For every condition there is its potential. This simplicity is known as G-d, according to the rationalists. If we dream, thereby we must exist. To exist then whence that energy promoted reflection upon the necessary condition, there is a principle to existence. Though it may be beyond a dualistic approach as our minds accord, still one may necessarily expect a principal behind that value.

This dharma stuff is, in my view, only to make us practical thinkers. This idea about he/she who goes away to find the light within, only to be received by the community to which they identify in an integral willingness to take on self-responsibility, is what we all can do when we sacrifice origination thinking. (meaning, thinking your beginnings IS answer, modifies all subsequent beginnings thus we languish in intra-mantra slavery!!) Had we the experiences that were lessons applied to every relationship, then no willingness to provide substance to our myriad path --the unfolding & dissolving our lives take, would be given. So, when do we jettison self-preservation, to otherwise don a new garment of self-expression in the language of our adversaries? To become objective about our fellows, leaving them so that renewing your experience with them makes the grasping ego no longer what we consent to, is Buddha's way, Jesus', Moses', Muhammed's, and any of us that sacrificed socially conventional blather for the alliterative bump in the road, we all must necessarily cross, are trying to chant down Babylon. **I just read last night in Karen Armstrong's The Bible, The Bible we inherited has more violence than the Quran--should be known considering the bad rap the West gives the 3rd of the 3 monotheisms.
"We're simply over-connected now and expect everything tomorrow." is this woman's feeling, somewhat adept I'd think, that I expand on. Do you mean we EXpect TOMoRRow's everything? Because it is an essential point. That we can look at cyber-communication as the same dynamic or attempt at bridging distances like letters used to, is also very interesting to me. The vast dispersion of the hangers-on in relationship with the 70 million killed from 1939 to 1945, when whole communities left neighbors behind thru immigration, it was letter writing that contained the thread to these relations had they cared for--to connect to pre-war reality. For most of us here, grandparents' scenarios is merely a stone's throw--my grandpa=Pap, was born in 1896. I knew I was seeing a 19th century connection my nieces & nephews would not know fully. Mom & Dad lived lives on the cusp of immense industrialization--the urban thing very real in their life time, yet urban sprawl hadn't come upon them as we saw quickly envelope us in our having received the reigns of the new day.
My sense of it, is really a developing thing (my friend and his last mention about his Mom is case & point.). I walked around the grocery store with Mom & Dad the other night & seeing the older generation around us, made me double take who I had assumed were the people giving context to my youthful remonstrations. Yet, now I am characterizing them as the Other--folks like I see aRoUnD us/ vulnerable, in fact... Nabakov deals with this: the shadow before we children came along as portending Mom's & Dad's vibrating-on in this temporal kingdom imprisoning us--then the voidance which is this world carrying-on after we receive the astral plane. So, today as any day, I trod with an image of loss & expectation on either side of me, like my parents (mind appearance) are coalescing with each step forward I take. I jump from this point like imagining the antediluvian images of Mom banging the grocery-basket down the aisles as if some image is still viewable of her eclipsing where I will yet be received... all very sad to imagine that I used to NOT be--and will NOT be again!!