A Helleva Surprise!
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When two realities collide, we’re in for a helleva surprise! I’m talking about that mouthless scream we all have when we see we’re wedged tight between our contradictions; when we’re in such a tight place we can’t breathe, and yet somehow we must! At first, the old tricks do the trick and we wiggle free, chastened by our near – death experience, and determined to never, ever do that again! So why is it that we do exactly that same thing again and Oh-my-God! again?
We thought we got the message loud and clear the last time; this time we’ve posted a legion of wide-eyed and savvy guards to watch out for danger. But somehow those old demons keep sneaking up in the night to grip us, at first with a finger tip, then an arm, a leg, two legs and another arm! Then we start gasping for air again, and the old contradictions are wholly, completely, back! Perhaps this time it’s time for a tune-up. Actually, a tune – in.
Realities –apparent and otherwise, are simulcast all the time, but up to that point of reception we don’t dial in, listen and receive them. It’s like George Bernard Shaw once said: “ All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
What smothers us is what we think we know. Our knowledge is like car headlights beaming into the fog; it meets and interprets the world we live in; it sees from what it knows and “understands” and projects this deciphered reality as “truth”. So the collision is one of our apparent reality meeting head on with real reality. Or, to help us get the joke, there’s the old Yiddish saying that “ God made man because he loves stories!”
A person is never himself or herself. We never own our own personage, but are owned and possessed by our ancestral stories. We re-present, repeat and react from all the collective thought and experience of all humanity. The world is, from the view of human experience, exactly the same now as in all time. Our minds –all minds, have and will continue to, collect and interpret data in ways that are pre-determined with, of course, the same pre-determined result: bondage. We are bound to see things the way we do by precedent; to run through our lives chasing blended mind-threads as they unravel from the ball of our implanted thoughts and feelings. And thus to endless argument with what is.
What is makes for great comedy and tragedy. The comedy is rare and often hard to find; the tragedy finds us all too often.
“ Contemplating the mechanism of our own minds and gazing morously on the chemical action and reaction that equate with consciousness and personality, we seem directed toward the dark conclusion that free will is but a concept designed, like Santa Claus and God, to shield us from the unacceptable truth. The truth, we are terrified of learning, is that we are chaff in the wind…
Jon Franklin
The good news is that we are freer than we know. We can, and many are, realizing the underlying truth that while knowledge is limited and informative, wisdom is unlimited and transformative. That which is bound and which we call “me” is actually not real; and that which is unbound and has no limited identity, is what we are.
And what we are is both human and divine. We simply misplace our identity as young children; we learn to pretend to be this limited person with all its psychological and mythological complexities. We establish a personhood in our mind, in the unbearable heaviness of non-being. But along comes a non-guy called “Rumi” to shed a little light on our dark perspective:
“…Look at the moon in the sky,
not the one in the lake…
There’s no self, no characteristics
but a bright center where you have the knowledge the prophets have,
without books and interpreters”.
In this knowing we find our being. Our mind is no longer the interpreter of an invented reality and it now becomes a great silent partner! We have found the truth wedged between the words, the mind-spin, and have moved beyond contradictions of true/false and good/evil to that concept-free middle ground which is the life behind and within our personal interpreted experience of living it.
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