The Near Side Of The River Styx

The one thing we all share in common regardless of what age or status we were born to is that we all entered the world alone, and we will all leave it equally alone.  Much has been said for nature verses nurture determining the course of our lives between the two poles of loneliness.  Some are born to high status.  Some into garbage dumps.  Some die surrounded by loved ones, and some die on the street corner completely alone.  Regardless, we were all born and we will all die.  What happens between the two is not so much about the conditions that the one started and the other ended, but more about the choices we make between the two.  You see, of all the things out of your control, you will always have control over your own reaction, if you so desire.

Freedom is a choice.  It is a choice to accept the position as a single individual who is solely responsible for his or her actions.  The tempest of reality brings its force to bare on all.  It is always your choice how you will respond.

All humans suffer.  The degree to which we suffer depends on the station to which me were born, but all suffer.  To negate this is to ignore reality.  To the degree that you suffer, make it meaningful.

Be that dark figure on the near shore who catches those who can't pay the fair across the River Styx.  By that one to talk to the homeless alcoholic on the street corner.  Be that one to care.  Be the single individual who is willing to be the change you so desire.

Be truly human.

Strange Dreams

The following is an interesting account of an adventure had by someone I know, which borders on the insane, but perhap the readers of this space are into that sort of thing. 

I found myself in seated meditation in a temple with oppressive tropical heat carried on the breeze through the hall. A sent of curry and fish oil carried on the same breeze. The rounded script recording the sutras on dried banana leaves, carved such so as to not destroy the medium gave away the language. I was in Burma, and my saffron robes give away my station. I am a monk, seated in meditation, searching for freedom from suffering.

I sat and I chanted. Breath in. Breath out. My pronunciation of the ancient words in a continuous and ever complexifying rhythum indicated a mastery of the practices of my sect. I strove to detach. Thought. No thought. Focus. No focus. Mind. No mind.

I had walked this path before. I had walked it for many years at this point. The final objective known for what I believed, but not for anything here to fore experienced or seen. And then a trance. And then a vision.

I was transported into another state of awareness. Perhaps not elevated, but perception none the less altered. Perhaps relaxed to see what was already there, and what had always been there. The distractions of physical samsara faded. I saw instead what lay beyond them, and it was yet even more suffering. The desert of gray below and in the sky stretched to the horizon. If anything, the view was more troubling in the absence of the physical attachments I had strived so long to detach from. In something so close to a void, it had always been assumed one would reach freedom from attachment. But here more than anything I was made aware of my own attachment to mortality. Even beyond the physical I was still bound to death and rebirth. Or perhaps I was simply bound to death in this place so bland and between light and dark, so devoid and yet so vivid as to call into question the deepest fundamentals of what we believed about extinguishing the flame. About Nirvana.

Perhaps I was in this trance forever. Perhaps only a few moments. The shift was as extreme as a flame being extinguished, only in revers. A light had appeared on the horizon. Or maybe it was the horizon. So massive the thing as to transcend the notions of time and space so normally visible in the physical samsara. It was as if it transcended ages, not only worlds. It was a ship, a vessel I knew in one look from the third eye could hold all below Nirvana. Perhaps it could hold that too. I would have fled, had I not forgotten my own body and had I not felt some very distant, yet very deep memory triggered by the vision.

The ship sat on the clouds above, which did not seem so gray anymore in the shadow of something so radiant. And then a voice. "See and understand. I have brought a ship great enough to hold the worlds. And so it shall for all below shall be raised above to Golden City beyond samsara. Beyond Nirvana. Beyond all comprehension. " And then I saw before me what I had only understood before to be an instrument of death. A cross of wood. And before it, a river of blood. I heard again, "all things in the worlds must die to be raised to life again. The cycle of death and rebirth you know well. I have died so that all the worlds my rise forever to the Golden City. Come and bathe in my blood, which will flow through all the worlds." I waded into the river, and I heard again, "I am the one you have heard about. The one you have been waiting for. The one the Buddhas spoke of. I am the Mesia."

At this I descended into the river, and all went dark. I awoke to find myself thrashing about at my desk, the sound of the highway outside, and my alarm clock about to go off.

Changing Seasons

It is nearing the end of the year. The season has shifted, and with it, life has made itself more scarce. Whether it be the trees barren of leaves, the grass dead in the frost, animals in hibernation, the birds flying over the horizon, or simply the sun lower in the sky in the interludes between long cold nights. The whole world dies to one degree or another and each element in it's own way. And then, it comes back to life more forcefully than before.

Eons of experience points to the seasons eventually changing, life returning, and the cycle continuing. It is the natural order of things, and a process we have long come to expect and take for granted. Those who went before from the majority of cultures found spiritual significance in the changing patterns. Some spoke of thin spaces as the seasons changed. The natural and the super natural getting closer as we were driven closer to each other to avoid the cold. Death always brings near the other. Some saw the need to placate the gods with blood sacrifices when they sensed them approaching in these times of shifts to darkness. 

Newer faiths capitalized on the older customs and adapted them to convey new messages. Whether Christianity, Islam, or consumerism, the innate urge to commune with the other is a powerful force, and one for which we still sacrifice greatly for the chance to turn what is into what be wish it could be. 

Some would see the rampant consumption and mass placating of social anxieties to be noise confusing us from the signal  for the "reason for the season". I see it as something coming from our deepest being. We wish more than anything else to be connected, and most of all to the Divine Other. Whether we recognize it or not, it is as fundamental as breath. Nearly as fundamental is our notion that to get something, you must give something. Thus the sacrifice.

As with everything though, there is a deeper pattern. Something over the horizon. A longer trajectory. 

All things die. However when death passes, life reemerges more forcefully than before, as surely as the grass after the thaw, and cherry blossoms in spring. It is such on more than the obvious level. We sense the thin spaces. Our traditions originated from fundamental ideas about the world. Even if the original meanings have long since been covered in noise, we still sense it. 

I commemorates this time in memory of when the Divine stepped through the thin space into the physical, soon to die, and then, to rise. And with this resurrection, the whole world will follow. The ultimate winter, and the ultimate spring to follow. Such is the sacrifice all our attempts only pointed to. Carried on the winds of ultimate compassion, there is a ship large enough to hold all the world. 

Death is still among us and overtakes all things. Belief in that not yet seen requires faith. We are creatures of faith regardless of its object. 

I chose to have faith in the notion that the true height of mastery is not to bring good from good, but to turn that which is broken and dying to even greater good. This is what I see as the nights are long and cold and life retreats. This is what I look forward to when spring comes again. 

Remember The Past. It Dictates The Future

Etched into flesh as if on stone walls are the memories that inform our present and dictate our future.

Some break us down, and some lift us up. Some we will never escape and some we wish had never ended. Regardless of the nature of our past, its marks we will never remove. It is a matter of choice and training to ensure that these marks inform our present and dictate our future in a positive direction. 

Examples of sacrifice and suffering endured in the cause of something outside of ourselves. Given enough time, these are the memories we hold most dear because they are the times we were tested, rose to the occasion and overcame. Facing the reality of our own mortality, we faced the darkness, did not hide, and became something more. 

Then there are other memories that no amount of reason will ever make right. They are the manifestations of the evil endemic to the world that no one really escapes and some are demanded to experience the full measure of. One does not make it right. They experience and survive, or they do not. 

However, on the other side of the past, regardless of the characterization of that past, here we still are. Remember the good and and the bad, and take pride where it is due. To sacrifice is an honor not readily experienced by most. 

To serve with those doing the same and more is a greater honor still. 

Blurred Lines

It is human to think in terms of things we deserve and things we do not. It is what has become natural to think in terms of what we are owed and what we are not, and it is in keeping with modern society to ask who is to blame.

However, it is divine to forgo all of this and instead ask who is to forgive. This is not because it is a a matter of being reasonable and congenial, but because forgiveness is something far stronger and from a place of greater nobility. 

The Divine stance on reality is always from a place of nobility, and not the mockery of nobility made in modern society. 

The Divine calls us to a higher purpose and a higher way of thinking. The playing field of normal life is transcended by this view and its very existence is called into question. 

Thus, in the face of all we face, ask, what is it you must forgive? What is it you must in forgiving release, and in releasing transcend to a higher purpose? 

On a night much forgotten from its original meaning as a time for a blurring of the lines between the worlds, ask, to what higher purpose are you being called? 

Making a Difference

I find it important to repeat myself at times. Repetition builds familiarity. Familiarity breads mastery. And it is mastery over specific things we seek to accomplish here. In specific, we seek mastery over the winds and high seas of chaos that threaten ever to detour us all, from mass society, to the single individual, from the light of reason and justice.

The world we currently live in is not getting more peaceful. The looming threat of a localized disease epidemic turning into a generalized pandemic, the rise of an extremist movement that hearkens back to several millennia of human history we would happily forget, and the continuation of inter state politics by other means we now see in our old adversarial area of influence. We have options as to how to deal with this. Succumbing to low grade panic with minimal commitment may be the most readily available method to respond.

On the Other hand, and this is where I repeat myself, forgo debates about policy and the need to blame elected officials for the current conditions we face. Take responsibility as the single individual for the world you live in.

The winds of chaos beat upon us all, but it is ever easy to ignore them via a low grade mass panic when they are far off.

This only masks the banal evils close by. It is not by the might of some overarching government policy that that homeless man on the street corner is going to get someone to treat him like a human being, and it is not by government power (because that has hence to for failed) that that street walker who is probably under the age of 18 is going to get anyone to treat her like anything more than a sex toy at worst and criminal at best.

Rather, as I have said before, do not be a slave to fashion. Do not go along with the popular anxiety of the hour. These only annul us to awareness of what is going on around us all the time.

Lift up modern society and there you will see the underbelly. The real world is not clean, from a distance, or from close by. But what is is is an opportunity for the single individual to change reality for someone more a victim of the world we live in than that individual.

It is for things like this that, if we would allow ourselves to delve into, more meaning and power would be found than 10,000,000 hours spent fearing whatever is the fashion of the day to fear.

Defend the weak. Insist on justice for the downcast, and do not allow fear of the distant to distract you from the work at hand. These are the precepts by which the single individual becomes the agent of change in his/her world. Isn't that what we all wanted to do anyway, make a difference?

Don't Hide

What you don't know will indeed kill you. But it is the emotional response we substitute for what we do know, but refuse to trust that leads to insanity.

In the face of the exotic and other and terrifying, it seems that no amount of rational evaluating can overcome the visceral terror that seems to naturally ensue, shortly to prevent all rational evaluation, and to infect the human thought process more surly than a physical contagion ever would. 

Nothing travels faster than bad news, and at the same time nothing seems to be harder to cure than irrational fear.  

We try hard to ascribe meaning and derive something of substance from everything that causes us panic. However, the majority of the time, it all comes down to not being able to distinguish the signal from the noise. 

There are many ways to deal with irrational fear, but the surest way to not cure it is to hide. As with nearly everything else, playing the victim is the quickest path to perceptions becoming realities. 

In the face of that which causes you panic, take the initiative. Charge strait in. Turn the tables and determine your own course. You will be amazed at what you can do when you have to.