Here's a sprawling analogy so bear with me: Imagine if you were going to take a trip to France but when you got there you would have total amnesia. Would you even remember your native language, you ask? NO! You will have forgotten everything - a total reset button. You would be reincarnated, in fact. You're dying here and being reborn over there, saving plane fare and meal costs. But what's rare is that you know this all in advance, so before going on your journey you think of sending some letters and messages on ahead to yourself.
But then you remember you won't be able to read them. You will have to send something else.
What about a bunch of pictographs? What if you didn't even know when you'd get to Europe, could be a month could be 10,000 years... You'd never even know where to send the documents or how to keep them preserved all that time. You'd maybe want to engrave them in stone monuments or tablets built to last millennia. But maybe by the time you got around to reading them all those centuries later, their whole meaning would be lost, it would just seem like a lot of mystic mumbo jumbo. Hieroglyphs... am I right?
All this pain and suffering you've arranged, then, is not because you're a masochist. It's all meant to trigger an awakening so you can remember where you're from and read the tablets and monuments. You carve out a space of time in your future life where you will have no friends and no food, all just to be able to get you to study them long enough to decode your meaning.
Maybe after all that, it still wont work. Your future self might not want to believe you existed all these realms ago. And so you have to communicate with this stubborn future self via obscure signs, so it takes the future you a couple decades to figure out what you meant, because you know you will still like to solve stuff. This is why you're making this long strange trip in the first place, to occupy yourself. Like a jigsaw puzzle, once it's put together it's done. So what do you do now? You shake it up and start again-- ain't no other puzzles but this, and if you could you would erase the memory of having done it the first time, since it's never as fun the second time, you would. In fact you decided to already, and forgot that too.
Once you grasp these concepts, you will begin to see eternity in everything -you will see cave drawings from the paleolithic age and think, "What was I trying to tell my later self when I drew that?"
Why? Because to truly understand it is to forget it - unless, that is, you are finally through the golden gate and this time make the choice not to turn around and help the rest of us poor suckers along the way, like ole Buddha.
Why? Because to truly understand it is to forget it - unless, that is, you are finally through the golden gate and this time make the choice not to turn around and help the rest of us poor suckers along the way, like ole Buddha.
In meditation sometimes you realize you aren't on a path so much as cleaning a very dirty window, painted over with layers of paint, caked with soot, hardened lava, vines, and cobwebs... through which the sun is trying to shine at you. As you scrape through the layers of paint you come across old Grateful Dead bumper stickers depicting skeletons, which remind you of the time your little brother got you grounded, for example. You see how this betrayal emerged as a negation of any love you might feel for people in your life who resembled or talked like your brother. Boom, you peel off the sticker and your life gets suddenly richer, sun shines through brighter. You see the thousand withered stalks and tendrils of possibility that never manifested because they resembled things you painted over on this window, so they reminded you too much of your put-off chore - you "don't do windows" - so even walking past one begins to create anxiety; so much happiness you threw away because you couldn't say you were sorry.
So you say you're sorry to him, and your brother looks at you funny. But whatever, you have a window to clean, and no shortage of dirt in sight.
So you say you're sorry to him, and your brother looks at you funny. But whatever, you have a window to clean, and no shortage of dirt in sight.
Look the world in the eye and admit defeat. Throw down your tendril-shearing sword of censorship and instead pick up the rosined bow of music and its endless variations. Scrape madly, passionately, but with love, and you will find you're also scraping off the crust that doth blacken up this strange and ancient window.
When the window is finally clear, what then? There are some practitioners who soon grow reddened and burnt from being so unused to the glare of the sun shining through the clean glass, and so they find a nice thin UV-protecting varnish to spread over the pane. Just enough, you understand, to keep out the gamma rays.
But what you didn't know was the gamma rays had the vitamin of remembering and soon you've forgotten that that thin UV-protecting gloss layer is even there. You think that the window is totally clean and clear, and when the cleaning lady comes by to try and point out it's not clean at all, you get so mad you burn her; you burn her eyes out, just to prove that she can't see there is no layer but this
And so it begins anew. "all the way to infinity." (12/07) You can study the puzzles they scrawl on our lawns, but you will never know the truth, until it's your turn to step up and forget all about it. What were you trying to tell yourself? Absolutely goddamned right.
No comments:
Post a Comment