 
Reasoning with an Optimist

with twenty-two sonnets

at the back

by

jack bresette-mills

August, 2011

For Barbara

"If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal -- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."

\--Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, published 1854

CONTENTS

confession

contentment

a life with meaning

true believer

mustard seed

test

superstition

responsibility

belief system

thankfulness

pretending

coincidence

communication

relationship

thinking

being watched

certainty

quiet

reincarnation

proof

spirit

evolution

redemption

entering the picture

stench of enlightenment

karma

wonder

winner mentality

directed thought

birthday

worthy task

P. S.

Sonnets

Reasoning with an Optimist

confession

I am in the grips of an illusion that life speaks to me. You, too? Because of this illusion, I'm happy and content with everything I do; no, that's not you. That's just crazy talk. Just saying it, writing it, whatever, I cringe. As you can imagine, it's a bit distressing being this happy. The only other people like this are insane, or power-crazed industrialists, or yogis, and from an objective point of view we know they are obviously messed up.

Of course, it's only distressing when I think about it. If I'm just living, reading a book, driving to work, I feel great. It seems like I am where I belong moment to moment, and that the right things are happening to me. You see how sick this sounds. I don't even seem to have any hidden quirks that make me respond to situations in ways I later regret. Either that or I've learned to take everything in the past as 'done,' and not worry about it. The reason I'm writing is that I certainly can't talk about this condition openly. The only time you want to hear about someone doing well is after they've died. (Since you're reading this, let's hope that I have.)

It wasn't always this way. I vomited blood and was hospitalized when I was fifteen, apparently because I worried too much. As a little kid I clearly remember being the one in the car to remind my mom or dad that the gas gauge was below a quarter tank, this from a standing position behind the driver, so I must have been about three feet tall. One of my older brothers who definitely felt it was his duty back then to terrorize me apologized; he blamed himself for what seemed to be an ulcer. The doctors never actually found one, but treated me as though I had an ulcer just in case. What I apparently did about it was stop worrying.

It took a while. But when your stomach tells you to lighten up, you listen. You listen or you die. My body has ever since been wonderful at thwarting me from enjoying any negative emotion. Within five minutes of my being jealous or angry or depressed or worried, I get sick, or I get a pain in some bad place, like my liver. It's very cool. I hear my body saying to me, "If it's that terrible out there, then what's the use?" My organs have tirelessly worked to force me to become someone who loves life.

My aching liver got me out of a full-time teaching job. Although I loved the kids, I've been happy ever since. It turns out that successful teachers are a bit like politicians, and think a 60% approval rating is a good thing. If one parent or colleague was against me I felt horrible. That dear liver told me if I wanted to keep teaching, I would die. Okay. Thanks.

Being forced to be happy or else is fine, and it might be the best way to get it done. But I've figured out a few things from almost forty years of force that would have worked just fine without the threat of death. "Love life or die," is the anthem of every rebel. It has a nice ring. But who would give up a chance to love their life in any case?

I have met some long-suffering people, bless them, who do not take clues from their body or the world, and face every problem as more reason to stick it out. That is not me. The slightest hint of something not quite right, a whiff of a funny smell, and I am out of there. Amazingly, life still gives plenty of worthy challenges even if you do your best to avoid problems. That is very cool.

I'm sure lots of people lived as well as I do, but we hardly ever hear about them. If they become famous or wealthy they may write about their life, like Ben Franklin did, but being famous or wealthy is not at all ideal. I am neither, which is much better. You must see this. The burden of fame and wealth, whatever you have been told, is monumental. Contentment without wealth or fame is true gold. With luck, I'll never be rich. If you paid anything for this book, and

I'm still alive, then let me assure you that I let that money trickle down like it's supposed to do and drip on someone who needed it.

But I'm still bugged. I'm happy without being rich. Who doesn't want to be rich? I am either mentally ill, or have stumbled upon a life-attitude that is priceless and universally coveted. In any case, the illusion of happiness is still happiness, so sharing how it has come about could be useful to you; unless this is all gibberish, of course. How can I know? Maybe I can help you to have the illusion of happiness. That would be nice. Sharing is nice.

contentment

As long as I don't think about it, life is good. That's the same way it is with egotism, isn't it? We can be ego maniacs as long as we don't think about it. That's not exactly what I do with this happiness thing. I see it, realize it's working, then back off. We are all egotists, if we are conscious. But we look at it, see that we are egotists, admit it, then get back to what we were doing, which in your particular case might actually be helping someone other than yourself.

If I am legitimately happy, I must have helped someone else fairly recently. The other kind of happiness, of sitting on top of whatever you just received, money or fame, is not really a legitimate happiness. It's the happiness of a full belly, digestive in nature, and it doesn't last. "The king was in his counting house counting out his money." If you're exceedingly stupid, this counting might keep you happy for six months, maybe. Being useful or interesting to someone else is what allows a calm contentment; it's something that does not need walls and guards to keep from being lost, and can't be taken away.

Does Gandhi count as happy? Or Mother Theresa? I don't even think their level of contentment has been looked into. The only reason to bring them up is to look at the comparison of their fame with the amount they helped others and their happiness. We know how much they helped others. No one could claim to have helped others more than they. Were they happy, content? They are not famous for being happy.

Being happy or content is not a good goal, actually. Maybe you know this. It hardly ever works, first of all. If we were just simply content, being human we might lay on the couch ordering takeout until we lost all our muscle tone, and discover too late how difficult we've made our own life. As a species, we probably aren't quite ready for perfection. We learn a lot more, individually, by suffering, by trial and error, mostly error. Sorry.

Being happy or content is something we mostly feel while we are doing other things, like digging a ditch, or splitting wood. Even in a horrible prison, if we have a plan and are working toward our survival, there can be a level of happiness in knowing we are on the way out of the hell we are in. Outside the prison, or after we finished something difficult, we can be content long enough to rest. But for most of us, the resting we do has got something unhealthy in it, so we wake up hungover from our rest, and need to get back to digging the ditch again to feel better. The word is recidivism.

There is a discontent that artists feel. They can't just enjoy themselves, enjoy the day. They've got a bug that drives them to paint, to dance, to create. Then they are happy, happy while they sweat. The great leaders of humanity had such a bug. It is not contentment they feel, though I am sure it is wonderful in its way: like standing in a fire without being consumed, knowing that any minute the fire will consume you, yet not being consumed. Looking into that fire from the outside, I don't think many of us would step in. So although showing the world a new non-violent way of fighting imperialist oppressors may be something we would all be honored to do, there aren't many volunteers.

Society tries its best to keep us from being great. We all know that the true innovators never come from within the system, yet we threaten our young people with stories of dire consequences if they don't stay within the current system. If you're taught how something must be done, and told that this is the best way to do it, how likely are you to think of a better way? You'd have to fail, get kicked out, go home and brood over your revenge, and even then maybe not have enough strength to think everything inside-out and come up with the breakthrough idea everyone else missed. Then, since you aren't qualified to offer your opinions, no one within the system will listen to your idea. If they do, they will likely take the credit. Bleak, I know.

Perhaps it was never better than it is now. A college degree probably always meant that you were highly employable, that you have proven yourself able to please widely differing authoritarians, subverting your own wishes for the sake of a future monetary reward. Bless the child that gets a degree and a worthy education, not just one or the other.

With all the fear and worry about straying outside what's normal, maybe I'm being unrealistic to think anyone would dare to be happy with their life without force. But what if the change was something inside, something only you had to know about? You know a happy man can enjoy his meager lot, can give thanks for his crust of bread, and be a truly great man. It has never been what a person owns or wears that matters, advertising aside.

True greatness is something that happens to you while you are busy living. Well, maybe not to you or me; but it does just happen. Nobody who seeks greatness ever gets elected to be great. If they did, it would be our mistake to think they would succeed to our expectations. The truly great are people who are doing their own thing, the thing they have to do, the thing only they can do, and they find themselves right at the head of a force of a movement of civilizations. Or true greatness is seen in a friend. You see your friend doing what they have to do, what they are called to do by their own inner voice, you see them loving their life as it unfolds, and you recognize greatness. What makes your friend great is that she is not trying to be great. She is being herself, fully, and loving it.

a life with meaning

It's more than a little fishy that so many people have found what they were meant to do. What's fishy is that these amazing, great people actually feel that they have found what they were meant to do, that they actually have come to a certainty that there was some task or some ability that they needed to work on and perfect. That's pretty fishy. If these very coolest of self-actualized people are all having the inner certainty that they have found the thing they were meant to do, and they use the phrase, "what I was meant to do," then life may actually have meaning.

Imagine what that implies, that life may have meaning. If life had meaning -- not just an individual life, though that is a lot even if it only happened once ever, but Life -- if Life had meaning, what would have to be true? You should answer this for yourself. We're not talking about what it means to a person that their life has meaning. We know that would feel great, we know that person would feel okay about things as they were, that they wouldn't be afraid to take risks, to love. No, that's obvious. What you should answer is what it would mean if LIFE, the thing going on all around you, from the center of your being to the farthest sphere of the heavens, IF LIFE WOULD somehow HAVE MEANING. Answer that, please.

You're walking along, everything looks the same, but you now think to yourself, "What if life had meaning?" Or you think, "Life has meaning." That's very odd, very special. What is different? Now that life has meaning, doesn't walking feel different? If life had meaning, what wouldn't feel different? Wouldn't everything you once thought about the world suddenly be turned on its head?

For me, if life had meaning there would have to be some order, perhaps not quite a purpose, but at least an order, to everything, more than a molecular order. The "right" things would have to happen, at least sometimes. If there are "right and wrong" things, then at the very least there would have to be some order or purpose to the world. We already agree there is an atomic and molecular order to the world: there is physics. For life to have meaning there would have to be some communication between me, me in the broadest sense, and the world, which would require an awareness on the part of the world. The world would have to have some awareness of me, whether or not I had an awareness of it. All our meditation and centering exercises would then be aimed at connecting with the world's awareness.

The reason the idea of Fate doesn't work is that it is dead, fixed. Who wants that? If the world was aware of us, it would have to be supremely alive. If we missed an important meeting we were supposed to have, Fate would decree that we would never be right again, but an aware world would work toward setting up a next meeting. This would imply a universal right and a universal wrong, and there would be parts of the world that would benefit by our success, and parts that would benefit from our failures. This is huge. If life has ever had meaning, that door you just cracked open to admit it lets in a typhoon.

But what if every individual, cool person who felt their life had meaning was deluded? What if life had no meaning, actually, outside these deluded people, and the world is not at all aware of us? I am fully willing to grant that this is true. Yet, wait: how can this question exist? If this simple "what if" question is not ridiculous, we are talking about something that is not settled. Do you see that the question is not settled? When something like this is outwardly unprovable, meaning even if I know life has meaning I can't prove it to you, and even if you know life has no meaning, you can't prove it to me, the door is wide open. I proclaim this to be huge. This is the realm of freedom. This is actual freedom. We are absolutely free to decide or believe or prove to ourselves that life has meaning or life has no meaning. Is there anything this huge that we are totally free to decide for ourselves? Not gravity: try to fly. Not murder: you'll feel bad, or people will try to kill you back. Not having two lovers: someone eventually gets hurt. This is it!

true believer

I do not believe you fully understand the significance of this. This is not an intellectual affair. This is the rock upon which your life is built. Do you not think it makes a difference whether you live in a world that is aware of you and communicates to help or hinder your progress, or whether you live in a dead world of physical/biological forces only? This is the stuff of mythology: are you one of the indigenous peoples who hear the voice of the trees and the water, or are you one of the soldiers of the invading army driving out the locals? This is how vast is the difference in the two world views.

But wait. You think it is not a decision you have to make. Whether the world is alive or dead is not your affair, you say. You stand there, living your life, the world is outside you, alive or dead. You will wait until it is proven that the world is alive, or proven dead, and live your life in the meantime. Sorry. That's not how it works.

We all act as though the world is alive or the world is dead all the time. Coincidence, déjà vu, "I feel like I know you," ghosts, "timing is everything," or, "screw you," "business is business," "nobody saw me," dog eat dog, "you're on your own," we go back and forth between the two all the time. What's wild is that the more you act out of one point of view, the more proof you have that it is correct.

What magic I know of in the world is connected to this question, and it is a true magic. Depending on which side of the question you fall, the world is alive or dead. As a result, you are lucky or unlucky, or there is no such thing as luck. Both luck and unluck are magic, actually, so if you live in a living world, things happen to help you and things happen to mess with you, whereas in a dead world, things just happen. The magic comes from the fact that if you live as though it is a living world, you immediately get proof that you are actually living in a living world. And though you wouldn't say it was magic, I find it magical that if you live as though it is a dead world, you also get immediate proof that you are correct.

I always wondered what would happen if God appeared in undeniable form, or if a UFO actually landed and space aliens came out. These are the great, unanswered questions, aren't they: is there a God, is there intelligent life in space? Instead of constantly wondering, decade after decade, about the answers to these great questions, what if we just acted as though we knew the answer. What then? Would humanity suddenly become nice, would we start being open to strangers, give up the pursuit of wealth? Of course not. Not if God really appeared, or if space aliens actually landed, that is. God, or the space aliens, would have to physically force us to change, either through God's Immense Will, or laser canons. It takes more than seeing something to be convinced.

It's the convincing we should be looking at. Showing you a picture I took of God wouldn't do it. You seeing God once and hearing Him/Her talk to you might have an effect on you while you are standing there shaking, but when you get among your friends and nobody seems that interested in your preaching, you'll probably doubt the whole thing ever happened. God would have to be right there every minute, pushing you around, making you do stuff, for anything to really change in your behavior. That's the point. What is this convincing that we lack, the thing that would make us behave as though there were meaning and awareness in the world?

A guy called me once and said he was the archangel Michael. He said that he had spent years trying to convince everyone about himself and his true identity, and he was telling me all the reasons why I should believe him. I saw pretty quickly there was no way I could talk him out of it; he'd heard every objection. So instead I said I believed him. I said, "Okay, you're the archangel Michael. Now what? What does the archangel Michael do?" That did it. I walked him through the door of belief. He stopped calling.

Convincing is not an intellectual process. When you are convinced about something, you act differently. A soldier in those invading armies could have a belief about the world being alive, but still be ploughing people under from the seat of his armored vehicle. You can believe in God and still be a crappy person. It's different if you are convinced that God is watching everything you do and think. I used to think that belief was the key thing in us, but now I see it is being convinced in the fact of a thing. Instead of a simple intellectual belief, an entire belief system is built, and each of our actions fit our system.

I remember wanting to be in love when I was ten. There was a girl I liked, and I wanted to be in love with her. (I turned out to be pretty sappy, I choke up when I sing love songs, etc.) Back then, instead of loving her because of who she was or how we were together, not knowing what love was, I thought I would get there by saying over and over, "I love her, I love her," while thinking of her. I even rocked back and forth while chanting, trying to convince myself. It didn't work.

There's a reference to a mustard seed in the bible, as the amount of faith you would need to move a mountain. This use of the word, faith, there fits my use of the idea of being convinced. There's an immense power in it, and it is our power. We are convinced, or we are not convinced. It's us, and we do it ourselves. Moving mountains might be a metaphor, but it would be accurate if the mountains are in our soul.

One use of the word, faith, is pretty weak, and I've held it in low esteem for most of my life. When you hear people talk about faith, that they have faith something will happen, or they have faith in God, I never thought much of the word or the concept. It's almost the same as hope. Hope can be pretty weak, as a force. Hope can actually be negative, and stop you from accomplishing a thing you need to do. You can hope things will get better, and not actually get up and make things better. Faith can be this way. You can have faith in something as a substitute for actually thinking through the possibilities of the thing. Of course, hope can keep you alive when nothing else will. We just use the words for a wide variety of concepts.

In reality, if I know God exists, you may say I have faith, or you may say I believe in God, but in my own soul I have proof. I know God exists. Using the word, faith, is socially correct, because you don't want to lord yourself over others; but inside this human shell there is factual, concrete proof. Perhaps the phrase, true believer, is closer to this level of proof. Not clutching the bible on your knees, sweating with fear, and repeating, "I believe!" over and over as the storm approaches. True belief has no doubt. True belief might climb up on the roof to get a better view.

I remember thinking there weren't many true believers up in New Jersey one rainy day. When the rain was heavy and visibility was way down because of the spray, the cars on the turnpike got real slow. That day I was a true believer, and I was not at all worried about running into anything, but all these atheists or pretend believers went from 70 down to 20, just crawling along, and it was kind of pathetic. If we were all true believers every rainy day, we'd either get home faster or all be dead a lot sooner, depending on, you know, God or no God. I just wondered how it was in places like Utah or Idaho when you couldn't see anything. I guess I won't go find out.

mustard seed

I grew up where roads and sidewalks were icy, and so I had several opportunities to have my feet swept out from under me suddenly. While in the air, suspended for a moment in time, I would invariably look down to the ground, utterly convinced that I would hit that ground hard. Sure enough, wham, every time I was right. But later, remembering the moment and the strength of my conviction, I would try to crack the nut. How could I ease up on that conviction? What would happen if I had the tiniest crack in that certainty of falling? Since you share the certainty, you answer that it wouldn't matter, that my conviction had nothing to do with it. All I am saying is I never gave it a chance. Every single time, I pulled myself down to the earth. I wished for the mustard seed.

The very coolest thing about God, the very most endearing thing, is the absolute inability for any of us to prove Her/His existence to anyone else. Being God, it wouldn't have to be this way. In fact, I can imagine millions and millions of universes where God is obvious and undeniable. To be in one where we can convincingly argue and assert that there is no God points to something most profound: that our individual freedom is paramount. This God of ours made everything here pretty amazing, but the most amazing thing is our freedom to decide for ourselves. Our learning to be independent thinkers must be up there on the top of the list of things important to God.

This is usually shocking to evangelists. The fervor of their convictions does nothing to convince anyone else. If God speaks to me, the best I can do is get you to believe in me, to believe in my fervor. You may become convinced that God speaks to me like I say, but I can not show God to you, even if you're there while I'm looking at Him. It's the same with scientists who are convinced that they can prove to you that there is no God. Every single proof they have dissipates, burns off like morning fog, when they speak to the true believer. It is really wonderful, and amazing to watch. We are all on our own here, in a good way.

I had a brother who spoke for science and the scientific method. It took quite a bit of argument, however good natured, to get him to consider the equality of the two sides. Not that they were equal because God is equal to no God, but equal because one side can not prove there is no God, and one side can not prove there is. His position, which is science's position, is that you don't need to prove what is obvious, which, come to think of it, is the evangelist's position. For him, God was an addition to the world, and he needed to be shown why someone is adding God to the world. He actually felt that there was no burden on science to prove, for example, that souls do not exist after the body dies. "Show me what a soul is, and I will show you that it doesn't exist after death," his soul said to me. Show me God, and I will show you that God does not exist, or something like that.

Getting that tiny seed of faith that things are not as you now think they are, or things are actually as you hope they are, getting that seed is what I am writing about. We are pretty hard, hardened, I should say. I don't suppose you actually will understand, at least right off. Really, how many people do you think there are who would actually wish to change how they think, or to open up their very solid belief structure? How many fewer than that would try? Moving mountains is no joke. What's amazing is that you might be able to grow that seed, crack that nut. You'd have to want to. I'm hoping you'll consider it.

We know we are blind to things we don't expect to see. We also know we see things that aren't there at all. When the things are things that others can see, we feel pretty stupid for not seeing them. When we are the only ones to see something, we might not mention it. But what about things that can't be seen, like God, or an aware world? (I hope we can agree God's too big to be seen, just like you can't see the universe, though you can breathe and eat parts of it.) What if we could become aware of an aware world, or become aware of God? That would be a good thing, right? You could always keep it to yourself.

test

Science is really just about testing assumptions. Being scientific means you are open to change, and you'll base your ideas on the results of your tests. Before you ask, no, many scientists are not scientific. Humans don't like to change if it means they have to admit their assumptions were wrong. I want to be scientific, so I wondered if I could test the assumption that the world is alive, alive in the specific sense that it is aware of me and will communicate with me. I didn't want to test the opposite assumption, because it wouldn't be as much fun. Besides, I could always do that later after I failed to get any results from my first tests.

So, I would test the world. I would try to find out if the world is alive and aware. How would the world communicate with me? I would expect it to communicate in ways that I could perceive. After all, I am from here. I shouldn't necessarily expect the world to speak English to me, because we invented the language a relatively short time ago, and we never taught the world how to speak it, keeping it mostly to ourselves. But, to be fair, I should be open to varied and un-thought-of forms of communication. My two main assumptions I tested, then, were: 1) the world is alive and communicating with me in ways I can perceive; 2) the world is a generally good place, so the things it tells me, however it tells me, will be good for me to follow. Those were my only novel assumptions. I would look for communication from everything in the world, except humans who are intentionally acting toward me, but that would mean random humans appearing at odd times and saying odd things would be considered part of the possible communications from the world. That's it. Simple, right? You could try it, too.

How would I know if what I interpreted as communication was in fact from an alive world? I wasn't sure at the outset. Of course, if I lost my keys, and then while looking a grasshopper landed on me, then jumped off and flew under the car and landed on my keys, it would be pretty obvious. I felt I didn't have to decide up front how I would know, especially since I didn't even know how the communication would work. I just started.

Since I didn't know how the communication would happen, I had to be alert to anything and everything. So the first thing I must report is, in testing this idea about the world being alive and aware, I had to become more alive and aware. This was good. Of course, it had nothing to do with the assumptions I was testing. It's like a scientist working in a lab, and although the experiment is inconclusive, lots of money is coming in to support the research. I was encouraged to keep testing.

superstition

I realized pretty quickly the necessity of keeping clear the distinction between science and superstition. I would walk out my back door to the alley, say, and just as I got to the alley a breeze would blow from left to right and I would turn right and walk that direction. Superstition would have appeared if I followed the direction of the breeze with a compulsion based on a fear of the consequences of not following the breeze. Or superstition would have appeared if I interjected thought into the moment I perceived the breeze and did not simply follow it, but questioned what the breeze meant. I intentionally did not question what to do with a perceived communication, but did the immediate thing that occurred at the moment of the communication. The word, communication, in this paragraph and beyond, should always be in quotation marks, as they were not yet proven to be such. There were countless breezes occurring the entire time I was looking for communications from the world, but I only took those breezes to be communications that were accompanied by an immediate active response in me.

Of course I am using an opportune breeze here as only one example of a possible communication, and a turn to the right as only one way to respond. Other possible responses to an opportune breeze could be to look in a certain direction, or to stop moving, or to listen, or to change a certain train of thought, etc. Interpreting the meaning of any particular breeze, or any perceived communication, would be superstition for me, and I avoided doing so. If I did not immediately understand what a communication meant without having to interpret it, I did not consider it a communication. A second thing to report, then, was my acquiring a decisiveness, a certainty or intuition, in my actions, which I felt to be positive, and which also encouraged me to continue.

My wish to avoid superstition is understandable, but my idea, that having to interpret a communication would qualify as superstition, might be new. We have all heard of fortune tellers and clairvoyants who interpret for us our dreams or our cards or our tea leaves. As an astronomy teacher, I have been asked many times what something astronomical means. When Mars had its closest approach to Earth several years ago (and every year since after some email scam tells people that it's happening again), many students earnestly asked me what it meant. I answered that it might mean something to me, but I could not tell what it meant to them. If they didn't know what it meant, then it didn't mean anything. I know there is no shortage of people willing and able to tell you what anything in your life means to you; I just won't do it. If you don't know immediately what a dream you had means, then you or anyone else interpreting it might be therapeutic, but that's not the same thing.

There is a lot our thinking can do for our understanding. But knowing is faster than thinking. We meet someone and know them immediately. Perhaps we have a bad feeling about them, but later, we go over it and find no reason for the bad feeling. This is a common movie theme. It is the difference between heart knowledge and head knowledge. We can have a list of reasons to like something, and over against this list the single feeling that we don't like it, and the matter is settled. If something is a true communication from the world, we will not have to figure it out.

Once I broke up with a girl in a distant city (I was young enough then to still use the phrase, "I broke up with"), and on the drive back home there was a beautiful sunset while a favorite song played on the radio. I knew that I had done the right thing in breaking up with her, and the music and sunset were a confirmation of it. Later, thinking it over, I realized that the song was one she also liked, and so the thought occurred that perhaps it playing during the sunset meant that she was "the one" for me. Wrong. This kind of interpreting is just bad. It might be a fun pastime, but it does not help. Knowing what something means directly without thinking about it is human intuition. Interpreting signs is superstition. It is acting without knowing the reasons for your action, acting based on signs. Turning a certain way because of a breeze and having it not be superstition is hard to explain from the outside, but when you are the one turning there is no doubt about any part of the process.

We have a sense of health. Just as we know warmth from cold, we know when something is healthy or unhealthy. Sometimes we can deaden or ignore it: if we smoke or drink too much, or if we eat unhealthy food too long, or were raised on unhealthy food, we might confuse our sense of health enough that we don't notice how unhealthy something is. Our sense of health is the best guide of right and wrong we've got, for what job to take, for what people to hang around with. When I report here that something felt positive, what I mean is that I felt more health while doing it, or while facing its direction. In fact, every communication I responded to was accompanied by a sense of greater health, either because all communications were for my betterment, or because I only chose to respond to healthy suggestions.

We do not like our political leaders to follow the word of God in making their decisions. It is frightening to be led by someone who does not weigh facts, but listens to an inner voice, mainly because anyone dumb enough to say out loud that they listen to an inner voice is nuts. Our main complaint with someone else's inner voice has to do with whether it is actually speaking words. We all listen to an inner voice, but most of us don't hear words talking to us. Something tells us to get up out of bed before we're late. A red light doesn't stop us; it's our inner voice that makes our foot hit the brake. But these aren't spoken words. We somehow know what to do, a thousand times a day, every day, and we can call it our conscience or our inner voice, but it is entirely normal and healthy. This is exactly what I did. Except along with alarm clocks and traffic signs, I also followed the suggestions of breezes, and sometimes bugs.

Haven't you said a proud, "Yes!," when you made a long string of traffic lights, or came upon a car leaving its parking spot just as you came along? What is that? Why would there be any trace of pride or gratefulness at being in the right place at the right time if everything here was just random motions of physical forces? That doesn't make sense. Haven't you ever said, "Thank you, God!" at some wonderful event, even if you aren't religious? Just extend that feeling a little farther to include every destination, every result, every single thing that comes to you, and you'll be doing what I was trying to do.

I assure you that you would not see any difference between how I act and how you act by watching me. Whatever difference there is only shows up on the inside, and maybe in my smile. I stop at red lights, I drive the speed limits as well as anyone, I keep my appointments. I'm a piano tuner, so I have to be on time with strangers every day. Flakiness and keeping appointments do not go together. If I have to be somewhere across town at 10:00, I am there by 10:00, but the path I take might not be the path you would take, nor would it be the path I took the last time, necessarily.

If anything, you could say that I seem to be lucky. I certainly feel lucky. If life does occasionally trick me into pain, it is a good trick, and I am happy to fall for it. I fell for an amazing trick when I took a teaching position based on the people in the faculty looking into my eyes, squeezing my hands and saying, "you are definitely the right person for this class of children." Two years later, when the same people were trying to ruin me by whispering to parents of the class that I was in some way hurting their children, I was impressed. That whole experience was so good for me, and I have been so happy now twenty years not teaching full-time, that I have only my heartfelt thanks for all those people. I am honored to have been in such a great trick.

responsibility

Most of the perceived communications I took in my tests altered my physical motion, either by suggesting I turn, slow down, get up, start walking, etc., but some suggested I change my thinking. An insect buzzing close to an ear might occur while my mind was running on in an out of control way, and the mild shock of the buzz would make me take possession of my train of thought. This then, again, was a positive, healthy outcome of my tests, in that I gradually took more notice of the quality of my thinking, and actively steered it toward calmer images or quieter sounds.

These movement suggestions were really the most important. We think the big decisions in life, who to marry, where to live, are the most important, but the very most important decisions are the little ones: when to get up, when to stop, when to leave. These little decisions make the rest of your life happen. You will meet the right people only if you turn the right direction at the right time. A car will run you down on the correct day, and not too soon, only if you get up from your seat at the right moment. The big decisions are ridiculously unimportant compared to being run down or meeting your future partners, so following the little clues the world gives and trusting in the goodness of the outcome is no small matter. It is everything.

One might surmise that, as I took more and more suggestions from the world concerning direction, I might correspondingly feel less and less responsibility for where I ended up. This is the opposite of what actually happened. In life, some things are logically reversed. For example, how do you teach a child to make decisions? They learn to make decisions more certainly if their parents do not constantly ask them to make decisions, but rather make decisions for them. Forever asking a child what they want, for breakfast, to wear to school, to do on the way home, to watch on TV, only makes them weaker, as they see that adults seem not to know how to make decisions. Because I followed the suggestions I perceived from the world, I more fully owned where I was. If I was in a traffic jam, I would feel that there was a reason for my delay, and would look to the car beside me or to my own thoughts to find a worthy reason for my being in that jam at that time.

I eventually came to feel that every place where I stood or where I arrived held some significance for me, because I was where I belonged. This sounds delusional, I know. I didn't always know why I ended up in a place, but the entire time I was walking, following suggestions, and arriving at some destination, I would look for why I was there, and believe that I was there for a reason. This is an excellent feeling, one I would recommend. I am not here saying that I actually was where I belonged, but that because of my assumptions, I was required to feel so. The difference is subtle but important. I am not claiming that the world constantly spoke to me and led me to where I belonged at every moment, but that I acted and felt as though this was the case. There is no discernible outward difference, which is my point. By acting as though the world was alive and communicating with me, my life became rich with meaning.

If I behaved this way with actual, physical things, speaking of them as though they may or may not exist, I would have to be insane. I am not suggesting that I pretended physical things did not exist, or that non-physical things were physical. The realm I was testing is a realm that is "undecided" in so far as our collective experience is concerned. The reason I am writing is that, by making assumptions about a realm that is wide open for assumptions, positive, concrete changes occurred in the quality of my life. I thought you'd like to know.

The requirement I mentioned above, that because of my assumptions I was required to feel a certain way in a situation, is one to avoid being a hypocrite. I am preparing for old age by telling myself and my loved ones that I will not be bitter and fearful at death, so that when/if the time comes that I am very old I would have to be a hypocrite to be fearful and bitter. I don't know about you, but not wanting to be a hypocrite is a strong motivator of my actions.

belief system

People like to criticize this kind of playing with belief systems as pollyannaish. (I never want to hear from any cheerful pollyannas/who tell me fate supplies a mate/that's all bananas. --Ira Gershwin) But mood is entirely dependent on the underlying belief system of a person. Say your bike is stolen without a trace. To be clear, your bike is gone, and there is no way to know what happened, or who took it. Isn't it entirely possible for your belief system to supply you with widely differing pictures of the cause, from, "The world is full of criminals," to, "The world is protecting me from a terrible accident by sending my bike to a needy person"? It's a big jump to the second view from our normal perspective, certainly, while the first view would hardly need any explanation. But where cause is unknowable, your belief system supplies an answer, and that answer informs your mood.

A lady I worked for told me about her husband falling through the attic ceiling and breaking his hip and shoulder. He's now in a wheelchair. Six months ago he broke his ankle felling a tree. She told me earnestly, "God sure was watching him: he had his cell phone the first time and I was home this last time so we got him to the hospital all right." I was very impressed with her system. She has one to envy. There is nothing that could happen to her husband that wouldn't be good luck.

You may get angry at someone who seems not to get angry at things that would make you angry. An elder brother once posed me a dark hypothetical scenario to prove to me the fallacy of a belief system that did not select anger and violence as answers for life problems. He asked what I would do if someone pulled up next to my mother, jumped out, beat her, etc., etc. Dark stuff. What would I do? Wouldn't I get mad, wouldn't I want to kill those people? My answer now, to you, is different than my answer then, 30 years ago. My answer now is that it is a supreme privilege to have a choice of a belief system. There are people on the earth right now who must view the world as a war zone where everyone is out to kill everyone, because they are actually living in a war zone where everyone is out to kill everyone. And just as we can't talk about how we would be happy and sunny with stage IV cancer unless we have stage IV cancer, we can't say we would respond without violence and hatred in a war zone unless we are in a war zone. Nothing I said to my brother would give him a good opinion of my non-violence stance. I answered that I did not accept his hypothetical, and that my mother would never be beaten, etc., etc. I was right, but it wasn't a good answer.

Most of us, thankfully, are not living in a war zone, the business world aside. You drive into your business war zone every day after you've had your coffee, so it's not at all the same thing. A large part of the world finds it possible to live a life free from the actual threat of violence on a daily basis. I must say, though, that if you were in a dangerous jungle surrounded by poisonous toads, you would not necessarily have to feel anger at your situation. Anger takes a lot of energy, and if your goal is to survive a war zone, it seems that being angry is not a wise use of what life you've got left.

thankfulness

Because of my assumption that the world was communicating with me, and that the communications were for my benefit, I developed a habit of saying Thank You to the world whenever I felt a communication had taken place. It seemed like the right thing to do. After several weeks of these tests, saying Thank You became as common an action for me as breathing. Of course, only some of these Thank You's were vocalized. I eventually transformed this practice into one connected with the breath, one you could do whenever it can be remembered and for as long as desired, which practice being to think the concept, Joy, on the in-breath, and the concept, Thank You, on the out-breath. That can be hard when jogging, but then the two concepts can just sort-of merge together into "happy." This result, or side-effect of the tests, again was like funding from the government to continue the research.

Certainly we can agree that if someone was thankful for everything that happened to them, even though their life was absolutely normal in every way, the quality of their life would be superior to most lives. This is obvious, I hope. You may think they're an idiot, but if they're smiling and humming along as they dig their ditch, what can you say? The difficulty for us is actually being thankful. Our culture tells us that we should not be happy until we have more money than anyone else, mainly, which is why people with the most money are usually miserable, because although the rest of us have an excuse for being miserable, not having enough money, the rich person has no excuse.

Picture a scene of a Christmas morning in America with a family surrounded by their piles of newly-opened gifts, or a large holiday dinner after everyone has been filled. Can you imagine anything more crude than to hear someone there make a wish for a different present or another kind of food? The only correct feeling when surrounded by gifts is one of gratitude, of wealth. Feeling wealthy is something any of us may feel anytime we choose. Do we have legs? If that's too high a bar, then how about: Are we conscious? Wealth is feeling that you have enough. The two paths to wealth are: make more money; want less stuff. Which way do you think leads most surely and most quickly to wealth?

I've watched enough movies to know that anything we wish for can be corrupted. Every good movie needs a devil, and as an archetype he is brilliant at twisting what a person asks for. In my personal life I have a good friend who wished he could work less but receive the same amount of money, and within two months had lost the center vision in both eyes, forcing him into early retirement as an airline pilot and triggering a monthly insurance payment equal to his past salary. I don't think he really wanted to lose his good eyes. If we wished to live in a certain house, we do not thereby wish that the current occupants all die in a freak accident. I did/do not feel wise enough to wish anything from the world, at least anything of consequence, so my standard wish has become, "I wish for the best thing to happen."

Of course, now and then I did wish for things, actual things. I'm no ascetic. But if I received what I asked for, I would feel responsible for the asking, and it would be my duty to accept whatever came. This was simply a result of my assumptions. When buying a car, for example, I might buy the first car I looked at. If I wanted a good deal on a good car, and then the first car I looked at seemed a good deal, what would I be telling the world if I said that I would keep looking? You don't walk away from a gift, especially if you've asked for it. When the world is kind enough to grant you what you have specifically requested and it appears immediately, it is your responsibility, if not morally then pragmatically, to take it gratefully. This attitude wouldn't work if you were with someone who wanted to "shop around." That would include most people, I think. How many people who are in the market for a house would buy the first house they looked at? Most of us have the idea that life is not so simple, that it can't be that easy. We have some deep belief that we have to suffer for good things. I don't think this turns out to be necessarily true.

Many of us were raised in a religious tradition that emphasizes guilt for pleasure, and cultivates in us a feeling of impending doom for any happenstance of good fortune. I hope you have noticed. God is often the bogeyman of little children's fears, Santa to a lesser degree, as all-seeing record keepers of moral transgressions, long before morality or even cause-and-effect have any conceptual meaning. We are easily scared when young, especially by our elder siblings and parents, and it's hard to blame them for using fear as a control. Actually, blaming them is easy. Forgiving them may be hard. I was spared the worst of it, and seem remarkably free of dogma, as far as I can tell. Who sees their own dogma?

Look at the religious war on sex. I'm referring here to the connection of guilt and pleasure coming down to us from our superiors. Being against abortions is fine and correct from a moral standpoint and totally defensible, but being at the same time against birth control and sex education and funding to reduce sexually transmitted disease and funding for child care and funding for early childhood education simply doesn't fit with the supposed moral standpoint. It fits better with the standpoint that pleasure should be accompanied by guilt and suffering, which happens to be what our forefathers pushed. No mystery that we expect to suffer from good fortune.

Anyway, if you are the typical American of a Puritan ancestor, you have my sympathies. You'll need to convince yourself that joy is not a sign of impending pain; because if this world actually does listen to you and wants to give you what you ask for, your expectation of pain

after joy is going to keep working as it has up until now, to all our sadness.

pretending

Pretending is powerful stuff. Denial is a kind of pretending. You know how people can refuse to believe their spouse is cheating on them even if it is obvious, or they can have a lump somewhere and ignore it until it's too late to operate. People use pretending all the time to get on with their life, though it may not be healthy or productive. If you expect to pay somehow for good things that randomly happen to you, you are pretending you understand how the world works. If you think you don't deserve love, don't deserve a promotion, you are pretending you understand your own karma. Is there anything more sad than that? No one has the slightest idea what life has in store for them! How can you? If you are going to pretend you understand life and your place in it, why not pretend something that pays some good dividends? Just asking.

The less you ask for, the quicker you get what you want. This I can state as a fact. If you ask for nothing you are immediately satisfied. When I was the kid brother in the family business, I was almost sold on the big idea, "work hard now and retire when you're forty." I was twenty and just out of college, feeling lucky to have such a family, and had just bought a new motorcycle, old airplane, and a house. The house was the cheapest of the three, since our business was construction: $3,500 house, $4,000 motorcycle, and $6,500 airplane. My eldest brother had just become an instructor, so the flying lessons were free. The plane was a 1948 Stinson that my brother bought and turned over the payment book to me. Within three months of joining the business, I was pretty far in debt, considering we gave ourselves only $250 a week salary (circa 1980).

It's like a spell we put on ourselves, this idea of riches after toil. I didn't fall into the spell after college; it got into my blood by my growing up in America. The first moment I was firmly in a position in a company it kicked in. I looked ahead to continuously growing wages and financial independence and did the normal thing: got into debt. This is exactly what the company wants you to do, exactly what the country wants you to do, because who can quit when there are bills to pay?

I sure wish they had made me read Walden when I was old enough to appreciate it. Of course, that would be age 30, and no one can make you read something when you're out of school. They might not even require it anymore in high school, since it might make you reconsider going into debt. Where would we be if we weren't all afraid of losing our jobs? Without the fear of loss, of financial ruin, we might actually live according to our conscience and not allow our taxes to fund wars and foreign invasions. But that's just crazy talk.

I don't know where I got it, but I felt constrained. Maybe it's natural and everyone feels it. I wanted more time off. Especially weekends, but I balked at working 8:00 to 5:00 every day. I hope you've noticed that it is not at all a human thing to do to go somewhere that is not your home every day and be gone for nine hours without having a place to take a nap or not being able to walk around outside now and then. The fact that this is normal says something about our feeling for health, at least. Anyway, when I was told that I should work hard now and have time off later when I was older, I said no. I wanted time now. They said time was money, and I could have one or the other, so I chose time. I dumped the airplane and bike, paid off the house, got rid of the telephone, turned down the heat (except for company), learned to bake bread, and retired. I walked a lot, especially in the rain and snow. I read everything I had ever heard was a "classic," taught myself how to tune and repair pianos, fixed up my old house, played at writing, and had a great decade.

Luckily I liked reading, and especially lucky I was in having Neal Gabler teach my one required humanities course for my freshman engineering program when I was 18. He was my first teacher in my first class at university, which might have had something to do with the effect he had on me. To open us up, he made all us math and physics students read Castaneda's third book, Journey to Ixtlan, published just five years earlier. Wow. The arguments about whether the stories were true didn't concern me at all. Artists use lies to tell a greater truth, and those adventure books had so much truth in them, I have never been the same.

The Matrix movies worked because of a similar underlying truth, that we know in the back of our minds that we're missing something. All we need is a slight change in our perceptions and we will be standing in a new world. We may all be just this close to happiness, to purpose, to a life with meaning. If only.

coincidence

You know how, when your friend buys an odd car you hadn't heard of, you start seeing that kind of car everywhere? You know it didn't just appear; you see it everywhere because you are suddenly aware of it, though it was there all the time. Well, if you are testing whether the world is alive and aware of you, it can seem that the world was listening to your interest in this kind of car, and then showed you what it heard you were interested in. This kind of thing happens all the time, but when you are testing the world, it does not hurt to think it is the world talking to you. What does it hurt? The kind of thinking that would say it is foolishness to think the world is answering you is the same thinking that tells the little child to get out of the puddle, to drop those nasty weeds, clean up and get their shoes on. Where did you lose the ability to have fun with life?

I can't tell you how many times I have found a couple quarters in my pocket, nearly placed them in the change bowl (I rarely use change) but stopped and wondered, "Will I need these quarters today?" Then, resisting rationality and bringing them along for no good reason, hours later, a man comes up to me and asks for that exact amount of money. "Hey, my friend, this is yours," I would say, and smile. He had the gift of my surprised smile, and I had the gift of knowing how I would have felt if my logical mind had won and I had left those quarters at home. Or, wanting to meet a friend for lunch and discovering the parking lot full except for a space with a meter, and knowing that without those quarters I would have been late, I reach into that pocket with such joy. Of course, a boy scout would simply always carry a stash of quarters. I am not talking about being prepared for all eventualities by traveling with a semi-tractor trailer full of handy gadgets. I am talking about being sensitive to little things, and not letting your rationality kill the possibility of fun from happening.

Casually working on a crossword puzzle with my dear wife, I will wonder what city ending in "th" was famous for helping John Glenn's 1962 orbital flight. Later that day, in a cafe, a newspaper will have a story about Perth, Australia on the front page. The same day. It is the most common and natural thing. Happens all the time. Just this morning I looked in my math bookshelf to see what problems I might have for sixth grade for a tutoring student. I pull out a small book I have never seen before, "Mathematics Lessons for the Sixth Grade." I ask my wife where I got this. She organizes all our books, but she has no idea. I have never taught sixth grade, the book was published in 2002, and there is no explanation for why I have it, except that I needed it.

Why must I assume I am senile, or call all my friends to see who lent me the book? Why can't I just say, "Thank You," and go on with my day? It's not at all a big deal. The world gives gifts all the time. If I wonder about working for some possibly troublesome person while shopping, and in the next isle someone says loudly, "Man, don't do it," to someone unseen, why can't I take it as an answer to my question? There really is no harm in it. The good it gives is quite wonderful, however.

I say again, there is no harm in thinking this way. It doesn't lead to insanity, or I don't know anything. If you can think about a factual event in the world in a particular way that makes the world a better place, and by thinking that way no harm comes to you or anyone, and no one has to know, why not? Why not smile at the day?

These are all just silly anecdotes. They may make me feel good because of how I think of them, and they may happen to me far more than random events of serendipity should, but I could think them all away and conclude nothing from them. It was natural, then, for me to look for some events or communications that I could confirm as having actually happened, if not to anyone else at least to me. I wanted proof that, what I felt was the world being playful, was in fact the world saying, "Hello!" I wanted a true, objective testing of my assumptions; I wished to think of a test that would be more analytical. One came to me.

communication

At this time, in my mid-twenties, I was a carpenter in a family business, and our little group of workers liked to have FM rock music accompany the job whenever possible. Some songs were favorites and classics, but most were random top-forty hits. Now and then one song would remind us of another song that we loved but hadn't heard for a while. Testing the world by asking to hear a certain classic song was an obvious, harmless, and enjoyable way to see whether the world was listening to me.

One day, I can't say how I thought of it, I asked the world for a certain song. I may have even said it aloud, "I would like to hear...," some such song I liked. Surprisingly, not too many hours later, the song I requested played on our radio. When it happened the first time, I laughed out loud, said "Thank you," and immediately requested another, different song. After three requests were answered in three successive days, I told my workmates what was happening. With their oversight, I continued the test.

Here's the way the test went. I had privileges, in that I could drive to get coffee or lunch, and while driving I could listen to the radio in the truck. At the job site, there may or may not have been a radio, depending on the homeowner or the noise associated with the job. We never played a radio loudly enough for the neighborhood to hear, so if there was music, I may not have been able to hear it. I made requests for particular songs that were specifically not current top-forty hits, meaning they were not especially likely to be played on any particular day. I voiced my requests out loud in the presence of my workmate, Bernard L., my best friend at the time. Sometimes my brother Dan would be present to hear my requests. Bernie and I were most always together during working hours, even at lunch, so we heard the same music during the day. It was understood that for the request to be answered, I must hear the song within 24 hours during the normal course of the day without using extraordinary means. I never listened to radio after work or when alone, so a request would not be fulfilled without a witness.

I might say as a request, "I would like to hear Judy Blue Eyes," in front of Bernie or Dan, and then go about my day of work. Again and again, day after day while the test progressed, the song I requested would play in front of me and Bernie from a random radio on a random station. Once, on a day when we were unable to have a radio on at work, while in a Wendy's waiting for our lunch order, the song I requested that day played over the normal muzak sound system of the restaurant. This in particular was very convincing for me, that the world was so intent on showing me it was listening it picked the scant few minutes I was hearing music that day to play my song.

I understand that, for this test to be actually scientific, you would be able to repeat it yourself. At the very least, I would be able to repeat it anytime with you watching. So, sure, I know, it doesn't prove anything to you. I don't even know really what I did, so I couldn't tell you how to proceed. It had to be more than just saying words out loud. My heart knew that I was asking the world a question, and then my heart received an answer: Yes. It was scientific to me, and a success.

At day ten of this test, after ten successful results in a row with no failures, I realized the true meaning, at least for me, of the idea of "tempting God." In the bible, Christ is asked by Satan to prove God's love and strength by jumping off a mountain as a test, to see whether God would save Him from falling to death. Christ declined, saying He did not wish to tempt God. I suddenly felt somewhat the same, when I had had these ten amazing occurrences. How many more answers did I require, what more did I need to be convinced? It is a strange feeling. It is asking yourself, "Are you going to be a hypocrite?"

But there is more to it. To this day, I will not try this test again. There is something definitely wrong about continuing to not accept that gifts are gifts. I can see why, too, no one who seriously has had their own proof of the world being alive has ever come forward to be tested by "science" or the media. Perhaps the feeling is connected to the God Loves Freedom idea I played with earlier. My proving to you that the world is alive is not what is crucial. In fact it is impossible. What is important is for you to prove it to yourself, either way.

I know this would be maddening to a skeptic. Here I am, saying I have tested something to a conclusion, but I won't do it in front of you. The only answer I can give to this is, I won't do it for myself either. I have been convinced. I know that any further testing, either alone or in front of you, is something as wrong as wrong can feel. There are stories of true love, where the man is somehow pushed (by the devil in the story) to test the fidelity of his young partner, and through his pride and belief in her purity he pays another young man to try to seduce his dear love while he pretends to be away on business. It is gross and disgusting, and in the story, she always discovers his testing of her and pretends to be swept away by the newcomer, only at the end to rip open the closet door where her distressed lover is watching. Such a wound to the heart is unforgivable. Certain tests are abhorrent, and the test itself ruins the treasure to be tested.

relationship

It is a tender thing, but paradoxically a powerful thing, this relationship we can have with the world. Although I may be wrong to think that I could harm it by testing it again, I wish to be worthy of it. If I am worthy of it, I will not test it. Instead I will live and love and be aware of it every moment, and receive constant proof of its strength and presence, and put far away any thought of testing, just as I would never consider paying someone to test my life partner. It is a thought that simply would never be considered for a moment.

When you are in love, you know you are in love. The more you do together, the better life is. You would never think of testing love, if it actually is love. Life tests love all the time, but if you test it, you have proven yourself unworthy of it. Every breath is peace while it lasts. If you are together eighty years it is not long enough.

But perhaps you do not yet know it is love. Of course a test at the beginning is appropriate. You will test life to see if it is love it feels for you. You will test yourself to see whether you are capable of love for life. The first thing you'll have to do is not be angry. Think of it as making a first impression. Would you try to win someone's heart by being angry? Never. Seeing you angry, the world would not know what to do for you. Staying away from you would be the most you could hope for. Getting angry at you in return is quite probable. I met an angry person just this morning. She appeared out of nowhere yelling about how my dog did this and that, mistaking me for the owner of a similar but roaming dog. When I realized she was angry, my first response was to get angry in return, but I managed to walk away without yelling, and left her with her anger.

How do you stop being angry? Not, how do you get your neighbor to stop being angry. That's impossible. For you, as with everything you want to change about yourself, picture your own death. Then either suggest to your body that the behavior you don't like will cause your death, or ask yourself if you wish to die without ever getting rid of that particular behavior. The second one works better for me. I picture myself a little old man who still can't -- whatever. That's how I finally got better at quieting my mind. I sat there with my noisy mind and imagined I was going to die today, the next 5 minutes, and I would die without ever having quieted my noisy mind. If you're serious enough it'll work.

Mainly we feel immortal, in all the worst ways, and nothing bad about ourselves has to change today since we have lots of time later. We can put off everything, and we can waste time now. You have to be immortal to have enough time to be jealous, to be angry, to spend time so recklessly. Death is the answer to wasting time. And though desiring death is morbidity, picturing it as a motivator is very uplifting. The best samurai, who pictured their own death daily, were able to savor the precious, infinite moment, and make use of it to expand time to strike before the opponent knew the danger. Cool. I love samurai movies.

So, you're not angry. You wish to see if the world is alive and aware of you. It is productive to picture beneficent beings, angels, forces, that wish to assist you, and that have long ago nearly given up listening to you since you are so inconsistent. You want one thing then you want its opposite. You want impossible things, like, "I wish it was Friday." If you ever were given what you wanted, you didn't take it. Imagine someone listening in on your thinking and trying to pick up some solid, clear wishes. If you do this picturing well enough, you'll soon be apologizing for all the nonsense you've been wishing. The general state of our thinking is just so unclear. How can you expect to notice subtle clues and communications from the world if you are so preoccupied?

thinking

My good friend is a horse trainer, and he explained the trouble perfectly. We first get on a horse, and it naturally knows what we are thinking. It tries to do what we want, but our thinking is all over the place. We see that up ahead we are going to want to turn right, and immediately the horse starts turning right. It heard our thinking, who knows how, and started giving us what we wanted. But we yank the reins and scold the horse for starting to turn. Of course, the horse now thinks we are insane, totally gives up trying to understand what we want, and just wants us to go away.

Most people I have known do not think they can improve their thinking. We may agree we can learn a new task, but learning new thinking is not generally considered possible. But you can. I did, and I am absolutely normal. If I haven't mentioned it, the reason I am writing is that I swear I am absolutely normal, yet have improved my thinking, improved my belief system, and thereby improved my quality of life. This means the door is open to you.

We improve our thinking by wanting to improve our thinking, of course, and by asking the world for help. Let it be angels if you like, or nature, or your higher self, but ask for help. Ask to think better, to be more peaceful in your thinking. You know what thinking better means: not getting so easily frustrated, not banging into things, not having thoughts run wild at bedtime. Believe that your thoughts are heard by the world, and that they affect your environment. That helps. Believe that you have an angel that suffers by your noisy, out of control thinking, and who thrives with your calmer, more penetrating thinking. It's your angel, not mine. If we each have our own personal guardian angel, don't you think it would be wise to help yours to be engaged and positive about you? Sharing the world is not a bad thing. It's not an invasion of your privacy. If we actually have an angel, your pretending that you don't have one won't make your thoughts any less visible. Live a life that your angel would be happy to share.

being watched

It's actually much harder to think no one is watching us than it is to think as I suggest you do. The whole time we're little kids (if we're lucky), we couldn't get away with much because some parent or sibling or teacher was watching us. I remember riding my tricycle way downtown once, all by myself, when some friend of the family loomed up in front of me and told me I'd better git my butt home. That was not pleasant. We have to overcome years of conditioning to believe we are solely responsible for ourselves, and that no one is going to tell on us. If you're ever in a mountain meadow with acres of nature all around, or standing in the wide open prairie, notice how you still want to stand or crouch behind something to pee. Thinking we are not being watched is the hard thing.

And what could be wrong about thinking you have an angel? You don't have to tell anyone. Believing you have an angel is not the same as letting the terrorists win. If you wonder whether your thinking could be improved, questioning why you desperately want to believe that you are the supreme being in the universe might be a good place to start. We do better, we act better when we think someone is watching, and doing better is what we are out to do here. (Sorry if some horrible religious leader has made you hate the idea of angels. There are creeps in positions of power everywhere.)

Speaking of creeps, why not look out for angels and demons walking the earth? I'm sure you've met some of each. They are everywhere. Letting yourself think this way makes the whole place more like a play, and in a play you're less likely to get lost in the role. After all, a demon is supposed to mess with you. Our job is to avoid demons. Who's going to honk at a demon? We don't want him to focus on us. Just let him go on his way. And who knows if that stranger you're cutting in front of is actually an angel? You should be nice, just in case.

Believing a child could be an angel is an excellent practice. Ageism is the most prevalent prejudice we've got. Dismissing children as unimportant, or talking to them like they were little idiots, is impossible if you think they might be an angel. They might grow up thinking adults are not so pompous then, too. That would be a good thing.

Believing you have an angel watching you for the purpose of improving your thinking is not the same thing as believing in a religion. Religious leaders have soured a lot of good people on the idea of higher beings. I know good people who feel that if they cracked that door even a little, it would be somehow admitting that some rotten priest or rabbi or monk or guru or ayatollah in their past was actually not as rotten as they know they were, and so they can't do it. This is not religion I am speaking for here. This is thinking, and this is between you and yourself.

That you must want to improve your thinking is no small thing. We can get so used to ourselves we won't notice our own rigidity. And as a natural defense mechanism, we might resist all probes that question the soundness of our thought processes. Rigidity may be good in some realms, but not in thinking. By the way, I am not asking you to do anything for myself; I am suggesting you do some things for yourself. Put this book down anytime you like.

Good thinking is fluid, and works best when we aren't holding it too firmly. Just think of how you remember things. Remembering where we put things, remembering people's names, is one of the main functions of our thinking. Yet things come to us only when we stop squeezing our thinking for an answer. Our greatest mystery is how, without our knowledge, our thinking is working behind our normal consciousness to answer questions.

My daddy taught me, by example, to ask myself questions before sleep, and in the morning the answers would come. He apparently designed structures in his sleep that in daylight he would build (as a carpenter, not an architect). Computers have not yet been able to make associations like we do: we can see a blue sky, then get a memory of a hike from twenty years ago where we met some girl who worked in Bozeman, and Bozeman is the city we were trying to remember. We want this kind of thinking, the kind that works like magic.

certainty

Ease up on certainty. There might be some lower, primitive feeling of superiority from believing you know something absolutely, but the wisest people throughout time have said that they knew nothing for certain. Your certainty would show you to be the opposite of wise, so there's that. More importantly, certainty is a closed condition. Prejudice is another word for certainty. It is rigidity, solidity, when what you want in your thinking is fluidity, or even a bubbly frothing.

Being uncertain might be what you think you are if you are afraid of the unknown. Actually most fear comes from a certainty that the world is unsafe, that those people (whatever color, sex, facial hair) are dangerous, and that no one is going to help you. If you could have a tiny bit of actual uncertainty, those people in the shadows might someday turn out to be your friends. You just haven't met them yet.

Becoming less certain intentionally is as hard as anything, which means you can do it if you want. My teacher Dennis Klocek suggested we look for the things in our lives we are most certain about, like our keys. We look at our keys, for example, and notice how absolutely certain we are that they are ours. It's pretty amazing, really, just how certain we can be about little things. To show how this might be a problem, think of how it is when you lose them. Then, the fact that they are your keys is not so good, because only your keys are going to work. You are just as absolutely certain that only those keys will work; and now they're gone. He gave a solution to finding them: crack the certainty that they are yours; shrug it off, say that they aren't even your keys, really. (Big laugh.) And soon: poof! A little picture opens in your mind, and you'll remember you were playing with the cat, and you rolled over on your keys, which hurt, so you pulled them out of your pocket and threw them over under the couch. Dennis is funny when he is great.

Notice how you reach for buttons when you enter a car. Either you turn on the radio or you make a phone call you didn't have to make. The car ride could be the one time in the day when you plant a little seed of quiet in your mind. There's plenty to think about while driving, and the mind is its most active negotiating traffic, but its work can be done without words, without rhythm. Our natural thinking is silent and immediate. When we move an arm, we don't use words. The quiet mind is not a sleeping mind; it is a highly active and forceful mind, unburdened by an overlayer of invented language. You wish to sweep away this cloudy layer that is between your clear thinking and the world, and your time in the car is a natural place to start. If you don't commute, and instead walk the cows from the barn to the pasture every morning, you probably are fine.

quiet

We start chattering to ourselves so young. Too bad very few of our parents ever thought to encourage quiet moments in our day. Mostly the TV was on, or the radio, and that talking, rhythmic noise became the norm, while the sounds of the world became the odd, extra sounds: the wind, but only during a storm, birds, but only between the house and the car. I was so lucky that my mom had a hiccough remedy that involved quiet thinking: she would tell me to sit down and concentrate and say out loud when the next hiccough would come. Marvelous. Already at age five or six, maybe once a year or twice, when I would get the hiccoughs I would have this one minute of introspection, one minute of looking into my own being to discover something. Fifty years later I reach back to that picture as the first seed of my quiet mind.

Dreaming is mainly a replaying of the daily life. Don't you wake up noisy? When I was first getting hold of my thinking I would sit quietly just before laying back to sleep, then sit up in the morning upon waking, and find that in the intervening time of sleep I had become very noisy. I felt it was of paramount importance not to stand up until I had at least brought the level of noise down to what it had been the previous evening before sleep.

I wanted some quiet in my dreams, so when I would sit quietly, I would imagine being asleep and sitting quietly in a dream. One night it happened, and I dreamed I was sitting quietly, but I knew that I was dreaming. What was so cool, and healthy, was how the place I reached while sitting quietly in a dream was almost exactly the place I reach when sitting quietly awake. A realization like that is worth a lot of years of sitting quietly, let me say.

Remember that what I'm suggesting here isn't for everybody. It's only for people who want to improve their life. Ha! You might complain that it won't work for so-and-so, but it will work for you if you want it to. Look at you. You've already read this far! I know so many people who are not in the least interested in changing, and would never read a book like this. (Please don't show it to them, for both our sakes.)

What I am suggesting here as a change in your thinking will make you sharper, not duller. I am suggesting you act as though the world is better than you thought it was. Acting as though the world is alive will make you feel more, not less. I'm not suggesting you believe anything that can be proved untrue. In fact, you actually have the possibility of proving something good to be true to yourself.

I hope you have once felt your depth of feeling open up. It's the feeling you get when you are hopelessly in love, struck dumb by love, but it happens at other times. Prince Andrew felt it in War and Peace (read it!) where he is severely wounded and near death, and sees the immense blue of the sky. His idol, Napoleon, is walking by at the same moment, but Prince Andrew has a revelation about the depth of the blue of the sky, and how he had been so foolish all his life not to notice; that nothing, certainly not Napoleon, could compare with that immeasurable depth of the blue sky.

We have the ability to open up the depth of our feeling. It happens by itself in the shock of imminent death or in meeting a person connected with our destiny, but what we can do at one time we can do at another. We read that the Great Ones would love everyone, that those nearby would feel loved just by being at hand. I would like to learn to love like that. I would like to learn to open the depth of my feeling.

I want to improve. I don't know where it came from, but I have the feeling that I want to learn. I will be a little old man and I will be reading a book on how to do it yourself. What is being old, anyway, but the feeling that you don't want to learn anything new? Being old is the loss of flexibility in your body and your thinking, and it's the feeling that you don't want to learn one more danged new thing. Let's don't be that way.

reincarnation

I heard a very smart man on a news show say the following sentence: "You'd have to believe in reincarnation for this to make sense." Apparently it is childish to think about the world in a way that would cause it to make sense. Ever since Nietzsche, the grown-up point of view is that the world does not make any moral sense. This is a stinking rotten place, and if you are happy you must be an idiot. If you aren't completely appalled you aren't paying attention. It's hard to argue with a grown-up. But you don't have to. Let them call me the idiot; you keep it to yourself.

Nobody can disprove reincarnation. My mom used to make it sound pretty silly, though. She would say, "I just don't think I was ever a cow." That's funny and belittling at the same time. There are several common pictures of reincarnation that sound very silly, but this doesn't mean you can't think of one that would sound good. Remember, we are talking about thinking up a belief system that would be unassailable with physical evidence, and cause the world to make more sense than it does now. Just talking about it can't hurt, right? Well, it can't hurt you, anyway. We'll see what happens to me.

So, why think of reincarnation in the first place? What's so wrong with the dominant paradigm that we would want to substitute it with reincarnation? Well, people live lousy lives, sometimes. You've noticed, surely. People are slaves. People die young. They die young and hungry. Telling suffering people that there is a heaven may help keep them from violent rebellion, but it still doesn't seem fair that certain people down here get good, long lives of comfort, and others get short, painful lives. It just doesn't seem all that Godlike to make some of us suffer so much down here, for no apparent reason. Saying some horrible thing like, "God has His reasons," and even coming up with God's "reasons" after a famine or a bombing or a mass killing is just so gross. How can a little baby deserve any pain? The whole picture of, "rotten down here now for some of you, wonderful up there later, you just wait," makes God look a lot like a prick. It's hard to take, especially without any proof. So reincarnation, with or without a God, could be a little easier to swallow.

With reincarnation, at least we all have a chance to live a good life. Heaven is probably very nice if you like floating and harp music, but being on earth with a good body in the prime of life several times is hard to beat. Even without an overriding moralistic authority, Lords of Karma, or God, it would still be better than it is now (one life, however short, maybe a heaven or hell at the end); better to have several random chances at life, hit or miss.

proof

I hope you understand that nobody has the proof of his/her philosophy of how things came to be, and how things will be, beyond basic physics. They can have their own proof, naturally, but their proof stays with them and none of us are necessarily convinced by it. There have been some amazingly smart and far-seeing people who told us what they were convinced about, and lots of what I've read makes good sense. There may be some very sacred books and sites, and histories and legends and mythologies, but God and heaven and hell and afterlife and karma and soul and spirit are all still matters of personal knowledge, perhaps, but belief and opinion. If you say this particular grouping of words out loud in the wrong circle, or write it down, you may be killed; but that doesn't change the fact. The proof of this fact (that there is no proof) is the very existence of religious war, which you cannot deny. A religious war would be entirely unnecessary if either warring party had proof of their views. Therein lies the ultimate absurdity of most of our human history.

For the very same reason, if atheists had proof God doesn't exist, they wouldn't have to be such asses in their criticisms of believers. It is the very fact that none of us has any external proof for or against any world view (beyond physics) that we have to attack each other's beliefs so viciously. So why would we have any particular belief system that causes us to live less of a full and worthy life than is possible? It may be that we are only here once (I sure don't know), but even so, living as though we will live again and have also lived before might give us the best chance to have the best life here now. We can look into it, anyway.

If we're going to do it, let's do it right. Let's make this perfect, so that this world will seem like a very cool place, or at least a very much better place. We might just find ourselves thinking of things the way they actually are, and God will be happy we gave Him credit for making such a sensible world. How would you like the world to be? Do you see that this is our choice, our responsibility, to think the best way about the world? You, none of us, we were not born with beliefs. There may be an argument about being born with/without a sexual orientation, however misguided that argument is, but no one argues that we were born bigots, or Christian, or atheist, or whatever. We picked up all our beliefs, or were given them by those around us. You yourself took on the beliefs you have right now, which means you yourself can change your beliefs to be better suited for promoting a good life. Let us see what we would come up with if

we were going to choose our own better beliefs, rather than keep and reinforce those poured into us by our local environment.

spirit

Well, for reincarnation to have any meaning we would all have to have something like a spirit or a soul that is our essence. This essence would be a distillation (spirit) of what is most truly us, and this part of us could never die, because it is not at all physical. Not being physical is required so we can avoid any incongruities with physical measurement. We have never been able to measure the weight or composition of the soul (it's been tried!), so the soul or spirit of our belief system can not be at all physical. However, this essence or spirit would make the neurons in the brain fire the way they do. We could say that, just as it is silly to believe the computer thinks without the human punching keys and writing software, it's silly to believe the brain works without the spirit. By the way, the fact that we have no physical evidence for our spirit is not so bad when you consider that we still don't have any physical evidence for gravity. We see what it does, of course, but we don't know how it actually works. Gravity. Show me what gravity is, you grown-ups, and then I might have a little more confidence in your ability to deny the existence of the spirit. If you can't tell me what composes the most penetrating and all-encompassing force in the universe, then don't tell me you know there is definitely no spirit. Please.

As we go along, our ideas about the way things are must fit with the real world. Reincarnation should answer more questions than it creates, to be part of our belief system. Well, right away it does a better job of explaining why some of us are born street-savvy-ready-to-go, and some of us are tender little earth-virgins to whom everything is new and mesmerizing. Some of us have been here dozens and dozens of times, and for others it's only their first or second time here. Isn't that a nicer, more egalitarian explanation for our differences than, "God must've been on break when daddy put you together."

evolution

Let's let it be that people come back as people, and dogs come back as dogs, etc.; unless we're talking about eons and eons of time, when Dog, or maybe Husky, along with all the other animals, might finally start coming back as people, and we finally graduate into the next level ourselves. Maybe the old ideas of the Greeks, with all the different Gods, and the old Christian levels of Angels, Archangels, Archai, and that rot, are levels of evolutionary development that all sentient beings progress through, given enough time. Who knows? It's cool, though, and if our belief system can point to established lore and find some connection, all the better.

The evolutionary idea is a keeper, because it makes our time here necessary and productive. With evolution we have a job: evolve! Everybody needs a job. To evolve we'll have to learn compassion, learn love, stop killing, stop stealing. Learn to love everyone you meet, learn to fall in love at first sight with everyone, learn to separate love and sex so that love is always and sex is sometimes, learn and learn and learn! This is much better than simply, "be good," and, "don't be bad." Those are fine, of course, in comparison to dog eat dog, and business is business; but being good and then being better than good is more challenging. We want it to be challenging down here. We want life to be a worthy challenge, and nothing is harder and more rewarding than learning to love, to give. Let's keep evolution.

Let's say, too, that we have to learn everything there is to learn here. Our job here is to learn everything there is to learn about being human. Only then can we graduate to be angels, or whatever our next level is. Maybe our own angels are rooting for us, because they evolve when we evolve, so we don't want to hold up the train. We'll do our part. So some of our lives we will be male, some female, of course, and every race of course, but also rich and poor and hungry and full. We'll die young, and we'll be parents who watch our children die young, and we'll be children who watch our parents live long lives, and we'll lose everything, maybe several times. And somewhere along the way we'll be murderers, and again we'll be the relatives of innocent victims, and we'll be the hanging judge, and also the lenient judge. And we'll learn and learn what being human is all about, how we can be great and how we can be terrible, how we know right from wrong, but that we're free to choose which we'll be, until we become wise enough to not have to choose anymore. Then we'll help others learn, until we all know.

We'll have to be smarter, somehow, when we are between lives than we are here, so that when we die we remember who we really are, and we see who we have hurt and we'll see how we messed everything up that we hoped to do, so we'll want to come back to make it all right. We can say, "You know how in sleep we can live anywhere, have all different friends and different clothes and it's all totally normal, but when we wake up we remember who we are and we see we were only dreaming? That's how it is after death: we remember ourselves and what we intended to do with our lives, while when we are here it is kind of like being in a dream, and we don't know who we really are." It's good if we can draw parallels to established facts with our new beliefs.

Some of us might be a little more pushy and excited to get ahead with our evolution, so we might want to be really tested hard down here. Or in times like they are today, maybe more of us want to be down here trying to evolve while there is so much temptation to screw up and blow it all off. I can imagine all of us being warned by our angels about how there is so much anger down here, so many lost souls who have forgotten what they came for, and drugs and violence everywhere, and wouldn't we rather wait a few more hundred years until it settles down a bit? And we would say, "No way. We can take it. Give me all you got, world! I won't forget myself." Then we get here and our parents die or they walk out on us, and our teachers are too bored or too frightened to inspire us, and our friends talk us into stealing, and the government seems so corrupt, and nowhere is there a logical, clear reason for being good, for learning, for trusting others, nowhere. These tests are severe. Who of us can keep our heads together in all this chaos?

redemption

So those of us that really messed up down here, Nero, say, or Hitler (I don't want to say any current names, but you know a few), maybe they'll (we'll?) decide to just keep going backwards, maybe join up with the beings that are trying to slow everything down. You know there have to be beings trying to slow this whole evolution thing down, beings that really love it when you get angry, when you slap somebody who loves you, when you shoot a few dozen protesters. Somebody's got to love that, for it to be so common. Those people who go backwards may join the animals. Why not? Rape and murder among animals is the most normal thing. Have you ever seen a dog share his lunch with a stranger? Me neither.

This is getting pretty large, this picture. We've got forward and backward streams of evolution, maybe some Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones that got the whole thing started way back when we didn't have the awareness of a stone, Who saw that we would learn faster and learn better if there were pricks and pokes and pointy things along the way, which explains this whole backwards stream. It's certainly necessary, if we think of the animals and plants and rocks as some result of past decisions to go backwards, the very kingdoms of nature that we couldn't live without. It's all so wild and bizarre that it might actually be true.

And if a Nero or a Hitler, after their miserable death, regretted what a complete and appalling wreck they made of everything good down here, and really wanted to make up for it, even though they never could, really, they may come back as starving babies a few dozen times, because someone has to, or as children of slaves, or as children in earthquakes in poor countries. Maybe they could come as privileged children of good parents, but throw it all away by suicide, or to become a hermit. Who knows? We can only hope there is always some way to grovel and beg and eat enough dirt to be allowed a chance at redemption, because who knows if it might be us next time doing something unthinkably horrible?

Since there is evolution of souls, with a learning requirement, the whole sex and pregnancy and guilt and responsibility thing can make sense. I mean, we see a physical, genetic necessity for sex, but why the guilt, the jealousy, the pain of it all? Dogs don't have that. Animals don't seem that concerned about who saw whom first. So, what if these Great Architects of Time made the sex thing, which can really be quite irresistible, along with the guilt and conscience thing, so that we are going to be forced to learn a few important lessons. If we aren't smart enough to be careful about who we have sex with, there's going to be a baby we didn't especially want, and one way or another we are going to learn. We will learn responsibility by raising this baby (huge learning), or we will learn responsibility by feeling immense guilt for not raising this baby (huge learning). We learn enough so that we learn to avoid having to learn things the hard way.

You have to admit that we do learn a lot more from pain and suffering than from the couch. I don't think anyone has ever learned much of anything on a couch. But a drainage ditch, a prison camp, there's where the real learning is happening. Hafiz has that great poem about learning more from three days alone in a closet than from an entire year with the best teacher. There's truth there.

What if these souls need some preparation before entering a life here? Say there's a soul that's been made ready for entering a little boy's body in Africa by the Angels, Archangels, etc., but just before birth, there's some accident, and that mother dies or the fetus dies; but the soul was strong and ready to come into life, and so the higher beings help direct it to a birth somewhere else on earth, say a girl in America. That was a soul who was ready to be a boy, maybe it had been female the last couple times and now it was ready to be male, and,... You see where I'm heading with this, a man trapped in a woman's body... Hello? And it also gives an explanation for how some people grow up with undeniable urges to travel to far-away countries. Someone sees a pyramid in a magazine and becomes absolutely convinced that they must travel to Egypt. Nice.

entering the picture

Okay, so we have this great picture of how the world could possibly be, and it seems to make sense. We didn't say there was God, and we didn't say where all the new souls come from, but it's pretty complete otherwise. You could add those details. Now comes the hard part: climbing into the picture. Standing there, outside the picture, you might say it looks very nice, but you still would like to know what's really the case: is there reincarnation or not? Is the world alive and aware or not? Is there a God or not? You want to know first, then you can believe. I'm so sorry that I haven't been clear. You will never know: no one will ever know, UNTIL THEY ENTER THE PICTURE. You first have to cross the threshold, and only then will you learn. You've been standing on that threshold your whole life, wondering what the truth is. As long as you wait there for the truth, you will never know.

Haven't you ever flipped a coin just to see what you believe? It lands "heads," say, and then you decide to try two-out-of-three. By flipping the coin you learned you wanted tails, although before you flipped it you didn't know what you wanted. You couldn't tell until after the coin came up heads. You have to walk through the door to get the answer.

I know people who are very open to the idea of life after death, who have lost a loved one and wish desperately that their love is not lost. Yet they have not taken a step beyond the threshold, and continue to wonder if there is life after death. It is the closest thing to limbo we have here, this waiting at the threshold of belief, waiting to know before we cross, when the only way to know is to cross. It is the leap of faith you have heard about. After you leap, you find solid ground supporting you when it seemed vaporous and dicey.

How, you say? How do we cross the boundary, and take up a new belief system? Pretending! It sounds silly, yes. I know. Maybe because we use the word for what children do. That's our ageism talking. We teach ourselves what we believe by pretending. That's why children play house: they are learning to believe in family. But we are not pretending black is white or that pigs fly; we are pretending the world is sane, the world is sensible, the world is amazingly wonderful and complex and worth living and loving in. It's not so silly, really. And nothing we will pretend in this realm is any stranger than any other picture of life/death that you'll find out there. The atheists may think their picture is not silly, but I have felt things, and I have felt loved ones (you have, too, I'm sure), when no such feeling should have been possible, so that the atheist's picture is silly; it doesn't work for me. This picture does. So I pretend it is the correct picture.

stench of enlightenment

Then what? Well, don't go preaching about it. If you do have to talk about it to someone you love, preface your remarks with, "Well, I don't know, but.." Better if you just start living as though you have the job to evolve, that you've been here before, that you'll have to keep coming back until you get it right. Live as though all your friends and enemies are going through the same evolution, and you're going to see them all again: especially your enemies. Nothing makes you closer to someone than hate, so watch it. If you really don't want to be with someone lifetime after lifetime, you'll have to stop hating them. You can love someone and let them go, but someone you hate you marry forever. Watch it.

And never, ever tell some grieving person how your world all makes sense. Don't do it. When people are grieving, it's something they're doing for themselves, and they don't need your help. It hurts to lose people, things we love, and making sense of it is for them to do in their own time. Don't go spreading your sunshine theories around suffering people. Take out their trash if they don't mind, tell them you love them, but don't try fixing them. That kind of sunshine is called "the stench of enlightenment." It's when you know enough to make everyone hate you. Just keep it to yourself, maybe bring over some dinner.

karma

There's a cute joke about a tourist in India who stumbles into a ditch with her backpack on, and is thrashing around trying to right herself while several locals look on. When she's almost out she asks angrily why they were just standing there and not helping, and they said, "We were interested in watching your karma unfold." One of the best things about reincarnation is the idea that one day the bad guy is going to pay for his deeds. When you know someone's evil deed was observed, and that they won't get away with it, you can let it go and get back to your own life. That's great. But karma is very complicated, and your witnessing something is just as much karma as the deed itself; and what you do about it is crucial. We are not observers here. We are not in the cogs of the machine, we are the cogs of the machine. How we respond is how the world goes forward.

Karma is not just the deeds and the payback, it is every little thing. For this whole idea to work, karma has to be in the lost keys, in the paper that blew off the counter, in the change in your pocket. Karma has to have its fingers in everything, and this world has to be alive down to the dot that is missing on the contract that makes the whole merger null and void. Karma is all the little things put together, and there is no "watching it unfold." You and your actions are the further unfolding of the world. You'll have to be on the ball. Be the first one to help out, Johnny on the spot.

On the subject of fear, if you are being told that the world is somehow structured so that things will definitely go bad soon, either economically or spiritually or environmentally, your first thought should be on the motive of the speaker. Because even if it seems all very reasonable, which most fear mongering does not (lovely awful word, monger, huh? "a dealer in slaves."), the speaker still must overcome the deficit of his argument, that fear makes money. When something makes money, then the person promoting the thing might not be fully honest with you, since they might be hoping you'll do something to make them richer. What are the biggest buildings downtown? -- the ones built on fear, the bank and the insurance company.

The other motivation for telling you that things are going to get a lot worse soon is old age. I guess it's because when you're feeling old and you know you're leaving, you want the place to blow up either just before or just after you go. It's also fun to predict disaster. Try it both ways at a party: speak about how wonderful things will be soon, and then go to another corner and speak about how horrible things will be soon. You know which group will encourage your point of view. Anyway, if someone's preaching about some horrible thing coming, if they're not old or making money or suicidal, maybe you'd better duck.

wonder

When you're standing alone out in the air, or walking with your thoughts, let it be that you think how amazing it is that you may be very, very old, that you keep coming back to this earth over eons of time, and how there's a part of you that does remember. There's a part of you that doesn't think in words, doesn't care what's on television, but steers you through life. That could be why you don't remember your past lives: your higher self doesn't think in words and pictures, but thinks directly, the way we do when we move our arm, or when we digest our food. That is us, by the way, who is digesting our food. Some part of us is a master chemist, and knows everything it needs to know about turning food into blood. You can't deny that there is a hidden master within you who does this miracle every minute of the day, and who regulates your heat and your heart rate. If that is you, which it obviously is, and that being is unknown to you, then it is entirely plausible that you have a higher self, connected to that master chemist, who lives lifetime to lifetime intact.

So wonder about it, in the sense of having awe about it. The being that is you, the one that can turn pizza into blood and keeps you at the proper temperature, may be your guide through life, may be responsible for your likes and dislikes, those quirks in your personality that ultimately lead you to your life partner, to your perfect career. That being may be eternal. Just wonder about it. It helps give you perspective next time you're clawing your way up the food chain at work.

Of course this idea would take away some of the relief some of us feel toward suicide. A lot of thoughts toward suicide are a seeking a relief, a "Let me just stop feeling, let me just stop everything," kind of seeking, which only seems possible with an atheistic picture of wall-to-wall nothingness after death. Don't let atheists fool you: they have a picture which might be quite comforting to wish for, one of absolute erasure of all one's thoughts. They like to lord it over believers that their picture is the more mature, since it has no end goal of happiness and endless peace. Endless nothingness might be very attractive to some people, and might be someone's idea of paradise, the suicide being one. Thinking that by death, we will not get away from ourselves, but will only have to repeat our struggles lifetime to lifetime until we eventually learn to solve them, might be quite sobering. So that's another good thing.

winner mentality

To take on a new set of beliefs requires a winner mentality, a mood of soul that is used to winning, used to success. You might not be that way. If your toaster doesn't work, it might never occur to you to look for the screwdriver. Some people are gifted with bounce-able souls, souls that just say, "I can do that." You might need some practice.

Start with little things, like doing what you say you'll do, or like twitches. If you ever see your pencil or your fork or your toothbrush twitch as it moves through the air, bring your hand back and do it again. Do not allow the first twitch to go unnoticed. Iron it out. Move your hand forward and back like it was very important to do it smoothly, and your mind will iron out the rough spots. It's amazing no one tells you about this. Twitching doesn't just start when you're old. I remember seeing some vibration in my twenties. There was a great movie scene where a famous surgeon is approached in a restaurant by some admirers, who hand the surgeon a one-inch piece of thread, and ask him to tie a loop. That was impressive. Those are the kind of fingers I want.

If your eye has a little twitch, or your leg or your arm, there's a place in your head that is firing its little electric charges and sending signals to the twitching muscle. You've got to stop that. The place in your head is probably in the back, near the base of your skull, and for some reason it's a little too excited. Think about that place. Closing your eyes might help, but think about that place and calm it, deaden it, with your inward gaze. It actually works. When it does, and your twitch stops, you get a little boost of the feeling you'll need to change your belief system. (Of course, that boost might make the twitch come back, so calm down and do it again.) Say, "I can do this." Say it all the time.

Of course, the particular kind of thought you direct toward the back of your head would make a difference. You want to calm the thing, not worry it. The kind of thought you want is the opposite of fear, the kind where your eyes get out of focus and your throat goes, "ghaa." Very calming. Don't stop until your twitch goes away.

Doing what you say you'll do is simple enough. But, wow. What a power that is, that comes from doing what you say. I write poems. They're just silly poems, but every time I finish one, bang! I get a burst of strength or power or confidence or winningness from doing what I said I would do. I told myself to write a sonnet a month. Then I do it. I almost think I should tell myself every morning to be sure to eat and poop so that I can cross those things off my list and feel good about it. Seriously, I have heard of lovely commands made every morning, "Today I will be open to strangers. Today I will look upon my life as the ultimate challenge," and good stock taken at bedtime when it is seen that the commands were fulfilled. This is what your soul needs to feel able to change.

Posture! They used to say that at school. Did you know it was to help you change your thinking? Well, maybe they didn't know that either, but "change your thinking, change your posture," and vice versa. Stand an inch taller, sit three inches higher, and your thinking will smooth right out at – that – moment. Right then. Of course, if you pretend it won't, it might not. Pretend it will. And realize you have three postures to manage: your head, your shoulders, your hips. Keep them straight, you'll be great, or whatever the old school hygiene posters used to say.

This kind of success you need to feel is also a daily reality when dealing with the little pains that come in the bowels, the legs. If a part of your body has a pain, believe that it means something. Your body is the closest representative of the world to you, and it communicates symphonies of information. It is also the practice ground for your attempts at communicating back with the world. Always be willing to rub and probe parts of your body that are talking with pain. After years of success, I doubt there's a pain I couldn't figure out within a day or two. If it's in my belly or chest or head, I always ask the pain if it is my death. I want to know my death when it comes, not hide from it, and not sleep through it. I ask each pain if it is my death, and if it seems to be, I try loving it, as though it is the right thing to be in me at that time. When you love a pain as though it is your approaching death, and embrace it as though it is your savior, it either kills you or it goes away. So far all of mine have gone away.

Now don't make the mistake of thinking I'm trying to get you to not have pain and suffering. People with pain are very protective of their pain. "You don't know how I've suffered. How dare you tell me how to get rid of my pain?!" A person's illness is their most personal possession. Don't ever try to take it away from them. I am not trying to take away your pain. But if it's not your pain, and you wouldn't mind getting rid of it, I would be happy to help. No pressure.

directed thought

Being able to think any thought you choose might be difficult if we're talking about a steady, directed thought at a body part. Yet choosing a thought and thinking it are pretty basic requirements to happiness down here. Changing your belief system seems to require a level of control to your thinking. At least being able to not think a thought you don't want to think is a requirement for happiness. It's disconcerting to not be able to stop a thought from running and jumping and trashing everything in your head, say when you want to sleep. Gaining a control over your thoughts can be tackled on two fronts, inside and outside. Watch your outer life for chaos. Try to catch yourself thinking out of control. Try to sneak up on your habits and catch them. If you need to have the TV on while you eat, try eating in front of the TV with it off, and eat while staring at your reflection in the blank screen. That works. Notice how much you need noise around you. Rhythmic noise outside your head makes rhythmic noise inside. Listen to music as you would read a book, but then turn away. You don't read all day; likewise, don't allow rhythmic noise to be the background of your world. The world is not rhythmic in the way that our noise is rhythmic. Our rhythmic head noise is somehow connected with our foot tapping, finger drumming, Parkinson's twitching body. We have a thing about rhythm, obviously, and our head just can't get enough of it. But if you want a quiet mind, you sit down and close your eyes and all you get is noise and chatter, consider limiting your random music during the day.

Read good things. Read good things slowly. Read anything you have heard called "a classic." Read anything you have heard called "a holy book." Read anything that inspired our great spiritual leaders, Gandhi, MLK; read Rumi, Hafiz, Plato, Tolstoy. Read poetry. Write poetry. Walk. Walking, all by itself, will make you a better thinker. Not on a treadmill, and not with earbuds. Walking outside is the single best way to become better at being a healthy human. What have we done for more hundreds of thousands of years than walking? Not sitting. Not driving. Not even talking. See the day, see the seasons, find out what parts of your body are needing your attention.

Read Walden, the first chapter, then see how little you actually have to work to make enough to live a simple life. If you have a family to support, all the more reason to listen to the wind noise, to the traffic sounds, rather than the radio. The reason we need weekends and happy hour and vacations is because we are out of balance most of the time. If your mind was more calm you wouldn't need to get drunk to sleep. Excuse me.

Do things that get you outside, that get you to be more interested in the world. I suggest beekeeping. And walking. Perhaps my blog, austinbeehelpers.net, is still up and running. Walk the big dog that needs lots of exercise. I live in Texas, so I won't suggest gardening: too many tears. If you're rich, golf, and do it without a cart. Try to work as hard as you can, and if your co-workers hassle you, maybe you should run the place.

All this creation of a belief system, every bit of it, is only the basement of your life, the foundation. You need a foundation, but it's useless without some ongoing creation of your life itself, the art you produce. What art do you do? We can't live long without making art. Is it your cooking, your yard, the way you dress? It can be anything, it can be the way you organize your socks. But it has to feel like it is your art. It can be how you walk, how you wear those shoes, or it can be the relationship you have with animals. If you aren't creating beauty, even beauty that only you can see, you won't be living the best life. I've heard it said that the ancient Greeks didn't ask much about the particulars of a man's life when he died, only the question, "Did he have passion?" Fill your art with passion, and if your medium is not large enough for your passion (your sock drawer, for example), change mediums.

Don't let your thinking push you around. The main reason for rhythmic noise, TV, alcohol, drugs, overwork, is to avoid facing our out of control thinking. Let anyone who says they aren't afraid of their thoughts sit still for thirty minutes with their eyes closed, no scratching, no fussing. This would be the simplest task if we were at home in our own head. Most of us get a glimpse of ourselves out of control and freak out. We sit, try to think a single calming thought, are shocked to find a party going on in our head, and turn away before the revelers see us and get upset.

When we sit and look at our thinking, and find that it does not do what we ask (like, "Be Quiet!), our reaction depends on our temperament. We could go after whatever it is in our heads that is fighting us: "I'm coming to get you." We could hold the line with clenched teeth: "This far and no farther." We could be shocked, momentarily stunned, but still sounding strong: "You don't scare me." We could pretend we didn't really notice the party and casually turn around: "I wonder what's on TV?" Or we could be a bit too freaked out: "Gimmeanotherdrink." Only the first approach will do. It is your head. That noise in there is you.

birthday

My spiritual birthday was Thanksgiving, 1984, for no particular reason. I know it was my spiritual birthday because that's when I said out-loud the words, "I am now on a spiritual path. My life is now on a spiritual path." I don't know why I'm the kind of person who would say things like that. My brother Dan used to be so worried about me when he'd come over at night and find me alone in my cold house with just a single candle burning. (I kept the heat at 40 degrees to save money and keep the pipes from freezing. I'd turn it up for visitors, of course.)

Part of what that claim meant to me was a dedication to quieting my mind. I finally succeeded, to the level I had hoped for, anyway, in November of 2008. For most of that long time I had had the attitude of, "You don't scare me," and "This far and no farther," in relation to my noisy head. I would sit, daily, maybe twenty minutes, maybe twice a day, and try to have a quiet mind with the attitude mentioned, and for those 24 years not much changed. I didn't get worse, but one thought would become another without my wish, and I would hear music or talking, like our heads do during the day, but no quiet. I remember telling someone proudly I had made it to 30 seconds of silence, and feeling pretty good about it, but that was it. Maybe that would sound quiet to you, but it wasn't quiet to me.

I should say, a simple goal of meditation could be to fall asleep while sitting up, without tipping over. This is straightforward enough. To fall asleep without tipping over would mean that you fell asleep while still being awake. It sounds like a Zen koan, I know, but it is sound. The only acceptable loss of consciousness we should allow ourselves is sleep. Sitting up and falling asleep without tipping over is a very high state of development. I'm not kidding.

Anyway, I was on the trail of nothingness with little hope of success, and became resigned to it, and even found good to think of my state, in that the trying was the important thing. I was strengthening myself, my mind, by trying everyday to be quiet. And just like we do pushups everyday but we never accomplish anything with them, I sat everyday and tried to be quiet, and I knew that this was good. And, for sure, my dream-life has been excellent, always positive, regular flying, great scenery, all of which I attribute to sitting everyday and trying to be quiet. So even if my whole life was like that, it would have been worth it.

worthy task

On top of that, and perhaps even better, I was able to have a worthy task. I had a worthy challenge. Instead of needing a certain job or a certain wife or a certain car to prove to myself that I was on the right track, I had a spiritual path. It meant more than the sitting and the quieting, of course, and what it meant made my life glowy, if you don't mind. Everybody needs to ask themselves the question, "What am I doing with my life?" As long as I was practicing quieting my mind, walking my little spiritual path, I could honestly answer that I knew what I was doing, and that it was a worthy thing to do.

Having that as a focus, as a center-line of my life's road, has allowed a marvelous degree of risk-taking and worry-free living. Think about it: how cool would it be to have a constant, always-at-hand measure of whether you are wasting your life or are on the right track, a measure that depends only on you and your own effort? As long as I was still on my little "spiritual path," I had nothing to fret. That is darn convenient. I don't know how I was so lucky to think of it.

I'm no expert at meditation, even after three decades of practice. I would say, though, that I didn't really have what I felt was "a success," until I changed my mood to be the one I called, "I'm coming to get you." I wanted quiet, another word for control. I wanted to be able to think a single thought, continuous and steady, be it a picture or a word; I just happened to want to think nothing, or nothingness. I know a lot of practices say you should repeat a word, or a sound, or a special line of prose, or hold an image of something, but I thought those were all gimmicks, suggestions to aid the beginning meditant. I thought that if I could be silent, even though it might be harder, then I could always think a picture or a sound afterwards. Anyway, that's what I figured.

You know how the eyes still think they're looking at something even when the lids are closed, and they scan the darkness of your eyelids looking for movement? When we dream, the eyelids disappear and we see full color and bright light with our eyes. When you meditate (if your eyes are like mine), it's not a complete, solid blackness you see, but after-images of light, and actual light coming through the lids; and there's movement from the blood vessels in the lids and floaters passing over the eyeball. Also the eyes don't stay still very well. They move all day and all night, with every change of thought. Anyway, there's movement to the blackness, and this movement leads gradually into a daydreamy-ness as your concentration fades, and fuzzy pictures start to rise into view. At that point, if I didn't stop myself, I wouldn't be meditating anymore; I would just be sitting up with my eyes closed, which, by the way, is a good thing to practice in any case.

So, twenty-some years of that. I became good at sitting with my legs crossed, at least; not like the yogis, but like the kindergarteners, and it's a pretty handy skill. I made my peace with never actually becoming quiet, which was good. All the great books on spiritual learning say that the student is the last one to notice any progress she is making, so I just kept at it, knowing it was good for me, and feeling I was correctly on my path. Then, I don't know why, I got a little more aggressive with the movement of the blackness. I tried, at least, to keep my eyes from moving, and I looked at one tiny little place in the center of the blackness. As soon as I did, it felt a little like I had just poked a monster; something did not like me doing that. Images formed that seemed made to scare me, like a human eye or a face. This is the point where "I'm coming to get you" applies.

That stuff coming up trying to scare me was me, the higher me, the master me. It's in there running everything, keeping the heat on, the food moving through, and it doesn't want my bumbling around to get in its way. It's a gate keeper. You can't get in without a key. For my whole life, it worked, and whenever I looked a little too directly into myself, into the workings of my thoughts, something would pop out and say, "boo!" I figure this is why most people don't ever look too deeply. They get a shock; something tells them to turn around and mind their own business. In my case, it was a sham. After five seconds of electricity and fire, and then maybe another five, it gave up and said, "Okay, c'mon in."

I have to say, it was nice in there. It still is. It wasn't a trick, and nobody changed the locks when I wasn't looking. The last few years now I've been the boss of my own head. It's nice, like I said. Well, I like it. Perhaps you can do better, and not wait so long to ask to get in there. I tell you it's worth it.

You know, people have found all number of witty ways of belittling self-development. Even though the highest call throughout time has been, "O Man, Know Thou Thyself!" in its thousand forms, all this I am saying here can be called navel gazing. Let me take the sting out of that. You, each of you, do what you feel is right, what you feel is worthy of your time here, and to hell with the haters. You have fun. It's your head.

\--love, Jack

P. S.

I recently wondered what my experience would have been way back then if I had made the opposite assumptions about the world: mainly that the world is not alive and aware, there is no underlying order, and nothing that happens has anything to do with me outside of physical and biological forces. It is hard to see if something is dead, unless you poke it with a stick. To the extent that I could test anything, since my assumptions would be that nothing is aware above a biological awareness, I would have to be testing my reactions to my altering the world around me. I might cut down a living tree and see how it felt, or kill some animal and observe my reactions. I'm not trying to be dark or biased here. What else could I do, since the world is (per my assumptions) completely dead to me? Wouldn't I see if I was also dead to it? And if I felt somehow worse after killing some creature, wouldn't I think that I was being unnecessarily foolish or squeamish, since according to my assumptions there is no underlying order or purpose to the world? Wouldn't I tend more and more to become dead in my feelings, and communicate less and less with such a world that I have assumed?

# P. P. S.

# Don't try this at home.

April, 2010, I told myself to write a sonnet a month for twelve months, as an exercise in thinking (and will, of course). As the twelfth month approached, feeling freer because of the completion of my stated task, I started writing two a month. As a means to keep myself honest, I sent the sonnets to close friends on the first of every month, and enjoyed the sharing.

Some of the sonnets correspond with outer events, the Oil sonnet, obviously, and the Heart sonnet with the strikes in Madison and Egypt. I found that the hardest thing about writing sonnets was finding a worthy subject. If one is going to make the effort to compose one and show it to friends, it should be worth the time. My favorite thing about sonnets, then, is the requirement to think thoughts that can grow and expand to reach beyond the material world. I recommend the activity.

Sonnets

Meditation

See Through

Anniversary

Oil

Sky

War

Lost

The Many

Large

Chockablock

Light

Joy

Heart

Wolf

Grace

Skinned

Rain

Right

Question

Health

Fear

Bulldozer

Meditation

The pictures that we see inside our eyes

We take as normal, or as just the lack

Of light, though in our dreams the bluest skies

Will nightly flood out of the deepest black

We sit and meditate and hope to see

Some vision rise up from the nothingness

To shake our soul, but day by year we'll be

Confounded by our dullness, more or less

If we could just attach a truer weight

To what we see there, bore into the heart

Of darkness, try to renegotiate

The terms that keep us playing a lesser part

We then would be confronted by the sight

Of all our boring ghosts possessed of might

See Through

What is it makes me think that I'm awake

I lay here in this bed as calm as death

And dwell upon my rising falling breath

Pretending I am floating in a lake

My mind is like a door that's open wide

But dreams refuse to take their place on stage

I'm waiting for the pictures to engage

And roll me on my nightly circus ride

Instead I lay here thinking that I've caught

Insomnia from trying to clear my mind

Or am I only dreaming that this kind

Of emptiness is my abandoned thought

If I'm awake what tells me that it's true

That part of me is what I will see through

Anniversary

The morning sun, the sky, the sound of leaves

The garments of the world are of my skin

This is, of course, what every soul believes

Who feels the world's creations as her kin

But add to this an inner sense of calm

Or comfort from the presence of a soul

So wise and warm to make for me a balm

That strengthens me to play an outer role

With these gifts come responsibilities

To live in service and to honor life

To do all that it takes not to displease

The waiting world and my most honored wife

I daily strive to better what I touch

To compensate the world for giving much

Oil

This blackness in the gulf of Mexico

It bends my mind how easily we spoil

With exxon, bp, shell and texaco

This living, breathing world by spilling oil

We generally go oops and shrug it off

Though some of us are angrier than most

We tend to choose what makes us wheeze and cough

And end up being like critters on a host

Is this what our religion's given us

This strange ability to kill and smile

We beings who have invented calculus

Are walking contradictions, great and vile

I don't know how this world keeps blooming Spring

Our place in it seems past all reasoning

Sky

The depth of you bends upside down my mind

The years that I have tried to understand

A fruitless task like counting grains of sand

To know the ocean, groping dumb and blind

Yet feeling wholly understood by you

I often come in pain within your sight

My ego finding balance in your night

And sobering within cold mines of blue

I get the sense that I belong within

Your endless depths, a point of light alone

Impossible to reach my nearest friend

Though seeming from afar to be akin

To all around me, planets all unknown

Yet in concentric orbits to some end

War

The bluest scar doth float above my thought

It brings to nothing dreams I have of peace

My pride's possessive battle has been fought

And now commands all further efforts cease

The ravaged landscape of my soul lays bare

What's left of this once healthy thriving place

The memory of the choice I wouldn't dare

Cuts furrows of remorse upon my face

If I could have the chance to try again

I'd like to think that I would make it right

But in reality my ego then

Was not one whit reduced after the fight

Where can I now find comfort from this fact

I damned the world and kept myself intact

Lost

Where do you think you're heading on your own

With all the spoil you've taken from this life

You know the deeds that brought you great renown

Were mostly done to save yourself from strife

What is a so-called self made man without

The plants and animals and people who

Gave of their energy to him? No doubt

You have forgotten those who strengthened you

Heaven and hell aside it must be clear

If you are heading anywhere that's good

Your attitude is far too cavalier

And you are lost, or have not understood

There is no peaceful place within the boat

When you have drowned your friends to stay afloat

The Many

The wise all know that we are of two minds

When young, and that to gain enlightenment

We unify ourselves, while that which binds

Us to the flesh will gradually relent

Instead we think it worthy of our mind

To split it four by eight to multi-task

And pay to lift our skin front and behind

Until we end up lost within our mask

Your mind is locked up running on and on

And fearing that you're on the downward stair

The key is just to concentrate upon

The present task, this now, this breath of air

The time has come to seize your human powers

By focusing on one, the many flowers

Large

Oh death, you call so many friends of mine

Though mostly young or sweet idealist

In public they may rarely cross the line

Of law to mandate a psychiatrist

The cold moon never has attracted me

Except as half of life, growth, death, decay

The crystal forms draw from a symmetry

In surge and rot, where form and chaos play

But aiming now for nothing, now to cease

While all about life booms and pulses, seems

Like seeking a relief, like seeking peace

When your young lover begs to fill your dreams

You're here now, and you could be living large

Don't pay for what will find you, free of charge

Chockablock

What if, instead of wanting company

We somehow learned to love the world alone

So many hours in disharmony

Have made me see I must rethink this one

If after death is really as they say

A time of living on without a form

And all our human souls go where they may

Then beings chockablock will be the norm

This place, then, is the only space to be

Alone and independently secure

And if we deeply love this truth we'll see

A bit of wisdom old as it is pure

With us the plants and animals that thrive

We never are alone when we're alive

Light

The stars once spoke to man, or so I'm told

The echo of that time I feel tonight

As these cold stars shine brilliant, fiercely bold

To pierce my jaded thoughts with living light

The world, like these starved fields, suspends its hope

As winter and our numbness linger on

What good there is among us seems to grope

And fumble ever toward oblivion

And yet a seed of possibility

Remains alive and glowing in my breast

Perhaps it is the stars speaking to me

Encouraging brave acts at their behest:

"Return the favor granted by our light

Sing brightly all your being in this night"

Joy

The feeling, Joy, comes wholly from inside

Completely unconnected to the wind

Or to the rhythmic rising of the tide

Our feeling life is so undisciplined

We think our moods depend upon our fate

But what about the wise man in his cell

The grief of the unhappy potentate

It rather seems the point is living well

One takes possession of the little things

The voice, the thinking, by and by we find

Ourselves astride a state unknown to kings

The clearness of our deeds brings peace of mind

True joy awakens in the human heart

In one who works to play his life as art

Heart

Whose side has love when strikers hit the street

When forces of rebellion wash the sins

Of past regimes from every soul they meet

It matters who has love because love wins

The quashing of the dissidents aside,

The corporate takeover of all that's good,

The Cheneyists' and Wolfowitzes' ride

Will clearly show the forest from the wood

For one side leads to life; the other, death

Not life and death of body but of soul

The weight or lightness of your every breath

Depends on if you lean toward God or ghoul

I swear, the deed of love will cause to start

That shriveled thing that used to be your heart

Wolf

My friend is dying of cancer; aren't we all

Though only some of us are diagnosed

The fear we drink from our impending fall

So good we often end up overdosed

And even if the doctor says you're clear

You really can't believe him anyway

Some forms are so aggressive and severe

You'd really need a checkup every day

Pain is to death as yawning is to sleep

We shun death like a child avoids his nap

Dear cancer is the wolf we need as sheep

His touch, though firm, is not a handicap

Look in the eyes of one who knows his ways

They live who know the value of their days

Grace

Freud thought that sex was our great driving force

Whereas his student thought aggression prime

A deeper cause to me is our remorse

At losing what we felt was once sublime

Before our birth we lived among the stars

And all that is and was belonged to us

To find ourselves alone and drunk in bars

Would naturally be felt as barbarous

Desire and envy, then, are natural

As we all feel bereft of what we had

And judging others hypocritical

Respect and love we need or all go mad

Love one another, let descend the grace

Upon you, and upon the human race

Skinned

I heard a scream today across the wind

And for a moment, stunned, I felt the pain

And suffering of my poor neighbor skinned

The safeguards placed around her life in vain

For just a moment I took on the weight

Of all the pain of screams I could not hear

Because of time or space those caused by hate

Or greed the human race conquered by fear

Though then miraculously came the thought

Of meditants and saints strongly at peace

Against the crushing evil tide they fought

This picture made the rising blackness cease

A Christ Being needs our love to carry on

Without help One would choose oblivion

Rain

It got a little wet today, surprised

I woke within a downpour of disgust

And rage because the place I lay comprised

A small part of a rich man's back yard trust

He meant to wound me with his epithets

And sure enough I felt the stabbing pain

Of insults pushed like burning cigarettes

Into my flesh, and thought my pride was slain

But luckily an old saw came to mind

Of turning words before they pierce the heart

Let people be however so unkind

They storm and rage a while and then depart

We give to words the power of death and life

To strike our soul like sweet rain or a knife

Right

When has it been that life was ever fair

The odds are really more than two to three

You'll one day be struck dumb and standing bare

Before your very own catastrophe

The bright young man gets cancer as a teen

The good man's wife takes everything he had

It isn't odd that these things are routine

What's odd is that it makes us feel so bad

We are the only creatures here with such

A deeply rooted feeling for what's right

It must be that we bring the spirit's touch

To earthly realms and long to reunite

We know it doesn't have to be this way

Our spirit selves look on in shocked dismay

Question

Is this wide world alive or is it dead

Is it aware of us and what we do

This question by itself contains a clue

To turn your understanding on its head

If it's legitimate to wonder if

A God exists and if the world's alive

Then it's an open question; we should dive

Head first and open-hearted off the cliff

Allow the breezes, birds, and bugs to speak

To you and take direction from their voice

A bit at first but soon you will rejoice

Please try it if your life is feeling bleak

A gratefulness and joy will grow because

You'll feel a part of all that nature does

Health

I made it very clear again today

On hearing word about a friend in need

Of health insurance how he can not pay

The hospital requires him to bleed

I told my angels that I'm serious

About not going into managed care

To seek health in that hell is ludicrous

I'd hate to think that they were unaware

You Lords of Karma please make no mistake

There are no lessons there for me to learn

No therapies or treatments I'll partake

All modern cures I hereby swear to spurn

Don't send Your deadly illness snooping round

Unless You want to see me in the ground

Fear

The difference between certainty and doubt

I'll bet you think the feeling would be clear

Especially if we're talking about fear

But that's the very thing I'm on about

You say that you're uncertain if those dudes

In turbans over there are terrorists

But actually the fear in you exists

Where your rigidity and sureness broods

We wouldn't be afraid if we weren't sure

Of badness going down before our eyes

An actual uncertainty is wise

And prejudice within it won't endure

Be open to the possibility

You cannot know life's vast profundity

Bulldozer

I hope you've thought of all those little things

The stuff you keep upstairs and in the shed

Those screws and chisels, broken airplane wings

What burden will it weigh after you're dead

Will it be friends or children who recoil

At your strange love of all things bric-a-brac

Will they enlist the public to despoil

Your private rooms and all your drawers ransack

A natural disaster could have come

To help you lighten up your living weight

The poundage must add to a hefty sum

How will you float up through St. Peter's gate

I wanted to be clear, you should know sir

Your only hope will be a bulldozer

I wish to thank my spiritual teachers in all forms, positive and negative, living and dead; some of whom, in chronological order were:

The television show, Kung Fu

Carlos Castaneda

My five elder brothers

Robert C.

Phillip Kapleau

Rudolf Steiner

Norman Davidson

Thank you for enjoying this e-book. If you would like a hardcover copy, or copies of my other books, email me at jackmills@mac.com.

Reasoningwithanoptimist.net
  1. Chapter 1

