When I was born, in those days, I was with the creator — [we can call ‘him’ “God”] —

Before encounters turned to dreams, waned, then faded to memories

Purple light became lavender recollections became imagined doubt

And it was gone for the remainder; no rote could ever bring it back

What we call ‘life’ ensued.  I did what we call ‘my best’.

In the duration of life, there is no true memory.

Memory is unreliable.

Selfish perspective gives assumed color.

We are all deluded by luster.

Memory taint.

Now I imagine that it’s coming back.

I drop everything and empty out all that is and turn to dream encounters.

When I have come full circle, it will become real.

I will be with.  And, it will be somehow known, mystery upon mystery, it all along was.

We are, all of us, transients in a cosmic eternity.

We can see this in a limited way based on fear or we can see this in the immeasurably expanded shimmer of joy and light – intimating the true purpose and promise of creation.

In the limited way, based on fear, lies all suffering, pain and angst. The operative pun is lies.  Ever doubtful, ever dependent on the addiction to the idea of salvation from the limits of fear, this way manifests in the hurting those we portend to help – which distills, namely and patently, to ourselves.  The pleading and begging that come with fear give creative credence to hell:  a true standard-bound creation.

We can be a moon-like reflection, made in the image, with creative powers – ever loosing and binding – creating out of fear.

[living what we fear out of avoiding the mind-game eternal what we fear – created monster idea]

Or . . .

there is light . . .

To be a positive influence in the world is to truly and genuinely join up with the positive force that is positively behind everything. It is to embark on a positive journey. It is an active quest. There is a positive consistency involved. Positivity doesn’t come naturally or easily, despite the positive fact that the positive is at the core of everything and can’t be avoided nor escaped. Still one has to train oneself to seek and to see the positive in the core of everything. And I do mean everything. Everything at all. I’m positive about this.

Sure there are constant slings and arrows, but they are not to be minded. They are not real. Much of the journey (and I wouldn’t take nothing for the journey now) involves, of course a negating of the negative that seems to abound.

Tireless negating of the negative with ultimate purpose to explore and to experience and to bring forth to light the positive is part and parcel of the positive experience.

The more determined and stubborn the insistence on negative one encounters, the more positively determined and stubborn the negation of the negative necessary. This, of course, can give off the distinct impression of one who is often negative. This can and will be used against the positive. Many conspiracy theories smartly fit the bill and provide the framework. The positive one, indeed, gets literally framed

This can be a tiresome experience, I presume. It can certainly be construed that way, of course. Everything can be construed, that’s kind of my point. And I do mean everything. Everything at all. But no, I will negate that negative called “tiresome.” It is positively invigorating to me.

And, to negate negative once more, I repeat: I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.

Construe the positive. That’s positively me. Won’t you join me, neighbor?

Post-script:
Another, more simple way to put it to the negative would be like this:

“Hey, negative: you are a stumbling block to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Post-post-script:
And sadly, some purport to divine things while they are all caught up in human things all the while. We call them, sometimes, “The Religious Right.”

They are highly political, of course. Caught up in human things.

(Sorry if it hurts).

There is the flow of rivers, mouth to delta, the longest rivers in the world: Amazon, Nile, Yangtze, Mississippi. White Nile/Blue Nile. Meander through the bulrushes. “The Sea Refuses No River”

There is tributary flow of sundry ilk.

There is the imperceptible unrelenting, often backwards lazy flow of the bayou, brown like an ugly snake in the sun.

There is the swift flow of the rapids throwing down the cataracts.

There are the cement constructions, lazy river flow. There is one in the shape of letters: “lima” “sierra” “uniform”

There is the energy of wind moving the wide expanses with elegant massive power flow. There is gulf stream. There is air stream. The two are related.

There is the flow of the floe of calving ice, releasing trapped and centuries-stored carbon, changing the composition of the vast expanses. Changes in density, changes in salinity. Nothing remains quite the same.

There is the flow of heat exchange, conduction.

There is circulation flow: pumps, pipes, and hoses.

There is the flow of blood, periodic lunar chart.

There is confined flow in contained hose nozzle-controlled.

There is a natural hose waste flow multiplied and shared by all the people in the world, fed by liquidity. It can go into a bucket, it can go into a pot, it can go into a public works, it can go behind a tree, it can famously go onto a second-best bed in an expensive suite with a Kremlin view.

There is the drifting flow of continents, to and fro. There is the clash of subduction zones. Mountains are like the vomit of orogenesis. Very moving.

There is magma flow in a hot spot, remote in the vast expanse. Once exposed, magma is lava, and it flows too: a’a & pahoehoe, leaving a mark upon the earth.

There is electricity flow in a wire. Turn on the light switch: immediate illumination. Think of a Newton’s cradle.

There are the waves and particles of radiation from the sun. There is the flow of photosynthesis.

There are flowing waves in the air, broadcast and caught with a dial on Marconi’s device. Limber limburger Limbaugh limbos to bimbos, unrelenting for thirty years, bending America’s lumbar like Beckham. Lump it and limp.

There is the information flow through a cable, fiber optic. It fills us with too much. It sows chaotic confusion and lack of knowing. [as Declan has said: “they’re gonna take that cable now, and stick it down your throat” and elsewhere: “it’s undercover around your houses, up your skirt and down your trousers”]

There is talk flow, Forrest to Bubba, back and forth, similar to this awkward word flow.

This could go on and on, ‘mimsy were the borogoves’, but I’ll run it through a sort of nozzle, and play with the adjustments:

There is an expression: “Go with the flow.” Some say it. It gets paid the lip service. It is associated with passivity. It is sometimes considered mystical and very eastern. It is represented many times as hippy liberality, a refusal to take part in decent society, a refusal to work. It is long hair and a beard. It is disrespect. It doesn’t stand upright for the national anthem. It smokes pot, kettle black. Lives matter. It is frowned upon in our America. It needs to pull its pants up. Serious social measures are taken to rid us of this mystical eastern passive scourge.

Decent Americans righteously rebel against it, irreligious and irreverent as it is. Yet a cousin of it, ultimately, can be found advocated in the Christian religions, especially in the ones which fight passivity and call for action. It clashes with the concept of the Protestant work ethic of course, but it can find accord in the concept of grace and in the dubious concept of “handing of one’s life over to Christ.” Literally defined, the word for this “handing over” is actually one that draws ire and derision, inciting and inviting violence: islam. (Not many decent ones will remain completely passive about the feelings that I just manipulated and stoked in the dropping of that one simple defining word).

And people talk about it, yes, this (paradoxical within the paradigmatic context) “handing over of life”. Committed people swear by it. What it actually amounts to in practice, I have yet to understand or to truly see. For it seems like the same old self-serving selfishness to me, only “righteous” and “justified.” [But that’s just me. As a gnostic heretic, I do have somewhat of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to this]. [It’s awkward, sometimes, biding one’s time on the execution line for heretics, especially within polite conservative society]. [Dead man walking].

But my written word flow is off again on yet another tangent. Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a mail box. I myself, indeed do advocate going with the flow. It is the way. To me it is the way to go. It is eternal. It is universal. It is beyond time and space. It always was and always will, like the spirits that we truly are.

But, I also see a trap in confusion with “the way,” especially when it is so obvious from my original Bubba Gump talk/list above, when there are so many choices and conflicting flows and ways and means and flows of bad advice with which to go. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – Hamlet (1.5.167-8). There is almost, seemingly, no way to discern the right way. The concept of “The Sea Refuses No River” and the “We Are All Water” sentiment do offer a bridge to redemptive theology on the matter. Yet, it clashes in a fundamental way. How to know? Traditional authority? The Pope? Formal traditional protest against traditional authority? Institutional?

But reality is that we all must serve somebody. We all must, “at the end of the day” [inane throwaway cliché!] flow along somewhere to something beyond us. This is that which we fear with all our might, all our being, all the while working on the conviction that we can somehow be saved and graced and somehow granted with the opposite of that which we fear in such complicated denial.

People, even the toughest resisters who would never stoop to feminine passive flowing do indeed flow in many lost and circular ways, like the Lost and Old River on the way to Beaumont. Like flotsam, we, all of us, flow on, in on something, one way or another, acknowledged or not. There is a regular flow of fooling ourselves. We call it life. We consider it finite. We look at it as a win or loss proposition. People like to play the zero sum game. People like to project the zero sum game everywhere. The world is like Plato’s cave. Action and initiative individuality and zero sum are shadows on our wall of reality.

Yet, consider that there really is a flow to creation. There is a flow that cuts through all the other flows. There is an uber flow that overrides. Don’t go with just any flow, I say. Don’t get lost. Don’t get old. Slow down. Meditate. Find the overriding flow. See the light. Converse with the one flow in the creation. Flow though time. Flow through space. Flow eternal. Flow out of this world. Find the light. Find the flow that cuts through it all, that is it all. ‘Get on the Right Thing’. Go with that flow.

This post is constructed from two separate posts that an intimate virtual friend of mine shared on facebook recently.

The first part was his answer to someone who remarked that “they can see the love” in a picture of he and his wife of 27 years.  Then, after some reflection, in a general post, he expounded further.

I being of very close kinship to this facebook avatar, have decided to combine the two separate posts into one single work to be published to the world herein:

August 4, 2017.  1:15 a.m.:

Troy Rosamond Thanks. I could see it too. When it was happening I was seeing it and I knew it would show. Not a version of itself. Not an image or a projection. Itself. I’m glad it did.

If you live long enough, and don’t give in and don’t give up, one day we will all run across it, perhaps in the course of stepping over and around it in desperate frantic search for intercourse with something else. If we can drop ourselves we can go there.

If you live long enough after that, and don’t give in and don’t give up, and override the sabotage of good intentions that we all desperately selfishly do, we can stay for a while.

If you live long enough after that, you might start to realize that your desperate clinging for what you were looking for in all suffering of not finding — or of finding and obtaining and suffering to fail, perhaps even trying to garner and enlist the power of the earth of the sun in your deluded efforts to obtain, alas to fail — was not suffering, failure, or the suffering of failure, but it is blessing: blessing beyond blessing: a crucible.

If you live long enough after that you begin, ever so imperceptibly, to perfect it, though perfect is the last word you’d call it.

If you live long enough after that you begin to quit looking over your shoulder. [Fear — desire — arrogance — you name it . . .]

If you live long enough after that you can see where it came from — hint: in the vast, unimaginable, powers of creation — and that is a true transformation. (Not of the kind that will get you kicked out of the army, but way, way beyond that).

I am talking about the love we all could share. When we find it, to try our best to hold it there. With our love, with our love, we could save the world.

Further elaboration posted to a general “selected friends” audience August 5th at approximately 4:28 a.m.:

This involves one of my favorite parables, the Matthew one about the seeds. I was exposed to it in an institutionally structured timely way recently.

Of course, it could certainly do without the blatant explanation attached. That is totally unnecessary. I’m sure that everyone can get a sense of what it’s about without the in-your-face commentary. That said, it’s still a really good one, and one of my favorites.

Rocky ground, thorny ground, on the well-trodden path. We can all get the idea. It is very cool. Deep, nourishing soil is where it is. Very cool.

Many have been exposed to this one. Many more have had it mansplained or have grappled with it in the course of self-guided study, alone or in like-minded group-thinks. The mansplaining and the self-guided tours are, of course, in the style and the fashion of all that is post-1517 (and all that!) . . .

But there is a major blind spot. There is a blind spot that is missed, despite the blatant, detailed and superfluous explanation provided in [inerrant] text. I will be a kind friend and I will enlighten you on this blind-spot trap as a “freebie” before I get into deeper theology regarding this one.

The major blind-spot, universally “un-caught” by the congregated, the mansplained and the self-guided alike, is this: the good deep soil is universally understood to be the sole and exclusive domain of the hearers and select heeders, i.e. those present and willing and active recipients of the word. That is not the case, I say. It is so not the case. Like, totally, otherwise. It is a parable still, mind you. It is a parable despite the burdensome explanatory albatross hanging like golden holy bling from the neck of the thing. The good soil, I maintain in true parabolic[sic] fashion, is indeed something else. It lies elsewhere. Thus, the blind spot is exposed. ‘Flashenlightenment’ flashlight having shone.

You’re welcome.

And if you don’t believe me, that’s fine. Good traps are not easily seen. (And when Jesus got sarcastic, it was always directed to the overly pedantic and ‘law’ ’abiding’/projecting insiders). [Just is always saying].

But, to get on to the theological grub of the thing: that’s why we are here, remember? That’s why I’m [still] here at least . . .

There is an overriding sense of destiny stuck in the heart of the craw in this one. Although theological gymnastics can get us out of it, it is still stuck in the core there. Soils are what we have, what we are. The seeds are strewn and fall where they will. Some take and some either don’t, are taken away, or only appear to take, for a time. We are what we are. It is what it is.

Of course, you can stretch out the tired old explainer of everything mysterious: free will. Of course, then you still must pull it over the frame of the true enough fable of a tiny seed of faith with the amazing ability to move physical mountains. Then thus, of course, path, thicket and rocky ground can be “converted” to deep soil (with grace, of course. One simply doesn’t ‘work’ at these things). But, really, who expects much out of rocky ground? The ‘proverbial’ path has been verily paved into a free-way by now, expanded to six lanes and the traffic has only increased. Where is the deep soil to be found these days but in the pew or in front of the book?

No, there is something altogether exclusionary and deterministic about the whole thing.

But that is parable.

This one continues the context-wide tension that always exists between the few, the proud, the chosen versus the good news offered freely to all. These contradictions will always be in tension as long as we hold onto that fundamental reality of life as once, finite, and for all. They directly lead, cause and effect, to false assumptions about dire recruitment obligations.

Parable.

O that concept of life as once, finite, and for all! This fundamental assumption renders all scripture incomplete. In this context, ends will never meet. This fundamental assumption makes nothing spiritual make sense. This road-map will get you lost. Parabolically [sic], it is intended that way. Scripture beats around this particular bush, always talking about promise yet, cannily, always able to make threats. Scripture never quite achieves the actual spiritual. Rote always falls short. Doctrine is always challenged by parable. Parable deludes as much as it explains, despite the best attempts of detailed explanation to deliver and/or to demystify. There is always a tension. It never quite makes sense. Even the deftest acrobatics merely produce an explanation that only works parable-free. Parables are always there in the life as once, finite, and for all. They, [the parables], haven’t gone away. Nor has the trap.

That is the parable. But there is a time-frame that is spiritual. Life as once, finite and for all it is not. The very idea of life as once, finite and for all is a conceptualization of nothing beyond fear and threat. Fear and threat are death. The way that we have been and the way that we are, continually, institutionally instructed and drilled — (well regulated) — to accept things and to grasp reality is a manifestation of death. No wonder fear is never far away.

There is a spiritual actuality, a true eternity of soul, stretching past and future like lone and level sands that allows for a breakage of all limitations, that allows the cultivation of the soil over an eternal working of over. It allows for the general promise and for the good news to be real and actualized. It is a tree. A tree of life. [Hint: someone restored it, there in the garden]. Or, you can go with your future-tense. Have it as you insist, as learning and tradition have taught you to do. Truth goes against the fundamental of life as once and for all though. It is parable.

Ponder the parable.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Sartor Resartus.
Parable.

No one can steal what is infinite and freely given . . .

At best, all they can hope for is to steal a march on time. But time doesn’t entertain dharmatic tricks. Time is eternal karmic hell to those who think to manipulate and dream to advantage. Don’t ever play games with the illusion of cause and effect.

The thing is, I am not here. But, while I still am, I will say and do to have an impact. I will not cease the practice of stillness and of the emptying of me. The ones who insist that I don’t understand a thing about here, they’re right. I will change it.

It’s temptingly simple to see the world as dichotomy of good vs. evil, light vs. dark, etc., etc., etc.

The concept of light destroying darkness is an appealing one.  And such a good variety of handy fill-ins give our hunger for order and simplicity a seeming satisfaction.  There are just so many bad guys to play the part.  And it is so easy to narrow down the ‘good guy’ to one good convenient version of one.

But, in this creation — invisible behind the material illusion — there are different dynamics going on.

It is not a case of light vs. dark.  It is more a collection of tendencies toward embracing light or toward turning away from light.  This is free will.

There are unlimited degrees, gradations, nuances to choose.  And in the atmosphere of free will, the selfish winds of the troposphere turn a weathervane of whim this way and that.  This is usually mistaken for depravity by simpletons.  Throw in fear and the simpleton remedies are downright hurtful.  Fear is the absolute best proxy for darkness.

Anything short of a full embracing of the light is an embrasure for the absence of light, an opportunity for man to fall short of spirit potential, purpose and destiny.  And there is no shortage of simpleton explanations to mythologize the falling.

Embrace the light!  Embrace the light fully!

Arguments are ‘aplentiful about right and wrong.

Relationships fall apart over this need to be right and to have the other be wrong. Groups band together in righteousness to conquer the wrong. Wrong is called transgression (and worse). It is taken personally. Wars are fought. People are killed.

It is good to be right. It feels good to have your ‘opponent’ shown to be wrong. To have law and violence on your side in this “showing” feels powerful.

But, law and the concept of right are only rough, approximate languages invented by man to grasp at the meaning of an abstract thing. Law and the concept of right are like the language of a math formula: S=[n(n+1)]/2, for example. It is an almost indecipherable formula slapped onto an underlying ‘reality’. The “reality/correct answer” can be approached in several different ways, requiring varying efforts and time commitments. Say that n equals one hundred for example. The answer could laboriously be arrived at adding sequential numbers one at a time until the answer 5,050 is derived. Or, one could write (or picture in the eye) an array of all the numbers and realize that they can be paired off into sets: i.e. one pairs with ninety-nine, forty-nine pairs with fifty-one, and so on and so forth with everything in between. One could write (or picture in the eye) that there would be fifty such pairs, leaving over a lone fifty in the middle left out like an outlier or a sore thumb. Adding all the fifty pairs of one hundred would make 5,000 and topping the cake with the outlier/sore thumb fifty makes 5,050. Or, quickly, one could plug in the number one hundred to the formula. Voila: 5,050.

Now this is just an abstract example (posing as a concrete example) of an abstract concept.

About the law: remember that it was said by a man who does indeed know that law is only necessary and imposed because our hearts are hard.

Our understanding just isn’t there. This includes the understanding of what is actually behind our manly concept of right, i.e. righteousness. It is truly unknowable on material earth. Yet, we fight. People die.

It is the ultimate irony starched on an ironing board of irony stretched ironically that we band together and we fight and we kill and we die and people are killed and people die over the concept of the law of right versus the transgression of wrong. We receive a jolt/epiphany when we awaken to the truth that it is the ultimate statue worship and the ultimate assumption of the role and power of the Creator when we can finally “get it” that the always and everywhere of the creation can only be known by the Creator. We have to know that we have no business in the know business. But we don’t. We know enough to stand up and fight for what we “know” to be right.

The taking of any life in the always and everywhere by anyone lives in a pretty righteous town and how can only be wrong, which is not right.

We are incapable of knowing. Yet, for safety’s sake, we kill in the name of the one who does know and for the unknowable Creator who created know.