Thursday, August 24, 2006

The Big Questions


Okay, so I’m just a guy contemplating, meditating and digging for information about the big questions— questions like:

• What is the essential nature of physical reality?
• Is everything a form of conscious spirit as the eastern philosophies and American indigenous cultures have intuited?
• Or is it all just a series of random happenstances that created a dog-eat-dog cosmos that is already dead in essence— reactive, mechanical, where any sense of deeper meaning is the result of wishful thinking
• Just as important: Is the average Joe capable of deep lasting happiness without destroying, one’s fellow beings and oneself in the attempt.
• Is the average Joe capable of perceiving a reality that transcends the electro-chemical nuero-firings of the old grey matter like Rumi and Krishnamurti and other ecstatic aesthetics whose names end in a small “I” have claimed?

Big questions and, like I said, I’m just a guy. I don’t have any advanced degrees like Ken Wilbur or Deepak Chopra or Stephen Hawking. But then again if that were a requirement then only bishops could determine anything pertinent about the sphere of the spirit and Jesus and Buddha would have been arrested for contemplation without a license.

But if, as some say. the spirit indwells us all, well, that and a public library, a world-wide web and some committed mindfulness and maybe some good discussions with like-intentioned fellow inquirers should yield up some big answers. Or at least some big inferences.

And, in fact, they have. There’s incredibly good news— good enough to make a lifelong skeptic jump for joy.
Enough to lift the heart of a committed curmudgeon? Of course, not. Because as the Buddha said, “With your thoughts you make the world.” — especially with your projections of the world. But anyone capable of honest, open-minded and determined delving will find excellent prospects for immeasurable joy and eternal gratitude.

These scribblings are not only an argument for such a vision, but also an exploration of the practices required to see through old thought habits to that infinite luminosity waiting just beyond those habits. These notes are also a celebration of the great gift of this existence. It is an e-sangha for the spirit. Emaho! Give and partake! Ain’t life grand?

Of course, being the bearer of good tidings is not a job for wimps. Everyone is understandably suspicious. They’re asking themselves, “What’s this guy smokin’?” What cult has brainwashed all his critical thinking skills down the drain? Don’t get me wrong. I’m painfully aware of the ubiquitous tragedy that forever characterizes “the real world”. Greed, hatred and ignorance have blinded most to the glorious spectacle of the unveiled here and now and of the vast potential good snoozing in every person.

But we’re not here to point out the obvious. We’ll leave that for a gazillion other blogs. We’re here to highlight the subtle but all-pervasive fact of a benevolent universe existing just beyond the nightmare of Greed, Hatred and Ignorance (G.H.I.). We’re here to point out the fact that since time immemorial people in power have tried to convince the minions that G.H.I. is the dark star around which existence forever orbits so we’d better face the fact that it’s us against them and that a major part of the human endeavor will always be devoted to building arms and dying to defend ourselves from people who” hate our freedom.” Blah, blah, blah. What a momentous crock.

But people are still falling for that age-old wheeze. It’s happening as we speak. Terrorists are the new communists under the bed. Self-anointed “independent thinkers” are mouthing the Cant of Can’t exactly as they’ve been instructed and they don’t even know it.

Don’t confuse being dour with being grounded. “Grounded” also refers to crippled aircraft that are incapable of flight.As Annie Philpott once wrote, “The world is a miraculous garden waiting patiently for us to awaken to its splendors.” Sometimes the best way to end a nightmare is to wake up.

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