Higher consciousness.

This is what Jesus is after.  A vision of the human being as more than a unit of production, occasionally allowed a little wine by the authorities to feed and numb some pains.

Of course his vision is regarded as a threat.  He's taking everyone along with him toward that higher consciousness.  Of course the authorities, who've reached a status quo to maintain, let's not rouse any rebels, everything's fine, they are going to jump all over him, immediately.

And the quality of a higher consciousness is such that simply it sees the higher, sees the great spiritual potential, the awesome spiritual capabilities, the peaceful enlightenment....

Hard-hearted.  Calcified.  Blind.  Seeking a sign.  Why would you need a sign?  It's all right there in front of you, within you, standing here before you...

And some people get it.  The kind of people who are sick, poor, miserable, outcastes, mourning the way things are going now.  (I remember America before the Conservative Reagan backlash, tossing the mentally ill out into the streets, cutting partnership programs of state and private cooperation, nothing free about education, meaning there's money to be made, everywhere.  Yes, Reagan was all for gutting the jewel of the California free university system...  His spawn live on.)

And people are not inherently selfish.  How could they be?  They are higher beings, in tune with nature.  If they act not in accordance with their truer nature, of course things will go afoul.

The Buddha is the vehicle, the ferryman to get you across to the other side, the boat of philosophy and tenets to be abandoned once across.  Higher consciousness, the mind opening to the vastness of space and time, once you've got there, you don't need Buddha anymore, just gratitude for an old friend of humanity...

If you had attained higher consciousness, yes, the old laws would be alive and perfectly obvious.  Your morality would be perfectly awakened.  You'd see appropriateness perfectly.  Not having to ape any manners...

But to them, who only see money, the way to make it, the way to use it, in everything, the ultimate purpose, what is Jesus doing?  Really quite a lot of nothing, if anything, giving stuff away, and that stuff is undefinable!   Can we stick advertisements on his white robe?   Oh, look, it's Jesus with ads for tires and car insurance on his back, waving and smiling to the crowds, as he holds a little girl who previously was not breathing but who is now smiling sweetly too.  Look at the crowds;  great placement!

But,  Jesus, doing a lot of nothing.  If anything getting in the way of the way we do things around here, a good market for animal sacrifices down at the temple, he almost messed that up royally enough, and then the taxation bureau and the regulatory commissioner would be out of work.

Jesus' point being that such things don't help you achieve much in the way of real enlightenment.

What is enlightenment, though?  Who is it intended for?

Well, it's for the people who are smart enough to realize the situation they are in, really a necessary balm for all the anxiety of life, the extra anxiety the powers that be put into the system trying to hypnotize the masses, another facet of human nature, to make other people anxious, unfortunately, a tool-ish show of strength beyond animal childishness.  Quickly does mankind go off into the Satanic in these contests of strength and aggression.

It's for people like me, people susceptible to existential crisis, people who are feeling a deep anxiety.  And the deep anxiety itself is informing you.  The old way doesn't work, of going to work, getting through a shift earning a few measly dollars that will never see your body into old age, drinking wine to forget the basic ills.

I'm very sore.  That's where Jesus is coming from.  This informs his gentleness.  His kind touch, his easy sense of humor and just words, the path he takes in life, healing and preaching to other people.

Did some national endowment fund him to speak in a breathy voice, each line charged to the maximum with sound byte emotion as old photographs played on the screen?  A TV show that would then still be a the voice of the basic corporate consumer attitude, okay, it's still good to go out and buy stuff...  Nothing ever too crazy.

There were the houses that let him in.  The only act of philanthropy that comes to mind is the guy who lends him his own tomb.  Though, I don't know, perhaps there was some sort of cooperative sponsorship that goes unsaid behind the loaves and the fishes appearance.  The local tourism board.  Maybe it was like a fireman's field day chicken barbecue, a good time people needed given cruel kings and empires and hopeless rebellions.  Saturday Night Live.  Put it on air, then let's see what happens, an experiment in live TV.  The Olympics.  Sponsorship will come.

But all Jesus says is take nothing with you and go to the houses that let you in.  (Let us not blaspheme the miracles of loaves and fishes he pulls off through his higher vision and consciousness.)  That's the only way you can really do your work, not having to worry about all the other stuff, just the worker getting paid for the real valuable work that he's doing.



The mind still hurts, doesn't seem to know what it's doing.  There was respite yesterday coming home from the grocery store, talking to mom on the phone and finding a miraculous draught of robins in a holly tree picking the red berries, and I stood there being natural and they were like chickens around you in a barnyard except they flew like hummingbirds, hovering, doing acrobatics and cooperative motions, plucking the berries.  One bent forward and reached around underneath with perfect aim to get a berry.  Right up until when I pulled my phone out carefully to take a picture they all flew off, disappearing, except for a last handful of stragglers up above Florida Avenue in a weary looking oak tree, where there had been many many.   These are not dumb animals.  Are they like the Amish, not liking their pictures taken?

I went home after that, put the groceries away, moved the load of whites to the dryer and took a nap.


But I've never found any real satisfying answer in the things of this world, except love of course.  I'm just the sorry person who admits that state of affairs.  Buying stuff and beach vacations doesn't going to do it, for the most part, not so much fun.  Though I do very much like the Martin D-28 I bought myself a couple years ago.  It is nice to see the stars standing on a beach at night looking up, humanity's lights and junk and consumerist houses behind you out of sight for a brief moment...

If I'd been a family man, I don't know, I might have tired of the competition and the attempt to blind one's self from the pain we must face to be better, to be truly helpful to our fellows and all the creatures...  Not been able to be the kind of teacher I knew I had to be...

Well, I gather it's nice to be able to understand your own motivations.  And maybe the very problem, when your standing in front of the mirror wondering what your worldly image is telling, saying against or in terms of a backdrop of magazine pictures of the happy life floating around in your mind,  the very problem is consciousness, being born into it, a sort of adept, in a humble human non-magical fly-around-in-the-sky able-to-drop-in-on-various-centuries kind of a way (which can only be a metaphor of higher consciousness, a vision, naturally psychedelic.)  That's the problem, the gift of higher consciousness, and that is found within, in your own self.  And maybe that's the meaning of Corinthians 13, an understanding that takes some of a long time.  Now I am face to face, truly seeing that there is such a thing as a higher consciousness, a miraculous thing, a thing that enables one to look back on life and be okay with things.

That's the remarkable thing, the thing that makes you feel better.  And this you can't consume.  You can't just go on up to that place in the Berkshires and shell out a couple thousand.  Whatever you are going to achieve you're going to find within.  And it comes free, and you must give it away free, end of story.  Kripalu, I mean, not that there's anything wrong with such explorations...

I'm from Amherst.  I was born there, the Holyoke Range rising above my childhood bed from the front window, singing its seasons.  I left, I went to school there.  How could I not be some form of enlightened, and that is the deeper meaning of education behind it all, why the farmers went through all the trouble, to build a campus by which you could look through a prism, as Emily Dickinson did, into Nature, transcendent.  Yeah, how could I not be.  Not my fault.  Just my karma.  What am I doing in Washington, D.C., I wonder...



Now of course it's obvious, it goes without saying, Jesus would never accept a position of power, the Satanic temptation, but he does accept the authority of the high consciousness of his father, who of course begets him in a moment of highest tantric consciousness, the only thing that can allow the true seed to pass on.  Then the son's growing life is simply a matter of realizing who he really is.  Yes, note how Satanic men can become for worldly domination, intimidation...  That's what current history shows, any day of the week.

That's what makes it a great myth, but it's also true, the great discovery of finding within that you are indeed cut of the cloth of high Jesus consciousness...  Of course the careerist religious authorities, who have put their own time in, studying the law, over and over, and doing their own difficult tasks which have their place indeed, of course they're going to be a bit taken aback by this newcomer who springs with authority, a natural wordsmith, a compelling speaker, quick with his wit.  A son realizing his father...

Worldly versions of that too, there are, like Kennedy, the patriarch, and his sons...  Lincoln, without a supportive father, a self-made man, he's doing something along the same lines, developing the great wisdom within along with his legal and professional pursuits.  Mankind is a mix, a kaleidoscope of an inner reality...  Where did William Blake get the authority to make high art, despite being poor?  Where did Daniel Day Lewis get the authority to play Lincoln?  Or any writer to write something striving to be good?  Within...

All it takes is a little support, a little push in the right direction, a day off from the usual toils...

Change is organic;  it comes from within.



The finest things much be approached gently, circumspectly.... This is to make as certain as it can be that the venture undertaken is not one of domination, power, a bid for the rulership of a fiefdom, cleric of a cult...  The prophets one should accept, and indeed have great respect for.  Just be wary of their worldly interpreters, especially when they amass influence and power and start commanding their subjects around to do to add to their power.

I take a walk around the block, to get the last of the day's sun as it passes behind Embassy Row.  Robins are digging around in the bank, rooting for insect as I come back up my street.

Higher consciousness, the stuff of Transcendentalists, a problem to the world, is the only solution.  Higher consciousness, the stumbling block to the status quo, but the natural healthy rights of humanity, and indeed the only solution to all the world's troubles, climate, wars, poverty, by simply changing the attitude, the arrow of causation's direction.  We are not to consume, stuff our faces, use the world and all its things for personal wealth and advancement.  The world is to teach us.  The world is to show us higher consciousness, that we might learn, and then start to live in peace with the way things are.

Adulterous generation, exactly.  Believing life is a matter of consumption, take what you can, use...  Rape the forest if no one stops you;  sell her to the highest bidder, and then move on the next one...



I guess it would be hard, in some ways, for him to be around people.  People with all their demons and depressions, their lack of faith toward the single pursuit of high consciousness, tripping over themselves...  Passers by, he would have felt their issues in a blink of an eye.  A sensitivity he picked up from his mother as well as his father.  (His mother would be a bit more blunt about it:  'he's a creep,' she would say, and he would humor the angles.)  It was a good exercise for him to do yoga in his own privacy, meditating, restoring the energy flow.  Calming, centering, so that you knew again that which was good practice apart from that which was a scheme, an egotistical act based on an illusion, a passing fancy in which greed or gluttony or intemperance showed itself.  This happened, no different from anyone else, just that he had his practice, and had somehow always been sensitive, able to contact the higher realm, without so much being aware of it, as it came naturally to him, and seemed rather like a part of his awkwardness around other people, such that indeed he wished to drink to bring himself toward the level he knew as well as anyone else if not better, a lower one.

The drink seemed to protect him, disguise him, ease his way through the streets of life.  It gave him an act, one that had evolved toward the better over the years, just as his mood had slowly improved and steadied itself, after the confusion... 

But now as he wrote more, thought more, practiced more, it was become increasingly clearer and self-evident, what sort he was.  The salted kind.  With some chance of savor still.  Did he still have time?  The scholar's son, a better translation than the standard 'carpenter's.'  Obviously something scholarly there, even as a boy.  Even then, authority, ease, comfort.  A knowledge of levels of consciousness.  From the root to the crown.

Shyness too came naturally, as it's not a world one necessarily wants to stand out in.  Rather adopt the lingo, the assumptions, the habits...  Always a good listener.

It was indeed a creative endeavor, every day, being his own version of that which he did not wish to admit.  You could be a great guy, sure, the kindest, the wisest, up there in the percentages anyway, but that didn't necessarily make you fit in or even be a good boyfriend.  Maybe a good therapy patient.  Maybe a good reader of books.  But every day, every hour, really took creative effort, work, and of course, naturally, it could be very tiring.  Until you began to realize and admit, or see simply...

The creativity was always there, if you sat down, quietly, or let the wheels spin while you tidied up a corner of the house or dusted, laundry still spinning in the dryer down in the basement, and more or less accepting now a quiet Friday night at home with flannel Dickies on, a light growth of beard, the humidifier working again, the Facebook password issue solved finally.  How the left hand doesn't know what the right is up to.

Of course it took a lot of creativity to go to work, fairy tales full of it, but then he liked restaurant people, Henri, the French guy who would soon be set to retire...