To Jesus the higher consciousness was a regular everyday thing.  An accessible thing.  His training was, if not exactly, much like the writer's, sitting down at a certain time and applying himself to words.  Seeking in his own mind the way he saw things, much in the same way he'd learned from both his parents to respect one's own impressions and deeper sense about other people.  For other people, if you study them, and judge them not, are bare and naked, transparent in many ways, despite their acts of hiding, their psyches and their souls and their psychologies and their inhabiting demons--whatever you want call them--basically evident, present to the powers of vision.  Each person, a slight shade different, a particular peculiar mix, each unique, so that reading them indeed could take up lifetimes of study.  And to be found amongst them a few people who were, or who could be coaxed into being naturally calm, which was the goal.

So could Jesus be able to cure their different problems, with hardly a word, a simple phrase, but one which, the way he put it, the way he spoke, the way he looked at them, the way he bore himself, by the clarity of his iconic face and acts, a gesture of the hand, was no longer passive, but an active cure.  Something the world always lacks, because the world is cowardly, as I would know.

Enough to get through a shift of people, possessed with shards and particular and sometimes legions of evil spirits of all stripes of selfishness, cockiness, pride, cleverness.  Enough to get through a night of that without making any visible or noticeable effort to correct them and cleanse and cast out.  Just by enduring you were doing a good amount toward it.

But to be perfectly honest, of course, you were a participant in the same as they.  You had, were subject to, the same kind of vanities, the same selfish wishes, the same hungers and thirsts, the same anxieties, the same wish for safety, security, to save your own ass and, to crudely put it, get a piece of another.  You didn't want lesions springing out on your skin or suffer the fate of Job.  You too wished to numb down the awkwardness of being on the right path, the path that might not make much immediate sense in terms of the wisdom of the world, toward the wisdom of God.  You too wished to take the challenge of trying to fit in with the logic of worldly wisdom, and desired not to be foolish.

You find you didn't quite belong so well.

So there needed to be an inkling, then a measure, then a cup of change.  You had to put away the habit of stupefying yourself, the habits of yes-men...  You had to, in short, be you.  You serving as your basic support system, of course with the good support of the spirits of your family and good friends.  After all, humanity is good, a good rather than a bad influence.  And sometimes it conspires and gathers as a particular flock in order to, by some collective wisdom and collective mind, teach you things, teaching by example, in a good way.  Maybe one learns best by mirroring them, as one can, through one by one exchanges, to feel them out, as they say.

There is Jesus and people of less consciousness have gathered around him.  Crows would get him better and be wiser and have knowledge of the earth and the ways of God, on equal terms, really, but here's this confused flock of humanity about him, but at least now with opened eyes and ear.  How to interpret all the human cawing?

I guess that's sort of when you put books behind you.  I mean, you never do.  The higher mind might direct you to pick up a poem, or have a thought about how Hemingway was an ecological thinker before it was barely thought of, or pick up on a cold night Corinthians.   Which says it's okay to be doing the same labors you were doing when you came to see the light.  Which holds that it is okay to accept what powers you do have toward good things, be they teacherly, prophetic, interpretive, curative, what have you.

And how long would it take to write something good, something you wanted to express?  Time almost vanished.  You'd look up at the clock and an hour had gone by, but that was almost immaterial, little to do with you, having found an envelope of some sort, away from time.  The voice had come, and you felt pleased about what you were writing and all the connections forming before your mind.  The voice was aided, yes, by another, say the slight irreverence of Saramago, and in other ways it had deeper sources, as natural born writers come upon in their wanderings, like Melville going down to the waters.  Drummers had played drums, all sorts of them, and now you were the drummer, smoothly enough, despite your worries of having little rhythm.

In the act of writing, peace had come about you.  Like you were Emerson out in Nature.  How could you not feel simultaneously shy and open about it, gentle, available, as if you'd sat down and a beautiful woman had sat down right next to you with an open ear and atomic proximity such that you'd already started to blend with her in a virginal way that who knows might lead to other things, though of course you would always be practical about such things, right?


And then the thought would return to you, distractingly, 'oh, but what are you going to do with yourself today?'  Well, I skipped the wine last night, for the first time in a long time, that seems a good start.  Nor was I gluttonous.  A kale salad with pumpkin seeds in lemon and olive oil.  Later, one lamb sausage with a bowl of five day old brown rice.  Falling asleep on the couch after finishing Corinthians I, very cold outside.  There had been a run of weeks requiring covering an extra shift, long Saturday nights even, and the snow had allowed a rare night off earlier, so finally a chance to be alone and think, letting the wheels spin in the sanctity of home, finally being able to reflect, to catch up.  Initially, boredom, a sense of not knowing what to do, but this corrected itself.



Really, how often does one have the chance, to do it, to be it, to be the real you, vessel of the higher.  You learn to grab it where you can, when you can.  Distractions aside.  The example shows that you can.  For if Jesus could do it in that hard time when people got crucified, if Herod didn't get you first...  He managed to thread the needle.  Maybe that's why he is such a legend, such a success, the epic times he lived in, and perfectly placed at crossroads, crossroads of time, peoples, geography, ideas, empires, religions...  Rising from obscurity, so it seems.

For our times we'd have a savior, a thinker to go with them as he went with his.  He'd be an infinitesimally small character unnoticed on the sea of ones and zeros, unattached to anything.  Obscure, he would take his fellow beings somewhere, somewhere they could heal and ponder the fate of the planet in private, not having to worry, a safe haven matched to their faith, the faith that somethings can be done about changing the attitude of the human being to make for a personal ecological ethos to arise, in stark contrast to nations, like China, and multi-national profit minded corporate entities to destroy the environment feeding an artificially created need sold to human sheep who are just trying to get by in the world.  Or just more importantly, to change the consciousness away from that illusion of self that causes much selfishness, toward...  what?

He would personally have a small sphere of influence, physically, temporally.  He'd be trying to get by just like the rest of us.  No panel would he sit on.  No faculty rank.  Just him, son of man, lower case.  He'd be fully human.  To solve skin problems or mechanical issues, he'd go to the Google machine search engine, like anyone else.  Then, after googling 'dry flaky redness eyebrows,' he'd be off like anyone else to the RiteAid to peruse the labels of dandruff shampoo, wary of sodium laureth sulfate.

Oh, sure, he'd have a good background for it, scholarly parents of a particular sort, steeped in, I don't know, thoughtfully considered systems of spiritual and religious thinking, and basically just being allowed to get it as a seven year old, no stumbling block put in his way, to understand that maybe indeed this is their world, the spirit world, that they were here first and we just come to it, as he explained tearfully to his father as he prepared to back out the old Volvo station wagon up the pebbly drive to drive down to the town to pick up the Sunday New York Times, and how he remembered seeing a deep sort of pleased sense radiating quietly from his papa.  Such that they would always be able to have conversations of a theosophical sort, about the spiritual man who keeps getting reincarnated, the same guy showing up every so many years, Moses, Buddha, Jesus... same guy.  He'd know the basics of what Zen is, or what a Noble Truth might be, familiar with vaguer things like Tree of Life imagery.

No, it wouldn't be a book, like the kind you find on a best-seller list next to Dan Brown, or even a book in the book store, bound by two covers front and back, such a person would write.  It would be like a mild sort of revelation, that disciple type people would be drawn to and draw satisfaction and pleasure from, so that they would assemble their own sort of oral gospel in their own minds, and strangely, already finding it--at least the outline--mainly there already, just in need of awakening or support, encouragement.

They would know simply, by being able to look out the back window of an apartment and seeing birds rise across a snowy sky, allowed to notice such a phenomenon on its own terms, with greater presence, distraction removed.  Feeling that sense of 'oh, this is us,' more than before, whereas before such things were more separate and leave the birds to worry about their own and I'll worry about my own.  Connection.  Diffusion.  Peace.  Clarity of mind.  Closer to the haiku and the proverb and the poem.  They would feel it in themselves, and accomplished it themselves.  Like the continual discovery of sexuality and its sensations, only they can do it for themselves.

Just a vague sense, perhaps, like one gets from a good country song.  "Hmm.  Guy's onto something..."  Like we get from Dostoevsky.  And the rest, of the understanding, at a deeper more intuitive level.

Worrying will not increase or add on a day to life.  We can apply ourselves to that which can apply ourselves.  A good teacher leads us towards the things we can apply our minds too.

Sure, maybe sometimes there's the prodigal aspect to it, of, say, smoking weed and listening to Pink Floyd, but by and large, we're good at what we engaged by.  A worthy sign.  Are we all going to become chemical engineers to live in suburban houses, absolutely nothing against such people who might be so?   Certain things make certain minds tick, and Jesus is the perfect example.

Were we to enter into the higher consciousness we would see beyond, and we would be at peace with things.  We would become relaxed and calm, in need of little.

Is there perhaps something of that tendency in the Prodigal Son, a consciousness high enough to be at peace with going down the familiar path to ruin, seeking earthy pleasures.  When he's worn himself out, no money left, nowhere else to go.  But he is worthy of being welcomed, because with an instinct towards the higher vision he saw that even the prodigal path would be part of a great overall lesson.  He gets more credit than his brother, because his brother, staying home, has not made the same effort to expand and raise the spiritual level of his mind through explorations in the world and life experience.  Maybe such prodigal failings are just the thing to ignite the fires of redemption...


I wrote and I wrote.  Stabs at things.  Attempts to corral thoughts, relationships...  And I was lost.  Adrift.  A good exercise in finding a voice, sure, but not amounting to anything in particular, not more than a notebook.  Really just a sign of a necessary work habit, not unrelated to a pile of sawdust, part of a frame.  What would synthesize it all, what would bring it together?  When, over what, would the work really begin?  I wondered.