Thursday, March 5, 2015

Well, you can either stand around like a dumb monkey after you wash the dishes and ponder what to do with the day or you can sit down and write out a few internally based thoughts, thoughts that are based on other thoughts, a finding of pleasure in the continuity.  Seems to be good for you.  Better than staring at yourself in the mirror.

I guess I found myself living in a time, in a generation broadly defined, in which much emphasis was placed on making money.  Not to blame anyone, a natural logical reaction.   Too little emphasis was placed on finding a sensitive inner spirituality to a task, in looking deep into the possibilities of life and coming up with things that were, whatever one did, spiritually good.  The good things are found in the things people naturally do, seeking company, having a glass of wine with dinner, finding the broader conversations that can happen when people open up a bit.

There I was, often feeling devalued, my not fitting in with all the people who got graduate degrees and went on to work in firms, in corporations, in institutions, who worked hard, long hours, went home, having a home, supported a way of expensive living.  My life was indeed almost the polar opposite of such success stories.  And on days of poorer moods I could well ask myself what I had accomplished, not a lot.  My picture of that might be similar or different from yours, a renter, no extra bucks to take vacations, basically supporting the basics.  And yes, fortunate to have the dignity of work, a job to go to, one that I did not always able to understand as to what I was doing with myself.

These considerations led me to think long and hard, and people who think long and hard can go through long periods of not getting anywhere, back to square one, back to square one.  Pondering the human depths, reading spiritual literature, exercises, yogas.

My father, having read my book, a finer wordsmith, a deeply wise man, wrote in a letter that I was, in effect, too sensitive, too thoughtful about things, for the Princess, for us, or 'them,' to settle into the deeper intimacy and experimentations of young body's explorations of the bed.  And his read is, fortunately or not, basically correct, even as I try to understand that statement.  The dopey feeling is rooted in a basic fact, that's how it goes.

And so too have I been too sensitive but to go and do what I have done, which is to be happy waiting on people, happy listening to them, and allowing a kind of a possibility of a spiritual opening up, something related to the gatherings of humanity that have most ancient roots.

There is something very deep about that.  And if you stand through a night, sometimes toward the end of it, the talk turns generously and peacefully to the explorations of consciousness which indeed people find very interesting.



There can be a bias against all of us who feel a need to return to the ancient ways, who've built up an encyclopedic knowledge of nature's riches, the lesser materialism of the nomad life, who like to experiment as is still done in the post-hippie age.  Perhaps because it does indeed threaten the status quo of the corporate meted out lifestyle that requires a radically different kind of thinking to get out of.   There can easily be exploitation of such values, a misunderstanding, a shallowness, the context of everything placed in monetary terms.

Enough, too much, has been put into the world, paved over, built on, institutionalized.  The thing is to realize the hyper space, the deeper dimensions of what we already have here, to see the spiritual presence in the common things.

I gets it's just hard to look past the worldly logic and see the spiritual in everything.  That is why it takes being sensitive, to see it, to be tuned in, and that's all some of us can do and achieve in this life. That's how one goes about identifying one's fellow human beings, the ones you can talk to.  Not much of a material thing at all.

No comments: