The year comes to an end. Time for resolutions, getting rid of egotistical habits. But don't blame yourself, necessarily, but where it's due. It's the culture, a culture that creates a good deal of tension as it spins. So to let go of that tension and remember the Essence of the being that is within.

There are the great masters of kindness. We could recognize them for their work in the same way, or rather better, we would Beethoven or a great architect. Such arts are offshoots of the ways of great kindness anyway, so that any living art shines and trembles with this inner life, as a child’s drawing does.

The work of the great masters is not always understood so well. The work is not as appreciated for the great art that it is, as it seems unknown by being so commonplace. It is commonplace, which is a good thing, in that most people are able to share kindness with each other and strangers and people with whom we exchange money for services, such as waiters and cabdrivers and teachers. But its commonness belies its importance.

Einstein had it, wisely, that space is curved by the gravity of meaningful objects. The Earth spins rotationally in space curved by the Sun. Kindness is that same law of gravity and curved space expressed in the affairs of the conscious beings of Earth. It is a law one may try to fight, but to no avail. (Substitute the term of kindness into Einstein's universal law and it is no more metaphorical than his original.)

The great masters of kindness live, shape their world, through kindness. They put out kindness, and kindness they receive, one way or another, each a unique and interesting story of how this works and plays out. They live through their acts, and shape the world in a way harmonious with natural law. (They put it to the test every day.)

A willful individual like Hitler or Stalin may treat the law of kindness and gravity as something to be tricked and subverted, as if to manipulate the force of kindness in one direction, toward one group of people at the great expense of another. By doing so, even in a slight way, he attempts to turn the law of nature completely upside down. His act is a moment of anger sustained, the same as trying to fly when one is not a bird. He may have concocted a great rational science, but the effort will fail out of a crucial heartless flaw. And from smaller acts of the same, less historically broad, sorrowful things happen too, no less insidious, a creation of sick beings and ill ways of treating life and nature.

People will poke around curiously over acts of kindness and all its arts. They will question and study the chemistry of it. They will look at kindness from the outside, as if they stand apart from its laws, as if they don’t get it. They want to be pessimistic rational journalists about it. They wish to judge everyone, and point out flaws (which is unkind to begin with). Focusing on anomalies, they cast a fog over the light. If they really had such questions, all they would need to do is to turn around and just be, simply, kind. And then they would know the beauty of kindness, and that to be kind is to receive kindness. They would step into the light and understand that the great masters of kindness create saintly worlds accurate to the greatest and deepest laws of That Which Is.

Yes, maybe it does sound silly and childish to say, far too simple. But art is full of examples of gesture of kind reach, useful for us especially if they are habit-forming, a lesson of understanding and sympathy, the basic great human traits that one shares not just with family but potentially with all. The art, however, points to a direction, the same direction that venerable religions do. Art recedes now and then, and reveals to us the act of the artist as a scientist comprehending the great laws of nature.

Everything has a magic to it. Fill a vessel of water and you get the happy sound of the notes of an octave. (Music reflects the order of Heaven and Earth, East Asian music philosophy holds.) This is why yoga works. Well, everything you can think of from atoms on up. Bowel movements, wisely guided public opinion, you name it. It's why back surgery isn't always so great.

So, if you do something for the right reasons, and in the right amount, applying some work, but maybe not too much so as to make it overly complex, you're going to wind up with something beneficial. (This is why wine is better for you than hard alcohol.)

It also applies to writing.

Now, in the spirit of good humor, lets take the phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code. I've not read it, and I'm not going to judge. Maybe I've seen an odd end of it on TV, or maybe one of those History Channel pieces working on the public obsessions with the book. Good for Dan Brown. He's a smart guy, his good old Dad, an educator, steeped him in code work, so his books are a spiritual tribute. Plenty of good reasons why the whole phenomenon is just so. He has bravely ridden the whole trip, and I doubt if it's been so easy. Bravo. Lots of information to be gleaned from them, though maybe not all of it true but rather serving the fiction of it. (To remedy any distortions of St. Sulpice, you might read a good book by Jean-Paul Kauffmann.)

But here's a code, and maybe the public grasps for it too when reading. Done for the right reasons, spiritual, writing is a very healthy thing. But if it's done with the idea of crafting a best seller for the market place, it begins to be a bit like selling doves in the Temple. Jesus wanted direct access to matters of the spirit for everyone, free, as he knew it was truly free, in need of no money changer.

When you write something it's an exploration. It's a beginning of self-observation. It's the start of sorting through mental activity in your head and isolating a thought, a passing one, a steadier one, or otherwise. In a way to write something is to try on a voice, maybe to flesh it out, maybe to live in it for a moment, to recall an experience, maybe to see if it holds, or if it dissolves into something else.

On a deeper level, the things you write are an exploration of "I." Which is to say that the exercise is in viewing the voices of ego, observing them more carefully. It is an interesting process. Within the exploration of ego, you may well find many voices, an aggregate, as Buddhists say, of many selfish wants, needs and fears.

My hope is that getting them out on a page is a way of studying these voices, to see the implications of them as far as the personal ego-related faults we have within. Maybe to write down is a first step toward a broader perspective, hopefully a significant and deeper one.

Writing is a useful exercise.

To cut to the chase, the voices of ego and the many "I's" are selfish. And those voices are quite apart from the essence of our being. Free from such voices, the possibilities are, well, endless. Certainly broader. One no longer harbors any resentment. One is in touch with the selfless. One doesn't need anything but very basic functional stuff. Not to mention being free of vanity, fear, anger, and so forth. (It sounds too good to be true. Not to worry though.)

How many habitual errors must one go through to realize such? So many faults one must admit. Such are the beginnings of freedom. Freedom from selfishly wanting things in a way one doesn't need.

A writer makes a drama out of all this. But the ultimate aim is making that writing a useful exercise in sweeping away the superfluous and the distractions so as to find the eternal being. This is the measure of useful art. Maybe of great art, but to call it so verges on the egotistical again, or not.

One simply hopes, gains, the joy and the strength to continue on with the explorations, the ultimate goal being, with help, to eliminate all the ego voices, for which end we hope for Kundalini experiences of our selfless essence to aid us.

Once one begins, the mind develops. The mind sees what we observe as impressions, impressions which we are able to control to our own benefit and well-being.

This is Hamlet's effort, to observe the ego and personality from a distance, hopeful of banishing and disintegrating their hold before the race is over. Rather than simply being unable to make up his mind, his is an example of work we must engage in.

A long list of egos spill like cans of paint before the true prince of Denmark and his girlfriend. And the reminder, the perspective, comes from his father's essence, here a ghost, telling the truth of matters. Where does Hamlet look to a combat the egotism he sees so vividly about him? The Play. Art. Drama. Poetry.

On Ted Hughes' Legacy

If anyone could have done it, it would have been him. On pagan and animal’s natural strength, Ted Hughes, Aquarian Poet, serves to bring poetry back into the fold of spirituality. Old Testament prophets have their visions and burning bushes, where Hughes has nature, the hawk in the rain, the jaguar, the fox cub. A Leo by birth, the later poetry of Birthday Letters and the related but more selective work Howls and Whispers have him coming to terms with the faults of his egotism, grievous enough, and also of forms of betrayal directed at a marriage. His work drags the sensibilities of the literature we meaningfully read back to the great primary example: It is no coincidence spirituality, like a Bible, is a written work, poetic, of the imagination, of metaphor, of faith rather than beliefs cut and dried. To mistake him for being simply egotistical would probably mask our own faults of the same. He has gone beyond that in his work.

Poetry, like gospels, is a good place to treat the consequences of life. Hughes includes us in the natural world, where we have our proclivities and habits, traces out a hawk's life for us for us to compare to our own, a world respectful of natural differences, of organic varieties of behavior.

Zodiac

The influence of Saturn, ruling planet of Capricorn, according to Wikipedia, doesn’t seem a propitious thing. "Where there is light Saturn brings darkness. Where there is heat, cold. Where there is joy, sadness. Where there is life, death. Where there is luck, misfortune. Where there is unity, isolation. Where there is knowledge, fear. Where there is hope, skepticism and stalling." This is substantively a direct quote, abbreviated, from Wikipedia, under Saturn (Mythology): Astrological Beliefs.

I grew up never far away from the influence of my Sagittarius brother. Confident, optimistic, the normal rules for humanity little apply to him, as he was born smiling proudly. I did not know him as the balance that I needed so consciously, and when I went off on my own, I was less protected from my bullying pessimistic stuff, my own slow plodding seagoat way. I tried to carry on with the things of his ego, but they weren’t a good fit. In the absence of his great influence, I found a beginning to my callings, the quiet lonely works of writing and music that are ultimately a gift, a gift for the player, but also for the distant listener, another self, seeking some form of light in the darkness. I found those things to ultimately save me, by being innate talent or habits, in the face of all the misunderstandings life can offer.

Virgo, by contrast, her ruling planet is Mercury, force of intelligence, communication, a message bright and speedily delivered. Rings she runs around my poor cold planet set at the edge of the known solar system. The sun wants his light on everyone, but somehow, I don’t know, things can get messed up. Leave it to Capricorn to snatch defeat from the jaws of beauteous victory. It’s just the way the universe is, no one’s fault.

It is for Capricorn, Saturn setting us to be melancholic philosophers, scientists, writers and musicians, to go through the worst, most frustrating losses, the most lasting of sorrows, to earn, only through the hardest fight, a kind of wisdom that takes too long to gain. But wisdom nonetheless, something essential to share, and thus one's birth, to save in some small way humanity.

In pains I learned the senselessness of ego. The lesson stared me in the face, and I suffered from the work of pleasing people’s egos, though not my own, except through escapist pleasures and lusts of the private sort at the end of the night. I was trapped, in the labyrinth, a ridiculously long time. Dark stars pulled upon me when I went out of the house. Each person encountered, demanding the things I thought I liked so, hour after hour, I finally understood as my own inner demons, to be kept at arm’s length despite their charms.

The world, humanity, people, individuals, needs the lesson of limits, needs to know the senseless futility of the egotistical, the aggregate of demanding personalities within that fight each other for what they want. Forget all that, the lesson tells me. Go observe natural phenomenon. Forget all the overly-complicated terms of scientific theory, and come up with your own understanding of the essence of things. Invest yourself with the grace of self-observation to distance yourself from and ultimately defeat the myriad of claiming voices within.

I am a Capricorn. But the influence of the stars is through the ego stuff, through all the devils I let live inside me, to be pulled upon. Perhaps if I had less of an ego, maybe things would have been peaceful and happy. Even being a Capricorn, I’ll lose someday.

Maybe all true poets and music composers feel obliged to really learn something in spades before they feel honest enough to claim it, that the lesson is proper to commit to paper so as to share. There is a science to it, and so there must be experiments and theories and exhaustive testing for something somewhat accurate to emerge.



Beethoven, born Dec. 16, the traditional eve of Saturnalia, an honorary Capricorn, as is Lincoln, born Feb. 12, an Aquarius, traditionally ruled by Saturn as well. Shane MacGowan, born Christmas Day, a Capricorn. Federico Fellini, born January 20, as well. People who liked to have room for creativity.

Cat versus Elephant

The cat and the elephant are relatives. One has fur, a long tail and tiny whiskered snout, whereas the other has a very short and almost insignificant tail (but to swish at flies), no fur to speak of, a very long snout to make up for it. The cat touches, announces, thinks and marks territory with tail, where the elephant does all this with a clever and tender apparatus up front. The domestic cat is small, the undomesticated elephant rather large. They pretend they don't know each other, but they don't bother each other much either. They stand about the same way, and their bodies, give or take, look pretty much the same, some differences here and there with the feet, but not much. (One stands around more, goes on proud daylight marches, where the other must sneak and prowl about cleverly, a burst of speed now and again.) One purrs and meows a tiny roar, the other trumpets largely as if with a klaxon, but really except for the matter of scale, there is not much difference. The elephant, larger, needs to be smarter, I suppose, but the cat, sly of eye, is fine with that. The bigger one, by some law of nature, is vegetarian, the smaller, a carnivore. Alike, yet different.