I clambered up the trunk of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil,
but this time
I did not eat of its fruit.
This time, I was
looking for something else.
Some other way
to filter the incoming deluge
of data.
I scanned the horizon, and finally
seeing the light, I tilted my head
downward, to see
what might be closer to me.
A different fruit. I sought a different fruit.
Tired of judging, and being judged.
Plants must seek light, and animals food.
Light good, dark undesirable.
Food good, enemy bad.
Humans were born in a garden.
We had no enemies in the myth.
What is the lesson?
The lesson to be learned?
The snake never sought to harm us.
In the absence of enemies, we can seek beauty.
We have time to contemplate our environment.
We can learn to see how beauty emerges from
the background. See how the background gives
birth to beauty.
Homo Sapiens birthed themselves thanks to Eve.
But the early stages of our reign were Homo Confusus.
Womo Charmiens yet awaits birth.
I clambered back down to earth.
I scrambled past the edge of the forest.
I rambled around in the clearing.
Down. Down under. Under the earth.
In the beginning, we never
had to look under the earth,
with all the fruit hanging at eye level.
After expulsion, God told us to work the earth.
Why didn’t we see that as the hint it was?
It was obvious that God’s ultimate purpose
was to make us work for understanding.
Not to wear us out to the point
that we couldn’t think straight.
Knowledge can be given, but understanding
has to be created by the individual.
My reward for telling the coffee guy that I had gotten thrown out of my interfaith place. He says his favorite stories are of people getting thrown out of Bible study groups and churches. 🙂
Happiness is a false goddess, unworthy of worship of any kind. The wise ancient Hindu teachers knew this, and warned that “The wise man hankers not after happiness.” Our American founding fathers were not as astute.
The middle name of Happiness is Fortune, and that reveals a truer aspect of her gift. If we are among the lucky, or rather WHEN we are among the lucky, we can experience happiness.
The very word HAPPINESS (note the similarity to HAPPEN???) expresses her fickle, random and uncontrollable nature. Maybe you randomly received good blood chemistry, but you probably believe you are happy because you “make the choice” to be happy, and “work to be happy,” or you have “good mental and emotional hygiene.”
That’s BS. It rings very hollow to anyone who either doesn’t have the blessings of cheerfulness hormones in their bloodstream, or is a thoughtful person. We all like to take credit when things go our way, and blame others for their personal ineptitude when they experience failures. We rarely give credit to our environment when things go well, and take personal responsibility for our failures. This is because most people are unaware of their susceptibility to “The Fundamental Attribution Error,” or as David Levy says we are prone to “Underestimating the Impact of External Influences.”
Some of the quotes he picked to illustrate this hardwired error in the human thought processes include:
“No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.” (unknown)
“Don’t call a man honest just because he never had the chance to steal.” (Yiddish Proverb)
“Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”
This last quote, attributed to Barry Switzer, gets at my point above.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for meditation and stopping the negative self-talk. Peace has now surrounded me, despite often severe or profound “reasons” to feel shaken and anxious. No, I have not escaped the human condition, and still feel anxious much of the time, especially when I am alone and slip into ruminating on my past, and the potential consequences on the future. I am at peace because I know that “I” am not the body, or even my mind or my history or memories. “I” am the one who watches the one who gets manipulated, by events and circumstances, into doing what has to be done to play the role “I” have been assigned to play in society.
Even if I have not been able to completely control my mind, and completely and permanently identify with “the witness,” (the one who watches my “self” go through life), I am not going to conflate peace of mind with happiness.
True happiness can only come when all are happy. Someone asked me “Don’t you want her to be happy?” My first (grouchy) thought was “I don’t give a rat’s ass.” (I said nothing.) My second (wiser) thought was “Of course I want her to be happy. I want everyone to be happy”
And so, like the Buddhists, I pray: May all beings be happy.
Furthermore, and much more importantly, like the Buddhists, I pray: May all beings have the causes of happiness.
As Lynn Sparrow Christie noted in a seminar I attended a few weeks ago, there’s the “problem of the food chain.”
When God, Mother Nature, The-Forces-Of-The-Universe see fit to have us all evolve past the food chain, all beings may have the foundation for the causes of happiness. We will no longer have to worry about maintaining the physical aspects of the carcass that carries the nucleus of the spiritual being within. We’ll have time and leisure to enjoy true happiness, not simple gratitude for what we have.
I’m not holding my breath.
PS Why does substituting SHM for H at the beginning of Happiness change it from the most desirable of emotions to a worthless mirage?
Maybe it’s the SHM sound at the beginning of the Yiddish “Schmutz,” or dirt.
I have always been a rebel. Osho says society can’t tolerate the Rebel. That’s probably at least part of the source of my problems!
You might enjoy listening to a short story I wrote about the source of our myths that evolved into Mother Mary, and The Goddess in many of her forms. This was humanity’s first major attempt to avoid the worst of the vagaries of nature.
You kindof have to be a bit rebellious to think that, as an outsider, you understand something that all the specialists missed.
I am a bit disappointed that no ancient historians have ever contacted me about The Convolution of Knomo Choicius, a sci-fi novel whose protagonist is a history professor. How many such novels can there be?
In order to keep the most boisterous, least thoughtful, greatest risk takers, and those with no depth of character, from destroying their own lives, and those of others in their environment, kids are conditioned to think of others first, not be selfish, etc.
But then the mild, shy, timid, thoughtful, risk adverse, end up being afraid to speak up for themselves, afraid to love and appreciate themselves, and can’t understand that if you are not loving and kind toward yourself, all attempts to be truly kind to others will fail.
This is a sad fact of life.
So remember, all of us have been conditioned by society to prevent the worst acts from the most barbarous 10%, and now that we’re adults, we should do our best to throw off the disguise and become ourselves. As Nietzsche/ Zarathushtra/ Osho /Merwegon said:
Reach, reach, reach. Reach for the stars! No. I’m tired. Why should I?
It’s what we do. It’s what you do.
Look, look, look. Look around you! No. That’s boring. Why should I?
It’s what we are born to do. It’s what you were born to do.
See, see, see. See what’s there, in front of you. No. I can’t. I’m blind. I like it that way.
No, you’re not. Take off the dark glasses. No. I live by my own inner light.
Wait, wait, wait. Patience is rewarded! No. I inhabit the now.
We are creatures of our history and our future. I am the creation of my own time zone.
Nothing is wasted. How could it be? We must realize how much effort is required to make the simplest of objects. To manufacture a paper towel for example, requires at least ten, and up to 25 times its weight in water. And that’s supposedly for a modern, efficient paper towel plant. To some, that might seem like waste. The five gallons of water used to make that paper towel. But another way to look at it could be that we are taking humanity that much faster down the path of crisis point. That much sooner to our doom and redemption. That much sooner to the moment when we have no clean water to sustain the vast majority of currently existing communities. That much sooner to the moment when humanity is forced to evolve into a new being. If everyone could visit a paper towel factory, and see the tons of water used, they might have a better understanding of reality. But that’s one thing our current society is doing everything to avoid.
We see CG images on TV and fail to remind ourselves that it’s a layer away from reality. We hide death, and anything that might be related to death. We don’t want to know. And without death, life can’t be complete. Can’t be three dimensional. Can’t be four dimensional. Can’t be real.
It’s the background noise, waste, if you will, that allows the portion of reality that we think is the whole thing, to emerge. It’s the background waste that is the fabric from which the reality we inhabit is formed.
But if it’s exploring, you have to see things in a new light, even if the things you are seeing are not new, or even new to you.
Every day, our experience reinforces some characteristics of who we think we are, and also offers us the chance to change.
I like to explore insects that I find lying around dead, using my microscopes.
Insects have fascinating structures. Here is a series of scanning electron microscope photos of a bee head, zoomed in to see the ball joint that lets the bee control the position of its antenna.
Note the varying length of the hairs. Those that would cause interference otherwise are shorter!Zoom of short hairs on bee antenna.
This last image was obtained at 500x original magnification. Note the 100 micron scale in the upper right. That is 0.1 mm.
When you are looking at something at even 50x, there’s a lot to see! You have to learn to see what’s interesting.
I have somedays felt that faceless is the preferable condition. Lay low.
But I read all of C.S. Lewis’ ‘Til We Have Faces” without figuring out what the title means, or meant. A fantastic story about the struggle to know what the gods want from us. The ancient chthonic dieties didn’t have faces. We moderns are aware that in normal human interactions, the words may carry as little as 7% of the meaning. The rest is conveyed by our tones, expression, even what we wear!
The faceless deities of course were not human. And thus also not from any particular racial group of humans. A faceless stone shaped in the female (round) or male (elongated) version, no wonder people had trouble knowing what these deities wanted from them. All we got was words through multiple layers of priest’s interpretations.
But we have faces, don’t we?
C.S. Lewis wrote this book late in life. He had a Jewish girlfriend, and maybe was softening his ideas that Christianity was the only true way. To me, even his Narnia books imply that.
Is Lewis struggling with the fact that the truest religion can only emerge when humans all see each other the way that the most spiritually enlightened Hindus do.
Which is also what Mother Teresa found to be the most important teaching in Christianity.
Learn to see the Divine in every face you encounter.
In order to flourish, we must have a clearly functioning ability to distinguish pleasure from pain.
That is the rock from which the more difficult discernment between good and evil may be constructed.
The thoughtful are surely capable of understanding that pain and pleasure are micro versions, in duration, size and significance, of evil and good.
Thus, it is imperative to the optimal functioning of higher beings, to whose family we claim to belong, that culture minimize, or even attempt to eliminate, using verbal reinforcement, while necessarily protecting the immature from pleasurable danger.
Perhaps this is the ultimate end of culture.
In so doing, the fields of true compassion are tilled.
