This week a short and simple prayer. And if you are one who is disinclined to pray to anything regardless of gender, cultural background, or inconceivability of consciousness, then to you I say, “May your actions contribute to said ‘prayer’ manifesting for the sake of yourself and those whom you value.”
A Prayer:
May I be a mirror capable of reflecting only light,
May the light that touches those around me brighten their own view,
May they see clearly the beauty of their own existence, and may they see clearly how best they can make their own life more beautiful,
And may they see of me beyond their own image ever a smile to share joy in existence with the light they bring, and the light they would desire to bring.
May the work of my hands ease the pain of any who suffer,
May the work of my hands inspire any close at hand to take hand in easing the suffering of those around them.
Okay, before I start I preface thus: this is going to be short. My internet’s been finicky the last two days, and I’ve been roaming about besides. So, even if I had wanted to up a longer post, the means were hardly at my disposal. That, and, due to these circumstance, this is going up a bit late, for which I apologize to anyone wanting to begin their Sunday morning with my fresh writings for the week. That being said . . .
Lately I’ve noticed how frustrated people seem to be quick to get with others from time to time. And so what occurred to me was this:
If something irritates you about another, and the reason for this is that you are capable in a way in which they are not, as their brother or sister, somebody who did not arrive on this planet capable of that thing which you now are, it behooves you to assist that person so far as your own mastery in that which you perceive yourself capable where they are not. Which is to say, if you know something about living they don’t, and you know it well enough you yourself are living it, it is your responsibility to shed some light and help others to share in said same preferred mode of living. Because, quite frankly, it will help you learn more about living too.
And that being said, the other flavor goes something like this: if the cause of your irritation with others is that you feel insecure because they seem to understand a certain something that you do not, the answer is to not be ashamed to learn. We all are learning, and practicing, and getting better at life. And we can all use all the help we can get when it approaches us accordingly. It’s a good thing!
So that’s it. With people either you share, or you respect someone for who they are and don’t take it personal. Or you get frustrated because patience can be hard sometimes, and sometimes it takes patience to love people, and that’s OK too.
The other week, as an acquaintance of mine was babbling something interspersed with the term “holy trinity,” (and I wish here to make perfectly clear for the sake of not offending anyone that this acquaintance of mine is absolutely NOT catholic) my mind glommed onto the notion that briefly going over the basic common-cosmic law of three would not make for a bad topic. Everything = God, therefore, even more so that most basic universal law upon which all of existence without exception is derived. God’s engine, if you will . . .
G.I. Gurdjieff wrote it out this way:
” . . . three holy forces of the sacred Triamazikamno the said science calls as follows:
the first, the Affirming-force’ or the ‘Pushing-force’ or simply the ‘Force-plus’;
the second, the ‘Denying-force’ or the ‘Resisting-force’ or simply the ‘Force-minus’; and the third, the ‘Reconciling-force’ or the ‘Equilibrating-
force’ or the ‘Neutralizing-force.’”
The Tao Te Ching’s says: From the Tao is one; one begets two, two begets three, and three begets the myriad things. – A paraphrase of different translations of chapter 42.
Jewish mysticism speaks of three, the Hindus have the Trimurti, even the catholics have their famous trinity. And so, all this talk of three in just about every deep teaching on creationism naturally gives rise to the question: is there truth to these teachings of three, and if so, what does the teaching mean? And it is quite simple, and the foundation, three-dimensional as it may be, upon which the universe as we can conceive it as three-dimensional beings, exists.
Let’s start with the conceptual, the squeeze your brain stuff, and work our way back to the basics, shall we? I hear no dissent, here we go!
The Tao says first is the Tao. I like that term better than the term God, personally, it seems more dispassionate, and thus somehow more objective. Of course, the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. But it is all encompassing and omni-present and eternal through all of everything, and thus, from the limited concept of numbers, since it is perfectly all-inclusive in every way, it is pretty safe to call it One. Which immediately, of course gives rise to Two. Why? Because the second you start calling something One, that means there must be something other than One; a Two if you will. And Two doesn’t necessarily mean an existence; it could mean a non-existence, like “On” “Off.” But the idea is that if you can call something “One” there must be a “Two” to compare it to, otherwise, instead of “One” there’s just Tao, or, if you like, God. And if there is a Two, then there must be Three, and here’s why . . .
Two implies the complement of each other. Being and not being. On and Off. Back and Front. In and Out. Plus and Minus. In between, the whole of their disparate existences, their net sum, the Tao itself, becomes three. One means Two, thus One plus Two is Three. Which is two say that two forces perfectly opposite do not destroy each other, they go exist as themselves, but when they try to interact, something not quite either emerges. A harmonizing effect based on what happens between the two, that is one and two, and thus is created from these sacred basic existences all the many many different things we can be aware of, or in other words, three begets the myriad things.
So first is all of existence indivisible. Then, when one perceives the reality of that whole, two is distinguished because in indivisible there is no perspective but omni-perspective. And thus, to be able to know that, one must be able to consider the illusion of differentiation, which sets oneself from the whole of All, and thus is born two. And the interaction between All and part is the third force, the holy spirit of creating existence, which is how the different things of existence comes to be.
Ready for the easy part? Force Plus, Force Minus, and Force Equalizing. So it goes like this: you put together two opposing forces and they find their balance based on whichever of the forces is stronger.
You push down on a soft piece of bread, there now exists bread with a dent. You apply heat to dough, bread rises and won’t get moldy for a lot longer than if that same substance were instead left in a cool dark place. You keep water and flour separate, there is water, and flour, and no new creation.
Proton, Electron, Neutron.
Male, Female, Child. From this most sacred of impulses amongst polarized sexuality within them, for the most part, comes a chromosome-equal entity that will exist based upon the sum of its parts internally, and its experiences externally; which if you think about it gets into the number 6 as 1.
And so, what the trinity means is one plus two equals three in all creations without exception. For an existence may lean more one way or the other, but where both directions intersect, no matter which direction one leans toward, that is where the harmonization of their existence reconciles the two disparities, and that is where the culmination of all existence exists within it.
Unless it is dead, in which case it is about to become a tree, which, personally, I believe is only a plus!
When I think about organized religions, especially the western ones, and I compare them to the way I perceive God, it looks to me something like this:
Many, maybe most, not all, who subscribe to the organized bunch generally seem to have some, if not in the very unfortunate cases all, of their thoughts on the matter written for them somewhere in some book, or thought into their minds, without a direct experiencing of what it is they think they believe. I have trouble believing something in a book, no matter how old it is or how many people buy it, because, I have read a lot of books. What is on a page, and what I can feel with my hand, seldom mesh. Mother Goose and Grimm is nice in its way. Porridge is better than starvation, and when one falls down a hill their likely-hood of death does increase. But, on a whole, I’m able to perceive that a story is not necessarily written to be congruous with my life as I am living it. It may contain a good example of something. Maybe make me think of something that does have an actual, real world, application. But on a whole, a story is a story, and when I’m not a crazy person, I can usually leave it in the book it came and walk away happily.
But when one can’t tell the difference between a story in a book, and the life they are living, there seems to me to be a problem. When a person takes the words of some man, or woman, and believes that the validity of their life rests solely in the words written by a human being, they have stopped seeking their own individuality and have stopped seeking their own connectivity to the divine form the perspective of their own unique individuality.
So, since everything, from my perspective, is God, and since every person is given the capacity to choose, if they choose to use that capacity, I see a metaphor for two distinct approaches to God. In this metaphor one has no choice but to serve the divine. One may be serving the adversarial aspect of the divine, HaSatan, but nonetheless, no one has choice but to serve wherever they are best suited to serve, within the context of an Omni-Divine universe. That being the case, the choice lies in this: In one version, in which one lives out the words of a book as though it were their own perspective, one chooses slavery to a God they choose never to want to have a direct interaction with. In the other version, one chooses to serve God and take their orders directly from a living entity creating existence in real time.
Because they think that stepping outside of their book and having a real relationship with God is too scary, one would bow their eyes below the light of the divine and see its light cast only on a man-made representation of the world. In the other version, one serves actively the creation of the world as it exists and is being made to exist by the light provided; their eyes resting where the intention of creation is at hand.
Not that one can’t derive good inspiration from some words passed down over the ages, but at the point in time in which one has been conned into being afraid that someone believing something different is damned to Hell, they seem too over-joyfully to begin creating that Hell amidst us on Earth in order to save us from the very thing they are so anxiously afflicting upon us living folk. At which point the desire for death to “go to Heaven” or in different terms “make it stop” suddenly becomes all too clear.
The alternative seems to be to eat our food with bits of salt. While understanding what we are creating in some moments hinges on once glancing and cognizing a handful of words in a book, it is the results we live outside that book that is the real test of the validity of our capacity to serve all creation in all its form. And may we be able to serve all its forms well, for appearance may deceive, but a kind action from one’s own hand never lies.
Well I wanted to open with the video from the movie “True Stories” for the song Love For Sale, but was only able to find the video with someone else’s music over-dubbed. So, instead of artsy to cultivate a point, I’ll instead settle for “I dare you to find a nicer song for the holiday” and I do expect comments with links . . . And here’s where I’ll begin:
Happy Valentines Day Everybody!
So, in honor of the holiday, a little about it’s Catholic origins because, contrary to popular belief, Hallmark did not invent it . . . they just perfected it . . .
So, for starters, most of this info, if not all, is gleaned from this site and this article: http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day and I’m giving the short version that I think is particularly interesting and pertinent to my ongoing theme, etc . . .
So apparently, before being commandeered by Christendom for the sake of converting more and slaughtering less, February 15th was a major Roman fertility ritual. The Roman’s would sacrifice a goat, a symbol for fertility, at the cave where Romulus and Remus, the alleged founders of Rome, were supposedly raised by wolves. Boys would then take slices of the hide of the sacrificed goat and dip it in the sacrificial blood and run through the streets of Rome lightly slapping the crops and the faces of young ladies, who were happy to have the blessing of fertility. Then a lottery would commence in which the boys and girls of the town would be paired up according to lot, which often led to marriage.
Given peoples misconceptions about relationships, and confusion of what love means after watching one too many Julia Roberts movies, I totally think we should bring back the skinned goat. Compared to today, just seems more civilized, but, I digress.
So, once the Christians took over, that went away, but they needed to convert the happy Heathens somehow, and enter the legend of Saint Valentine, or Saint Valentinus as he is sometimes known.
Now, the legends are apparently murky at best, but, according to this article, at least two stories about Saint V seem pertinent to me. Supposedly, around the third century, one of the emperors, Claudius the 2nd, decreed that young men couldn’t marry because he believed that unmarried men made better soldiers. A priest named Valentine was said to have then performed clandestine marriages between secret lovers, thus securing him a place as the patron of love. Claudius finding him out and having him killed, secured him the sainthood.
The other legend is that Valentine, while in prison for performing marriages, fell in love with the daughter of his jailer. And remember, it wasn’t until well after the third century that priests were no longer allowed to marry in Catholicism. In fact, it was at least a good thousand years or so after Christ had kicked it that the church began writing in its new policy of child molestation. Anyway, again pardon the digression, the point is, Valentine, while in jail, was said to have fallen in love. And before he was killed he was said to have written his love a letter signed “from your Valentine,” and hence the valentine giving on Valentine’s day was born.
So, that’s the interesting bits, more or less, of how we have arrived today with the yearly ritual of stimulating the production of oxytocin in the minds of the women we love, as well as bringing them flowers that cost way too much to compensate for the fact of any who should probably be bringing them flowers a lot more often when the price is reasonable.
In a modern world, where we are blessed to love as we please, may anyone reading this have a blessed day to celebrate happiness. And if one’s initial impulse is lacking in happy, may you find a big box of chocolate to take the pain away!
So, I was eating my Bagna Calda at Goodfellas, and I was contemplating whether the Garlic was roasted in oil or water. And it seems obvious that the roasting takes place in oil, or oil with maybe a little butter, but it didn’t say on the menu, and it didn’t exactly taste like olive oil to me, probably because of the garlic and anchovy tastes overwhelming the olive oil, which probably wasn’t a very thick olive oil. And thus, a meditation on the nature of water occurred to me, obviously.
And so, as I was contemplating my olive oil in lieu of water, what struck me was this: Ya ever notice that water becomes what it touches? I mean, initially the thought was something like “If this is water, then it mimics the flavors of the garlic and the anchovies such that it is no longer discernible as water.” And of course the reality of the time was probably olive oil, but the extrapolations therefrom became all about water.
The next logical association in my mind was lemon mixed with water. Never mind lemonade when sugar crystal breaks down in the water molecules to become a water-sugar, no, just the lemon alone without the sugar. The water becomes as the essence of lemon. Just a squeeze goes a long way for a glass; the glass of water becomes in essence filled with lemon. And anything water touches water seems to become.
When blood enters water, it is almost as though the water begins to become blood. The ancient Greeks used to mix water with wine. You seep a leaf in hot water, and it becomes as the essence of that leaf. You run hot water through a coffee bean, and the water becomes infused with energy and Earth.
Even solids water becomes, or is it that that which enters water naturally tries to mimic the water? Dirt mixed with water becomes mud. Even a rock breaks down into sand finer and finer, as though to become the water.
Water is of such substance, purely life giving, and it seems that all of creation tries to become as water when it touches it. Even a human being whose life is dependent on water, who must transmute some form or another of water in order to continue to live, and who will benefit most from pure water itself, strives to attain with the fullness of their capability the divine exercise of emulation of “the motion of the ocean.”
What greater example of living is there than water? What higher to attain to? For life it perfectly sustains, all that it touches it strives to become, all that touches it strives to become like it. Perfect reciprocity of existence and partaking of mutuality. May we all serve as though the water of life. May we never thirst!
The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.
Hi! I'm Tygarjas Twyrls Bigstyck. Currently the home of the long work in-progress "The Chronicles of the Angels of Eden." Prior to this, I wrote about a conception of divinity that might be helpful for those willing to think outside of organized religion, and subsequently a place for me to flex my creative muscles as I devoted a year of blogging to short fiction. Enjoy!
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