Thought and Knowledge

Our language, and through our language, our hidden mechanisms of observing and imagining reality, tend towards permanence. We think in terms of things being steady, firm and unified. A rock is a rock. A single clear unit that stays, wherever it may come from and wherever it may go, it retains its unity and its completeness and separateness. And given that we see it as "rock" it retains its identity and we project it into the past and into the future. We stand before a rock and in our minds the rock, as it is, has a past that extends into the obscurity of unknown origins and a future that extends into the brightness of infinite possibility.
This way of observing, thinking and imagining, extends to all our concepts and ideas, including thought itself. And so, a "thought" becomes like a "rock". A thought becomes a single steady unified entity that stays and is complete. A "thought" has a past and a future, and it can be relied upon to manifest and emerge into the light when called upon. A mind may then be pictured as a large bag full of solid thoughts, thoughts that crowd each other, sometimes crash into each other and sometimes even come together to form a larger unit. To learn, in this visualization, is to augment the bag with additional "thoughts" – facts, ideas, theories, concepts, techniques and so on. A "wise man" then is one who owns a large bag of "thoughts". An ignorant man’s bag is nearly empty.
Following this path, in looking for a guide, we would look for the being with the bag that is heaviest and most full of these permanent and solid thoughts. Such a being would then be able to impart these single, complete and solid thoughts one at a time, as needed. As the student learns, another solid single thought would be given and the student’s bag would grow in time, filling itself with new permanent and complete thoughts. Eventually these would be passed on to another.
But thoughts may bubble sideways, they may encounter a corner and come out drenched in different colors, thoughts may one day turn soft and in their softness climb a hidden stairway and become that which they weren’t, they may break in two and then in two again, they may dance in a frenzy and collect into tiny beads of sweat along your forehead, they may drip from your chin, they may twist around your tongue to be spat onto your lover’s mouth, they may fill you with intense lust and lift your feet forward and out, and so they may break in three and one may travel out and one may hide and another may expand so far that you will lose sight of it and you may then ask: "Did I ever really know anything?"
Such playful and infinite bursts of energy cannot truly be contained, and not even the limits of our human language will prevent them from running away and finding new homes where they may rest for a while before continuing on their endless journey… our endless journey. As long as they are alive they will continue changing and moving and transforming.
A true wise man knows to not even attempt to enclose them, knows that any force that is inclined to wrestle them onto submission will produce only death and dust, and rocks… Any attempt to capture and enslave the raw energy of creation will only result in the warden becoming a slave to his own prison. In trying to make them permanent, the mind will lose its explosive burning life and be reduced to a quiet cemetery where old, tired ideas come to rest.

And yet we can learn.
And yet we can be taught.
And yet there is a Teaching.
And yet there are Teachers.

What is it then that a wise Being can pass onto us that will not trap us or enslave us but set us on fire, propelling us up and out into the vast unknown?
What is the Knowledge that is not a thought but makes all other thoughts dance?

Performers

His father died in Auschwitz in 1944. The family name perished along with that old kosher butcher and another was born, a name that would rise in fame. To avoid a similar fate he adopted the name of a General and joined the French Resistance where he rescued his father in the guise of a multitude of frail Jewish children lifted from concentration camps. When that manifestation of the war ended he accepted the burden of the world and became the fool of god, mastering and then teaching the Art of Silence, the science of presence and posture. This teaching spread, trickling from those that surrounded him like invisible droplets of water from the many fingers of a spread hand to yet other hands, open and waiting. Out into the world, invisible drops found their way into the nervous systems of so many that could not understand what had passed into them, and some that could, and yet others who held it like a microcosmic well, waiting for the coin that would be tossed into its depths with a wish. What came to pass when the well at last met with the coin, an action, that tracked through the matrix of time, began in 1944 and waited 6 decades to blossom in a woman troubled by laundry burnt in the oven and dreams of a wise man once met, is the subject of this writing; the answer to the wish. As a rosy cheeked maiden the woman had been taught by a student of God’s fool. Here she was told to commit 100% to her performance on stage or before the camera lens…

In the dream, the wise man, a dancer and artist, told the woman not to be apathetic. Sitting in the cramped cab of a pick up truck feeling dazed from the many changes and choices she’d had to make that morning the woman thought back to her dream and suddenly understood the root of apathy. It lies in feeling that one cant keep up with the changes. It stems from a lack of decisiveness, it is the opposing force to commitment.

WE ARE ACTION, THE POSTURE, THE POSE.

We become the shape we take. We take shape by committing presence and attention to posture, and gesture. There can be no pussy footing around. Life is a tremendous piece of improv theater. Things change. When they do we must quickly choose and assume a new more suitable pose. There are no wrong choices in improv, the only mistake is to let the attention wander and let our performance be without presence. The great secret has been taught to actors and dancers and mimes and musicians, and yet not all of those within such vocations have the wish to use that secret. There are those outside of such professions that wish to encounter a great spiritual teaching, but do not even guess that it requires becoming a performer.

This, the stage of life, has been so used that we have forgotten its true nature. So distracted by the myriad of thoughts racing through our imaginary minds, we are lost on the set, submerged in identification with those thoughts, we have forgotten that we are performers. In such a state we are not even characters, but the ghosts of characters that would be or could have been. We are made of energy which might be used creatively, but instead it pours from us in chains of thought, chains that tangle and bind us to an imaginary existence. We have thought more of ourselves than we have ever been. To be, you must posses a vehicle to be in, an apparatus with the capacity to be filled with that wealth of energy. We have called this apparatus a human being, it has a nature which is physical, as well as emotional, and intellectual. It is an apparatus over which we have never tried to exercise any control, and therefore we do not posses any control.

It is by working from the bottom up that anything real can be done. It is within the physical human body that any real mystical transformation occurs. The first true step towards spiritual work is literally a step, a step taken with a physical foot moved deliberately and with presence.

The Fisher King

My father, the Fisher King, waited for me to come and take his place.
Turning gray with age, within a stale chamber only dimly lit, he waited for me to come and dethrone him. He named me for a King of forgotten lore, but I am not his son.
He has no sons. I am his first born daughter.
By name and teaching he designed me to be both male and female. When I came to replace him, his death was gentler than any death ever brought to a father by a son. We beheaded him together, he and I, slowly examining the way he played the game designed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
His strategies, which were passed to me through mechanicality, these we examined together in an awakened state. Together we saw their limits, their weaknesses, prodded the blind spots that are part of my inheritance. Just as if he were handing down a used and slightly damaged car, honestly admitting that it can only make right turns, suggesting that it should be repaired, could be improved upon, gracefully he surrendered what he was.
His crown passed to me at the close of the 2007th year A.D., so gentle and subtle a passage that it will be undetectable.
I now am my father. I now bear the responsibility of raising my line from the enclosures of the Great American Zoo and becoming for all those who came before me, that which is more than animal; that which incubates and takes shape within and through the biological animal and its body of habits.
We call this the alchemical marriage, but the words grow weary with use by those who can only touch the words because they have not grasped or glimpsed the thing itself. But some do know the thing itself through some experience of it. They may refer to it in this way, or that, or not at all. What I refer to now is a transformation which may be unnamable.
I put the game that separates mortals from immortals on the hexagonal table of my dwelling place. Today I began to instruct my first born.
What we began today is to fertilize the soil. What we began today is to build a vehicle which someday she may learn to operate creatively, against its tendency to turn only right. We raised her to be as strong as a boy. When she grows she will become a woman.
Two parts of self, activated simultaneously to work in harmony, this is 33; two triangles oriented in opposing directions, unified to create a new form, 6, the star. Every man and woman is a star, within every man and woman it waits to be activated.
I have been able to tell secrets because the blood is coming and I am moving with it and through it, having been kept in the dark one week prior, forging the habit of a predator.
The predator is such because it eats that which may be herded, hunted, or fished.
My father, the Fisher King, waited for me to come and take his place. Turning gray with age within a stale chamber only dimly lit, he waited for me to come and hunt him.