Better Than Dead

How do I reconcile the spiritual, high strangeness, the otherworldly stuff that happens to me and to others I know with the shitshow that is the world? I know this is an old question, the oldest maybe. The world has always been a shitshow and yet we have these little tender pockets of spirituality springing up like magic mushrooms in the shit. How do we reconcile them? I know it’s more than just the human longing for something greater. There is something greater. But how do we bring it into the forefront? Or are we even meant to bring it into the forefront? How do we give it to the world without starting some new fucked up religion. Or must it remain strictly personal? I don’t think belief ever comes from outside. It can’t be inherited from your parents or anyone else. Belief is based on experience and those experiences are, as I said, fragile and rare. Must it, of necessity, remain tiny mushrooms of joy and wonder?

Do these others, these beings, these forces, these experienes, have as much power as I suspect they do or are they linked irrevocably to human imagination and hope and to the netherworld of our minds? Do they, in fact, feed on us as I suspect they do, on our hope and our creativity and our vitality and our humanness? It seems to me they need us as much as we need them, only our side has stopped acknowledging that for the most part. Maybe their side has, too. Are we on the brink of some great breakthrough as Jo Hickey-Hall of the Modern Fairy Sighting Podcast thinks, or is that just her wishful thinking? And mine. Can they save us from ourselves? If we’re lost, I suspect, they are lost too, their world destroyed along with ours?

Is this a road, this road of perception and feeling, one that masses of people can ever walk, or is it always going to be a select few or those who are persistent and insistent on walking that road? That whole opiate of the masses crap, is it real? Can only simplistic answers and religious thought affect great numbers of people at once? I don’t want to think that I am special in that way because I really do feel that anybody who wants to can walk the road of high strangeness and find some enlightenment. I also suspect that most people don’t want to make the effort. Or don’t have the time to make the effort because they’re too busy trying to survive.

I certainly have times when I don’t want to make the effort, certainly not in the way that other people of my acquaintance do. I’m lazy and a little afraid and tired. I’m very tired. The world has made me so tired and more cynical than I want to be. I don’t want to be a naif, but I think I need to open up the hope in my heart more. I want to trust my knowing heart, but I also think it’s important to retain our critical thinking. Our discernment, if you will. There are a lot of people out there who want to trick us and take advantage of our gullibility and our desperate need to believe in something. We need to stay within ourselves and our own knowing but also open ourselves to extreme possibility. Not locked in the prison of our prejudices but in the possibilities inherent in existence on this crazy planet. We need to trust our own perceptions, but we also need to be open to the perceptions of others.

That’s where the discernment comes in. We should listen to what they have to say but we don’t need gurus. We should be highly skeptical of gurus. They are, at base, tricksters as dubious as Coyote or Anansi, but lacking the scared elements of those gods. They have agendas that may not match with our own, and certainly not with our own good. They seek to lead us down their path and to worship them instead of trusting our own knowing, our own instincts.

How do we reconcile our perceptions of something more, something greater, something that walks beside us at every step, with the ugliness of the world? We can’t withdraw from the world. That’s as much a defeat as closing our eyes and letting other people lead us by the nose. We have to stay in the world and fight for our own personal redemption which has more to do with trusting the spirit within us then worshiping something outside of us.

And asking questions, perpetually asking questions, because the questions are the answer.

Random quote of the day:

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

—C.G. Jung, “The Philosophical Tree,” Alchemical Studies, Vol. 13

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The presence of God.
In a tunnel of birdsong
a locked gate opens.

—Tomas Tranströmer, “Haikudikter”
(tr. Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“In the jungles of flaming ego,
May there be cool iceberg of bodhicitta.

On the racetrack of bureaucracy,
May there be the walk of the elephant.

May the sumptuous castle of arrogance
Be destroyed by vajra confidence.

In the garden of gentle sanity,
May you be bombarded by coconuts of
wakefulness.”

—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, “Timely Rain” (more…)

Random quote of the day:

“If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial turndowns you remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate and fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill, if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog.”

—Jack Kornfeld, “Pema Chödrön and Jack Kornfeld talk ‘The Wondrous Path of Difficulties,’” The Lion’s Roar, October 15, 2017

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“I believe that in the 20^th century, humanity has learned from many, many experiences. Some positive, and many negative. What misery, what destruction! The greatest number of human beings were killed in the two world wars of this century. But human nature is such that when we face a tremendous critical situation, the human mind can wake up and find some other alternative. That is a human capacity.”

—Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, New York Times, November 18, 1993

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Orville and Wilbur, Katy Perry, or the Avengers. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“If you think you are so enlightened go and spend a week with your parents.”

—attributed to Ram Dass

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Orville and Wilbur, Katy Perry, or the Avengers. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

—Zen proverb

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care and love—even the most simple action.”

—Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.