Earthy words
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - may 07 ]
Solitudo animo quod cibus corpori est.
Solitude is to the soul as food is to the body. - Seneca
Isabella, you have asked me, your great-grandfather, what I have learned during my long life. Well, here I am, a bottle of mineral water, a salty dog, an old man sitting in a cottage in the mountains watching the snow between the earth and sky. Like ice and snow, I am only one of the many forms of water, as polluted as any lake or stream. When they take out the water at my cremation, only salt, dust, ashes and my gold teeth will remain.
The part of me that passes on to you is in the blood, which is the water that carries air for the fire that is life. We breathe in air and burn in it ever so brightly or dimly for a long or short time.
While some of us get to go on burning for a long time, others do not. For instance, fifty years ago I buried my baby girl who lived only ten minutes outside her mother. The doctor who delivered her baptized her with water to make sure a part of her would live on. She is a spark of fire in you as she is in me, and as I was in her.
You see, you cannot tell how your fire will burn, no matter how well you lay it. If you start with dry kindling and put bigger pieces on top, the chances are that you will get a good fire, but the fire may be very small, rain might fall on it, or a wind might blow it out, scattering the ashes. No matter what happens, at the least we need to try to keep a small fire burning at home as long as we can, rebuilding it again and again as we must.
Also, we cannot tell whether luck is good or bad in the long run. Good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, it seems, but that is only what it seems. Nothing is simply good or bad. We only know how events affect our own thoughts and feelings. Whether there is a purpose to whatever happens I cannot tell, nor can anyone. For example, if lightning kills you, your death may save you from great suffering, and, on the other hand, great wealth or accomplishment may lead you to madness and despair. You are not to know. No one can know.
Make your life an object of derision and scorn, a mockery like death, for there is little to love that lasts, and disappointment is the backside of enthusiasm just as squalor is the absence of love.
If you love life, you will love death.
The first act of every play is the best act.
No love affair ever ends happily, no attachment is secure, no loyalty is fully repaid, and no good deed remains unpunished in the long run.
If you do not desire anything, your lack of disappointment will be the same as peace and joy.
To find something you can trust, and which you can turn to when you get the blues, you have to use your own power of choice to create pools of contentment for yourself. Feed your senses through the arts, with music, beautiful things, and good food. Rely on your family and friends, your tribe and religion, or your king and country to give you love and sweet dreams, if you can. However, if you are not blessed with grace, joy and certainty, you will have to look for God entirely by yourself, even though you know that you will never find Him. It is not given that a seeker after God should find Him. It doesn’t work that way. God is not hiding in Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, or in the beauties of nature. God hides behind his own hands and plays peek-a-boo with us.
Furthermore, He is not all that He is cracked up to be, for everything He touches withers and dies. Every living thing turns to dust eventually, to fire, air, water, and finally earth.
You will learn that that there is no God the Judge before whom you may plead your case. You cannot find Him and petition Him, but you can ask a lesser being to help you, for instance, His Son, Krishna, a Buddha, the Earth, a saint, or Lucifer, the most beautiful angel. Furthermore, if it makes you happy, you can also pray to the god called Science, which is the vanity of humanists who think people are the purpose of existence, and who pretend to control things.
Words are usually more like air than earth, fire, or water. Breathing out hot air, people say, "Gnosis is spiritual truth, held to be essential to salvation." I cannot quite tell you what any one of these words means. Here held means believed, stated, or thought. Essential means basic and necessary. Those other words have meanings such that they mean whatever people want them to mean, which is to say that they are words made of hot air. Hot air, heated by the fire that that drives them, comes out of people when they try to sell you their ideas and feelings. Salvation means rescue from misery and despair. Spiritual refers to the imagination, and truth is what any fool can see. Gnosis is earthy words.
There is a deep but easily understood difference between logical and mythical language, and both give equally true results, eventually. Religion is mythical. So is every report and everyone’s side of a story. No one can say exactly what happens at any event. Everything told with words is only partly true. Some words that seem to be only hot air are the stories we call myths. They are not about the truth that any fool can see, but about the truths that many fools cannot see. Myths are stories about what happens to people over and over again throughout all time in some way or another. We create myths every time we report what we think happened. For example, Eve ate from the apple; Santa Claus brings gifts at the end of the year; Easter Bunnies lay eggs that hold new life; witches and ghosts are free to roam about, especially on Hallowe'en; bad things happen to Job, a faithful, good man; Odysseus wants only to go home; Noah builds an ark to save us animals; Moses carries the Ten Commandments to us; a fish swallows bitter, old Jonah, but spits him out; Jesus rises from the dead; we get life from eating God’s body; God is love; Christopher Columbus is the Christ-bearing dove... and so on.
Furthermore, deep down inside themselves most people are no good. Despite the excuses they make, the shifting of the blame for their misery to the cycle of poverty, to bad genes, inferior race, welfare dependency and discrimination, they have no one to blame but themselves for the mess they are in. It’s truly their fault. They do not go beyond their upbringing because they are weak, flawed, and profoundly defective.
You must make yourself happy in spite of bad luck. If you blame others for your mistakes, you are lying to yourself. You make your own luck.
What this truth (that any fool can see) means is that you must take the responsibility for yourself. You learned to be what you are from parents, caregivers, relatives, and friends. You can say you didn’t know any better, but that is a lie, and you know it. If you did not know it, it would not be a lie. Like everyone else, you never stop becoming whatever you want to be. The trick is to want it and get it by force of will.
Good and evil, right and wrong, are not mysteries. They are what you do because you want to. You can’t erase or paint over the facts. It is not written that you should be the way you are. You alone can be better than your parents ever were, and better than those who shaped your external self that others see.
You don’t need teachers, preachers, or social workers in order to become rich, successful, and happy. You don’t need anyone or anything that cannot be bought. Teachers, preachers, and social workers are witches, the garbage men of society; because they could not get better jobs, they pick up the trash the rich and successful leave behind, and try to recycle it.
Society and its governments are basically criminal groups, mafias, just like all other commercial, business teams. You are a member of some of these companies. You can’t quit them before you have what you want. You have to do what you are supposed to do for a while, and do it better than all the others. Please your bosses; they are the only ones that count. The most successful bosses rob others with fountain pens instead of with guns or armies. You too should use a fountain pen.
And then, having done it your way, when your fortune is secured, get out of the crowd. Retire to live, not to die. Stop running around in circles. Take your property and hide yourself away from the continual pain of this perilous, delirious, and demonic world. Take the money and run. Enroll in your own witness protection program. Give the other side of your split personality its day in the sun. In this way you might evade false friends, madmen, fools, disease, mortgages, banks, television, salesmen, preachers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, politicians, policemen, judges, and relatives. Make your own luck by living simply, avoiding gluttony, poisons, processed food, tobacco, drugs, alcohol, exhaust gasses, filthy air, radioactivity, and despair.
Remember Descartes’ famous apology: "He who lives well, lives hidden". Of course, he was a hypocrite, but he was making a point.
Naomi Nye in her poem 'The Art of Disappearing wrote:
When they say Don’t I know you? Say no.
When they invite you to the party
Remember what parties are like.
If they say we should get together
Say why?
When someone recognizes you
Don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Remember trees and
The monastery bell at twilight.
And once you have found a retreat, the monastery of your mind, protect it with all your strength. As Alexander Pope wrote:
Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lye.
So live in a convent of one.
Honor thy mother, father, dentist, ophthalmologist, and anesthesiologist, those who mean well.
The Lord’s Prayer and the Jesus Prayer are good to say. Om mane padme hum.
Perhaps you can have a long life, maybe, if you want to, for some reason only you can know.
