I have a friend who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome. She suffers terribly. She can’t eat. She can’t sleep. As therapy I have recommended cultivation of “The Historical View.“
In the prelude to his account of the (431 BC) Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (a general on the losing side) says that if people understood how stupid and unnecessary the war was then perhaps this sort of thing need never happen again. In the plays of Shakespeare we find a catalog of cruelty, cunning, and chicanery worthy of any modern despot. Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are A Change’n” was something of an anthem for a certain idealistic set back in the day, but the times have slogged on in the same muddy rut.
The creature that we are continually recreates the forms made inevitable by the animal that it is.
My friend immediately found Donald Trump recast as Shakespeare's Richard the Third, but it hasn’t seemed to help much.
I think we’ll try Ecclesiastes next.
Though necessary and celebratory, consciousness is patently superficial. Like the skin of any animal, consciousness is an interface and a protective layer. It is a conditioned state of Awareness that is made inevitable and necessary by the vicissitudes of existence, and the Awareness of any organism is generally found wholly identified with its animal consciousness.
But animal existence is the garden in which the Awareness of the Universe distills and refines itself to the state of Self Recognition. When the Universe awakens to Self Recognition in its progeny this is called Enlightenment. Awakened Awareness clearly recognizes consciousness as superficial and consciousness becomes more or less subsumed by an Awareness that transcends what is normally considered consciousness.
One side affect of this is that we find individuals with abundant potential who are hypnotized by consciousness and who therefore never become properly Aware.
Consciousness is individual.
Awareness is Universal
There is nothing the least poetic about "The Ten Bulls". "The Ten Bulls" is an utterly prosaic description of the state of an Awareness wholly identified with animal-mind discovering the Self.
The fact that this reality was noted and codified well over one thousand years ago says something about humanities marginal powers of observation.
Enlightenment is simply a matter of the obvious becoming apparent.
The mind is not a labyrinth. The mind is a system of hallways designed to lead an enchanted Awareness into the ways of the world. Seen from above our humanity is warren of ancient pathways leading to various rewards that most generally serve the needs and appreciations of the creature that we inhabit. The Universe is thus served by the production and emanation of vibrations completely foreign to the material world.
The only new thing in the Universe is the experience of living organisms. The paramecium, the earthworm, the elephant, all generate what we might call "life", and the creation of new vibrations common only to life is the Universes way of feeding.
Enlightenment is an entirely personal matter, but I rather suspect that the Universe may find the vibrations delicious.
Knowledge does not distance the mystery. It is not uncommon that physicists are properly in awe of the unknown for they are amongst the few who experience the limits of the known. Knowledge brings us closer to the Mystery by obliterating opportunities for mythologizing and donkey-tail pinning. The greater our penetration into the perceptible, the more obvious it becomes that the perceptible is the surface of a sublime Mystery the center of which is the substance of ourselves.
Many are those who continue to pin an imaginary tail on the inconceivable donkey,
A mind has limited space, and like a a closet, or a garage, or a barn we can jam it 'till the doors won't shut. When we are in the habit of keeping things and making them ours, what then.
Meditation is the exercise by which we clear the mind of the detritus of our human existence, and create spacious living quarters for the Pristine Awareness which is the essence of all life.
A great difficulty with Enlightenment is that the unenlightened imagine something that happens to a person. Enlightenment happens when the "person" dissolves into the sea of awareness while retaining the discipline that enables self purpose.
Without the familiarity with silence and emptiness that comes with the exercise of meditation the sudden breakthrough by accident might leave an otherwise newborn child of the Universe in a straightjacket.
The "Gift of the World" is that we will never know any peace except through self discovery.
