Uncle Ati - Chapter One
Sometimes I'd see the heel of uncle Ati's patent leather shoe just as he rounded the corner. I'd race ahead, but by the time I got to the corner he'd be gone. Then I'd get home and smell his cherry pipe tobacco in the next room. I'd sneak in, but he had just left. It was always like that. I caught hints, but I could never catch uncle Ati.Now and then, when I was out, I could swear I saw his patent leather heel disappear around a corner. But I'd get there and he was nowhere in sight.
Now and then he'd send me a letter that made no sense. Or a package would come for him, I'd put it on the table, and later it was gone.
Uncle Ati was a sneaky guy.
But he did leave notes from time to time. Most were short and cryptic, but a few were long - a whole printer page - but written on, with a very arabesqued style.
One day I looked at the kitchen table. It was yellow and old - well carved wood - somewhat oval. With a leaf in the center so you could make it small or big. My poor, passed-on mother said it was Uncle Ati's favorite. Laying lightly on the table, slightly crinkled, curved up like a shallow tortoise shell, was the note:
"There is a way out."
"How strange," I thought. Out of what? I felt suddenly tired and lay down on the brown divan. I have a strong feeling about taking noon naps. Most animals do so, as do most indigenous peoples; and also those in more civil countries that have abjured the Mad Rush of America. It is a natural thing we should never have given up in our eagerness to slave for The Man. Lack of naps has made us fearful and irrational. We have bent our nation double over "terrorists" who killed 2000 people and yes that was terrible. But the half million people who have died in auto-accidents since then, don't even cross our minds. Isn't it strange that we have become fear-riddled pansies over the one event, yet blasé over the other, which has killed 4000 percent more of us than died on November Eleventh?
But I settled into the couch, rustled around like a pup, for a comfortable position, and dreamt about:
The Infinite Turkish Bath
I was slowly wending my way through a series of small Turkish Baths, buried deep in an infinity of gray rock. There was no escape from the hard, moist, inch-long tiles that lined the floor, ceiling, and walls - their colors faded by the beaded damp. It was warm and steamy. Each bath had a door at either end and was the size of a medium bathroom. On the left side was an enclosed tub of tile, with tepid water in it. Above, glared a naked electric bulb - unfrosted so you could see the filament.
As I stepped through the door from one bath into the next, and the next, slowly plodding in the humid, dense air, feeling drowsy - I realized the baths went on forever, in an infinity of rock. There was No Escape.
But then I awoke and remembered Uncle Ati's note. He had anticipated my dream. But how do you escape from an infinity of rooms buried in a foreverness of rock? It made no sense.
There was a knock at the door. Actually a banging. "How rude," I thought. Then the door I thought was locked, burst open, and men in dark suits rushed in. But for some reason I was not alarmed. This all made no sense, and for some reason it made me think of another note Uncle Ati had left on the table. Thinking of it made me feel very calm as I stumbled from the couch and the dark-clad men rushed up:
Uncle Ati's Note About the Universe:
All meaning is contextual. A hundred dollar bill has meaning in America, in relation to other money and within our economic system. You can get a good pair of meals in a fancy restaurant with one.
On a desert island you would starve. All meaning is like this - to have any meaning something must exist within a larger sphere and be related to other things.
But the universe, by definition, is the largest thing and the only thing.
So it can have no meaning by the very definition of the word.
The Universe has no purpose in human terms - it just is.
Yet it is not just random acts. How could you have any feeling or concern for a series of meaningless events in a junkyard universe? How could you even be conscious of a series of jumbled images, like all the world's movies cut into frames and jumbled about on the floor? It's really all about Stories. The world doesn't make stories. Stories make the world.
And think on this. Humans get into terrible situations. You can't ask Nonduality for help. We are Persons and are designed so - it's hard to relate to the Great Nothingness. Perhaps whatever is behind things, also allows for a personal connection. Otherwise, it seems odd that we are persons at all. In the end I would say the Relationship between us and That, evolves. And everything is relationship. If I have just contradicted myself, is an idea a wave or a particle? Some questions make no sense.
But to return to the dark-clad men
..to be continued
=========================
BIRD TREE ROCK FISH
Bird came and told me
The Human Beings
Are in a large black box
floating on the waters
They have animals and plants within
They torment the animals
Poison the plants
Kill the birds
Tree asked slowly roundly
His deep voice echoing in my chest
Why do Human Beings do this
Because
They are in the Box I answered
The Box keeps out the light and air
Then Break the Box Tree rumbled
They fear to break the box I answered
They fear the light
The Guardians of the Box
Say they will drown in
the vasty waters
But they can swim said Tree
Break the Box
The box is breaking
Of its own accord I answered
Not all can swim
Some will drown
'Then let them drown'
Rock's soft voice rose silent in my head
'This is the way of all nature'
Then Nature be damned
I said angering
From fear of nature
We built the box
And yes now it shuts
Out the light
But my anger cooled
I knew the Box would break
And the drowning could not
be stopped
And deep within
The voice of Fish
no voice at all
< none will drown
but let them come
to Me >
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Years ago my mother suddenly told me I had an Uncle Ati. She had a room with a side hall and separate entrance built on the house with money he sent. She died soon after and Uncle Ati left a note that he was paying for my education. Since it was expensive, as education is these days, I was grateful and didn't ask questions. Actually, I couldn't. I only got notes or the lingering smell of cherry pipe tobacco.
Oh yes, the dark-clad men. They turned up one day - I could see a badge through the peephole and let them in. They weren't violent, as I've seen in no-knock raids. But very commanding. They asked what I knew about Uncle Ati and I told them, since there was nothing at all to tell. Then they left with no explanation.
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Nobel Prize winning Neurophysiologist, Sir John Eccles said:
"I want you to know that there are no colors in the real world, there are no fragrances in the real world, that there's no beauty and there's no ugliness. Out there beyond the limits of our perceptual apparatus is the erratically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. And we're almost like magicians in that in the very act of perception, we take that quantum soup and we convert it into the experience of material reality in our ordinary everyday waking state of consciousness."
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How could you have any feeling or concern for a series of meaningless images in a junkyard universe?
I think it's all about Stories. Without spacetime there would be no stories. It would just be a "blooming, buzzing confusion" Without coherent stories there could be no consciousness. Nothing would make any sense at all, just one totally unrelated image, thing, or event after another, and no consciousness could arise. It would be like taking all the world's movies, cutting them up, and jumbling them together on the floor. Zero sense. Even dreams have stories, although they are episodic.
Sometimes I hear spiritual teachers claim life is an illusion, but it's not convincing.
If you're busting your ass in the hot sun for minimum wage, and trying to feed hungry kids or give them a good life, you might be less inclined toward the "it's all illusion" side of things ;') Even if you can be impartial about yourself, it's hard to be impartial about others if you are empathic.
I think that's why spiritual training is often geared toward being celibate and living in a cave. Having a family brings you too much back to earth and "reality," whatever that is.
But being celibate and living in a cave does not strike me as "natural." We are social and economic creatures, for good or ill. Living celibate in a cave is an artificial condition that only a few can aspire to, or for that matter afford, at least in a Western country.
All the caves here are owned by someone, so you have to pay rent. And no one is going to bring you Prasad, so you have to go buy food at the store. Although I don't like crooks who fleece their students, saying there should be No charge for spiritual teaching in a capitalist nation, is silly. Of course the great holy men of India were paid. They got free, cooked food, and free room and board. In America that wouldn't have happened. They'd just have been homeless bums.
When I read overly-skeptical explaining-away of unusual phenomena, I often think of Occam's Razor, when the "explanations" get more far-fetched and Rube Goldberg than the event itself. At that point one should just admit there are unknowns and we don't know everything yet. Physics claims there are only four forces, yet also admits it has No idea what dark matter and energy are.
There is not Rick looking at the mountain, and Peter looking at the "same" mountain. But there is only a betweenness, between Rick and the mountain, and a different betweenness between Peter and the mountain. So there are two different mountains. However, mountains have more betweens than clouds, so although they are as ephemeral as all reality, they are "pinned down" so to speak, and appear to be more substantial and long-lasting.
And Rick and Peter are also betweens. It recedes indefinitely.
I feel I've been marvelously unclear about this. I'll have to sleep on it ;')
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http://tatfoundation.org/forum2013-10.htm
Shawn Nevins
Today's spiritual discourse would benefit from a dose of logic and reason from time to time. I'm not suggesting an "Integral" injection of Ken Wilbur-esque pondering, but old-fashioned critical thinking.
Take this experiment, for example: Lay your arm on a table, and now verbally tell it to move. Likely, it remains still, awaiting its true master. Now, mentally picture it moving. Perhaps a twitch results, but nothing more. In spiritual circles, this sort of experiment is an oft-encountered first step in the deconstruction of the belief in self. Cleary, it is declared, such a basic event as moving our arm or getting out of a chair happens of its own volition. We do not control our movements. We don't cause our hair to grow, or our food to digest. We do not control our motions. They just happen and we later claim governance. Such is the first pull in a logical thread which leads to a supposedly inevitable conclusion that we (our self) are an illusion.
Maybe.... I recall when, as a new graduate student, I was directed past the frosted panes of a laboratory door and pointed towards a hulking, decrepit-looking piece of equipment called a gas chromatograph. "It doesn't work," was the grim pronouncement, "See what you can do." Shortly thereafter, soldering iron in hand, there was a minor electrical explosion as I tried to remove an unanticipated live wire. Serendipitously, the prior weeks had seen me busily convincing myself of the "spiritually correct" obviousness of not being a body. My conviction was reset as I was, literally, shocked into seeing that I was definitely a body! In fact, in the afterglow of my newly electrified consciousness, I realized I might be nothing but a body.
In short, it's one thing to lay your arm on a table and marvel how you can't control it, and quite another to burn that arm and realize how intimately connected to it you really are.
=========================
I recall having to read "Call it Sleep" by Phillip Roth in college. I found the book so smothering and execrable that when the course was done I took it out in the woods and shot it.
Filled it full of lead with a .32 automatic - two full clips. It was very satisfying and I would recommend this catharsis for anyone forced to read a bad book. It also helps to throw your TV or computer through a window if you can afford it.
I have a feeling there are many fragments of Phil Roth's books fluttering around - some shot, some burned, some drowned, some dissolved in acid or electrocuted - by the creative.
=======================
People think they are such an original self, when they are mostly copies.
I have to laugh at these folks who buy some "original" jeans made by the million in China, to display their originality.
Or a gang-biker who thinks he's original, but who is wearing a "uniform" as rigidly defined as if he were in the military. Try wearing a three-piece suit with your dogs and you'll be "original" (and most likely dead ;')
We are shaped by our heredity, parents, friends, random experiences, books we have read, things we have seen and done. And a Great deal by our language. About all that is left for "originality" is chance, and how could "you" by any more than a roll of the dice?
The "original person" the ha, ha self-made-man that Economic Darwininsts like to posit, is nowhere to be found.
==================================
Class was over and everyone had gone, so I took out my magic white chalk and drew on the blackboard faster and faster - mountains, fish, the Mona Lisa, geometries, everything, until it was covered with an infinity of chalk figures. so it was pure white.
A student appeared from the island of Sunim, where they have white boards and black chalk. He claimed my chalkboard was empty, since it was white. I said it had an infinity of figures.
The bell rang and I left. The student from Sunim took out his magic black chalk and proceeded to cover the board with an infinity of black figures.
I returned and claimed he had erased the board and it was now empty. He said it had an infinity of figures.
We argued far into the night.
"Infinity" and "Nothing" depend entirely on your viewpoint.
==================
I like to think of spiritual practices as "window cleaning." If you clean a filthy window and see a beautiful vista, you did not create the scenery, you did not make it happen, you had nothing to do with it since it was Always There.
But you still had to clean the window to see it.
I didn't say you Had to clean the window. Some people do, some people don't, and there is no predicting. I think for many, their life cleans their window. Tragedy is especially good for window-cleaning.
I do observe that most who have awakened have a sincere questioning interest about things. Not necessarily a spiritual one, or having to do with any formal practices. But there is some sort of sincerity to get at the truth.
=========================
When I was five. I thought the adults around me were talking hokum and bullshit - like they were actors in a script. They'd bloviate about Adlai Stevenson while I was entranced by the butterfly on the window. Adlai Stevenson is dead and most people forget who he was, but there are still butterflies on windows.
If you read an old newspaper - not the big stuff we might recall - but the inner pages, about minor "celebrities" we have never heard of, or political concerns that are dead to us - it all seems like hokum and bullshit.
Forty years from now all this fuss over "homosexuals" will seem like hokum and bullshit. They'll wonder if we were addled. But they'll be going nuts over their own hokum and bullshit.
When I was five I sat at the top of the stairs in our old house. My parents were downstairs, listening to the old glowing tube-radio. I could hear their whispered voices in the dark, but not make out what they said.
I thought they were Martians, plotting to do something awful to me. A passing fantasy, since my older brother read science fiction and talked about Martians.
Many years later I realized they Had done something awful. They had turned me into a human being, and most of the things I thought about were also now hokum and bullshit.
Now as I get older and death approaches I realize there is something more to all this. There will Always be problems - read any old newspaper. That doesn't mean you should sit on a mountain. In fact, compassion is one of the few Real things there is, not the bloviating people do all day.
But compassion is not talk. It is acts.
And when I am gone there will still be butterflies on windows.
And children who wonder, rightly, what in the world the grown-ups are talking about.
=============================
I had this dream where I had grown much older but didn't feel that way. But I looked old and enjoyed playing the part:
I walked into McDonalds for my cheap senior coffee and fries - and only had a wad of change in my pocket; so I handed it to the young girl while exclaiming, "I know it's cruel to make you kids count without a computer."
I must admit, I loved doing the crabby old man routine. It wasn't me, but I had even grown a grey beard so I could play it to the hilt. I could say stuff that would have gotten me into fistfights when I was young.
But there were real crabby old men there, who actually thought they were their act. They sat around drinking cheap senior coffee, grousing about 'Bama Socialism" while they were on Social Security and Medicare. Duh. That was the part of the dream that actually happened in waking life. It's pretty bad when the people who are awake are as senseless as the characters in dreams.
===========================================
Got a stomach ache from MSG. It's in everything now, but I forgot to read a label. MSG can make dirt taste good, so it's a sign of bad cooking and cheap ingredients. Frito-Lay uses it by the boxcarload. So I laid down in the afternoon and fall asleep:
I was dreaming again. The aliens were among us. They were coming through the neighborhoods, taking people.
I had to move my family. Stuff everything in the car and run - before they got here.
I was on the porch roof. At the second story window. It was bulging outward with a landfill of junk. I tugged at the junk, throwing what was useless to the ground, trying to find the totally necessary. You can't fit a house into a car.
I think the dream was brought on by a shelf, earlier that day. I had been looking for something in a darkened room - reached up - and cans fell down. Useless crap. Nearly empty old spray cans of anonymous stuff. As they fell I grabbed reflexively, scraping a finger. It throbbed in pain. In anger I grabbed the fallen cans and threw them into the garbage.
Then I woke and my first thought was - how much useless crap do I have, weighing down my life?
And what if the aliens came?
===============================
BabyMind
Sometimes we drive ourselves nuts with squirrel-mind, thinking about how he, she, it, or they done us wrong. A good way to calm yourself is babymind.
Babies are amazed at Everything. Everything they see or hear or feel. They are amazed at standing up and amazed at sitting down. Taking their attitude now and then as you move through life, can stop the ugly mindchatter. Here's a translation of how babies think:
"...atisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthiswhatisthis..."
===============================
Twenty times more people die in auto accidents every year than died in the Twin Towers. Almost a quarter million since then. Yet we haven't engaged in senseless wars, spent trillions of dollars, or shredded the Bill of Rights because of cars. Am I missing something?
==============================
An old miser scrimped and saved so he could have a wonderful, gaudy funeral. The only drawback is he couldn't be there to enjoy it.
But now you can.
A funeral parlor in California will now throw your funeral while you are still alive, for only $42,000. You get the whole nine yards - a daylight motorcade with lights on, so you can watch your hearse drive by. A stirring sermon. A funeral service anent with bagpipers playing a mournful tune as you are lowered into the ground. Some stirring last words as flowers are strewn on your coffin by tearful mourners. All paid actors of course, as you are disguised as one of your own mourners.
Well worth the price.
After all, what if no one even comes to your real funeral. A lone hearse creeps through a drizzle as your coffin is tossed into a hole. A few people laugh nervously and it's done.
But your pre-funeral funeral you can treasure - well, not forever.
====================
If you write something down and look at it a year later, you may see you were an asshole.
If you write something down now and think about it, you may see that the you a year from now will think the you of now is an asshole.
This is wisdom. I call it "asshole wisdom." There is also the wisdom of age, which I call "headkick wisdom." Nothing special about it. It's just that if you've been kicked in the head often enough you learn to duck.
===========================
There is free speech and there is free speech.
I think the magnitude of the lies counts. If you lie to millions it has to mean more than telling a tall tale in a bar. If Hitler had remained an unknown bum and just vilified the Jews over his warm beer, he'd have done little harm. When he vilified them to millions of Germans he did a lot of harm.
I don't think the founding fathers foresaw modern telecommunication technology, when one virulent asshole can hypnotize three million people with three hours of lying hate-filled bile, every day. Especially when the idiots who listen to the asshole can vote.
I'm a great advocate of free speech, but telling known, bald lies to millions of people, causing irreparable harm to our democracy, verges on yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. Opinion is one thing - that's fine ; as rough as it gets, I don't care. But known, bald lies to millions? That's what Hitler did, and there's something wrong with letting it go by so easily. Yes, you can inject opinion and color the truth all you want, but just lying outright for three hours to three million people? There just has to be some limit. Bertrand Russell once reasoned that to tolerate the intolerant to the point where they gain power, then destroys toleration. A point to consider.
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"Let's say that right now, you're looking at a clay pot. Is the "pot" battling the clay for its position? Is the clay battling the "pot" for its position? Is the clay declaring, "I am not a "pot"! I am clay! How dare you label me! Death to the "pot"! Long live clay!!!!!!" -Ypifany
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I call it "fitting into yourself like a hand into a glove." Only closer than that. But not like a ghost in a machine. Your duplicate is also every part of you - one and the same. That makes no logical sense, but it's a feeling - an intensity - so it doesn't have to make sense. This causes a natural slowing down. I used to do things slowly as a practice, but this comes from within.
It's not a focus - a focus implies a narrowed view and this is all over. It's a saturation - like a color saturation that makes a dull color more vibrant, brilliant. You feel like solid light that can move its arms and legs - but slowly, as in water.
The hardest part is slipping into your own thoughts. You wait for a thought to appear, like a cat waiting for a mouse, then slip into it like a cloud into a cloud. It's not that you're "observing" your thoughts - that creates two of you, which is redundant. You are "inside" your thoughts. This - also - causes - a - slowing - of - thought. It's - how - you - can - tell - you're - doing - it - right. At first thoughts are the hardest so you lose attention to the body, but you must keep coming back to it. After awhile you can attend to both since the thoughts are slower.
If the thought infiltration is hard at first, do the body. Thought infiltration will come since the slowed body makes for a slowed mind, and the thoughts are easier to nab as they slip out of the cave of darkness.
Your breathing will probably slow and it may feel like you're breathing vanilla ice cream. Or you may feel very, very relaxed and forgetful. Or hear a whistling in your ears. Or some spontaneous movements may happen, I liked to sit and just rotate my upper torso in a circle or side to side.
Walking through the glint of
sunlight on stone edges, interspersed by
dusk-green brush
I infill eternity, a bit at a time
burrowing like a worm - through one
of endless stories
that have already
happened
But someone has to do the burrowing or
even Eternity would have no idea
what's going on...
=======================
From the viewpoint of timelessness, the universe may be predetermined, but to "reach into" the universe and predict a particular event involves using a human, and humans are very subject to error - thus the vagueness of prophecy and prognostication. Predetermination is only theoretically correct.
=====================
The Parable of the Grasshopper and the Ant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJWyg2x05x8
=======================
But to return to the mystery of Uncle Ati…
End of Chapter One
