Ludo - Love Me Dead

www.youtube.com/watch

"The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same."

- Carlos Castaneda

I discovered that the poet Gary Snyder, famous for his zen nature poetry (as well as for being the basis for the character "Japhy Ryder" in Jack Kerouac's novel "The Dharma Bums"), wrote a poem about the town I grew up in---Santa Clarita, California.

As I consider the place to be pretty much an overdeveloped cultural wasteland that had long ago sold its soul to corporate America and even to this day continues to sleepwalk in that pathological direction, I would say it does pretty much sum up the place. So here it is:


In The Santa Clarita Valley
by Gary Snyder

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal "Denny's" sign
starry "Carl's"
loopy "McDonald's"
eight-petaled yellow "Shell"
blue-and-white "Mobil" with a big red "O"

growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.

First off, I am posting this more for myself than for anyone else, but if anyone who reads this has any thoughts I'd like to hear them.

I've been working lately on formulating a 'natural religion', meaning a way of viewing the world and the realm of human experience that is not dependent upon belief in the supernatural, one the is focused on refining the mind and bettering oneself. My aim was to cut through the trappings of existing religions (such as anti-science views, for example) as well as all of the cultural baggage that comes along with them and do so in a framework that makes understanding it as simple as possible.

What I have come up with is this:

We have a lower nature and a higher nature.

Our lower nature is not 'bad' or 'evil' but it is problematic.
Our lower nature has been honed by necessity, by millions of years of evolutionary pressures.
Humans have symbolized our lower nature in various mythical figures.
Examples: Satan (Christianity, Islam), Mara (Buddhism), Set (Ancient Egyptian Religion), Etc. Most cultures have at least one.
But essentially these are representations of our own lower nature.
Some people have a better handle on their lower natures than others but
we should all be working to subdue our lower nature.
Subdue, I say, not eradicate. By subduing we put it in its place and
Make it a tool of our higher nature, for it can be a very useful tool at times if
expressed with temperance and self control.

Our higher nature is essentially an undiscovered country that needs exploring.
We are socially conditioned to behave in a way consistent with the
qualities of the higher nature even if our experience of our higher nature is limited.
The real threat of prison or the imagined threat of Hell serves this purpose
But it is best if we do not have to be coerced or terrorized into
the thoughts, actions and attitudes consistent with the higher nature.
At times, we have the ability to see our higher nature
shine through of its own accord, sometimes in an absolutely spontaneous way.
These glimmerings are the signposts on the path to a higher mode of being.
Our higher nature mostly has to be accessed though striving
to align our thoughts, actions and attitudes with the intimations
of a higher dimension of being that we have all seen and felt at times.
Our higher nature has been personified in various ways as well.
Examples: Christ, Buddha, Krishna and many others.
Our higher nature can be accessed 'accidentally' but for real deep
access it takes sustained effort and a receptivity to the lessons
received from our higher nature that we must heed and integrate.

So the basic idea is that the lower nature must be subdued and
the higher nature must be accessed. Both aims require effort and mindfulness.
One must do this, however, knowing that the dichotomy between a
higher and lower nature is an artificial one that is made purely as a rule of thumb
out of convenience. There is no higher or lower nature. There is only nature.
Ultimately, there is no self-nature and no not-self nature. Only nature.
Just the same, there is no separation between the mundane and the divine.
There is only the totality of all that is. But knowing this does us no good without
a frame of reference that bubbles up from our current mode of perception
and leads up to a higher mode of perception.

It must be understood above all that the ideas I have explicated above
are based entirely on the idea that all cosmologies are irrelevant and that
cosmologies are just primitive stabs at psychology.
A mature Natural Religion must begin at precisely that starting point.
Religion usually focuses on what is 'out there' but unknowingly
it is really talking about what is 'in here'.

That's all for now.

I'm about to have full knee replacement surgery and came across this Flash tutorial that gives an idea of what's involved in the procedure. I thought it was pretty fun actually....give it a try!

www.edheads.org/activities/knee/