ALWAYS IN THE MIDDLE

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what
you do are in harmony.” -Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

The truth (intellect), the spirit (emotions), and the soul (body) know, speak and act through cottony layers of conditioning and parenthetical fog in subliminal urges whose serendipitous harmony we recognize as happiness when it surfaces as randomly as the sun shines, as if the clouds of self protecting deception ever made it stop.

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Attitude

The only true control I have in relation to the world is my attitude toward it and the clearest realization I may ever have of reality occurs when that attitude is neutral. At such a threshold the world speaks as one voice in syllables of seconds in sentences of hours, unknown cast unrehearsed, play based on everything that has gone before. Any thing noted is a reflection of past attitudes and judgments being out of kilter with what is finally seen as it truly is. If I expect to be free to do as I will according to the golden rule, I cannot expect the world or any part of it to be the same every day, and attempts to regulate, escape or capture it are the source of the endless self-inflicted failure of trying to thwart the natural curve of the way thing just are.

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Universal Uniqueness

If we were as alone as the universe,
Our only sensations would come from within.
With no external distractions to compete,
No news of caresses or abuses,
We could truly hear
The voices of our cells
Reporting the state of life within.


But, we aren’t alone.
We write our own story on the earth
Of what its body means to us
From our unique position upon it.
The unique instrument of our own body
Hums with the chorus our cells sing to us,
Nuanced by our attitude toward the rest of the choir —
The only expression of our free will —
The music we cannot write but always play.


Their atoms sing to my cells,
My cells sing to me,
I sing to the Earth,
Earth sings to the Milky Way,
The Milky Way sings to double helix of galaxies,
Which itself sings to that of which it is a part.
That which we call the universe
Can only listen to itself


Unless, at such unimaginable scale
As such a universe must be,
Thoughts are so grand they're material
As fine as inspiration and as coarse as atoms
Coagulating into eventual songs to itself
Through a horn folded like a mobius loop
Or the worm Ouroborus
With a black hole for a mouth.

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As perfect metaphors for the universe, we are born as beings of infinite wonder through whose eyes the universe gets unfiltered answers while we have no idea of what we observe or to whom we are reporting, thus neatly avoiding the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As adults, our reports tend to become cloudy with filters of conditioned conclusions about what we’re observing and our role in it all.

As perfect metaphors for the questions we are, drops of water fall as rain upon the land and begin to seek the ocean through the curiosity of gravity just as we traverse the course of our incarnations from evaporation to clouds to rain again until we attain enlightenment of understanding at the level of the original asker of the question, the sea from which we arose.

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“… it was thus, by degrees, he arrived at forming an idea of that intelligent cause which he placed over nature to preside over action — to give her motion of which he has chosen to believe she was herself incapable.”

“… unable, however, to reconcile this seeming confusion with the benevolence he attached to this cause, he had recourse to another effort of his imagination; he made a new cause, to whom he ascribed all evil.”

Paul Henri Thiery, System of Nature

Any order to the universe may be inferred by the infinitude of metaphors with which its variety abounds. Is it more likely such endless depth of beauty is authored by some godly intelligence or is discovered by an intelligence that can find a face in tree bark and look around the forest for a cause or is realized by an intelligence formed of universal stuff recognizing itself in reflection beyond our always inadequate words?

Order abhors the chaos of variety such that any author imagined for the universe cannot intend to establish anything beyond the perpetuity of chaos, much less a kingdom peopled with sycophantic idolaters. If a personality must be given it, I see the universe as a being of perpetual wonder the variety of whose questions must be addressed to itself — there being nothing outside itself to ask — to produce an infinite variety of answers in the form of we beings asking what we claim to be our own questions of the body within which we find ourselves a part. No beginning. No end.