Also today while I was juggling, I bought a really fancy bag of bird seed at Rite Aid which had fruits and nuts in it and which smelled so good that I thought - more than one time - about eating some myself. Every location which I stopped for any length of time at to juggle, I would take a handful of the birdseed and throw it on the ground by me, as sort of an offering or a prayer or something to the birds. I guess I had in my head this really grandiose image that there would be these like tremendous flocks of birds which would descend from the heavens and create a really amazing backdrop around me as I juggled, but that never really happened, although some pigeons came and ate the seed I left in the west end of the Monument park while I was sitting down eating my apple. The park had signs everywhere in it about how you’re not supposed to feed the birds, but fuck that. They’re people too.
In conjunction with that, I’ve also been thinking a lot (ever since I quit my job) about this part from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them…
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Oh, and speaking of Sermons on the Mount and birds, one of the little kids when I was juggling up on Federal Hill, he had an oriole painted on his cheek!
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19 Comments
What that parable means to me is that were are holons of God. We are complete. Being complete we have no lack.
If we think we have lack, then we are operating the basis of a false sense of self.
We then act as fragments alienated from the whole. So then we have to join up with a bunch of other alienated fragements and build some type of expoitative society that never completes us.
Buckminster Fuller decided he was never going to try to make money. He always had enough. He decised he would just try to make artifacts that make life better for everyone else. If the Universe thought he was on the right track it would provide.
It worked for over 50 years until he died.
I mean it worked for the rest of his life. It didn’t stop working. He died because he was old!
I think this is where I’m arriving at right now. There are certain games, certain things we’re supposed to chase in this life that I’m just done with. I’ll work it out one way or another, even if I have to sleep in a ditch for the rest of my life. At least I’ll know I earned that ditch. At least gravity never gives up on you and you can always lay your head somewhere and try again tomorrow.
Biking around the city and juggling and smelling the world and seeing things like new for the first time is opening my eyes to something. Having no goal, no destination, freedom, whatever that means. I can’t fathom now why other people do the things they do: they must just be used to it, to the routine.
And Ted, even if you’re as much of a Devil’s Advocate as I am sometimes and we get into it, I’m genuinely thankful to have made your acquaintance as a human being!
Same here bro!
Back to Fuller,
He can be hard to read. He makes up his own lingo. But the thing with him is that he never seems to say anything unless he is 100% sure. He is very very rigorous. He basically worked out the essence of that parable mathmatically using physics and stuff and recorded a daily journal on his progress.
His whole life was an expiriment. He called himself “guinea pig B” for Bucky. That’s basically the expiriment. To see what what one peniless normal average person could do to improve the world that governments and corporations couldn’t.
So maybe you will lay in a ditch for a while, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself jet seting all over the world giving talks on open currencies and buildng all kinds of stuff. or whatever.
You are definately tapped into a lot of things the Universe seems to be doing.
The way he described it was called “procession” Like how bees just want nectar, but end up pollinating all the flowers. People ften just want money, but end up inventing useful things. He figured that if he worked on things no one else was doing, there would be no competition and the Universe would provide, directly.
I think the thing is is that I’m very impatient because I can see and feel and hear so much, that I expect everything in the world to just instantly morph to fit that vision
yeah. That part kind of sucks.
I kind of felt like I was depressed recently, because of that. I felt like once I finally figured out the direction I wanted to take with the rest of my life, the wind kind of went out of my sails.
Its kind of a weird thing.
I guess what it is, is that the wind actually does go out of your sails. I found an article about it that sort of talked about that phenmena. Something about the “affective ego” but it was mixed with a lot of buddhist stuff I am not real keen on.
But anyway, I felt bad because I found out Buckminster Fuller already came up with all this stuff already, most of it anyway and we are just in a big time lag. Its like there is not that much more to figure out about how the world can function as a harmonious global community.
So in a way finding out all these cool things depressed me. But I understand it gets better. The depression like state is a stage.
But community currencies and global collective intelligence all that stuff is coming. Cheap abundant energy, universal prosperity. Its all in the pipeline.
Some of the stuff made me just sick. The things he came up with that he presented to different governments and they said “no.”
Like for example all the world’s power grids can be hooked together so that each hemisphere can use the others excess as the there side sleeps.
Basically everyone can live like a billionaire, without any money being taken away from the current billionaires out of revenge. All wealth comes from the Sun. So he calculated it in such away that everyones share of the suns energy equals several billion each. 400 billion billionaires.
After I read that, I figured you had won me over to your basic guaranteed income idea.
You’re making me paranoid. What happens if gravity decides ‘thumbs down on Julia’ and I have to fight to just lay down.
Ted, what’s that article you mention on an affective ego? I’d really like to look into that some more. I had a similar experence recently, feeling like I’d made a decision on where I was going in life, went through with it, and then once it was completed feeling really empty. Not defeated or depressed, I’ve felt enough depression before to know the difference. Just empty.
I was thinking that the decision I made was something that took a lot of energy to accept, it was a way of overcoming some strong internal division, chopping off part of my false self. And once that was done, my capacity for energy grew. I became a larger tank to fill, so to speak. But I also understand things more now, so it’s a good thing, and I can refill my “motivation tank” more quickly.
yeah,
I think we are both talking about the same thing. What it is I guess is your “affective ego” is motivated by stupid things. Distractions basically, so then once you are at the threshld of a breaktrough it gets deflated.
I’ll find the article. I only agree with the first half. The first author is speculating. The second author is this Buddhist guy that thinks feeling empty and apathetic is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Which is my impression of a lot of Buddhism.
Anyway if its a threshold to a next stage I think its good. I am not enamored of it as a final destination.
Is it depression or loss of affective ego leading to spiritual gain?
I guess the second Guy is not a Buddhist but just sounds like one.
Here is a god article by the second guy:
http://peterspearls.com.au/philstromain.htm
maybe he is not so bad.
I don’t know what it is but people talking about “enlightenment” make it sound really really boring and ennervating.
but maybe there is somthing to it.
I got a lot more out of the first half than the second too. This must be an epidemic around here. I’m guessing here based only on my recent experience but I think another good way of looking at it is as the spiritual survival instinct needing spiritual quite to assess new territory.
If I sense physical danger my senses calm before my mind does. If I’ve already turned my path in a new direction my spirit knows before “I” do. I have to listen to the still, small voice that tells me I’m on the right path now because the new path only has a glancing relationship to the old path.
Cool thanks Ted. No true Buddhist would confuse detachment with apathy or depression. Here’s a little something on that from the NYT, of all places.
And there are no final destinations, I think, just more and more stages, like waves.
I was told this about two years ago, but am only beginning to understand it, and really, really appreciate it, and I think it ties in well with this conversation-
“don’t do what you approve of, do what you admire”
Strangely there was and is a shit ton of birdseed outside my door today. I swept what I could out into the alley a couple hours ago — not to get rid of the birdseed per se, but just this weekend, I swept up the winter leaves which had built little leafy, moldy fortresses in the corners of the walls. After I got rid of the leaves, in comes the birdseed epidemic. Since the sweeping of leaves felt so good, addictively I began sweeping the seeds as well. Maybe I should leave the seeds. . .