Gone friends

 I missed my friend’s memorial service. I figured I’d watch the streaming video but for some reason the stream wasn’t flowing when expected. I can’t say why I didn’t plan to go to the in person event except I have got in the habit of going to virtual funerals and memorial services and out of the habit of getting on the G train to go be with an audience. I was unhappy with myself when the video didn’t stream and wished I was with my friends, remembering our friend with them. What is wrong with me? The recording of the memorial was available the next day and I watched the whole thing but the night before I felt like one of the disciples who was supposed to keep watch at Gethsemane, dozing off instead of watching. Watching what?

I want to watch now and tell you what I see now, radiating out of the emptiness of bare awareness, one hopes, from the soft machinery in the skull. Laboring in this warm glow I retrieve words from my vocabulary and put them together in a net as big as my life, wrapped around my life. Is there a dimension where everything is possible and upon this rock of infinity our world constructs itself as we construct ourselves and our world?

Too oracular. These are from notes I wrote this week. I’m looking for something to begin that I can finish and read in class tonight. I already started something last week but when I read it now it sounded false as if whoever wrote it was prevaricating, whatever that means. Evading.

It is a word game. Arrange words following rules of grammar established by human community, by convention. The words have meaning and individual sentences make sense and might be true, but if they are true when separate, when conjoined they contradict, they speak against each other.

So it goes.

So what goes?

What is it and where does it go and from whence or whatever? 

Are you going to get to the point?

When is he getting to the point?

I can’t say there is a point on this twisted line of thought that is THE point. As I type my mind is jumping like a cat chasing a laser in circles on the floor and up a wall and doing a back flip. My mind is like this only much slower, doing its slow motion brain flip in the ether of thought, like a goldfish in honey. 

When you finally let go you are not lost you are home.

You are already home, someone argues.

Emptiness, emptiness, running on empty, standing on emptiness, falling into emptiness.

Bring the doctrine of emptiness home, someone suggests, where its always been.

It was her 63rd birthday. She was almost 57 when she died. I’m doing the math. The abstractions about the existence and non-existence of a self come home to where they belong — an empty home.

The grain of wheat that breaks open isn’t the body, someone argues. It is the reified self, the thingified self, an object of ignorance, they say, the self synthesized by the network of brain functions they call the Default Mode Network. Interference with that hardware could result in a loss of self. Drugs, brain damage, traumatic brain injury, or natural, god-given mental illness, unstable brain chemistry, can interfere with the hardware and the work of the soft machine.

She had a natural god-given mental illness, a bipolar disorder, and sometimes was not herself and at worst became so lost in a nihilist void she would sit here all day, every day, imagining blades cutting wrists. She had made a few attempts before we got together and approached the edge of self annihilation, if that is truly possible.

When you finally let go you won’t be lost, you’ll be home and you are already home, I hypothesize. This is when, in eternity, the non-existence of a god as a reified self, god as a thing, constructed by the default mode network, out of what we were taught or found out on our own about reality, a hologram of a god, is enshrined in the radiant electric emptiness of your mind.

Meditate on this your archetypal deity, the book of natural liberation by hearing advises, not as a thing that has an inherent essence, but like the reflection of the moon in water. Do not meditate on this god as a solid corporeal form! we are advised.

notes for a homily

Good news, everyone

I began reading a big book entitled The Ocean of Reasoning that I found at Spoonbill and Sugartown. It was written about five hundred years ago by a Tibetan philosopher as a commentary on a work by a third century Indian philosopher and despite the obvious absurdity of studying commentaries of commentaries of commentaries on the doctrine of emptiness and of the emptiness of emptiness, I intend to plow straight through it, pushing my eyes through the thicket of words until I get to the other side.

The use of books is endless, but I imagine this is my work.

It pays nothing, but I imagine this is my work.

I’ve also been studying the gospel of Mark.

The Buddha said his dharma is like a raft you use to cross over and then you don’t need it any more.

Maybe Mark’s gospel is like a raft that carries you across the Jordan River or Sea of Galilee and when you get to the other shore you leave it behind. You don’t burn it. You leave the raft for others to use, because it wasn’t yours in the first place.

What does it mean?

What does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean beyond the historical fact that he was the leader of a movement who was arrested by the police, tried, and executed by the authorities, and that this dead radical’s students made grandiose claims about magical acts and spread the story that Jesus had been resurrected and will return to conquer the bad guys and set things right. 

Did Jesus think of himself that way?

Did Jesus think he would be killed but the Heavenly Father would glorify him and he would become an archetype, and the instrument of state terror, the Cross, would become the central symbol in the myth of Western Civilization, all of that “history” — that story we tell ourselves, as I’m telling it to myself now, doing what I believe is my work, writing whatever comes to mind while flying high on the wings of the morning? I fill scrolls with ink and roll them up tight and stack them in my mountain cave. My cell with a view.

I can see the whole world out my window and way into the past and not at all into the future. I see Europe arrive at Manhattan, wearing a cross around its neck as a threat to the uncivilized and unchristian. 

Good news, everyone, says Europe. This cross I’m waving means we are in charge, and our laws are now the law of the land, and now this land is our land, and this land ain’t your land, because we worship the Cross and you don’t and you don’t understand the holy law of private property and that we bought mother earth from you fair and square, no paper lease necessary, and we now own your home, just as we own these Africans we brought here to be essential workers and to build our church to the glory of God.

Look. No kidding. Religious nationalism is dangerous and evil.

The nationalist gospel is a false god fabricated from pages torn out of scriptures. If your conception of the gospel is false, you need to forsake that false conception. But you also have to go beyond the simple negation of the false gospel. I’m thinking of those professional atheists who proclaim the non-existence of a straw god and then preach their faith in this no-god. Still, it is better to believe in no god than to serve your nationalist god. 

Consider the hypothetical historical Jesus, the plausible human, a teacher of justice and liberation unjustly executed by the ruling class because they feared a change in the order that might take away their power, privilege, wealth, and they acted exactly the way Jesus expected them to act. They persuaded the Empire’s agent to torture and kill this threat to society and enemy of God.

Why did Jesus do it? Why did he say he would be in his glory? Why did he say he would be resurrected and what was it that his followers called “the resurrection of Jesus” — a lie? A conspiracy? Folk tale or urban legend? Myth? Archetype? A symbol, fantasy, mistake, miracle? An ideology? 

Was the execution of Jesus an empirical fact that flashed like lightning reflected in a dew drop? Was Christ nailed to a cross a mere thing that happened that, in the scheme of things, Is not worth remembering at all?

Why did he do it?

Why did he take up the cross and why should I?

But, after all, we all die, and many die worse deaths than Jesus’.

Life is Unfair — the ruling class’ theory of justice in which justice is a transaction among competing political groups and institutions and in which justice is transactional because sometimes you have to execute a mentally disabled man because otherwise you might lose crucial electoral votes.

We all die, but there is a power stronger than death, an empire bigger than Caesar’s, a glory in one’s very extinction, a pure light flashing neuron in the brain of a dew drop and heaven is in your mind.

Jesus said the rich man can only get to heaven if he gives away his wealth. In Luke’s gospel Jesus told a story in which a rich man goes to hell and a poor man goes to heaven.

Blessed are the poor, said Jesus. Damned are the rich, he implied.

The gospel of Jesus Christ.

Thanks be to God.