Jack Kerouac: The Fog is Paradise

I just got my copy of Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (no, it’s not a must-have for the Big E library; I’m doing research on the Beats, the 1906 earthquake, creativity, and salons.)

I’m floored that Kerouac was inspired by Thoreau’s Walden Pond (inspiring; in nature we are in silence; so there, we might glimpse that our nature is silence). He “was so inspired by its discussion on Indian philosophy, especially the Bhagavad Gita [it rocks], that he was prompted to read other Hindu scriptures.”

Funny though, when he got to the San Jose Library (gulp, literally a stone’s throw to me) Kerouac picked up instead a translation of Ashvaghosa’s The Life of the Buddha.

The empty blue sky of space says ‘All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me’ — The blue sky adds ‘Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise; the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise.’ – Jack Kerouac, quoted in Big Sky Mind

The fog is paradise.

If you’ve spent any time in San Francisco, you know he’s writing from witnessed experience. The thick grey shroud is an icon of SF.

The fog is paradise can take yet another level of meaning: This mental fog is paradise. I’ve been in THE fog today and this passage whacked me.

The conditioned reaction is to struggle with the fog. 

And I can get caught up in the details: the rent is overdue, why won’t the car start when it’s a torrential downpour like yesterday and day before, my Technorati rank is plummeting, my friend hasn’t called back, why do I even write this blathering blog, I want that sweeping bliss back, what’s the point it’s all samsara, and the beat goes on. Droning on and on and on. Over and over.

Haven’t I been here before? FOG ‘R US. 

Lifetimes before?

There is no reincarnation, says Bryon Katie, just reincarnated thoughts. (As good a definition of karma as I’ve ever seen or heard.)

In the many reincarnations of the fog, I’ve attempted to get rid of it, deny it, and a past winner - succumb to its entreaty to wallow and bury myself in its fogginess.

Zen Really is Boring, Enlightenment Is

“Some people come to Zen expecting that Enlightenment will be the Ultimate Peak Experience.” – Zen is Boring

I’m one of them except I read that linear time was an illusion so I figured it’d be some kind of eternal, you know, permanent Peak Experience of Flow. In Disappearance of the Universe the author is goaded on by with the comparison of endless orgasms offered as enticement.

Shortly after I was silly enough to believe I’d ”lost” ”my” awakening (merely stream-entry*, not nibbana, or Enlightenment), I heard Gangaji speak.

She said that anything that comes and goes, isn’t It.

What you are precedes all that. Hint: Unchanging. You cannot lose that.

“Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment.” – Zen is Boring

No experience is enlightenment. No person becomes Enlightened. Enlightenment appears to happen when Self becomes Self-aware. When you ARE precisely what you are rather than KNOWING about your Self. In that split second before your mind engages to interpret Self.

You are the primordial all-encompassing awareness where tangerine, tangerine-eater, and tangerine-eating arise from. That One realizes that the tangerine-y images arising and departing never mar the clear mirror of Awareness itself. 

I agree with the value of the living Presence of a teacher. Luckily my teacher was after the Truth more than after Zen. Fifteen years of rigid zazen under his belt and he awakened in a slouched position. Go figure. The first time in his presence, my thoughts were irrelevant background noise like a kitten walking in and out of a cat door within a vast mansion. While all attention lay within this mansion of indescribable silence for nearly ten days.

Dry? Far from it. Deeply awakened people are a breath of fresh air, humorous and rarely take things or themselves seriously. (Except when they think they stand for Awakeness and become defensive like where this post is headed!)

I see my teacher every few weeks, so he’s not by my side 24/7. However by using the tool of inquiry you can use each and every situation, every person as a mirror to cut through your interpretations (peeking through the layers of ideas about Reality) and pierce through to Reality itself.

Up till now this post may not seem to make rational sense, but this part is straigtforward: Go buy Loving What Is, by Bryon Katie (website).

The Sublime Aspect to Art

There are two SF Bay Area arts events that may be of interest. One is a free symposium on Arts and Consciousness, Berkeley, this Sunday, March 19th.

The second is a panel in SF, March 27th, that explores the theme of creativity, calamity and catastrophe in commemoration of the 1906 SF earthquake centennial.

What does art have to do with enlightenment? (Note: Not all art is sublime.)

From a post on art and world-view disrupting lives I wrote last year, here are two hints:

Aquinas defines beauty as that which pleases; that’s a very nice definition. There is another aspect, however, to art which is the sublime. And the sublime is that which simply shatters your whole ego system.  – Joseph Campbell, from his lecture “The Way of Art“

I’m in the bookstore doing a bit of sleuthing on the Parsifal and the Holy Grail myth. I spot one of those oversized coffee-table astrology books. My curiosity peaked, I just had to open it to my birthday. It spoke of the path of the artist for me. This stands out: “Great art is energy channeled in from spirit and translated into words, images, or sounds to which people can relate. Art is powerful, not just because of the intense emotions it can stir, but because it helps people feel the inspiration felt by the artist at the time of creation.”

Rilke’s Poems Sprung From Stillness

“These intensely inward conversations with God distilled the seeking of the past years for an unmediated and intimate encounter with the heart of the universe. In November he wrote in his journal – the journal in which he never mentioned The Book of Hours – “I have begun my life.” – preface by Joanna Macy to 100th Anniversary Edition Rilke’s Book of Hours

Never mind the theology, these love poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke are exquisite and transport you to that place of stillness for yourself because that is where they sprang from. It’s exactly what mystic Jean Klein meant by stating that words spoken from silence are perfumed with the source which they came from.

If this is arrogant God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea. [1, 12]

Don’t get just any translation, get this one.

I would describe myself

like a landscape I’ve studied

at length, in detail;

like a word I’m coming to understand;

like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;

like my mother’s face;

like a ship that carried me

when the waters raged. [I, 13]

When two or more are gathered in my name

“I sell happiness. I sell enlightenment,” said Rajneesh, popularly known as the Cadillac guru or Osho, in an interview with Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes.

But how can you sell what one is and what is?

I’m not selling enlightenment. That’s free.

Eventually Dwelve will be a community space. Perhaps we can support each other in sustaining a livelihood so we can go about our real work. And engage in everyday work so that it brings us face to face with pure reality .

In highly motivated, spiritually-disciplined groups, approximately fifty to fifty-five percent of the people in the group reach the goal of Unconditional Love (e.g. twelve-step groups, spiritual/religious ashram devotees, monastic renunciates, members of spiritual communities, such as Zen monasteries, etc.) – Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Stairway to Enlightenment, by David Hawkins

Among my favorite blogs – WhiskeyRiver

Rarely do blogs slow you down, penetrate you, remind you, (smack you on the head – in a good way).

This one always does.

For instance, here’s a recent breathtaking post from Monday, February 20:

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
And between the two my life flows.”
- Nisargadatta Maharaj