Tonight’s Thought [Epistemology]
If you can only explain something in one way, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Archive for March, 2010
Today’s Thought [Prose Poem: “For Science”)
In honor of the successful non-disintegration of the Earth upon activating the Large Hadron Collider.
***
god is a field of potential
wishing to be known
it knows itself
and our all our minds and our yearnings
serve the execution of this flawless circuit
which is why science
in all its poetic rigor
is the most sublime and highest art
the inquiry of existence
for the sake of everything that exists.
Today’s Thoughts [Postrational Equivocating + Diary of a Zen Sufi]
Honestly I’ve got nothing to say that someone else couldn’t say better, but I see things, I think things, and I can’t be content until I put them down somewhere. I don’t know if that makes me a writer or a selfish bastard, but I’m willing to wager my credibility on either.
***
I’m a Muslim because I have surrendered to the idea of God, but I’m just as much a Buddhist too. I’ve never found any dissonance. For me, soul works as mind, worship as practice, and salaat is a great excuse for a few minutes of zazen. I say “idea of God” because if you accept the prevailing theistic view of a Supreme Being, then actual rebellion is impossible, only apparent or conditional separation is possible from the All-Creator, so a human being is only capable of making the apparent decision to obey or disobey God. In reality, God is always getting Her way, but such is Her mercy that She lets us believe pretty much whatever we want, like a mother who lets her son shut the door and play loud music to show his disapproval for an order he is fundamentally impotent to change. What difference does it make to God? Your head is just the room your soul lives in. Put whatever posters up you want. Clean or don’t clean it. It’s your room. You have to live in it. So I say, “the idea of God,” to differentiate between the conscious decision I’ve made to clean my room and the fact that, at some point, if left for too long… mom is going to make me anyway. It may be our room, but it’s Her house.
Today’s Thought [And Upon the Beast There Was a Mark]
Corporations are cults organized around the subjugation of the will to the balance sheet. God is its intangible and infallible enfranchisement. They can be zealous and/or benign.
More Thoughts [Poets Rush In]
Being a poet is not simply a vocation characterized by recitation and composition of rhyme and meter. No, being a poet means being first in line to get gunned down by the imperial forces of reality. It means surfing the deep waves sanity calls madness. It’s somewhat hyperbolic, but must be. Poets break semantics, freeing us from tired notions such as ‘what a poet does.’ Instead they are replaced with booby traps, mines and sink holes to foil rationality. The disciples of apathy and inertia will never understand it; for it looks toward what could be and not what cannot. It does not define; it transforms.
***
Do not trust those who would trade your belief for fear.
This Afternoon’s Thought [Gratitude to God]
Gratitude to God is another way of saying ‘happiness.’
This Morning’s Thoughts [Take No Sides]
Take no sides, not even your own. The radar cannot save the ship from a leak. Just so, consciousness does not save you from yourself. You are meant to return everything to its source. Do not mourn the wind when it does not blow. It is not dead.
Tonight’s Thoughts [All Around the World, The Same Song]
I wonder sometimes if the pea under my pillow is just something I’m going to endure for the rest of my life. Of course I am. There’s nothing to this being wise jazz. People already know everything. The story never changes, the song is easy to learn. But we get pulled off the road to Grandma’s house again and again. The fun is remembering the way home.
Shamans see further because they lift their heads higher – they seek peaks and solitude. They wear birdshit on their faces for the same reason. Or was that angels? I forget.
Today’s Thought [Poem: Alchemy]
Things are always changing so things are always the same. When you get to the end of a flip book, the punchline is nothing. That’s when you realize you were better off changing, staying in motion, going forward. Leave it to the salesmen of despair to paint you a picture of nuclear abnegation, to tell you about the death of God, morality and the gold standard. The children of the sun keep finding ways to pop back up again, like flowers with iron roots, drinking poison and blooming arsenic. It doesn’t matter what you give an alchemist, the product is gold.
Today’s Video [Young Artists for Haiti "Wavin' Flag"]
This video so touched me, I broke into tears. I couldn’t stop thinking how important it is to save the babies, how they are our most precious resource, but only if they are fed, cultured and educated. Everyone alive exists because of some kindness paid to them they did not deserve or earn. The lovers win because they fight for something, the haters lose because they fight for nothing.