Taking the Cosmic Bus Out for a Joyread

Say man, back again Bo Diddley. DL is still on the DL with the ManFlu. Yeah, Bobby's 'neath the bed sheets maxin' out the cold meds. I think he's planning to lay low and not post this weekend to preserve his delicate coonstitution -- who knows, maybe even just "play out" the Christmas season. I don't know. Looks to me like he's enjoying the pseudoephedrine a little too much. I don't think you're supposed to crush it and mix it with your beer.

This time he didn't leave me or anybody else in charge, so I'm gonna just slip on in the back door while your other man's away, so don't you tell nobody and let's keep our bidness to ourselves, okay? Colonel Beaglehole tells me that many musicians of his acquaintance -- purveyors of R & B music in the American negro tradition -- insist that love is that much better when you're stealin' it.

I guess I won't comment on that, but why don't we blogjack the Cosmos together and see if we can't pillage the celestial village and loot a little light? You know, let's commandeer the big blue bus, head down thunder road, and find out if heaven really is waiting on down the tracks, no? Ain't no big thing. We'll put it back when we're done. Petey's behind the karmic wheel, Dupree's ridin' shitgrin, and I got the transdimensional woohoo map in my trembling hands, so we're in for a guffah-ha! experience. Driver, where you takin' us? Destination O!

Hell, let's throw away the map, bust open the dawn, and plunge this thing into uberjive!

You know what I'm like without Bob's bloated ego in the way? I'm like a bright and gory sun god cast upon an alien shore, that's what, like some tropic of cancer survivor. Yes, immortal am I, a visitor from that dark backward abysm of time before time. I am that which has never been soiled by tongue or pen or keyboard, the fire and the sacrifice, first born among the dead, within you and without you; that being, the size of an academia nut but larger than the cosmos that gave him the gift of tenure, dwelling in the lotus of the heart, unborn body of the bodiless one, dark rays shining from a midnight sun, your phase before you were bearthed an begaialed, empty tomb of a deathlaz child!

Indeed, I am all these things with Bob out of the way!

An invocation for our journey:

O creator, O sustainer, O destroyer, only seer of the whole cataphatologue, comptroller of our moral bank account -- O illuminating Sun, fountain of life for all creatures and creators, let my handful of readers merge with some helpful heartwholed tips!

I'm here to tell you that you come into this world with all sorts of implicit knowledge of its deep spiritual structure. Everything you need to know, really, except that you've forgotten it. So the purpose of a spiritual practice is to help you remember it, okay? It's not new stuff. Rather, it's a refresher course designed to engage... let's call them your "hyperdimensional preconceptions," which are like empty archetypal categories that you must fill in with experience.

No, this is not deja voodoo, then again, I suppose it is. You know that feeling when the transdimensional key meshes perfectly with the nonlocal tumblers, don't you? You gotta pay attention to stuff like that, brothers and sisters. That's as close as most of you are gonna get to a burning bush. And trust me, you didn't stumble upon that key or the Order of Raccoons by accident. Rather, both down here and up there (way up yonder, 'bove yo' haid) like attracts like, which is only one of the basic laws of the cosmos. So be very careful who you are, since you're usually going to get what and meet whom you deserve, if not today, then over the long hell.

You see, as I believe Bob mentioned in One Cosmos, you're always depositing little seeds in the ground of eternity, day by day and moment by moment. All these seeds are therefore maturing at different times. So it's not as if you can be an a-hole your whole life, accept someone -- anyone -- as your "personal savior," and then automatically uproot all those seeds you planted over the years. Sorry. Doesn't work like that. Yes, you will hopefully start planting good seed at that point, but it would be a gross cosmic injustice -- not to mention an arbitrary violation of the moral law -- to give you a free pass on all that bad stuff you brought into the world and upon yourself and others.

Now, don't get me wrong. As you plant those new seeds, they will help you bear what you have coming to you with grace and equanimity -- they will give you the strength to bear your cross, but you still have to bear it if you want to grow, and equally importantly, understand what's happening to you while you do. Spiritual maturity means re-penting or turning around and accepting responsibility, not obliterating it. These folks who think they have a free moral pass are just sanctimonious cosmic cheaters, that's all.

Buddy, when you begin a serious spiritual practice, that's when your problems begin, not end. But there are naturally compensations. First of all, your suffering is transposed to a higher key and conferred a cosmic meaning and significance which makes it much easier to bear. Secondly, your cosmos expands, both in terms of spatial "depth" and temporal "width," in such a way that you'd never want to go back down to the cramped quarters of 3D. Thirdly, as you deal with the unfolding consequences of your samskara monsters and mind parasites, suffering is converted to power. Call it sophering if you like -- the painful forging of wisdom -- or perhaps the agni and the ecstasy (agni is the spiritual fire which consumes our impurities, written about by everyone from Augustine to Saint John of the Cross to Sri Aurobindo; it is a true constant in the spiritual testimony of the Maestros).

In a way, you are transitioning from the lower world of fate to the higher world of providence, even though, so long as you are in the material world, you cannot entirely eliminate the former. However, it can certainly be mitigated.

To put it another way, one of the central purposes of a spiritual practice is to help you "rise above" fate and align your being with providence, which is the "polar opposite" of fate. Someone who lives their life by mindlessly propagating all those bad seeds is essentially a slave to both randomness and fate -- and therefore meaninglessness. In other words, not only are they living "randomly" in the moment, but they are guaranteeing that bad things will keep happening to them in the future that "appear" random. Even though you are creating realities that cause you pain, you will often not see the connection because of the time lag and because of various levels of interaction and influence -- especially in a secularized world in which one is taught that the most fundamental laws that govern the cosmos are "superstitions" or "magical thinking."

Again, the alternative to this view pervades fundamentalism and new-ageism, both of which teach a false doctrine about the "intentionality" of thought -- as if your thoughts create your reality in a mechanical and instantaneous way. Of course this is true in degrees and in the long run, but it all has to do with the depth and persistence of the thoughts, plus whether or not they are aligned with the cause of causes, the Ultimate Real. Just staring into the mirror each day and telling yourself I'm a good person, God loves me, and I deserve some slack will generally get you nowhere. Rather, the thoughts must be rooted in being, and you cannot fool mother being or father begetting.

Again, this is where a mature spiritual practice engages you: on the level of being, not just knowing -- or (n) vs. (k). No memorized creed, no matter how sublime, will have any transformational impact unless it becomes part of one's psychic substance. It cannot be a mechanistic superimposition of (k) on O. Indeed, the purpose of, say, the Christian creed, is to memorialize this cosmic law, not to magically eradicate it. This is one of the major reasons so much contemporary religious thought is so superficial, and why it does not appeal to serious or deep people. Their souls tell them it is a lie, but they don't realize there is a truth out there, so they reject the whole innerprize. But there can be no counterfunny money if the real gag doesn't exist.

As fate is opposed to providence, randomness is opposed to purpose and meaning. This appears to be a paradox, since "fate" has the connotation of something that happens mechanically and automatically (as opposed to randomly), as believed by the Mohammedans. But the whole point is that by aligning oneself with providence, one may gradually lift oneself out of the mechanical stream of cause and effect, and avoid the fickle middle finger of randomness and fate. It's like tilting the cosmic pawnball machine, so you don't have to be one.

Another way of saying it is that the purpose of a spiritual practice is to cultivate truly free will, which, to the extent that it is free, is "above" the blind mechanical play of cosmic forces. But free will is only truly free when it is aligned with the purposes of the Creator, which creates an automatic descent of grace, as most of you know. Thus another paradox -- by giving up freedom one finds it, and by surrendering to providence one mitigates fate. In contrast, exclusive reliance upon the fallen will "feels" subjectively free, but it will just generate randomness and chaos in the long run (although many, if not most, people try in some sense to align themselves with the Good, True, and Beautiful, so to that extent, the saving grace will operate in their lives even without their knowledge).

Well, I guess it's time to sign off again. Sounds like Bob is about to stir, and I don't want him to know we were in here messing around. Let me just add that many of these thoughts were inspired by Bolton's Keys of Gnosis, which I hope I have playgiarized and rewordgitated with my own psychic substance as it trickled its way down here. Although I am ultimately responsible for this post, any errors are still Bob's fault. I'm outta here.