Tom Howe's Blog, page 2

Is is is?

Now there's a question for you. Depends on what is means, I reckon. Is can be a poem, and it is, inside the Hai Tree.  But is outside the tree is not the same as the one inside.

In fact, is is kind of funny that way. Depends on who you talk to.

Certainly there is a real is. What we experience with our senses ain't it, even with machines to measure what we can't see or hear or touch. Pretty close, maybe, kinda, I guess.

But what about that other is? The one that some people say they experience but usually they're crazy? Sure can't measure that one, since no one ever measured the human heart, or even saw it, for that matter.

Nobody knows. But despite that, and despite my own experience, I think that is is is.

Hopeful,

LWIII

Blog roulette

Blog roulette is played by opening your Favorites list in your browser, closing your eyes and clicking on something, then blogging on whatever you opened in your browser. You only play this if you made a stupid vow to blog daily until the end of the year.

It's a page from Ken Wilbur's site. He rocks. A quote from him:

Ego, good? bad? In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the 'edge of history.' There would be a real New Age.

Here's a link to that page on The Tao of Twitter:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 LWIII

Them darn vows

That's the problem with vows. Say 'em one day, fulfill 'em the next.

So even though I ain't got one goldurn thought anywheres inside this empty head o' mine, I still gotta post. Post on, blank man.

Hi! My name is Tom, what's yours?

LWIII

The meaning of nothing

What is the meaning of nothing? That's what I want to know.

Especially since nothing is everything in my new philosophy/insanity(?) that All is not only One, but it's the same. Where then meaning? The meaning of meaning is meaningly meaningless if meanings mean meaningless meanings. That is to say, what's up dude?

It's about three. There's two things, opposites perhaps, then there's the one thing between them, the killer app. It's all about that one thing between the two. A viewpoint?

I'm guessing,

LWIII

Life takes a holiday

What's up with death these days? This whole vampire/zombie kick has me blowing chunks. I feel like one of those guys in the tales who goes to sleep for a century and wakes up and now death is good.

I ain't got nothing special against death. Being the philosophical type I understand there's no life without it, and life is worth death. Or used to be. Now death is the beaniest! Who needs life anyway?

The reason I'm going off (like I told myself I wouldn't do while blogging) is there's this guy in my apartment building who hung a six-foot plastic Grim Reaper on his door for Halloween, in an ominous hooded black robe, bony fingers hanging out. Freakin perfect for Halloween, but now it's Halloween all year. He won't take it down. Every time I drag my fat sad carcass up the stairs here at home, when I get to the top, there looms Death.

Now, in the spirit of Santa one might imagine, the guy's hung Christmas ornaments for earrings on the skull. Come the Fourth of July no doubt Death will wave Old Glory. Here we go Deaaath, here we go!

Pop culture is the vampire. It sucks the heart out of our brains.

Still breathing, sorry,

LWIII

Everything is everything

Still wondering…and have to fudge with a double-post, to uphold, kinda, my vow of a post a day until next year. Can it really be true that joy and agony are the same thing?

Guess I'll find a purty picture to put in here, to try and make this post at least worth the click. Love ya bunches!

LWIII

A love poem

I see a man, a holy man, a one stuck herculite hungry man,

   a yearning man, a wordless man,

a man who never learned the way, a man with oh so much to say,

   without a mouth to say it with.

I see a man so full of love it almost overrides his fear,

   it does, in fact,

but not enough to get him there.

   I see a man with such a wish it goes beyond the mortal star

to fix upon the infinite sphere

   and tear again that ancient scar so deep inside him no one's where.

The wish of fury ultra meek

   so tender that it cannot speak of anything that lurks within

or remotely resembles sin.

   I see a man so pure of heart that almost it must come apart

whenever doubt, the hidden seed,

   becomes the word,

much less the deed,

   and grows into a heartbrake along the avenue.

A man I see much less like me than I like him,

   a man of dim bewilderings and brilliant sense,

a man whose borders are a fence of steel

   to sense surround the feeling firmament within,

a fence of sense and practicality to fend the pain of personality

   and ward invaders from the safe parameters within.

I see a man whose being cries for love whose code forbids it,

   who says stick it

and intends to leave it stuck.

   I see a man who worked and sweated and says what am I

who worked so hard

   to just ask why now I am old and feeling cold and lonely?

Why, he says with every doubt, did I always shut me out until

   I lost myself out there

and lost the chance to ever share that part of me?

   I see a man whom I will ever love, a man whose yearning matches mine:

to reach out and touch and say yes,

   to smile and laugh and feel free,

to make mistakes and admit it,

   to become the one who sounds the son and finds deep waters.

I see a man who tries with every fiber of his being to become

   something new

encased in a rock of old and hating it.

   I see a man with inspirational courage.

I see a man of shaken faith.

   I see a man of questioning love.

I see my father.

by Tom Howe

God bless,

LWIII

A bad secret

But no one should shatter the old words, unless he finds the new word that is a firm rampart against the limitless and grasps more life in it than in the old word.

~ Carl Jung

This is the kind of bad secret that it's not a good idea for most people to know, or believe anyway. That's why it's bad – the kind of thing only very advanced beings should understand, because there is no possible benefit for a normal person like you or me, unless you've gone beyond knowing somehow and need no rampart against the limitless. If you believe it, there's not much difference between you and an insane person, other than you act normal when the occasion demands.

Don't know if I believe it or not yet, but I know it, and I feel infected with the seed of insanity. Strange thoughts lurk in the murk.

So beware, if you are of a philosophical bent, prone to deep probing wonderings past the boundaries of quotidian reality, this one will make you crazy. The first original deep thought I've had in quite some time, a secret that has not been taught to me by any book or spiritual source, but by my own questing mind.

I would really kinda like that I know this – if it didn't make me feel so crazy. My rational mind says it can't be true, but in so many ways it feels really right to me, in my bones, and in my deep understanding-ness, that part there's no word for. Maybe the crazy part, I reckon.

On the face of it, this idea is silly, which is why you have to go by the ass of it. Prepare to enter flip-flop world, where everything is is not, what? Feeling-brain, ON.

It starts with the belief that all is one. That everything in the universe and out of it is so tightly interconnected that it's indivisible. Not that hard to believe. Makes sense to me anyway.

Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.

~ Heraclitus

The knowledge of the unity of all is good for you and good for others as well. Therefore all is one.

~ Ellam Ondre

We are all one.

~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of One.

~ Hermes Trismegistus

Part of the reason I believe in the unity of all is language –  there are no everythings. There is only everything. One thing, everything. It's generally thought of as something of a baseline Buddhist belief, that true oneness is overlaid by our perceptions of things, that we create divisions where there really are none. "Pleasure, pain, loss gain…all the same." And whatnot.

That's Part A.

Part B came after I watched the movie Inception for the third time in two days. I was caught up in the dichotomy of dream versus reality. That movie is a great primer for confusion.

As the top on the table sat spinning at the end of the movie, for the third time, still unable to decide whether to fall or keep spinning, my mind spun too, between the polarities of everything, not merely dreams and waking.

The difference between dreams and waking….

The difference became for me not between dreams and waking but between difference itself, how dreams and waking both build each other and the only real difference is in the difference.

Then it hit me. There is none. And not just dreams and reality. The only thing between anything is the word between.

Everything is everything. And I don't mean identical, I mean the same. A bagle is a pork chop is a streetlamp is an otter is a stump. Everything is exactly the same as everything else. There is no difference between any two things because they are literally each other. It doesn't matter what two things one picks, there is no difference between them in the least, for they are only one and the same.

Infinity is the same as zero. Evil is good. Good is evil. A penis is a vagina. Mother is Father. Father is Mother. Theatre is hetero. All the really weird things you can think of that are most the opposite of anything else are not just another side of the same coin, they are the exact same side. They are that.

Everything is everything,

LWIII

Why the world is like this

First of all, like what? For many people, most perhaps, it would be why is this world so harsh and unjust, why is there so much pain and misery and unending drudgery? For others (the rich ones most likely but this ain't politics so we'll let that pass) it would be why is the world such a wonderland of beauty, such a conucopia of delight, such a miracle of blessings and ever-renewing bounty for the soul?

For me, I belong to the second group, kinda. I have a hard time finding fault with the world as it is, or at least the ground rules for that world. Humanity sticks a spoke in things sometimes, but that's as it should be too. The old reap as you sow effect, and we are often crappy sowers. Majorly crappy.

That too is as it should be to my mind, since you can't just pull wisdom out of a hat around here, you have to earn it, and the human race is pretty darn young, as species go. We're trying a whole new thing here on Earth. None of the other mammals ever had the guts to grow a brain. Not a very pleasant experience at times. Quite an unruly organ, the human brain. Hard to ride.

Give us a few tens of millenia and we may bust that bronco. At present our minds ride us.

Time will heal, I hope.

There is one thing in this world I have a problem with, however. Our world is to me a miracle, every bit of it, a wonderland of geometry and biology, with each bit fitting exactly right. Except one: that little unfit bit I refer to as me. To live well in this world of gravity and entropy and time and chance it takes a certain kind of human – one with grace and courage and will.

Oops!

Many writers get their inspiration from injustice and the problems of the world. I don't see that in the same way. Were I to rail against the problems of the world all I would do is talk about how pusillanimous I am, constitutionally incapable of beating down reality with my forehead. Suppose I could start a screed against procrastination. Join the Anti-Procrastination League and stamp out injustice!

The world is like this because you are like that.

LWIII

Vow news

Ran a hardware diagnostic program on my computer yesterday – FAIL. It said the hard drive is about to crap out any moment. Wondered why things been getting hinky.

Hoping that day isn't today, but will need to replace the drive. Basically I'm wiping my computer's brain. It will still work, there just won't be any information in there, not even a blessed operating system. May take a while for a non-geek, at least in the computer sense, to get things running again (backup city here we go, do dah, do day) so if I miss a post it won't be that I don't have anything to say, but because I can't say yet, because the ol' computer is down.

Your friend in excuses,

LWIII