Sunday Stream (187) ~ Heaven & Hell

[mtmynd]

[note: doing a show this weekend... no time for streamin'... i pull this one out of the files from august 2002, six plus years ago... time marches on with or without us... ]

Heaven & Hell

What is heaven and why do we seek it? Is this heaven for real? Where is heaven? What is in us that has us seeking heaven (or its equivalents)?

First we need to realize that heaven and hell are not geographical locations. They are not on some map locked up in the attic of the Vatican. They are not places that have crumbled from antiquity. Heaven and hell are not geographical in nature. There is no thing called either heaven or hell in the religious sense.

Heaven and hell are within our minds. They are together in our mind, each end of the seesaw that we find ourselves on. But deep down we want to get to heaven. Heaven is our paradise...our world of perfection, of beauty, of love... a calmness lives in heaven where we’re free, free of any earthly shit that spoils our life, our needs, our wants. We are free from any anchor to hold us back. Hell is our ignorance, the ignorance of knowing our self... our true being, our essence of life... ignoring that which lies deep within us, and most ignore it. They cannot go there because of fear, knowing that they don’t know and could know.

Some say we are wired for heaven. It’s the brains way. It is what makes us human. Heaven is our ultimate destiny.

Heaven is all these things, but so much more. Heaven is nothing...no thing... has no substance, non-matter, words cannot contain heaven...heaven is beyond words. But humanity speaks of heaven, desires heaven and looks forward to heaven. But nobody can put heaven into words. Sure, we try... poetics... poetry speaks well of heaven... but it can never be complete.

Because heaven transcends any 'thing'... no words are had for it. All language revolves around 'things'... nature and her abundance, the animals, the birds, the fish... the weather, the oceans, philosophies, sciences, religions... all of these things can be expressed, because we have made them 'things'... we can analyze them, watch them, count them... things, things, billions of things...all have their words, their languages...

The beyond, the inner, the self, God, Allah, Yahweh... all things because they are placed within words...

Heaven lies just outside the words... the land of god... nirvana... pure bliss... self realization... 20 virgins just for you... all words... struggling to define godliness... a state of being that encompasses everlasting... this pure consciousness... where words have no meaning. Beyond time because time can be measured... experience the now... this is heaven... this is god... this is authentic... this is you, this is me, this is them... now, no time for analyzing, no time to put into words, no time to use the mind... pure being... pure existence... every thing within no thing.



cecil
23 nov 08
(written 18 Aug 02)

picture of the week:

* self-portrait 5.31.08 *

photo : cecil

[Artguy]

All along I thought God was George Burns...and heaven and helll were at opposing ends of the subdivision...Great self Portrait...

[Arcadia]

I didn´t read you in 2002, so it´s new for me!

beautiful auto-retrato, Cecil: the fucsia, the pinks, the turquoise, the lilas, the greys, the black and the light-greens fit you well!!!!!!

gracias for the stream, best wishes with the show & saludos!

Arcadia

[Nazz]

Joe Campbell calls H & H "psychological definitions".

Mainstream Christianity of course treats them literally. Hard for so many to get past centuries of hardwired "God-fearing" dogma.

[mtmynd]

hola, arcadia! "auto-retracto"... that is un palabra nueva para mi, amiga. me gusta! y los colores... que bueno. gracias.. pero yo soy mucho negro y blanco... en mi cabeza.

nazz: "Hard for so many to get past centuries of hardwired "God-fearing" dogma."

that is so true... centuries of thinking within one box and believing all truth is in that one box... ludicrous. as long as 'the fear of god' is the basis of christianity... and islam, for that matter... that fear permeates into the very lives of those believers on social levels which does little to advance the true belief of attainment of Truth, that which cannot be contained in any box we imagine.

thx, friend, for the reply... enjoyed!

[stilltrucking]

I had a hell of a night the other night

Heaven isn’t walking a street paved with gold
Hell isn’t a mountain of fire
Heaven is lying in my sweet baby's arms
Hell is when my baby's not there

Old Waylon

That picture Cecil,
Reminds me of another bad old man
Gary Snyder

Thanks for the stream Cecil.

Thinking about mnaz reply. It interests me that Christians do not believe there is enough suffering in this world, we must suffer after we die on into the afterlife too.

[mtmynd]

you're a tripper. i've liked trippers since i could follow their thoughts. at least i think i can follow a tripper's thoughts. as long as he can follow mine. it's gotta be that way of it isn't.

truck: "That picture Cecil,
Reminds me of another bad old man
Gary Snyder"

bad. is that like really good... 'bad, man... you bad!"

somehow i can't visualize you saying anything like that so that's why i wonder.. maybe he really thinks i'm bad.. but why? i ask myself, once, twice... one more time, 'does he think i'm really bad?"

o, get a life, cecil... of course not. truck doesn't have that in him. he's a gentle giant living in the shadows oy yesterday waiting for tomorrow to brightn his outlook right now. or not.

at least that's a general glimpse into this run of thought...

thanks. i appreciate that very much. indeed.

[stilltrucking]

Bad as in the sense of Gary Snyder is bad

Bad in the sense of those old black men I used to work with out of Teamsters Local 557 Baltimore

Bad as a term of respect.

"Why do log truck drivers rise earlier than students of Zen" Gary Snyder

Nothing to do with this but I did my best "sitting" behind the wheel of a truck. Does that count as Zazen?

WHY LOG TRUCK DRIVERS RISE
EARLIER THAN STUDENTS OF ZEN
In the high seat, before dawn dark,
Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging in Poorman creek.
Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life.
----------------------------------------------
Gary Snyder - Turtle Island 1974

Took me years to grok the irony in that poem.

You are not old yet Cecil.

Not as old as me anyway.

But you are bad
Badder than Leroy Brown
Nobody I want to jerk around
or fuk with

sincerely
jack the tripper

[mtmynd]

truck, you're a kind aging man... a wee bit more aged than meself. ((in chinese astrology i think you are a dragon, are you not?))

thanks for clarifying what i really thought you meant (hoped?).

to be compared in any friggin' way to Gary Snyder is quite an honor... and one i'm not sure i can accept responsibly. muchas gracias.

cyber-i.d. is really quite different from face-to-face contact and audible speech. i'm sure we all 'see' each other, if we never have seen each other, quite a bit off the base of who we actually are.

there won't be a Sunday Stream today, truck. Soo & i are doing a short, one-day sale today at the place where we do our weekly farmer's market gig during the summer. it's their annual christmas show and has been good to us. given how the econ9omy is going, we hope this will be a success also. if not, life goes on and the art continues revealing it's needs despite all else. art is really quite powerful this way, you know?

keep it together, amigo...

later.

[stilltrucking]

I hope you have a good show Cecil. I admire your right livelihood



I don't know if I am a rat or not. I was born the year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Gary Snyder got his act together as a young man; you probably did too. That is a blessing. I am a late bloomer


talk at you later

[mtmynd]

Chinese Astrology: Dec. 7, 1940 - Metal Dragon.

see: http://www.tuvy.com/entertainment/horos ... dragon.htm

'Cosmic' Astrology: Sagittarius Sun / Pisces Moon = Keyword: Humanism

[stilltrucking]

Boy they sure got my number
I am brave and smart about money

Thanks Cecil

I think you are a trip too.

[stilltrucking]

some of it was spot on but those two facets of my personality seemed far fetched. But maybe I am brave and smart. Maybe I need to reconsider.

You are better than a trip for me Cecil.

I hope you live to be a lot older and badder, I mentioned Gary Snyder I meant someone who had their shit together. I do not wish to give you any invidious honors you can't handle responsibily.

[mtmynd]

astrology, most any kind i think, is pretty damn useless if the interpretations ain't right. but when you read an interpretation that makes you naked to the world upon hearing it, that! amigo, is something to be alert to.

i reckon you didn't notice you laughed at yourself when you read that you were "brave and smart about money." but that was a nervous response on your part. bravery isn't only what you see in movies or read in books... bravery is coming to grips with who you are... it takes a pile of honesty to brave the truth in that, and I think you do, truck.

and the $$ thing..? you're independently wealthy, but that doesn't mean you are living under an I-10 overpass with nothing but a filthy blanket to wrap around your cold body in the winter with a belly as empty as broken wine bottle. you have food and you have shelter, you have warmth and you have family, you have transportation and you have imagination... and you're a good writer, Jack Tilles. smile about that but don't laugh at yourself for not being what your ego wants. that's wrong and you know it. you've been without ego many a time and it's made you a better person.

[stilltrucking]

I found myself sliding backwards off of Monarch Pass Colorado one winter because I was trying to act brave.

I have come to the conclusion bravery is not an act. I mean you can't act brave. Sometimes fear is a good thing to pay attention to.

I had no business trying to go over that 11,200 foot mountain in a winter storm. But I was ashamed because I was afraid so I tried to act brave. Not sure if that makes sense to you.

I mean I may not have expressed it very well.

You can't try to be a hero. A couple times in my life, well only one that i can remember now I may have done something brave it happened so fast it was not my doing. I wondered if it was my autonomic nervous system taking over.

I think there is something to astrology. I think that because people I respect see something in it. Theda, you and others. some of it is spooky to me. Theda did one for me a couple years ago and it was eerie.

I like this bit from a science fiction novel called Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams.

I know that astrology isn't a science... Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis.... The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people. ~Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

http://www.quotegarden.com/astrology.html

Right livelihood is half the the struggle to happiness I think, or as that old suicide Freud put it about the best we can hope for in this world is happiness in work and love.

Since I am 0 for two I have decided to go for awareness.

That is why I write.

thanks for the modulation
not sure what that means "modulation"
I think it is a CB radio term for tuning a signal.
That is what this is Cecil, I am talking to you so I can hear myself.