Mayday 2: The Constant Need For Correction... Or Not?

Have you ever tried to row a boat in a somewhat straight line? Have you ever sailed and realized that something that looks so easy and effortless--after all, all you do is just let the wind fill your sails and off you go, right?--is really full of constant correction to adjust to the elements--the wind, the water--so that you can stay on course?

I am thinking this morning that life is just like that: constant correction. That life itself is a constant adjustment and re-adjustment to ever-changing conditions and circumstances.

Anytime that we set a goal or chart a course we are setting up a situation where conditions are going to conspire against us achieving that goal or staying on that course. The wind swirls. Our right-side is stronger than our left, so that as we row we are constantly needing to adjust for that muscular imbalance.

The result of living seems to me to include a constant need for the kind of adjustment and correction that may indicate a certain sinfulness or inadequacy in a) the world, or b) in sentient beings. That, perhaps, is the more negative view; indicating that if either a) the world were perfect, or b) sentient beings were perfect, then there would be no need for adjustment and/or correction.

Alas, there is need for adjustment and correction. If we have any goal in mind--any ideal, any image of who we want to be or where we want to go--then we are going to both a) veer off course due to the shifting nature of the ground beneath us, and b) feel a need to correct our course relative to the shifting ground.


The Perfect Sage

There is another option. It is an option pointed to be the Saints, Sages, and Mystics of past, present, and future. These occassionally crazy-wise adepts have suggested that there is only a 'missing of the mark' when you are beholden to some image or idol. Set a goal and you have sin. Chart a course and you have mistakes. Intend to do something and you are prone to failure. 

It's these crazy-wise Holy Fools who have brought a possibility to the table that few are willing to accept, let alone dare to live. The only reason we fail is because we are attempting to use our own personal will to make something happen. Be goalless... be empty... be without agenda or imperative... and you are free, liberated.

This red pill offered by the Sages and the Mystics is about offers up a vision of Truth and Reality that is about as far away from the norms of Western Society and Civilization as one could ever imagine. Christ said that 'many are called, but few answer.' And I know why? There is a sense that being goalless and empty is a cop-out. The basis of Western Civilization (which one might now say is the same basis informing Global Civilization) is that one needs to be industrious. You need to decide who you are. You need to determine who you are going to be. You need to chart your course and stick with it. Don't be a quitter. Don't give up on life. After all, winners never quit and quitters never win, right? 


The Cultural Bias

Next time you are out and about, and you are given the chance to tell someone new that you are meeting for the first time who you are and what you do, just tell them... 'I really do nothing. I don't have any goals in life. Easy come... easy go. I'm just along for the ride.' Then watch them try to digest that statement. Watch how it totally undermines the assumptions that we have about life. For instance, the assumption that you are a specific somebody who is here to do a specific something and you better get busy doing that specific something you specific sopmebody because the clock is friggin' tickin'!

You see this? We have goals even about what the world is for. We now even have goals about what the Universe is for? Many are convinced that they know what the primary goal of the Universe actually is (and God Bless 'em if they actually do!)! 

But how can we know? How can a sole human-being determine what the whole course of the Universe is supposed to be (Omega Point anyone? Singularity you say?) when that person may have trouble just managing his or her own life on a daily basis. Can't even handle the personal, but the Universal is set and determined, final and complete?

 
Universal Uncertainty

Maybe God does have a plan for the whole kit-n-kaboodle. Problem is God only told George W. Bush what that plan was.

Personally, I would never dare to assume knowledge of something so vast and encompassing. Shit, I have trouble finding my keys now and then and I am supposed to re-member the Universal Plan! I think God could do better than to place that Plan in human hands, don't you? 

I am not saying there is no plan. I am not saying there is. Maybe the Sages and Mystics are completely right in asserting that this is all a Cosmic Charade--amounting to not even a hill of beans in the long-run. That seems fine to me. In fact, it would make me feel much better to know that my own personal allotment of f*&ked-upness isn't going to permanently scar anyone or anything. That would be Good News indeed!

Yes, David Jon. You are a mess. A real piece of shit you are. But just know that in the end, after all of this is said and done, no one will remember the hurt, the pain, the wounds you are grieving. Not the wounds on you body, or in your heart... but those wounds you think you have inflicted on others. Those will not stand the test of time... let alone the curtain call of Eternity.

But yeah... right now... right now you really do suck!


Trying Too Hard To Be Something I Am Not

I think I suck most---like everyone else--when I am trying too hard. When my asshole clenches up and I am really giving it my all... then I am really sucking. Maybe that's why a lot of good-intentioned religious people suck the most! Because they are the ones trying the hardest (and they want everyone else to try as hard as they are trying... God help us all!).

When we try too hard---when we make that All-American effort--we end up in such a contracted state that the energy gets all twisted up in knots inside of us. When you try too hard you are really fighting your 'self.' With all that earnestness and forceful intention things can't help but go awry. And so maybe we try harder next time! With even a poorer result. So we repent and turn to God and commit to trying even harder to be a 'good person' only to be so clenched up and contracted that we become known as King of the Clenched Sphincters!

That's what the wahitos have to deal with: the White Man's Disease. If only we can spread our religious misery and do-gooding around the world! I can even imagine the first priests to enter the New World saying they had 'Good News' for the Natives and the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and Indies. I can imagine the Natives getting together and saying something like the following:

Man bra... you think he hasn't heard the Good News yet? Dude, I'm tellin you this... If it's such Good News then why the hell is he such a sourpuss. Man, he's so tight is ass is sucked half-way up his colon man! Before long he'll be turned completely inside out!!

King of the Clenched Sphincter People indeed. That may have even been me back then. I wasn't Napolean or Alexander the Great in a former life. I was a tight-ass Jesuit Priest!


The Goal? Control

In an uncertain world, where the sands of time are constantly shifting beneath our feet, and where all sense of the Eternal and Infinite is lost, then I suppose we may tend to become given to trying to control the world around us. After all, if we really realized we are Eternal and that Infinity is the Blood of our blood, then why would we ever try to control the movement, direction, and nature of even a single atom?

For the Infinite there can be no control. We only get suckered into illusory attempts at asserting control over the world around us (including what we might call our own body-mind) to the extent that we are convinced there is some goal or objective to existence.

It makes a tremendous difference in how we live when we answer the question, Is existence a task to be completed, or a play to be enjoyed... a goal to be achieved, or a game to revel in?

That's the question for me to begin asking myself. A question whose answer I can feel registering in me as I weigh those options. I can feel my whole disposition change and alter when I answer, 'Existence is a task' vs. when I answer, 'Existence is a game the Gods play in the Field of Eternity.'