Cassandra’s Rejoinder

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What will we do? How will we carry on
when all around us hate and anger rage
and nothing seems to matter ’til it’s gone?
Who will we be here on the empty stage?

Where will we find the strength and will to fight
as enemies just multiply and grow?
Do our eyes dim, or is there just less light
by which to gather up I told you so’s?

Against such hopelessness what good are fists
except in vain pretense to preen and pose,
and then when danger actually exists
to hide away from any errant blows?

Let our illusions fall away and die,
lest we succumb and they alone survive.

03 APR 2025

Get Busy and Die Trying

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Every day when you wake up, it’s useful to believe that you’re going to get something done. Right? There’s an entire industry devoted to distributing planners, daily devotionals, tear-away calendars, thing of the day calendar reminders, and constant alerts to keep you on track, in focus, on the bandwagon. Not to mention a myriad of gurus, coaches, advisors, consultants, influencers, and other self-proclaimed experts to guide us as we toil. We seem to need a lot of constant prodding to keep us at our busyness, don’t we?

It’s a lot of work to be awake, isn’t it? Mindfulness is after all a full-time job. All that time paying attention (or as Krishnamurti put it, at tension). It’s supposed to be a way to reconnect, to rejuvenate, to synchronize our inner core with the parts of the universe from which it is made. And yet, when we “take time” to do anything that isn’t visibly productive, it always feels like theft. We’re absconding with those minutes and hours, pulling them away from their otherwise unfettered and absolutely useful purpose – to measure how much of our current manifestation remains available to us.

Add to that the idea that you are not this body, nor this mind. So who’s doing the minding? An aggregate of multiple sensations available for review only and exactly in this precise moment that has no permanent substance or form. You might as well be this body or mind, since they are equally as non-eternal. So nobody’s actually behind the counter; and in fact, the quickie mart that represents your 0 to 100 maximum acceleration in this lifetime isn’t really a thing at all. There’s nothing to mind, and nothing to mind it with.

OK. Take that a step further, and you walk straight into a series of contradictions or oxymorons. New and improved. If you’re new and fresh out of the crate each moment, the only thing you can possibly be is the best there is at that moment. Since time and space are merely convenient abstracts, there are no used to be’s or never was. There’s nothing to improve. If you’re improved, there was something that once existed that is now available in a fancy updated configuration – so it’s not New.

We take these paradoxes to be self-evident. There are roomfuls of mystical writings filled cover to cover with this kind of mumbo-jumbo. The more difficult a thing is to understand, we say, the more profound it is likely to be. Of course, we’re not completely sure. It’s like when you stand in front of a painting and nod knowingly, pretending that you get not only where the artist is coming from, but the language they used while visiting and what souvenirs were available at the duty-free gift shop on their way back. The truth is that we don’t actually know anything. But that can be a good thing. At least our religious traditions tell us so; after all, don’t they all have some reference to filling an empty cup but making a mess out of trying it on a full one?

When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, you will be ready to leave. But the secret is that there is no pebble and no hand. There’s no magic spell or esoteric ritual or hidden wisdom. There is just here and now. Again and again and again.

Enlightenment, salvation, epiphany, realization, awakening – there’s nothing to it. Really: there’s Nothing to it. You do it every day without even being conscious of doing anything.

Tag. You’re it.

03 APR 2025

Talking Loud is Saying Nothing

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When you start writing about your life, who are you writing for? Who is your audience? It takes a certain amount of conceit to believe that anyone is or will ever be interested, of course, but say we’re past that hurdle. Who is reading this now?  I know a whole lot of people, having had human encounters now for 60 years. But we may have never met in the flesh. I may not know your name or what you look like. And your only experience of me may be through these words, or through words or images you’ve seen elsewhere that take some sort of stab at describing me or my actions in this life.

But RD Laing suggested that’s really all we have anyway. Our experience of each other – not any kind of deep knowing or grokking, but a projection of ourselves that like the filter of a historian colors whatever I see of you to be whatever I think you most likely should be. We are impressionists, not photo-realists. To be honest, most of us haven’t even developed any skill at all with brushes or other artistic implements, and are busy dirtying our hands with paint on recycled construction paper. We look to philosophers to be our abstract expressionists. We stand in front of their works and nod our heads knowingly, but all the while are really confused as to what is being communicated. Because, of course, communication can only occur between equals. Between parties that consider the other party a useful equivalent to themselves. When we really talk, it’s to ourselves.

Interestingly enough, that conversation can actually be useful. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. It may also be true that when the teacher is ready, students appear. Everything is just one end of a stick. Everything else is the other end. There is no cause without an effect, nor effect without a cause. As I’ve said before, it’s turtles, all the way down.

The nice thing about talking to yourself is that you’ve got a captive audience. No matter how you try, it may be possible to dull the sound, or temporarily hit the mute button, but ultimately, because the sound of your own voice is created first instead your head before it hits your vocal chords, you can’t turn off the endless stream of chatter you provide yourself on a daily basis. Honestly, even listening to the void, or emptiness, or Nothingness, is still using your brain to kick-start something.

 So maybe everything we write is just an extension of that self-talk. We throw our thoughts on paper just to prove to ourselves that we have them in the first place. The only thing we actually have of ourselves, if you consider the Buddhist idea that we’re just temporary aggregates anyway, with no permanent or abiding substance, is our experience of ourselves. It’s not, as Descartes put it, that “I think, therefore I am.” It’s that we are what we think we are, and nothing more. Once we stop thinking about it, that sense of separate identity, individual essence, isolation, smallness, and independence slips away. Form is nothingness. Nothingness is form. It’s not that we realize our connectedness or interdependence, either. Those words and concepts become meaningless, irrelevant. Remember, it’s two ends of the same stick. And there’s no stick.

Rumi said, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.”

But a true conversation with our self is beyond even that field. There are no words or sounds or even vibrations. Just the ghosts of who we thought we were once, communicating via osmosis to projection of who we think we are now, translated by who will believe we will someday become.

02 APR 2025

King Me, Please

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As a culture, we have fought a long and hard war against personal responsibility. Because everyone KNOWS the right thing(s) to do. They’re just hard. How much easier it is to elect a clown-buffoon-strong man to make all the decisions and take all the responsibility so no one else has any guilt, shame, or sense of sublime ridiculousness. Throughout the history of humanity, we have sought rulers, kings, and tyrants for this very reason. A despot is the ultimate scapegoat. We don’t even have to say we were just following orders. We will always just be children of our gods, never need to be grown-ups.

01 APR 2025

The Salmon in the Streambed

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About 30 years ago I wrote something almost every single day: poetry, essays, lengthy monologues. I hung out with writers and attended a weekly open mic poetry reading. Like when I’m in a band, I write songs for that band to play. I thought a lot about “stream of consciousness” and usually just started writing until I stopped. Some interesting things developed as a result that’s for sure.

But it makes me wonder – when people say stream of consciousness, what exactly do they mean? And how, exactly, is consciousness anything BUT a stream? Is it ever a lake, or ocean? Can it also be a mud puddle, a leaky faucet, or a urinal? When we say we regain consciousness, are we talking about a merely awake state or an awoken one? If you are truly conscious, are YOU even really there? The Buddhists and some Hindus suggest that what you perceive, what you are conscious of at that lower level, is a mere aggregation of sensate objects and receivers, with no permanent or underlying substance whatsoever. Not a void or nothingness, but simply an absence of uncaused phenomenon.

Is there really any other place where we exist, EXCEPT in the streambed of inspiration, as the Celts would have put it? In that sense, does a fish comprehend the nature of water any more than a bird appreciates the nature of air? A medium for temporal energy dispersion, nothing more, and the outside that makes the inside stay where it is, at least when we’re not really conscious of how we are interdependently connected to each and every other thing across all time.

Imagination, creativity, inspiration, exultation, joy, happiness. Are these things actually anything other than the perception of truly being alive – those moments when the dull dust of every survival is rubbed clean away and we are able to connect fully to the universe? As I wrote a while ago, a place where “we are not lost in these woods, nor are they lost in us.”

If we are REALLY all connected, is it possible for any of us to actually disconnect? Or is that simply another illusion, a deception we buy into when we need for whatever reason some “alone” time? That’s another oxymoron, isn’t it? Alone time. If time is a never-ending spool that stretches back into the past and forward into the future, ad infinitum, with only a spec of a dot at the point where the Speed of Now creates the coordinates that look like us, how could we EVER really be alone? Wouldn’t we be co-existing not only with every other thing throughout time itself, but also ourselves in whatever the smallest increment of evolutionary change we can imagine might be?

So, is consciousness a stream? If it’s not a stream, is it consciousness? If we claim to be awake, or awoken, what is the state in which we are not? Is that not also part of the stream?

01 APR 2025

Birth and Death

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I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. That is poetry. – 13 Words, John Cage

Where does it begin? What is “it”? What is a “beginning”? If you’re going to plumb the depths of the universe and try to come up with a way to explain each and every thing from sea to shining sea, you really have start with a definition of terms. Right?

If you subscribe to the idea of cause and effect, every cause is an effect, and every effect is a cause. Like the old mythological riddle goes, “it’s turtles, all the way down.” There is no beginning and no end – just an endless collection of here and now’s that meet as two ends of a myriad of sticks. And you can’t pick up one end of a stick without also picking up the other end. Every birth has bury it in.

So if you’re going to write something like an autobiography, where does it actually start? With your conception or your live birth? Or does it start with the energy that fuels you, that fueled your parents and their parents, that is simply passed on from generation to generation in one form or another without pause or ceasing? How could you become what you became at birth without whatever your parents were at that time or any previous time in their existence? They didn’t get to where you became a thing just by flipping on a switch, any more than you got to be 50 or 60 years old by blinking your eyes at age 5 and wishing you were a grown-up.

Can you explain the fact that you’re not the same person you were in elementary school using some exact science, or is there invariably (and perhaps unfortunately) no small degree of magic involved? How much mumbo-jumbo is actually required to explain the universe, after all – and doesn’t that inclusion automatically defeat the purpose of rational explanation?

31 MAR 2025

The Plan It Planet

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What does it mean to have a plan? I used to date someone who had scheduled the vacations they wanted and were going to take up to five years in advance. As if in the course of living life, day to day, in the period between then and now, the world and their attitude toward it, their wants and desires, their situation in any way, would not have changed. Like parents who buy a Subaru because they believe it will be the perfect car to pass off to their children when they are of driving age. Never mind that hopefully in the 15 years you own that car that automotive technology will not advance to such a point that your current vehicle will be hopelessly outdated and definitely out of style.

Sure, it makes sense to store your nuts for the winter, so that when that time of your discontent (or retirement or inability to continue working frenetically) inevitably comes that you and yours will have at least a store of protein to consume. But even though we watch our grandparents and parents make that slow decline into autumn, it’s difficult to imagine the scope and breadth of shit you’re going to have to adjust for as you get older. For one thing, despite what you do to delay it, old age, infirmity, and decrepitude are coming. For you, just like everyone else. Regardless of how gentle or fiercely you go into that good night, the darkness is going to get you. It’s just a question of time. And time, of course, is relative. Eihei Dogen, the Japanese Zen master, predated the theories of quantum physics by about 600 years when he suggested that the “passage” of time is imaginary. There is only the current moment, in which (and only in which) all the future and past exist. Time travel is impossible, if only because when you choose a past or future to revisit, whose time is it? You are not the same person you were five minutes ago, let alone when you attended elementary school or who you will be when you grow up and out of it. To suggest otherwise, to imagine yourself the same at 20 as at 50, is to, as Muhammad Ali quipped, “waste 30 years of your life.” Your purpose is to grow, to change. To grow old. To live and die. To borrow a finite amount of energy for a finite time, and then give it back.

You want to make the gods laugh, they say, make a plan. But “they” also say you should live as if you’re going to die tomorrow, but save as if you’re going to live forever. Forever, of course, being an impossible condition outside the controlling principles of cause and effect. In other words, not reality. We struggle to make a meaningful contribution to the world in less than 100 years. How much more difficult, depressing, soul-crushing, and ultimately useless is an infinite lifetime’s worth of failure?

But everybody’s supposed to have a plan, right? Especially, when they look to be doing something we disagree with, they’re supposed to have a Plan B. A backup, a strategy. But if you think about it, there has not been a single, 24-hour period of time for any being that ever existed or will exist where everything has gone the way they wanted or expected it.

So is the answer to let go of expectations? Forget the results and lose yourself in the doing? Maybe. Maybe not. Just like a car will only go so far on a half tank of gas, the human body and mind can only function for a limited number of miles without refueling or checking the engine lights. And preventative maintenance IS a plan, isn’t it? You gotta eat.

Maybe it’s more like a religion – in that EVERY religion, regardless of its number of adherents or how ironclad its promises or doctrine, is always just a single generation from extinction. We are all in that sense merely living from paycheck to paycheck. Even the most tight-fisted billionaire can lose it all in a few minutes on the stock market. It’s unpredictability that puts the living into a life. Otherwise, you might as well be an automaton serving a will greater than yourself with no time off for good behavior.

Honestly, what’s the difference anyway? If there IS a greater or higher purpose or being or driving energy or calling or destination, greater than you, right here and now, how would you recognize it when you saw it? Could you in fact even see it? How can you really come to grips with something truly extrasensory, extraordinary, superhuman?

Would you be able to determine whether that super-something was encouraging you, creating constant roadblocks, or simply laughing its divine ass off?

If you could interpret the language of the gods, could you then easily slip back into the linga franca of humanity, of mere mortal communication? Or would you be, like someone who is able to distinguish the fabric and meter of the universe while high on LSD, unable to translate your all-absorbing experience in the land and speech of the trip into your common, ordinary, mundane and altogether boring mother tongue?

Ultimately, does it really matter whether you have a solid plan? If you’re going to be alive, truly and absolutely alive in this moment, what difference does it matter what has happened, what you imagined you wanted to happen, what might happen, and what is possible? It’s not really like Sherlock Holmes quipped, that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, some part of the possible, no matter how impractical, must be the truth. The Truth, with a capital T, is that anything that can happen does happen. In fact, it’s already happening. Or you wouldn’t be able to think of it, or plan for it, or NOT plan for it.

They teach you in project management that planning is just a spoke in an ever-turning wheel that spins from through initiation through planning to execution, monitoring and closing. Not in big grandiose cycles, but in tiny, easily measurable segments. But keeping up with that rhythm isn’t as easy as it sounds. Far from it. The trick, if there is a trick at all – because a “trick” requires you to be a separate observer who thinks if they watch closely enough they can see the “secret” mechanics for how the master magician achieves their sleight of hand. Learning the trick means a denial of all magic altogether – including that magic that right now is considered science and therefore physiologically, psychologically, and metaphysically not only possible, but predictable. No the secret to the project cycle is that everything is infinitely small. So infinite, in fact, that it is finite. But measuring, as Sri Ramakrishna pointed out, is itself a tricky business. We are all just dolls made out of salt, who think by wandering out into the ocean we can accurately measure its salinity.

03 MAR 2025