IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN?

Doing is only possible Now. If it's an intention for tomorrow, the intention is done now. The action may be done tomorrow. But, among other possibilities, tomorrow may not come and you may not be alive.

    NOW 
    Now.

    Sit down.

    Let go.

    Tomorrow’s now will be no more than this

    - another was.

    Nothing is enough

    to distract

    your present thought.

    And your present thought

    is only a movement between two points,

    a wave that leaves the water behind,

    plotted by an electrical mind.

    So take your nothing.

    Now.

    Old Dhong says "if you have noodles, eat them Now!"

NEW PROJECT: THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR

SINNER MAN

There is nowhere outside where Sinner Man can hide. The karmic results of one's sins are within and you take within with you wherever you go. Medieval Christians were taught that the only things you can take with you at death that will be of any assistance to you are your Good Deeds.  In the Tibetan rituals, which attempt to guide the dying man over the bridge of death, he is constantly reminded "Remember your Good Deeds."

But you can't remember your good deeds if you haven't done any.

Undoubtedly you have done not-good deeds.

When are you going to stop the not-good and start seriously doing good deeds?

It will certainly be too late if you wait until "that day".

And they need to be genuine.  Nowadays the emphasis is increasingly on packaging and labelling which hide and disguise what the product actually is.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is described how the dead man's heart is weighed on the scale of Maat against the feather of truth.  If his heart is lighter than the feather, he is allowed to pass into the afterlife.

Maat = Truth, law, morality, justice.

Book of the Dead: better translated as "Book of emerging forth into the Light".

NEW PROJECT: IF NOT NOW, THEN WHEN?

THE JUNGLE OF SPEECH

AFTERNOON TEA AT THE WARNEFORD*

Speech
reaches out
to whisper and shout,
praise and curse,
across a silent universe;
making of molecular vibration
a means of human communication.

It wasn’t always quite like this;
the groans
and moans,
the hiss
and howls
in the warm pre-Cambrian mud
were eloquent enough avowals
of love and hatred, fear and blood.

Even now,
it isn’t always quite the same;
the grunts and lowing
of pig and cow
in farmyard barn and shed
make no poetic claim
but express the cosmic suffering
of the living and the dead.

When fragile humankind
comes here to peer,
through spiralling downwards mind,
into thorny jungles of raw sensation,
it loses its clear articulation;
the fine distinction
of the human word
is dislocated and blurred
into jabbering of animal and bird.

* Warneford Hospital, formerly Warneford Lunatic Asylum, two and a half miles east of Oxford city centre where the professional and middle classes, including senior and junior members of the University, came (come) when they could no longer cope with the lives they had created for themselves.

NEW PROJECT: SINNER MAN

"Hey Sinner Man,
Where you gonna run to?
Hey there Sinner Man
Where you gonna run to?
Hey Sinner Man
Where you gonna run to
All on that Day?"

ECONOMY OF SPEECH TWO

Are you married?

"Yes."

There's economy of speech, for you! But wait a minute. Listen again.

"Yes," she said drily /sadly/ thoughtfully/ explosively / miserably / happily / dully / laughingly /tearfully / defensively / aggressively / quizzically / triumphantly / humbly / proudly/ coldly / cheerfully / hopelessly /regretfully / confidently / doubtfully / angrily / stubbornly / sexily / hopefully / lugubriously / manically / suicidally /dreamily / shyly / breathlessly / untruthfully / arrogantly / gratefully /discretely /painfully / mournfully.

The fact is that the word is a neutral statement of the case. But it is often accompanied by feelings or emotions. A piece of speech not only indicates something but also reflects and reveals the speaker's mental (or physical) state. It is a mental footprint. Even when the mind attempts to use speech to hide something, it becomes a footprint of the mind attempting to hide something.

NEW PROJECT: THE JUNGLE OF SPEECH

ECONOMY OF SPEECH

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly. What one cannot speak of one should be silent about.

Question: If one is asked for a bunch of carrots from the garden, why does one struggle in with an overflowing wheel barrow? (To be sure there may also be carrots in there somewhere.)

Answer: Either the mind is confused (garden garden must bring something from the garden).

Or it is deceived (it doesn't really know what carrots are). Why doesn't it admit this and ask?

Or it is deceiving (if I can ramble on long enough, I can bury the answer and he won't notice that I don't answer the question or he might even forget altogether).

Question: What is the aim of this project?

Answer: To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

NEW PROJECT: ECONOMY OF SPEECH TWO

MAKE SOMEONE ELSE REALLY HAPPY THIS WEEK

Since the natural state of beings is happiness and they become unhappy by choosing to think, say and do things which lead to unhappiness, it is hard to imagine what one might do to help them out.

If one were seen to fill one's watering can and walk to an already full pond and empty it carefully in it and, on being asked what one was doing, one replied, "helping to make the fish wet"; it might be thought that one was wet oneself or at least in need of help.

If there were fish flapping around on the dry land next to the pond, it might seem sensible to throw them back in. But if they had spent a lot of time and effort in struggling to jump out of the pond in order to further their careers, like oneself, on dry land, one's efforts might go unappreciated.

No. The answer is that, since their natural state is happiness and they leave it of their own freewill, the really helpful thing to do is to avoid doing anything which might cause them inconvenience or nudge them out of their natural state. That is the half of it.

The other half is, without any kind of ostentation, to generate from one's heart, wherever one is, indiscriminate goodwill towards all beings, without any expectation of appreciation.

The role model is the radiator in the hall; maintained, fully functioning and full on, it warms the house whether we are aware of the source of heat or not. And it is quite oblivious of being appreciated or not.

Like that other radiator in the sky. The sun shines on the good and the bad, the deserving and the undeserving. The rich and the poor.

In a world which has become very cold indeed everywhere with the coldness of misery and poverty and war and disease caused by beings wilfully turning their backs on their natural state - happiness.

NEW PROJECT: ECONOMY OF SPEECH

HERE IS NOW

You can say the Girl IS Jill. You can't say the Girl IS a Boy. Not unless you mean that you had always thought Jill was a girl but now discover that she has been a boy all along. That is, you are saying that the boy is a boy, which makes sense. Boys are boys and girls are girls.

Here IS Now follows the same rule. It must mean that they are not different. You thought that Here referred to the dimension of Space, and Now referred to the dimension of Time, and that they were different dimensions. But now, you are being told that they are the same, that they must, in some way refer to the same dimension.

The mystery is solved when one realises that Time does not exist.

When we look for Time, all that we see are movements through Space: hands turning on a clock; sand trickling through an hour glass; heavenly bodies moving through space; molecules coming together as things come into existence and grow; falling apart as things "decay" and "die".

For millions of years we lived in the present and had no knowledge of or need for "Time". We did not anticipate a tomorrow and our experience was that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." We "laboured not neither did we spin", "Yet I say unto you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these" (lilies).

Now we cannot do without our invention of Time. The servant has become the master. We work harder and harder to keep up with first the hour hand; then the minute hand; then the second hand. We are like lemmings; like Wildebeest breathless in our haste to meet the crocodiles of Serengeti as soon as possible, yet terrified of the inevitability of meeting them.

When we stop movement and sit completely STILL, mind and body, Time, which never existed and which we have invented, completely disappears.

    STILLNESS is

    the space between movements

    the crack in the universe

    the gloved hand

    with the art

    to pull apart

    two thin life stitches

    and let a stab of nothing in.

This is Eternity, in which there is no "Time" and even "Now" becomes irrelevant.

NEW PROJECT: MAKE SOMEONE ELSE REALLY HAPPY THIS WEEK

NEW WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

And he spake also a parable unto them; No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.

— Luke 5:36-39, Authorised King James' Version.

“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

— New International Version (NIV)

The established Christian Churches are Old Wine.  As is Tibetan Buddhism.  And Anythingyoulikeism.

NEW PROJECT: HERE IS NOW