Siri, Why Does God Allow Human Suffering?

Consciousness is quite an impressionable child. The forms I have it take are myriad and diverse.

And when it takes the shape of what I call a human being with a central nervous system

that is capable of amplifying resonance to points of self-awareness never seen before, although not guaranteed,

yet always in the universal evolution of my realizational intent to know myself, unknowable as subject only,

it is indeed a most objective child. The forms it takes are subtle like a mother’s or a father’s thought

but harden quickly to procured belief, the most original among them being certain of its separation

from the wonderful holistic entity of itself as universal knowledge. And this division is the war one calls the world.

No need to ask a god about such suffering; just ask the child you are, and know that's why, beyond belief, I am.

Of Shakespeare, Muddy Waters, and St. John

Wisdom unaligned with love will vector to belief and end in some apocalypse

religious in its uniform and holy in its weaponry and absolutely nihilistic in relationship to others.

Love that's unaligned with wisdom stagnates in desire and ends in tragedy Shakespearean or blue.

But some escape such fate in substances to end in personal catastrophe while others choose a narcissistic wreck as substitute.

While none of this is true except the binary array of love and wisdom, its fictitious fact will make a billion stories, if not two.

A Wise Love Poem

love unmoving

turns indifferent

and with provocation

dies—

unmoving wisdom

turns aggressive

and with habit

kills—

the way is always

moving in-between

the one of love

and wisdom's zero

as if two—

while knowing

there’s no me

and there’s no you

The Daring White Light on the Flying Trapeze

From early childhood, I was taught to see my world as this conceptual array and what is more, I'm taught to see myself in such a manner.

But who am I that's being taught this way?

One who has been thoroughly so trained to see oneself as storied and conceptual forgets—

and has identified with thought in such a way that I've become this me, a set of thoughts which seems so tentatively real,

methinks to think another thought a mile a minute to identify with each.

It's like I'm just this base of being or white light if you'll allow this metaphorical intrusion for a minute,

and each apparent thought is like a passing colored cloud which filters this white light creating such a laser show of raw emotion—

which is just our terminology for light, white light, now filtered into colors we call sadness, anger, envy, fear—

that I've become materially imbalanced and go from filtered light to filtered light in high dramatic fashion,

just a trapeze artist grabbing on to each emotion for dear life.

I haven't got the time to rediscover that the great unknown that can be known is just the known that can't be named—and I am That.

The Mystic Church of Hiking in Acadia

The first time hiking in Acadia, I took the Beachcroft trail, beginning with a set of granite steps for more than half a mile

until I reached an overlook above the valley pond that’s called the Tarn which lies beneath the steep expansive side of Dorr Mountain.

From there I scrambled up the face of Champlain Mountain's pink slick granite and low evergreens until I reached its naked dome.

There I was ascending when the barrier of summit disappeared and right before my eyes was nothing but the great blue sea of luminous Atlantic.

It hit me like a mystic ton of spectacle and infinite reflection, as if my body had just opened up revealing deeper breadth I never knew was there.

Long sighs came sweeping from the vast horizon where I glimpsed a cloud or two above ancestral shores of Nova Scotia, if not France itself.

My heart was sky, my feet were earth, and no-mind was my state of being. No wonder I'd return to walkabout for corresponding seeing.

Disbelief: That's the Ticket

Between my absolute zero and my universal one,

my way meanders and encircles and is sitting

at the junction of the Yin and Yang trains.

When you've ridden one as far as it can go,

then ride the other. This is called arriving at

your destination by the road you didn't take.

The Emptiness of Offices and Goldfinches

I had an insignificant small office with a window at the rearmost section of the building where I could see an undeveloped spruce tree

growing from a secret patch of grass protected from the eighteen-wheeler trucks arriving at the shipping dock just twenty feet away. 

Outside my door, an open lab, where quality assurance underneath my diligent direction happened.

Christmas, San Diego John, a quality inspector I had hired, just recently returned from California, who missed the West Coast desperately

and had returned east only for his wife's desire to be back home with family, had gifted me a thistle-feeder, which I hung upon that tree. 

As winter turned to spring I watched the goldfinch flocks begin to turn in color, from a drab and almost gray-like green to brilliant yellow.

I had never seen this spectacle before. It's almost twenty years from that occasion. John had left his family soon thereafter,

moving back to San Diego, and I heard he had a heart attack and died. In time I got a transfer to Materials

and then I was promoted to a bigger office with much more responsibility and then, in time, let go.

But it's the transformation of those small goldfinches that provide this story all its lovely

lack of any allocated quality of all material effect or meaning. I have to thank my great unknowable for that.

Fundy in Consciousness

The Bay of Fundy has the greatest tidal ranges in the world extending over fifty feet. Some docks are almost built on stilts and still some boats will lie in mud flats at the lowest tide.

It was almost named a wonder of the world by those who deem themselves the legislature of such matters.  (A chickadee is hovering about my window at this moment and appears to be the current wonder of this world.)

Others on that list that didn't make the final cut of seven are Grand Canyon, Mount Vesuvius, the Matterhorn, and Angel Falls. You can look the winners up,

but there's just one real wonder of the world and this is consciousness itself. Without it, there's no wonder, all would be like deepest sleep, and not a word could write it otherwise. Enjoy.

Who Believes in Atheists?

Atheism is a sad religion. To believe there isn't any god but still believing in the universe it made is sorry stuff indeed.

It's like to want a cake without a cook, and not to see you cooked up both the cake and yes, the cook, and all of it is nothing but imagination

and what's more: there isn't even any you. The me and universe it made is just the means that I intended to—to know my unknown essence.

In the end, it's not so much a god that's unbelievable, but the person in itself, professing atheism when there isn't any atheist at all.

But then again, just who am I?

The Great White Spirit of Mount Pemigewasset

It was my first real hike alone, in the Whites. Admittedly it wasn't Washington, or even Lafayette, but ascending fifteen-hundred feet was not exactly easy for this novice.

The path itself was just a little shy of two miles long from trailhead to the summit, and I enjoyed the early easy-going, although the bear claw imprint on an ash tree supplied adrenaline enough.

As the incline increased, I felt my heartbeat do the same, and as it increased even more, my backpack and my breathing got a little heavy. By the time I reached the top, I was literally a mess; sweat had soaked my t-shirt through and through.

But there atop the granite features they call Indian Head, I could see the notch below in all its mirroring the humble genius of an ancient glacier's flow. I thought of subsequent Abenaki tribes who traveled through that very valley giving thanks and praying to the silent peaks above them.

And then I saw the spirit of our age emerge from out behind a thicket. He was carrying a can of beer and smoking a cigarette, so cool there wasn't any sign of sweat about him. "Hey man," he laughed, "don't go spiriting  away my valuable point of view."