happiness is the now - part 4

8/7/2019 Happiness is the Now - Part 4

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DON'T TELL ANYONE

A Look at the Human Condition~ trough poems, images, and quotes ~

PART 4

F o r e w o r d(Revised)

I had on many occassions considered the value of our everyday thoughts andactions and came to a statistical representation that 96% of what we say andthink is robotic sloganeering.On rare occassions something surges in us and produces thoughts, words, and

acts of substance. Something that originates from within our core, and directlyrelates back to our core. This, with a sense of serious humour, I refer to as thetwenty-fifth item. The other 24 are insubstancial, but this one has the punch.A logical evaluation of the human condition, what we are and what we do, leads

me to consider the major player in the situation: that system of programs we call"our mind".

If we place the mind under a closer scrutiny we can see it does not really serveour innermost interest. It appears to serve our need for personal survival, butonly in the coarser sense of the word. It makes us endure life, rather thanactually alowing us to live life.In this scenario of two mutually antagonistic forces - the body and the mind -

each striving to win our being for themselves, our heart of heart's desire to befulfilled goes forever unsatisfied.In the course of this mind-examining activity we may also come to notice how

skillful our minds are in making promisses based on projections into ahypothetical future, and making us believe in these promises.

The mind's ongoing mode of operation is insinuating personal fulfilment with onehand, and forever withholding it with the other. For what end? Since the outcomeseems to be always a background sense of dissatisfaction, is it exactly thissubliminal sense of unhappiness that the mind wants to achieve with the body inthe first place?

The mind gives us placebos and soothers. In doing this it skilfully covers up thereal effect of its acts: the deliberate, ongoing and neverending generation ofsubtle unhappiness - the first part of its business.The second part of its business is to convince us that it is doing all it can to fix usup in so many different ways, and make us good again. When asked: "Well, howcome I stopped being good in the first place, anyway?" - it goes dumb. Silent. Itwon't answer. Every other question - yes. But not this one. In answering it it


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would have to admit its true role. It would have to say: "You stopped being goodever since I started running you."

Despite its nefarious agenda the mind can never quite obliterate our trueheritage - the heritage to be free beings run by no foreign programs imposed on

us by forces not originating from within us. And thus from time to time weremember, in different degrees of intensity, our true status as incomprehensiblebeings with the potential to keep evolving our awareness

The following poems, images, and miscellaneous quotes somehow, and indifferent ways, pertain to this premise. Though seemingly disjointed, they arestill meaningful through the unifying intent of the desire to know. They beckonand insinuate that there is something beyond our current terrifying and puzzlingpredicament, something outside of this impasse of not knowing what, rather thanwho, we really are.

Peter Faigl


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Yowie, The Spirit of Death, and The Southern Cross

Biami was the greatest of all the spirits. His magic was stranger than anyoneelse's. He walked the earth.From the red ground of the ridge country north of the Barwon River he made two

men and a woman. He showed them what plants to eat to stay alive. Soon a

drought came and the plants became scarce. One of the men killed a kangaroorat, and he and the woman ate its flesh. They liked it and urged the other man toeat but he would not. He grew weaker and, despite their urgings, refused to eatthe meat.Finally, he left them and wandered from the ridges down to the black soil

country. They followed him as he moved to the river and there, weak withhunger, he died beneath a great white gum tree.As his companions neared his body, they saw a huge spirit figure raise him up

and drop him into the tree hollow centre. The tree was lifted from the earth andpassed into the southern sky toward the starry warrambool, where the sky spiritslived.

As night fell, the man and the woman could no longer see the trees, only fourgleaming eyes. Two of the eyes were those of the first man to die, and the othertwo belonged to the yowie, the spirit of death.To another people, those four stars were known as the Southern Cross. To the

Aborigines, they were a reminder of the coming deaths to the world. Two whitecockatoos roosting in the tree took fright at what happened and flew into the sky.They became the Two Pointers of the Southern Cross.

A dreaming story of the Gamilaraay people, Australia


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Shared Reflections Separated By Eons

Top: "Australia. Songs of the Aborigines and Music of Papua, New Guinea" CD case art.Bottom: "Tripple J's Hottest 100" Vol.14, CD case art.

Unexpected Turnaround

It was just three days before Christmas, high in the Rocky Mountains, whensome unexpected and uninvited guests dropped in on a young Colorado family.Two men, desperate for drug money and a car, rushed into their home without


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warning. They were wielding guns and held the family hostage over the next twohours, ultimately deciding to kill them.While the gunmen may have failed to murder the family in cold blood that night,

they did accomplish something: they succeeded in changing Leo Schreven's lifeforever.

"After marching our entire family into the garage to kill us", Leo relates, "Mumtold them, 'You can't kill us, because this family is under the blood of Jesus. I ama praying mother, and an angel will prevent you from pulling the trigger.' "Leo well recalls that life changing event 32 years later."Afraid they would be caught, the gunmen pushed us into the garage and lined

us up - four in the back and three in the front. With one shotgun blast, theyplanned to kill the whole family. But in three attempts to shoot us, the gunswouldn't fire. As Mum prayed aloud, the rage of the gunmen grew. But theyrealised something supernatural was holding them back. Mum yelled out, 'Family,God is going to save us!' They cursed and told us to get back in the house."That was the transforming moment of my life," Leo says. "I saw her courage,

power and joy. She was ready to die and I wasn't. That's when I said I wantedwhat she had. I had seen a miracle. And later that night, those same gunmenshot up another family and the guns worked fine. That's when I realised thereality of what had happened."

Signs of the Times, Jan/Feb 2010, Vol.125

An Irish Airman foresees his Death

I know that I shall meet my fateSomewhere among the clouds above;Those that I fight I do not hate,Those that I guard I do not love.

W B Yeats; first four lines


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Edward Nolan, in "A Galaxy of Poems Old and New", 1970

The Sleepers of the Cave

According to tradition, these young men were from among the early followers of

the Prophet Jesus and were subjects to the polytheistic Roman Empire, whichwas treating the believers of one God ruthlessly. According to their mutualresolve they left the city and hid in a cave in order to escape death by stoning orforced apostacy.>If you had looked at them in the cave, if you had seen them, you would havethought they were awake, whereas in fact they were asleep. If you had looked atthem, you would have turned on your heels and their sight would have struck youwith terror.And in the same miraculous way, We raised them up again so that they might

question one another. One of them asked,"How long have we remained here in this condition?"

The others answered, "Maybe a day, or part of a day."Then they declared, "Our Lord knows best how long we have remained in this

condition. So let us send one of us with this silver coin to the city and let him lookand bring us the best food he can find, but let him be cautious. Let no onebecome suspicious of him".

These young men were roused from their sleep in the same miraculous way ashad been employed to send them to sleep and keep them hidden from theoutside world.


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When the man went to the city to buy food, he found a changed world. Thepolytheistic Roman Empire had turned Christian long ago and the language,culture, dress, etc., had undergone a marked change. Thus, this man who waswearing a costume of two hundred year old fashion and spoke a differentlanguage from the one in vogue immediately became the centre of attention. And

when he offered an outdated coin for food, the shopkeeper looked askance athim.On questioning it was found that he was, in fact, one of those followers of Christ,

who had fled the city 200 years ago to save their Faith. The news immediatelyspread among the Christian population of the city and a big crowd of peoplegathered and followed the officials to the cave.Now, when the Sleepers realized that they had risen after a sleep of two

hundred years or so, they lay down after making salutations to their Christianbrethern and their souls left their bodies.

The Holy Quran, translated & annotated by Ebu'l A'la Mevdudi;Al-Kahf 18: 9-21, excerpts

Precipitous Possibilities


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For An Unknown Woman

Go, no more shall we meet;You who are I do not know, nor you, who me;but if they speak, the eye, lips, and face,all is said, even without the help of fraze!

And days, months and and years will pass,behind us the lazy world shall close,but you more than sweet dreams' steps will remain,more than a blossom glimpsed from speeding train.

Years later only, when the old tree trunk falls downand is cut up - so many growth rings shall be found!


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Oh, sweet dreams... You one of them shall be;I do not know you, nor do you know me!

Jaroslav Vrchlick; transl. Marcela Rdlov-Ehrlich (modified)

Neznm

Jdi, my se nesejdeme vce;j nevm, kdo jsi, ty nev kdo jsem;vak jestli vluv oko, ret a lce,ve eeno, necht kad zstal nm!

A dnov pejdou, msce a roky,za nmi zave se ten ln svt,vak bude vc ne lbezn sn kroky,

ne z rychlku spaten sladk kvt.A po letech, kdy star kmen se skca rozee - co najdou kruh v nm!Ty jednm bude z nich... O snov sladc,j nevm, kdo jsi, ty nev, kdo jsem!

Convergent Intent


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The Evidence:1) Above, above. Reported in The Sun-Herald, Jan 25, 2005.Four young people were interviewed at random in the street.Then, in a different place, one and a half years later, a different journalist from adifferent newspaper photographed -2) Above, below. Central Coast Express Advocate, July 20, 2005.Sculptor Scott Cunliffe with two of his sculptures.

Although they could pass themselves as father and son, Scott and Russel are

not related.Although they easily could have, neither Carmen, nor Sophia sat as models forScotts' sculpture on the right.Although the image below may suggest, Scott did not model his other sculptureas a female version of Elie.


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As these people were not consciously involved in bringing about thiscoincidental pattern outcome, what kind of power, if not pure blind 1-in-a-billionchance, created this playful and bewildering alignment?

If such an invisible force actually exists (just like do the millions of TV imagesstreaming all around us without us having the slightest inkling of their existence),is this power molding also other, non-visual, aspects of the world?

The sage is square-edged but doe not scrape, To be identified with your mind is to beHas corners but does not jab, trapped in time: the compulsion to liveExtends himself but not at the expense of others, almost exclusively through memoryShines but does not dazzle. and anticipation.

Verse 58, Penguin Classics The Power of Now


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A f t e r w o r d(Revised)

Anyone can find, or come across by accident, the evidence for this law of 'One inTwenty-five', as mentioned in the Foreword, in just about all printed matter. Theproblem is that we seem to routinely overlook it. The mind wants us to do so.The moment the mind spots anything that threatens its uncontested dominion

over the body, it intervenes. It makes us skip the crucial information. Throughadult cynicism revelations are ignored or dismissed. Or they are disparaged.Anything, but examined.The selected poems, passages, and images do not, or not necessarily, express

my personal convictions. They are just something nI found. When I originallyselected them I had no pre-determined idea what I was doing nor what I was

doing it for. Over a period of some years whenever something I happened toread or just plainly stumbled upon grabbed me internally, I coppied it in a journal.Subsequently I titled the journal "Indications from Infinity" and subtitled it "Peeksinto Open-Endedness".I am not quite sure what I meant by that but the name seemed appropriate. If I

am pressed to clarify my selection criteria I can do that only post facto. To pindown what it was that made me choose one and discard the other I would saythat it was some sort of intensity I sensed emanating from those items. It was thisintensity that somehow arrested my attention for a moment and made me copythem into my journal. The mind did not seem to be involved in this process at all.I hope that the reader too will experience something of similar nature - the

intensity of wonder.

peterfaiglATgmailDOTcom YouTube channel:peterfaigl

~ T H E E N D ~

happiness is the now - part 4

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