Doppelgänger Dreams
That which is inaction is action,
stillness is motion, eternity is change,
that is truth, and that is existence.
Real life lies in this eternity.
Everything else is just the stream of dreams.
In truth the world is just a dream
and the question is not whether to leave these dreams or not.
One has just to be aware of them.
With this awareness, everything changes.
Osho
There are bountiful examples of a counter intuitive, highly contradictory, almost oxymoronic, axiom in the universe. It is the tendency for precise opposites to exist within the same phenomena. Matter and anti-matter. Positive and negative magnetic attractions. Day and Night. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the worst of actions within the best of beings, an unbelievably bad act in the life of a superlative person. How can we talk about this tendency for the seeds of all possibilities to exist inside of every being and every force? "He seemed like such a nice man. He never bothered anyone. He was so polite." Isn't that what the neighbors usually say of the mass murderer, the man with three women chained in his basement for two decades? And while that one is easy to see, happens frequently enough, the opposite is less fun to play with, but equally true. The most base of humans, the vilest, who does someone a good turn. Say the Denzel Washington character in Flight, an alcoholic, cocaine using, lying airline pilot who saves the lives of some hundred and fifty persons in an utterly heroic act--is he a hero or a heel? And who gets to judge?
But it's not just people, it's other animals down to insects and bacteria. Right? The ant instinctively understands, is genetically programmed to sacrifice itself for the good of other ants, for the nest, for its queen. And systems. Every system has within it the seeds of its own destruction. It seems fair to ask, does it also possess the kernels of it's own salvation? This type of dichotomy, this kind of balance, must exist. All the good must have some bad. All the bad must have some good. Which part, the mostly all or the little bit of strong opposite, should one be judged on?
The spiritualist and writer Osho has written many meditations, many words that I have found too apt, too perfect, too much how I feel or want to feel, strive to feel. Here are a few.
"To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life"
"Take life easily, lovingly, playfully, non-seriously. Seriousness is a disease, the greatest disease of the soul and playfulness the greatest health."
His understanding of how a person may choose to understand their place in the revolving emptiness of the great universe that we inhabit, that we pass through in a so short span of time, how we can work to place our perspective in a spot from which each and every emotion or attachment is but a cloud passing overhead soon to disappear or a guest who stays in our house that we should, regardless of the quality of said emotion, honor and host until it chooses to leave, seems to me to be so worthy of emulation and awe. I mean I want to be in that marvelous place, right? Enlightened. At peace. No worries. Hakuna matata.
Yeah I strive, I work at it. The long slog towards enlightenment. Forgiveness yada yada yada love blah blah blah breathing. Want to let go of attachment, learn to do without, let go of the things not meant for me. Who doesn't? It is a bit easier for me here so far from away from so many of the things and the people that are triggers for me. Especially being away from the most recent her in my life. The crazy upside down ness of the last years are of such a bizarre, hard to believe nature that I stopped using other humans as a coping mechanism, meaning I no longer regale others with hard to digest anecdotes from my last marriage because the look on the faces of those unlucky enough to have been the unwitting recipients of my desire to unload made me realize that it was an very unpleasant experience for them. The crinkled noses, the averted gazes, the half sounds of discomfort. Frankly, I think many folks just flat out didn't even believe half the things I said, that's how messed up they are. Besides which it ends up setting up a dynamic a lot like when you've just met someone and they start sharing with you how they were molested as a child and you sort of withdraw and think, why are they telling me this?
It is definitely easier here. Since I have stopped unloading on others, the only options I gave for processing the large backlog of icky events is to either pay a counselor or just work through them on my own. While I was in the relationship I never had time to process because other events happened with such rapidity that I was always chewing on some new crap not long after the last one became apparent. As for a counselor, it would take a year or two of just me talking at the rate of one or two hours a week to even relate all of the separate incidents, let alone have any time to "work through" the episodes. Someone said once that it is much easier to be holy on the top of a mountain than it is in the middle of a city. Well, ain't that the truth.
"A serious person can never be innocent, and one who is innocent can never be serious."
"A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life – the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave."
I had believed Osho to be Japanese based on the content of his words and his name. Much of the paradoxical logic is from the Far East, and much of Osho's words bear frequent oppositional phrases. He is not from the Far East. A photo of the man appeared on one of the websites that held a list of some of his words. The man looking into the camera was quite obviously a man of Indian, dot not feather, descent. This intrigued me. I Wikipediad him. What I found was far more interesting than I could have imagined. He is a Hindi man, or, rather he was. He passed on in 1995 at the relatively young age of 58. Interestingly enough, his name was changed to Osho for most of the second half of his life. The reasons for this change appear to be a bit vague.
Here's where we circle back to my initial points about the inevitable, inherent contradictions within all beings and systems. For you see Osho was a man who owned 93 different Rolls Royce automobiles. The vehicles were paid for with money "donated" to him by members of his, well, his church, I guess. Osho is another name for Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, the man who was the leader of the sect, cult according to many, that lived on a 64,229 acre property just outside of Antelope, Oregon during most of the 1980s and into the 90s. Anyone remember Rancho Rajneesh? This is a man who was deported from the United States in ....under the cloud of controversy that included, amongst other things, attempted murder. Incidentally, before he changed his name to Bhagwan Rajneesh in the 1979s, his name was Acharya Rajneesh. His given name, which he went by until he was in his thirties, was Chandra Mohan Jain.
Among other strange episodes, the Rancho Rajneesh disciples imported many hundreds of homeless people into the town of Antelope in order to have them register to vote as locals for the purpose of having members of their collective elected to local office. His second in command, a woman named Sheela, secretly taped him discussing plans to introduce ..... Into the local water supply to poison the local citizens of Antelope, punishment for their antipathetic views and anger towards this mammoth group of outsiders with their different lifestyle, their peripheral views, and their strong arming of the local government and community.
Are the beautiful words that this figure bespoke true, are they words of truth? Can truth be derived by persons who are, well, not truthful people? And what does it mean to be a non-truthful person? Can good come from bad? It seems quite evident to me, given the overriding beauty of his statements, that indeed it can.
As far as final judgement goes, when the scales are balanced at the end of days, the actions of a lifetime added up, do some deeds really count for more than others? Does a life spent mostly living so as not to harm others, lived with much energy given towards the betterment of others, does every one of those small actions merit only small coins dropped into the bank account of personal worth? Does one, two, a few, really nasty injuries to others count for much, much more in the negative so that a life of helping others, of holding one's impulses and angers, resentments, in check while giving and aiding and treating others well all get wiped out in the ledger with the sordid, drunken, or rage fueled moment or two of insanity, infidelity, brutality?
These seem terribly important questions. In my own life I have worked hard to live and to love, to approach other beings with peace and with acceptance. Many of my jobs have been for charitable organizations, volunteer work, gifting of my time to lend support and succor. Yet there are episodes of madness that have plagued me as well,and some that have caused great and unwarranted misery to others. So where do I stand in the universal accountability/goodness balance? Perhaps more importantly, how will I ever know? Or what, in the end, is the value of knowing? Were a person to in fact know where they stood on the cosmic scales could it help them? If one has certainty that they are in the black, will they then feel complacent, able to sin a bit more because, like spending only the interest on a trust account, they have knowledge that they are not going to end life overdrawn? Or the opposite. If I came to a realization that I was not only deep in the hole but that there would never be time or ability to climb out of it, would I stop trying to keep the demons inside?
No, there is not any benefit to the knowing of any answers in this game. Nor does there seem to be any advantage in attempting to calculate the status of myself or anyone else in this macabre contest of yin and yang. There is already enough judgement in the world. We all carry it around in gross surplus. How many consecutive minutes really pass each day in anyone's life in which they are not in some form assessing others, their thoughts or their deeds?
My world for most of the last ten years fell into his unhappy, self cannibalizing milieu of tallying up the wrongs, the perceived wrongs, of my partner, codifying and concretizing the negative, deceitful wrongs that caused me pain. The betrayals. The abandonment. The confusion. The helplessness. So if her misdeeds, missteps, unhappy actions were tallied, well, so what? What is the good that rises up through the negativity? If every system bears within itself the seeds of its own salvation, then where and what did the seeds germinating in her sprout into? Could it be that as I solicited from her the emotional malnourishment that I desired yet could not notice or understand until it grew so large that it suffocated me so that finally, misanthropic and deformed with self pity, it forced me into recognizing my own needs for self examination? And in this process, this distasteful yet necessary procedure, has it caused me to grow? To limp just a bit further down that unimproved road marked self enlightenment?
Early in our time together I was upset over what was always the same issue for us and was talking with her about ending our relationship. She pointed out our personal problem areas and how they fit together like a "lock and key." Me with my issues of self pity, betrayal, emotional abandonment, and she with her issues of betraying trust, emotional abusiveness, selfishness, philandering. She reminded me that when we first got together I had told her that I did not want to be in any serious relationship with anyone who could not view being in an intimate relationship as a most difficult form of yoga, an exercise that would aid a being in getting closer to God. I was reminded that without discomfort, people do not generally examine their own behavior or their patterns of belief with any serious intent to change them.
Did she tip all of the scales back to even with this service that she in the end gave to me? This other that I had known from the ultimately first instant that I laid yes on her would bring me right back to the place that I guess, in retrospect, I had been sticking out my thumb all along to hitch a ride back to? A place called home?
Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.
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