ST69 ... Tom, a fool across the plains....
Fantasies from Tom ... a grey area / mirrors of our fears
"there ain't nothing worth the headache. You will never know more than what's on your plate of the moment, then it vanishes, leaves you speechless even when your mind is spluttering out more tongue twisting sounds ", he said. Tom was a fool, lived on Donahue St., played some dark blues mean guitar and sang alibis in the shower. Tom didn't believe in much other than the obvious logical understandings to get him thru the day. He drove a big truck for a city, "for money", he'd say.. but it was more than that. He believed if he didn't take care of himself no one else would and he'd end up in a ditch somewhere out along one of those dim lit streets of the many new babylons. He was right. Today there are many more homeless than the few that would once roll away and stray from the tree of apples and ripe syllables. Executives, factory pawns, social workers, jokers and users too, all out there begging for a handout. They would work, almost all of them, if they could. The super-machine that they and their ancestors slaved over and build has thrown them out, found them obsolete and now wanting to completely dispose of them for ever, if they could, in a nicely packaged hidden way……. hey, maybe a poisoned shot in the arm.. much more acceptable than an outright ethnic, class cleansing… but that will work as a last resort also… that's what many are saying from under the streets today, sounds probable, a reality to me, and Tom?, he's in the same novel.
The sun burst through the skies today and Tom took advantage. He set aside his usual routine and shuffled his mind down along the coast. He could faintly see the sea lions on a distant dock and hear them barking thru the slight mist. 'Life is a mystery and beautiful', he thought. 'The closer i approach that feeling of peace in the mind the further away from society i become. There is something in nature that replenishes the soul and yet i don't even know if it really exists….. it is mostly reason that tells me so, and i don't trust it, ultimately, it is so tricky, sticky, delicate, harsh and feeble in its approach. I have learned not to trust any body, any thing, including my last resort, myself… but i have nothing else to rely upon and the more i know i don't know the more comfortable i become in this mysteriously strange existence, so i keep walking. Somehow that empowers me in a fruitful way; fear, little to none’.
‘When i am in love, i love as if there is nothing else, no truth so dear, no completeness so worthy. Then it is gone and i must rely on memory to prolong its existence, that fades, fails, forgets and when i turn around i see i have already left, gone, somewhere down the road awhile'.
There is too much continuity around. Tom could feel that too. Everybody wants to string along one concept to another, dreams woven together with sheer weak desire wanting so desperately to be alive, awake, true.. but it's not. In the end it all falls apart, that is the nature of nature, one plateau over looks the vast valleys of soft securities and then it itself flies off into another realm where the past is mostly irrelevant, useless in this beauty of the moment. Tom could see all that but he had a family, a wife, a few kids grown up now and he knew the necessary relationship of feeling the sun shine when it shines, and to be honest, true, kind…. that's all he thought was worth anything in this life, this one, this one we are apparently living.
He hurts when his loved ones hurt, cries when they are tormented, and yet he could feel that space where nothing is real and the peace with that sacred love within the moment, lives. 'Life is a contradiction', he thought, 'it's endlessly a paradox, completely useless to rely on thought for any reasonable conclusion about almost anything for very long. Playing the game of logic, taking it to the limit, to the edge of absurdity, to its ultimate end, dualism and the paradox, words attempting to describe what they can not.' So Tom, made fun with it, not to take himself so seriously that he would drown in his own waste. He shone his gift, this relative truth, his open mind for all to see with a misty-haze of words, vulnerable, honest, and he knew he would be perceived as weak, confused, tormented, depressed but that was far from the truth. He was long over mountains of the soft avoidance of that grey darkside. He did not avoid the deep black of the forest, the darkest nights, the endless voids one must enter where no other has gone; to be whole, one person, one heart amongst the many. 'Trust in leaders for a way, will always lead you astray', he knew that.
People wanted fantasies from Toms literature, not the harsh truth, the obvious sorrow, the pain in the brain of almost all humanity. It's easy to bring in the light when one has not faced the darkness. Smiles hiding in the clouds, manufactured and shuffled down the assembly lines of hope and investments. That will lead you to more fear, eventually the dark side will seep back into your soul, undetected… unrecognizable ….one has to see it head on, it is nothing but a mirror of fear within the self. It's a hard road and no one can walk it for you, it is yours and yours alone.
Tom tried his best to face the night, thru psychedelics, native rituals, meditation, all of these and more leading to a surrendering of the mind, thru the heart, mother earth, christ consciousness, buddha way, the red road, what ever name you name this mystery beyond pre-precepts, concepts, whole paragraphs, stories, all in vain at the end of the line. That is where Tom fell, into the dark nothingness of night, a strange shattering mystery. He survived, it did not kill him, it was not poison.
He said, "if mankind doesn't quickly learn and understand how thought is simply a tool, then its predecessor will take control and rule the world. We have created machines that will out-think us in every possible way. We need to wake up to the uniqueness of human kind beyond our obsession and absolute adoration for 'thought', if not, we are doomed, it is as simple as that. There is no turning back. Mechanical intelligence has out shone us with the very tool that created it. We say we have a heart but most have a very superficial understanding of what that really means. They continue to describe the 'heart' with the very tool that can not ultimately understand it, 'thought'. Spirit is pre matter, the heart is the tunnel to the beyond, the intelligent mystery. The machine has taught us this, 'thought is matter'; ic chips, electro-magnetic movements across terrains of chemistry.
Mother nature is much more than an infinite space of reason, logic, thought-conclusions. Much of humanities scientific-like investigations has been at war with nature since we left the instinctual realm far within the gates of eden. We presumed that god must be a mathematician, the king of logic.. reason tells us so. As we now have created a system that can out do us in our own magnificent ideal, 'thought thinking'. Possibly when we left the warm and harsh arms of nature we may have presumed that we had out shone the very process that created us. I think that is the conceit of thought, Lucifer doesn't agree, he is heartless… you have to make your own choice….. somehow, i presume, i suppose, i don't really know, it just feels right to surrender to nature in those moments of great intensity of mind. Logic promotes logic, reason lives for reason, thought thinks it is the only way to know, to understand, to be within this universe. The heart and the mind are at war. Peace can only be obtained, possibly, when the mind surrenders to its creator and the only way is somehow and somewhere down through the gates of the heart.
There are tools to defeat this arrogance of thought when one stumbles upon this knowing. It is a long road, a roadless trail. Meditation, exercising in the zone, focused prayer and song, pagan rituals as sweat lodge ceremonies, vision quest days without food and water alone in nature, psychedelic therapy and other surrendering methods….. all to alleviate the ego, to reset it, the matrix of belief systems, to break on thru to the other side, the realm of pure love, eternal spirit, beyond the knowing of pre-thought, the word, visions of harmony within what we call the heart. You get the idea… it's beyond, way beyond, it's tricky… it’s a mystery, i don't know why!
Tom knew it was a long shot, but the Great Mystery acts in the strangest ways. We have no idea when our time is up, when mankinds dimension is through, done with, or if and when we will wake up. As an individual, Tom tends to believe in a simple way, 'to understand your experiences as best you can, be honest with yourself, walk your own way, transform the mind to observe from within beyond the heart'. Love is love.
Tom, a fool on a hill over looking a vast valley of many ways with a silent breeze blowing free.
… ‘open your heart and love will appear’, ….. silently, he thought …
A simple coffee
WeyWord Times / All Writing and Images by Patrick Wey
Hang Me Up Somewhere…. Images