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no, your computer is a brain

In Gary Marcus’ article he does a good job of descrbing a “modern” computer, and discrediting “scientist” for their inexcusable ignorance of this computer.  And of course, he wants to compare the human brain to a computer.

But an alternative view has existed for thousands of years: the computer is definitely a brain.

That is, ever since the Torah proclaimed that G-d created Man in His own image, we have found it an essential revelation that all human creations, including G_d, are revelations of the true inner human creation.  In other words, we unwittingly recreate ourselves, and, if we are smart, can decompose ourselves by decomposing our creations.

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Ginsberg Theology

Needless to say, a gay Jewish man on acid comes to the conclusion that there is God in everything.  If you haven’t ever read the Paris Review 8 “Art of Poetry” interview….

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4389/the-art-of-poetry-no-8-allen-ginsberg

Anyway my first thought was this was what I was born for, and second thought, never forget—never forget, never renege, never deny. Never deny the voice no, never forget it, don’t get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds. But the spirit of the universe was what I was born to realize. What I was speaking about visually was, immediately, that the cornices in the old tenement building in Harlem across the backyard court had been carved very finely in 1890 or 1910. And were like the solidification of a great deal of intelligence and care and love also. So that I began noticing in every corner where I looked evidence of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hand placed them there—that some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me. That some hand had placed the sky. No, that’s exaggerating—not that some hand had placed the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself. Or that God was in front of my eyes—existence itself was God. Well, the formulations are like that—I didn’t formulate it in exactly those terms, what I was seeing was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body … my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I’d been existing in. So, I’m trying to avoid generalizations about that sudden deeper real universe and keep it strictly to observations of phenomenal data, or a voice with a certain sound, the appearance of cornices, the appearance of the sky say, of the great blue hand, the living hand—to keep to images.

So then, the other poem that brought this on in the same day was The Little Girl Lost, where there was a repeated refrain,

Do father, mother, weep,
Where can Lyca sleep?

How can Lyca sleep
If her mother weep?

“If her heart does ache
 Then let Lyca wake;
If my mother sleep,
Lyca shall not weep.”

It’s that hypnotic thing—and I suddenly realized that Lyca was me, or Lyca was the self; father, mother seeking Lyca, was God seeking, Father, the Creator; and “If her heart does ache / Then let Lyca wake”—wake to what? Wake meaning wake to the same awakeness I was just talking about—of existence in the entire universe. The total consciousness then, of the complete universe. Which is what Blake was talking about. In other words a breakthrough from ordinary habitual quotidian consciousness into consciousness that was really seeing all of heaven in a flower. Or what was it, eternity in a flower … heaven in a grain of sand. As I was seeing heaven in the cornice of the building. By heaven here I mean this imprint or concretization or living form, of an intelligent hand—the work of an intelligent hand, which still had the intelligence molded into it. The gargoyles on the Harlem cornices. What was interesting about the cornice was that there’s cornices like that on every building, but I never noticed them before. And I never realized that they meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of industrial tin. Not only that man, the workman, the artisan, but the architect had thought of it, the builder had paid for it, the smelter had smelt it, the miner had dug it up out of the earth, the earth had gone through eons preparing it. So the little molecules had slumbered for … for kalpas. So out of all of these kalpas it all got together in a great succession of impulses, to be frozen finally in that one form of a cornucopia cornice on the building front. And God knows how many people made the moon. Or what spirits labored … to set fire to the sun. As Blake says, “When I look in the sun I don’t see the rising sun I see a band of angels singing holy, holy, holy.” Well, his perception of the field of the sun is different from that of a man who just sees the sun sun, without any emotional relationship to it.

 

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Discipline

I wake up at 5 a. m. every morning to do yoga. People have said that this requires discipline, but that word strikes me as objectionable and false in this context.

Growing up a musician, I was constantly presented with the word discipline. What it meant as a child was forcing yourself to do something you didn’t want to do. But later it became clear that this was a childish view. Clearly I love music. It is not that I don’t want to do music. It is rather that so much practice time is sometimes difficult to reconcile. Most people cannot imagine what it is like to spend 6 to 8 hours every day practicing. This begs a different meaning for discipline.

For Westerners discipline is usually wielded like a sword of righteousness. It is entirely egotistical. A disciplined person loves his discipline and disdains those that live in sloppy disarray.

In my practice there is no room for the ego. Indeed the Vedic teaching are focused on freedom from the ego. Patanjali’s yoga was one of the first attempts at realizing the Vedas in a way that people could embrace. Instead of discipline – the word is never used in any translation – the Vedas offer 6 “graces”.  Together, these comprise what I substitute, in my heart , for discipline. (Summaries are from Shankaracharya, The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom)

1) Restfulness – a steady intentness of the mind on its goal.

2) Self-control – the steadying of the powers that act and perceive, each in its own sphere, turning them back from sensuality.

3) Withdrawal – the raising of the mind above external things.

4) Endurance – the enduring of all ills without petulance and without self-pity.

5) Faith – an honest confidence in the teaching and the Teacher.

6) Meditation – the intentness of the soul on the pure Eternal, but not the indulgence of fancy.

This ego-less approach is very difficult for the Western perspective.  The fist question the Western student has is, “wait – what’s the goal?” The answer that Dogen would give is that you can not possibly understand the goal, even if it were expressible in human terms. This is where Dogen uses the word Faith – it is faith in the Teacher: that your Teacher knows what to teach, having inherited from the thousands of years of Teachers, the path to this goal.

Back to music – what is the goal of music? In America, the goal of all those hours of practice is probably Money and Fame – among the “graces” of the Capitalist Church.  But discipline with that goal will produce mediocrity. A very great film, coincidentally about the cello(ish), is Tous les matins du monde.  It has been very influential to me, in terms of my understanding of “discipline”.  Here is the iMDB summary:

It’s late 17th century. The viola da gamba player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe comes home to find that his wife died while he was away. In his grief he builds a small house in his garden into which he moves to dedicate his life to music and his two young daughters Madeleine and Toinette, avoiding the outside world. Rumor about him and his music is widespread, and even reaches to the court of Louis XIV, who wants him at his court in Lully’s orchestra, but Monsieur de Sainte Colombe refuses.

One day, nineteenyear-old Marin Marais (Guillaume Depardieu) shows up at Sainte Colombes door, requesting that he be accepted as a pupil. In spite of an impressive audition, the Master rejects him, to the great disappointment of both Madeleine and Toinette. In a short but cold and biting pronouncement, Sainte Colombe tells him to go to play at the Court, where his undeniable talent will be most appreciated, but he, Marais, will never know what real music is all about, and what it means to be a musician: You make music, Monsieur, you are not a musician.

For me, this suggests the related word “discipleship”, instead of discipline. You go to your shed in the garden each day to practice, through no power of your own, no ego. Instead, you are called to the shed, to do the work you have been gifted with.  It would be impossible to explain this as a kind of “goal” to someone else. This is why discipline may be loud, but discipleship may be quiet. St. Paul says, in the first letter to the Corinthians

 In fact, preaching the gospel gives me nothing to boast of, for I am under compulsion and I should be in trouble if I failed to do it.  If I did it on my own initiative I would deserve a reward; but if I do it under compulsion I am simply accepting a task entrusted to me.  What reward do I have, then? That in my preaching I offer the gospel free of charge to avoid using the rights which the gospel allows me.  So though I was not a slave to any human being, I put myself in slavery to all people, to win as many as I could.

I have also heard the word sacrifice used in relation to discipline. I take issue with this, as well.  In the Western sense, sacrifice is again, tied to the ego. People would not do sacrifice if it were kept a secret. If they drag the cross up the hill, they do so only with a crowd of onlookers. Sacrifice in this sense implies the loss of something great.  I see no loss in the few hours of sleep I might have had. I see no loss in the sleep I lose to quiet my baby’s fears in the night.

Instead, I see only gain, feel only enrichment

 

 

 

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The Dead are like Seeds

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2015:20-26

In my opinion, this is the most mystical passage of St. Paul’s writings. Not that there is any particular merit in being mystical. But I do sense a deep message in this passage, embedded and encoded by a Higher Self. And I do not want to miss such communication.

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

The first image, that of “first fruits “, implies that the dead are not dead at all, rather, only sleeping. And so, if you consider this the truth, you would not say “goodbye” to those who die, rather “good night. ” As we comfort little children who are afraid of going to sleep, because of some genetically transmitted Victorian fairy tale of infant mortality, reassuring them that morning will come, that sleep is not death, that turning out the light is not extinguishing the flame, that closing the door is not the same as rolling the stone over the tomb, so we could comfort ourselves that death is but rest for the soul. Rest in peace. We will see one another at the dawn.

21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.

I don’t exactly know why Paul, or any Christian, needs to buy into the Hebrew notion that Adam cause Man to fall. This can remain an allegory in my book.  The only prerequisite that Paul requires is that “Man” – humans – have caused their own misery, through their constant rutting in material, thus transient, “pleasure”, and the seemingly uncontrollable urge to kill one another. For this, we don’t need some guy named Adam, and his girlfriend, nor their murderous child.  I think we all know it. But we may not know how this behavior causes death. I believe that the constant sorrow we cause ourselves makes us live in death every day, and that without this incessant self-loathing practice, we would indeed have life without death, without the fear of death. Thus, “since death came through a man” – since we create the conditions for death – “the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man” – only we can bring ourselves, our souls, our collective souls, back to a true life, a real life, a life without fear and death.

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits;then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power

Indeed, the spiritual plan, from the dawn of creation, was to bury all, and raise all. A definitive plan. But there is more to it.

The plan is to make out of the chaos, a Kingdom. No doubt this suffers from Paul’s editorial chauvinism and deep seated desire for some kind of earthly power. Jesus himself was not in the habit of using the “king” allegory. His words were “in my father’s house there are many rooms. ” Regardless the Paul’s confusion, the image presented is that of God giving humanity a creation – a wild and beautiful creation, driven by free will and protected, but not curtailed, by Divine will. As we know such a creation can bristle with beauteous creativity, swirl with the rush of the beauty of it all, and also , erupt with violence hatred lust, boil over like a cesspool,or  overflow like a fountain. There is creation that comes from the destruction – the final piece would be shallow without including the pain of birth and life. But in the end, what is given back to the Creator, should be finished, perfected, and this would require removing the cancer that comes from the abuse of will – dominion, authority, and power.  Because these are delusions.  There is no human who has power, nor dominion, nor authority. Humans are creatures, not creators. Once perfected, this “kingdom” will be a living entity, comprised of only the living – those who chose to live, by giving of themselves to the creation as a whole.

For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

A little confused – death is not a thing to be conquered. Paul has already said we are only sleeping, and without worry, since Jesus will awaken us. If anything, it is the belief in death as an end that is the enemy.  It is the fear of this thing we think of as death, that kills us. This is the enemy to be destroyed.

 

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growing down

We want to grow. When we are young, we want to be grown up. When we are older, we want to grow, as well, but, since the psychobiological depression_ii_by_ash_3xpired-d4x0edarealization of growth has finished, at least in the sense of growing as a word for “becoming larger, faster, stronger” and “gaining cognitive functions”, we  quietly transfer “growth” into some metaphorical application.

She said she had grown spiritually in the past few months. He grew his business by wise investments. We decided that we were not helping each other to grow.

And again, we are confused by our own language. Indeed, there is no growth – just change. And even that change is not real change, but rather a change in our perspective of reality. Dogen uses the example of a person in the boat: when he looks at the shore, the shore appears to move; when he shifts his perspective to the boat, he perceives the boat to be moving. But he then follows this illustration with something that always struck me as not the logical follow-on:

Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.

To me this means that both the boat and the shore are moving. Also, that, most importantly, YOU are moving.  That is, everything changes, and there is no single vantage point which is stable.

This kind of talk does not help many people. It is a deeper digression into metaphorical language, used to explain an ineffable “reality.” However, the problem is, ordinary people unconsciously apply those metaphors in their lives constantly, almost exclusively, and this confuses them.

In a marriage, people “grow apart.” The woman thinks – without really thinking – that the man prevents her from “growing.” The man feels restrained by the woman, feels that his growth is stilted by her constant desire to control him. And then, they reach the brilliant conclusion that divorce will free each from the other.  After the divorce, for many years, they may feel that they are free!  The man can drink and screw as much as his heart desires.  The woman can enroll in all kinds of self-empowerment courses, and participate in groups where people really do listen, and try to nurture one another. Ah, the things that were missing from the marriage, can be readily found, in the phonebook! Online!

But then, inevitably, the booze sours in his stomach, the Reiki masseuse seems to be a poseur, and the massages become simply painful; the groups sour, the people turn out to be self-centered, only desiring to hear their own voices, but willing to pay the price of enduring other people’s mundane whining bullshit.

You see, you can’t get free by “escaping” from someone.  No one can make you grow; no one can prevent you from growing. All the growth that was ever completed in your body, was done by your body.  Your parents did not teach you how to walk – your body knew how to walk, and through increased awareness and listening to your own body, at age 8 months, you walked!  Yes, your parents held your hand, but it was not instructional in any way, and, probably detrimental to the speed of your development. Learning is a process that takes place entirely inside you. Teachers hold your hand, for reassurance – but it is false in some ways, because ultimately, the teacher will not be there for you to rely on.  The more dominant the teacher’s presence in your s=psyche, the more difficult it will be for you to make the unavoidable transfer of trust from the teacher, to yourself (or yourself plus God, depending on your spiritual awareness).

When you are a grownup, the growing is over.  “grown” has what in grammar is called the “perfect aspect”, which means an action has finished, as opposed to the “imperfect aspect”, as in “growing.”  You really are done growing “up.” However, metaphorically, can can grow “in”, or grow “out”, or, in the worst case, grow “down.”

If we accept that this metaphorical growth is simply “change that makes you feel better about yourself”, instead of thinking of it as “improvement”, then we see that feeling better about yourself comes only from a greater love of yourself, or, a greater confidence in yourself.  And you may gain this through achieving something in your breakdancing class, that you thought you could not achieve.  But, if you open your eyes, you got nothing from the breakdancing class – instead, you simply reminded yourself that you must now trust yourself, now that you are the grown up.

 

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it takes a big ego to be a leader

No one like that word, “ego” in polite company.  Even in the company of big fat egos, no one is going to admit to it.  It has a bad ring to it, because of it’s surface form “egotistical”, which actually means something more like “arrogant.”

An ego, says Freud, is the mediator between you “gut” (your id), and “reality”. Nothing much to do with “egotistical”.

The ego (Latin “I”)[18] acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bring grief.[19] At the same time, Freud concedes that as the ego “attempts to mediate between id and reality, it is often obliged to cloak the Ucs. [Unconscious] commands of the id with its own Pcs. [ Preconscious ] rationalizations, to conceal the id’s conflicts with reality, to profess … to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding.”[20] The reality principle that operates the ego is a regulating mechanism that enables the individual to delay gratifying immediate needs and function effectively in the real world. An example would be to resist the urge to grab other people’s belongings, but instead to purchase those items.[21]

What makes a leader, and really the only thing that makes a leader, is the ability to make decisions.  I differentiate between “choices” and “decisions”: you make a choice between Prada and Louie V; you make a decision to drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan.  Of course, there is a sens of “choices” in each case, and it’s not just the gravity of the choice that makes it different in my mind.  Maybe I would concede to calling decisions “hard choices”.

But that what a leader has to do.  Because nobody else wants to.  Because the masses want to have what they want, without seeing the guts of the thing slaughtered to bring it to them. Everybody wanted George W. Bush to make a decision after 9/11.  Nobody wanted to be the one, however, to make that decision.  Now, no one wants to take credit for the negative fallout from that decision.  Nobody, but a leader, wants to make decisions.

Adults – ha, ha – are supposed to make decisions.  The kid wants candy. You have money for candy, candy is available, you love your kid.  You also know that fat kids without their teeth exists. You know about entitled generations of kids who expect to get everything they want.  This is more like Hiroshima, than Prada – unless you want something more substantial.  Your teenager wants to smoke pot.  You smoked pot when you were their age (and you still do, you hypocrite!).  But, it falls to you to make a decision.  You may have to lie, which may teach lying, if you are caught. Pot may not be bad for you, according to results.  But you know a lot of people who kind of stumbled through high school. dazed and confused, because the power (not so much wisdom, just power) to decide when to be very stoned was not with them.  So, you really do have to make a decision with your kid, in this case.  It involves some truth that they can’t really handle – as with many decisions.

Abraham Lincoln have been an egoist. He sent 620,000 men to their deaths. In relative terms, that ouwld be 6,000,000 men, today. The disease and destruction was widespread. The country was destoyed, along the lines of Afghanistan.

casualties by war

What would his popularity ranking be today?

More important, what exactly was that decision?  Did those 620,000 men die, leave 3 times that number of wives and children homeless and vulnerable, for emancipation?  The Emancipation Proclamation, actually.  Do you think that anyone got emancipated?  If you saw that the KKK was still free to burn and rape one hundred years later, would you say that anyone got emancipated?  Would Martin Luther King, Jr. have been assassinated if those 650,000 lives had really bought his race freedom?

Nobody knows. And frankly, it doesn’t seem like anybody cares.  All those Civil War dead, are dead. But the issue here is, no one knew then, either.  And then was the time the decision had to be made, or not. But somebody, this leader, had to wake up with such a sense of self importance in the morning, to get out of bed and say “650,000 people must die horrific deaths, and the country must suffer greatly, for some big reason.” And we don’t really know if his reason was Emancipation, or economic, or, whether he was just an egoist, at the level of megalomaniac. Hitler killed 600,000 Jews – about the same number – for some crazy reason, and everyone left that decision to him.

Because creating and destroying human life must feel, to these guys, like God.  If you believe in God, then you may have asked God, “why did you kill all those people on the plane from Malaysia?”  Like you were expecting an answer – or an apology.  And you were expecting the answer to make sense to you.  But instead, God is silent about those things.  You probably wouldn’t understand.

 

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No one can make music

All music is already made. Like Einstein’s matter, music is neither created nor destroyed.

So what do musicians do? Delude themselves, at worst. Act as resonating instruments at best.

My analogy is coffee. What does it mean to “make coffee ?” I mean, the coffee beans were already made, there on the tree. Of you pick them, are you making anything? Is roasting the beans the same a making coffee? And isn’t pouring hot water over the roasted and finely grind beans is still only boiling water and grinding beans.

But musicians think that coffee beans are not the same as coffee. Coffee is the beverage humans make, and that beverage is somehow part of a higher manifestation of the thing called coffee.

For years when I studied classical music, I was conscious of trying ever successfully to extract all the information from the composers notations. The written music can be compared to a literary author’a attempt to describe some reality using words. Of course we know that the reality did not happen using words. Words may not have even been a part of it, of the sunset, of the feeling of loneliness, etc. You could say that the written words of an author, even those great words of those great authors, are weak at best at being – not just representing – some moment.

So that’s the key – certain of “the arts” have been devoted to recording and representing. And those arts have gotten wound around themselves to the extent that the “material” – the spiritual substance from which we drink, to see, to play, to perform the story of our wonder – that material is longer recognized as the actual thing, but rather an inspiration for the real thing. Wow. Look at your navel.

When I improvise music , including when I make up vocal harmonies on the fly , in my minds eye, I see the harmonies, in mind’s ear, I hear them, and then I try to guide them into my body and then back out.

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what happens in the brain, stays in the brain

INTERVIEWER: …I don’t understand it: the grey room. “breaking through to the grey room”

BURROUGHS: I see that very much like the photographic darkroom where the reality photographs are actually produced. implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It’s a film, what I call a biologic film

-cf Interview with W.S. Burroughs, The Paris Review, 1965

For fifty years, I imagine most intellectuals have written this theory off as paranoiac delusions of a hunted heroin addict – the butt of a joke that contains “the thought police”.  Further, I doubt that many scientists have read Burroughs at all, even though Burroughs was far more a scientist than a writer, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, modern cognitive theory now completely accepts and promotes this theory: that the sensory organs merely collect sensory data and present these to “the brain”, which assembles and interprets the data into what you experience as reality. In other words, we now accept that there is a less direct connection between reality and what we experience of it, in our minds, that someone like Aristotle, and thousands of years of Western thought after him, thought.

I think that nowadays, with the advent of very advanced digital filming technology, made available to the Wal-mart shopper, it is just not so hard for the average Joe to believe that there as a very high-speed processing phase, in between the moment you perceive a moment  of reality, and the next moment when the “film” is ready to be played inside your head. It doesn’t seem so drug-induced a notion, because we have experienced machines that can do something similar.

We could have understood this long ago – it has been accepted for hundreds of years that they eye functions like a camera lens (okay, vice versa): the image is “captured” by the cones and rods in the retina, upside-down, and then righted, and projected onto the “mind’s eye.” People in the street with little education know this, and accept it. 

What interests Burroughs in all this is that stage in between, where the “processing” happens.  It’s a kind of limbo, if you consider the outside sensory world the “real world”, and the world inside, painted by the mind, with the help of the sensory data. This grey room – grey matter + notion of film development + notion of “grey area” – is a vulnerable place.  Presumably, we’d like the picture we end up receiving and viewing, to be accurate.  After all, our decisions are based on “reality.” We move right or left, to certain degrees, based on where we think the attacker is, based on what – this process of transferring, rendering, and interpreting?

But haven’t you found that indeed, the picture in your mind was often very “wrong”? Haven’t you watched “The Thin Blue Line”? Haven’t you sort of woken up, several times in your life, in a significant way, to “see” that who you though you were, and what you thought you were doing, were way off the mark?  So, there had to be a miscommunication somewhere, right? 

And I don’t think our short-circuits happen, in most cases, is in the sensory-intake-to-sensory-perception link up. I think the broken, or, imprecisely-machined portion of the outside-to-inside transfer mechanism is the interpretive phase. I think this is the part we are supposed to train, but don’t. And within this phase, the words are what get in the way.  True enough, and sad, I know, for all you who are wed to the word – it is a poor excuse for a symbology of experience, and you rely on it for everything, even your perception of pretty clear signals coming in from your ears and eyes.

If you could just eliminate the words (Burroughs gives exercises for this, as does Dogen and Patanjali), and get a purer dose of uninterpreted reality, you might not be so confused by a reality that doesn’t often make sense.  I

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Doubt/Faith

What if doubt and faith really comprise the entirety of all power available to us humans. And like a mix of ethanol and rocket fuel, whether we fly or just row, is dependent solely upon the proportions?

Surely you’ve been in the situation where you are trying to attain some new cool skill, like handstand, for example. But you simply can’t do it. You see your teacher floating up into space with ease, and she says to you something like “just trust yourself “. That is, she doesn’t say something you think she should say, like, “move your hands farther back. “. No. She says some mystical new-age thing, which can not possibly be the actual secret that will enable you to do something which is physical magic This isn’t Harry Potter.

How about those really hard times in life, that will surely kill you or at least send you to the pill bottles? You think, ” I am putting all I have into this. It has to be enough. I don’t have any more. “. But then, surprise. It does require more – a lot more. And, you really don’t seem to have it. There is even a period of touch and go, maybe a long passage, where you seemingly are NOT making it.
Then  finally, when you emerge on the other side, you have been schooled. You were lucky enough to receive an opportunity in this life to see just how little you are dong with your power. You can remember thinking, if you take the time to look back,that you were certain your bones were breaking. And it was true! – at the time. You could not move your feet. Professionals told you you were not going to make it.  Friends shook their heads, and told you to get give it up, focus on something within your grasp. But, if you were able to listen only to your inner voice, and continue on “stupidly”, with blind faith, it turned out that you actually grew a stronger pair of legs, a bigger heart.

If this hasn’t happened to you, then you do not have all the information you need. You have not tapped your faith, have not seen the living rise from the dead.

But if you have, when you encounter someone else who is entering the passage you have just left, you see the whole thing, with eyes that are similar  to the eyes of God, who has the ultimate faith. And you want to tell that person the great truth. But, they can’t hear you.

So my question is this: if it is just a question of the depth, quality, and intensity of the faith you put into a thing, that gives you power over it, then how can you be sure that in those times when “faith has failed you” it was really just that YOU did not wrack your soul enough, to really really believe ?
You know ?
When the Krsna followers try to levitate the roof of a building. When the Power of Prayer people pray all night and day to save the life of a child. And the roof just sits there. And the child just dies, like all children who die. Is it because it’s all just bullshit? People just die. Roofs do not levitate.

Could you really jump off a cliff, and have angels catch you, lest you dash your foot on a rock. if you had enough faith?  I mean, imagine having a lot more faith.  Enlarge your belief, and imagine that you could believe much much harder.  Just for one moment, will yourself into believing that you just haven’t come close to the faith you would need to jump off the cliff –  a real cliff – and survive, but that such a thing is truly possible.  Let yourself feel that belief for just a moment.

But don’t jump!  Not yet.  You don’t have it, yet.  You will need to open your heart and mind yet a million miles wider, before you can begin to feel the cushion of air beneath your feet. And you will not find it through drugs – thye all try to fly, within just of few hours of taking the drug, and fail.
How can you be sure? I mean, so sure that you are willing to post your own life as collateral? But then, how can anyone say they have ever tried hard enough to levitate, if they have not levitated? And how, when that little boy lay in a coma, how can you be sure, you of so little faith, that all scientific discoveries have already been made, that all attempts at world  peace have been exhausted , and that you have heard and seen all there is?

What tragic ignorance, cloaked in arrogance.