where chickens fear to tread

This is part of something I wrote a long time ago, and I'm posting it now because about five things converged in my head to give me the idea that maybe it's just right for just now. I no longer like how this is written, but I don't think I want to rewrite it to make it sound better. It would be better to just write something completely new. Funny, though, how I was screaming about social things that are exponentially more apparent now than they were even then... something like fifteen years ago....

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At age seven, I found a book on Albert Einstein, plop in the middle of the sidewalk. I opened it. Huh... energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Yep. E=mc². That rocks. So there is one occupant of the cosmos, as much inside my skin as outside my skin. Better put it back. Don't think I'm spozed to be reading this. It rattles them. And, being credulously young, wanting not to rattle my parents, I put it back on the sidewalk.

However, even though it clearly was not my seven-year-old place, I could not forget what I had so instantly known. It was a bit of insight into the grown-ups --> those magical people who made things work perfectly: who wanted handy water, so installed plumbing; to talk to people far away, so fashioned devices suited to ear and mouth and hand; heat, ergo thermostats; the will to be entertained begat boxes with dials and antennae. It was amazing to me these contrivances produced what had not previously been available on the spot. For me, water started and ended right at the sink. I wondered why we had to go to the grocery store; was the refrigerator imperfectly developed?

Yes, all grown-ups were infallibly intelligent. They made everything work. I only worried about them over one thing. Mom told me we couldn't afford to buy me a microscope. So? I told her to just write a check. She said we had to have the money in the bank before we could write a check. I was appalled.

I'd thought all along Dad had to give us his paycheck every Friday so the bank would know we could have cash for lunch. His check from work's an ID. Everybody's assigned a bank. You give them your dad's ID, and they give you money to live. I'd no idea a paycheck represented cash. No, a paycheck is simply proof from the father that this bank could give us green money. You had to give green money at certain places. Some places took green money or checks. Some places only checks. But everybody goes to their dad's bank and gets the money for what they need. I am positive. Thank God credit cards weren't popular then.

So now, this scenario as she was explaining it to me sounded outright macabre. It meant that other people don't automatically assume we belong alive; we have to give them proof in the form of money. The only earthly purpose to go through such a downright ridiculous ritual every Friday --> giving the bank money to dole right back out to us <-- is just separating the credentialed from the not. Mom had been careful to show Good People work for money and keep it in banks. Yuck. This was some sorry kind of social certification I had never dreamed necessary. What about people who didn't or couldn't work? What about people without dads? What happened when you didn't have a husband? This did explain waitresses who cussed, had cigarettes hanging out their mouths, called you "Hon". I finally got the concept of robbers too. I thought their urge to steal was pathological, but, clearly, they stole out of need. Working for money creates robbers, putting it where robbers go is unsafe, a pain in the ass, way too elitist to even bear, and plain dumb. How can grown-ups be so stupid?

I mention all this to illustrate for you both that there was a long-standing predisposition here not to fall so far under the spell of snooker-jobs in robes or to be moved to make incoherent amendments to my thought by cognitive dissonance, and to complain that I still haven't figured out how grown-ups can be so stupid. I grew up knowing that every skin was the halfway marker of the cosmos, that all is one. Hence I had, and have, no understanding of, nor can I ever comfortably participate in, social conventions like money, banks, insurance, taxes, acting Acceptable. I object to the dualism forced on me by every thing I encounter. It took up my life, seeming to leave no option for freedom in the world. You get born, and wham! Incoherence assails you afresh with each breath, just for having been born. This being irrefutably so, the migraine, I compound it agonizing over the supreme punishment of being aware of it. Get over it. Get, the hell, over it, you dweeb. Grow, the fuck, up! The whole wide world assumes facts not in evidence for a living. Period.

I contemplate good translations of the Ancients, sages who had mastered duality, could transmit it to others. They all said that perfect enlightenment is not reached without guidance, and true guides are very picky about who they choose. How could you choose your teacher? Your teacher chooses you, else no mastery is remotely involved. What do you want running off to someplace that advertises itself as a Bodhisattva School to attract rubes to come man their shovels and brooms? Sure, you are free to bow out any time you want. There are hordes looking to become better humans, other rubes to replace you. All you can do is let your bugs out, pray your ass off they're gone. There's no getting it for self. Listen! It's impossible to get it yourself. Forget the self, and it drops in your lap. If it doesn't drop in your lap, you've not forgotten yourself. One studies the self to forget the self. If you've any shame whatever, somewhere along the line you will be so embarrassed about your participation in it, you'll want to forget it. One's basic affinity for living without scorching-red cheeks will kick in at some point, exist without all that humiliating selftude botching up life for each and every one of us. Every step will waffle with realization. You can't fake this. Even a wisp of doubt, no matter how well you've hidden it, whatever you've been doing, it did not cut it. Try again. It dropped in Buddha's lap.

Optionless, I prayed that if I worked hard by myself, karma would set a free human down right in front of me. I worried over my experience of people, feared self-mastery was as dead to us as dinosaurs, fretted over how improbable any success with the only way out of my death wish seemed. Still, how ever could I find this transmitter without decent reception anyway? The problem is me, whether or not there's real help around. The cosmos responds when it's real. This has to be the only way. It must be me. So I worked blind to prime the mess of women you heard yammering in the very start of this story to receive truth. These various personalities of mine are consequent to evil, created by man, millennia before I was born. I worked to retake the helm, take responsibility for all the stupid and heartless things I've done in my life, feebly fighting that first wound, that apocalyptic mistake made by some poor blunderers before even the pharaohs ruled in Egypt. It is my responsibility to fix The Big Mistake. Even if there's a gazillion ways to talk myself out of it, I am The Big Mistake, and no true teacher bothers with an excuse mill. "We were put here to break the negative cycles."

And. Oh-shit-oh-shit. It worked. I straddle the razor. I am laughing like a fiend in a malarial mosquito bog. Argh! It worked. I've had a feeling my whole life that each encounter is another attempt by karma to teach me exactly that which I want to know more than any other thing. It seemed crazy, but it was dead bang on the nail head. Soon as I let it be so, truth called me on the phone. I implore you, let it be so. Goddammit! That's why I'm writing to you now. You don't have to get frustrated to death by impostors who say they teach how to make your bones stop turning to powder by the world. If you aren't mean as me, you're apt to be powdered to death by your own drive to be a good human.

* * * * * * *

It demands we examine our own mental functioning. It's worse than a mere cop-out to shrug when Inscrutables insist the world is as it is because each is as each is, and set out in a robe, no different but for our esoteric props. The world is a mistake because "I" am a mistake. In Dogen's hands, enlightened hands, The Schedule's a medium in which this can be imparted, but otherwise, it turns out not other than forced collusion from POWs by fiends. The Accidental Nazis to whom I subjected myself, and deplored nowhere near exhaustively herein, remain unidentified because if narrowed too far in their particulars, it might leave the deadly-false impression Zen Dudes are the only ones to avoid in your quest to wake up. The people to avoid aren't avoidable. They're in the PTA, IRS, CIA, MADD, FBI, ATF, NAACP, SEC, AA.... Lots of nefarious stuff under the White Hat of "righteousness".

* * * * * * *

Go on, let the shrinks have a fit while I turn their dear psychology on it's ear. It's long been held "unconscious" means precisely what it purports: simply, utterly uncomplicated-ly, stuff not available to conscious consideration. We're prompted to "discover" what it might be, wooing adults to believe their fathers raped them in childhood, actually visualize it and call it "real" --> well, depending on the specialty of the shrink in question. It could be penis envy, or stunted development in the anal phase, or a gross failure to differentiate from Mother --> whatever brings mutual willingness into doctor/patient relations. It's popular, currently, to call anyone apparently alienated from the expected course of citizenship "wounded". Gently suggest it, and percentages are high the mark will cave right in to your fold and start paying hourly dollars to pour their wounded hearts out to you. Nobody does not wish Mom would just come take all this uncomfy responsibility off our quavering shoulders, and an hour of petted wounds, whatever the cost, can be a downright practical expenditure. We will, and we do, pay money to be Victims.

How darn marvelous to vindicate our failures as perfectly understandable sequels of circumstances beyond our control! It does not even look like help if those to whom we have turned in our extremis don't cluck and coo and excuse us, and certainly not when someone butts-in to the middle of our dysfunction, daring to point out the ramifications of our ways for ourselves and others. Nope. This is an attack. Love is excusing. Hate is accusing. And what if I now assert that unconscious is not even a little inaccessible to our ordinary minds? It is right there, uppermost in all our minds, all the livelong day, all our livelong lives, and we have felt so utterly safe in the sanctity of it for so long that we don't even think we think it, let alone anyone else. We have not had to talk about it with anyone. It never lit up and stood out from our gestalt for consideration as an entity to itself, or even as an ingredient of the whole. It does yammer incessantly, all our waking minutes, so automatic we don't check its maintenance schedule. No amount of bombardment from our much more honest dreaming induces it to give itself away to our very own ideas of ourselves, either. Big as heck. Loud and clear. Ugly as anything. A pilot so automatic it doesn't even occur to us there's anything there to fix, not even when someone hops up and down, describing it to itself, to a tee, asking it to quit "hiding", admit itself, get real and grow.

* * * * * * *

Back when everyone was sleeping with everyone; when people still felt wrong if they did not sleep around, I had an exchange about honesty with a man in a bar. The bartender, Randy, was an ex-boyfriend of mine. Our deal was he made every guy who came to sit with me believe we were married, even though he had married somebody else. We feigned detached friendship together once a week in his bar. Randy came over and asked me something about our kids when this man sat down. So the fellow began talking about his sexual strategy, instead of using it.

He said he wasn't one of those jerks who picked women up, never getting the ground rules clear right up front, leading them to believe he'd become involved with them, and then never calling them again. No, he was honest from the start. He told each of them straight up he didn't want a lover, just a friend to sleep with. So he didn't understand why women still got hurt, still expected things when he'd been so careful not to deceive them. Why don't women hear when he says so plainly he wants friends?

I said, "'Friends.' Rah-hite. That tells a woman you want closeness, too, and guys really do want to get involved, just not with anyone who actually exists. If you were being honest, you'd tell them, 'Look, I'm scared shitless of commitment, chances of landing me are one in a million, but I still want to get laid.' Get real! You don't want to be friends. You want to fuck --> to pollinate each and be moved-on before she wilts. End of story."

Randy said, "Look buddy, your illusions are not safe around this woman. If you want somebody to believe in your shit, you better not talk to my wife. She's definitely a no-bullshit kind of gal. You keep it up, you're gonna be sitting there naked in no time. She eats lines like yours for snacks."

"Well, why did you marry her?"

"She's great in bed." You see, Randy didn't mind protecting me from men's raunchy advances, making me sound like a power pack who'd only do it with a real man, because he got to be that "real man", undo his humiliation, act like he had not called me, from another state, some six months after he'd last stood me up, to explain that he couldn't be with me because he loved me.

* * * * * * *

Brain elision, skipping how many honesty levels, defaulting to the self-serving one doing honest, doesn't cut it. Break that barrier, that knee-jerk mental default that there's a you here to look out for. It is no cakewalk, but it's the Way.

It is outright grotesque, hideous, to be standing there in full view of a person who is so sure they are hidden they won't even start to talk like you are in fact face-to-face, even as you are absolutely, undeniably, face-to-face. They deny it anyway. This just sends me through the roof. Picture it. You are ten, and you're It. Your friend has hidden in the closet, and you've found him. You stand there in the open closet doorway and laugh. Ha! Tag! You're It! He says you're talking crazy! This isn't hide-and-go-seek. Ha, ha, nice try. Nope. He is not hiding. Hey, dude, you are crouching under Mom's raincoat next to the vacuum cleaner. Nope. He's living his life. You are making rude and crazy accusations to an innocent person. And this can go on for years. However long you stand there in front of him is how long he will keep up calling you a mind-fucker, any kind of addled he can muster. He'll starve before he'll ever admit where he is, what he's doing. That's what it's like to talk to someone who won't be induced to cop to what shrinks call unconscious and I say is more conscious than any consciousness we ever had yet.

My recursive shards, my ice spatters from hell, do not show signs of willingness to be It. Not, certainly, if they can pin a me to me, and they do. Oh, they do. I yell for them to leave me out of it, and it's for sure they think I'm mind-fucking now. So I do not get through to them. They won't ever get the uplifting news that we're grown-ups now, we can order our lives any old way we want, for real: like we can, if we want, make assets out of sociopaths; can declare starvation and homelessness unamerican; can reinvent all the specs on what constitutes eligibility for the best medical care our science can provide; can take profit out of weapons production and drugs; can shorten the work week.

Snap. We are this kind of grown up and powerful. Who'd believe me? Who'd get it? What Republican, slimy Newt-faced Gingrich of an excuse for a sentient being, would ever get that this wouldn't have to discomfit them one smidgen, one nth of a jot, one quark? Which of our Democrats would stop buying-in to this nitwit capitalist polemic --> about as cogent and sensible as Alice's trip down the rabbit hole <-- that altruism, peace, need to cost bucks to be squeezed from the comfortable? Who of us would wake up, see our false economy does nothing whatever but fake profit and loss over which to worry and die, over which to hurt whole populations till they're dead or numb-as-dead in our effort to avoid worrying and dying over it; see that it has all been for the sole benefit of providing the few a view from atop the Darwinian heap, and that we jointly and severally made the whole thing up to create the possibility of this lofty illusion?

* * * * * * *

This desperate need to hide and simultaneously insist it's not hiding we're doing is how we predate ourselves right off the map, why our support flows behind anything guaranteeing continued "innocence" as we engage in bodily refuge, at the expense of any and all others. We won't stake our own lives on anything, except our hiding places. When we are exposed, the game is up --> so, yes indeedy, we'll kill, and we will even die to kill, just so we can call it "survival". Just so "self-interest" is not what it's called. We mow down anything or anyone, never losing our virtue, or entitlement, as long as we call our mowing something innocent. Self-interest, by any name, can never, not ever, not in a million years, stop being self-interest. Harm by any other name is harm. The way to freedom, is putting your life at stake, chancing even dying so the light of the One Love can be blaring from your very own face. We are here to break the negative cycles.

* * * * * * *

Okay. It's 1666. You're a British sailor. You've debarked on Mauritius to scare-up some animal protein. A dodo waddles up to you, plum pleased pink to see you. What do you do? Is your palate that entitled? Are you that entitled? How does the dodo species stack up against a few hours' nutritional boost?

* * * * * * *

Werner Herzog, the incorrigible German film director, once told Jonathan Cott, interviewing for Rolling Stone, that deep in the eye of a chicken, if one looks closely, one finds frightful, horrible, nightmarish stupidity. He likened this stupidity to the Devil. Herzog used lots of chickens in his movies, said that chickens are "vicious, neurotic, the Real Danger." Herr Herzog hypnotized his actors to get what he wanted from them. I fancy he wanted them to go where chickens fear to tread, to bridge the obstacle of stupidity, and all that issues from it.

* * * * * * *

All this stupidity issuing, evil and dumb discomfort have gone on to give the few a type of comfort they don't even need to be comfortable. How the heck did a nation full of equals ever get themselves into such a malign hierarchy? Merely by virtue of mistaken identity, I assure you. Who'd get it? This is exactly what the Buddha asked himself under his tree. "Who'd get it?"

I know "Buddhists", ice shards, who'd state unequivocally that this last statement of mine's just been my way of saying I'm enlightened --> which, if you don't know the lingo, is verboten. "She's being colorful and conceited, crazy, again!" Their prefab excuse to shut down synaptic activity before it gets hard, a view to mask fear and laziness of mind, a label in service of the self remaining autonomous --> even as they're in fact locked in cosmic hide-and-go-seek, in jails that seem bipedal, and keeping this up unimpeded by vexing, terrible truth. Never mind that one of the favorite slogans slung around in their Cult Centers is that there is no good or evil, no polite or rude, no self or other, any and all such mutually-dependent terms are the stuff of delusion, mere views that don't exist in actuality --> they go right on acting on these distinctions like it isn't a big waste of time, isn't inimical to precisely the tenets they and their poobahs mutter to each other in dokusan every day. Human egos defy the very laws of physics to wax virtuous like this, while ripping the guts out of virtue itself to avoid dealing with the too intense pressure of real probity on our, imaginary, selves. Insane!

Okay. Perhaps it would be helpful if I stop to remind you freedom is not ease. This may be key. It might be the culprit. The brain elision, the thing that seals childhood in such big and baggy skins. Yup. Freedom truly is gorgeous, good, powerful and perfect, but the one thing it absolutely is not is easy --> and never can be till everyone's free. We've glued "free" and "easy" into one corrupt miscalculation. This brain elision also eludes notice with stultifying regularity. We fail to remind ourselves not to misconstrue the "and" between them.

We forget how crucial it is to living sane in a real world. Believe it, there will not ever stop being this insane disparity until we remember. I tell you, I mean never. No more excuses. Stop legislating for equality already declared outright in our Constitution; stop tactic-stacking to nudge the world in line with beliefs we adopted because they verify our creature comfort, foisting views on each other, arranging each other in hierarchic relation and calling this democracy. This is working like mad to become what we already are. Pernicious silliness. Nullify the whole socio-economic teeter-totter, send it clear the fuck out of fashion forever, and we have what we want, we are that over which we have been at each other's throats all these years. All beings ARE created equal. No laws can do it. In fact, our declaration of equality was not even necessary; it was just nice.

The definition of the Sanskrit word "sangha", last of the three Buddhist treasures, is: being as is. ("Like this.") We make being seem other than it is by the very fact of our deeds to force what is to be. We do and do. We pass laws. It's flat out impossible to coerce what already is into being, but we go crazy creating plastic indicators to induce illusory being in order to obviate our discomfort --> which effort increases our discomfort no end. It's this goofy. Breathtakingly wasteful.

* * * * * * *

True humans ("like this" beings) are quite benign creatures, utterly disinterested in bug ballet. Realizing the ugly truth yibbering away atop our pea brains our livelong lives, taking a look around, confirming for ourselves that we have in fact been hiding in broad daylight, pressing on with the sacred business of being as is, would vaporize all suffering. Not so hard to grasp, is it? People starve and die so we can keep pretending you're you and I'm me. We're so busy innocently consuming, voting for some toad who'll turn the whole world third just because he lies about lowering taxes, we don't even have time to stop and look.

Each one of us, criminal and saint alike, was delivered into this world pure. Every thing that goes on in our world is born of a desire to stop being hurt so much --> every crime and every bank account. We all think the way only to stop hurting is to start mattering somehow, even if it hurts others a lot, even as it hurts ourselves a lot. And, you just do not have to swallow this point whole right here. If you will learn, truly, it will make itself blaringly apparent regardless of anything I say, or anyone says, but for just for ducks, for understanding this bound agglomeration of English words, try to let it be, experimentally, so. The cool part of the sanctity of these pea brains of ours is that one is free to test notions by assigning them hypothetical veracity --> see how this plays out. Startling discoveries can be made this way. Get out from under the street lamp. Look with true eyes. Transcendent authenticity pours down on the problem. We know truth without being told.

* * * * * * *

And, try admiring that young cuss in your office who keeps threatening your integrity with his talent, the one you're always having to remind he's your subordinate, the one whose work often gets your name on it. Could be he'll promote you to a very fat paycheck some day. Try buying lunch for that street guy with the big sign on the corner you always pass on your lunch break. He might end up showing you the ropes when you're homeless. Next time you see the Chinese lady, with the accent so thick you think it's still Chinese, at the grocery store, stop and chat, find out she's really from Vietnam. Feel your fear, look past all your knee-jerk reactions, doing something else instead, pay attention, and see the true landscape. Go where you fear for your identity, your cover. Risk your job to help Hot Shot's shine. Risk your clean look with the homeless man. Risk your smug ideas with the "Chinese" lady. Risk your life to encourage a good society. Do everything someone like you would never do. This isn't a Scope commercial. No excuses. If you're a yuppie, shop at Salvation Army. Let every discomfort that arises shine the spotlight on whatever addled assumption caused it. Let your co-stars take the movie from you. Give away your fame. Let it all be so. Look like a hobo. See if it changes your heart. Quit following ego's orders. Stop, listen to them, think about what's really going on. Realize both that all situations pass away by themselves, and that you have an ocean of options behind every new stimulus. Look in. Take it from the Dalai Lama. Watch yourself.

Find out that nothing we've thought up is True. Cheh-heck it out. What a gas! Your ego will turn out to be the biggest liar you ever met. You want that running your show? Look at what you want and subordinate it. I'm not saying sublimate it. Let it dangle. Look. Give up. Wake up. Look at yourself. Do not just stand there in the dim glow of the known. Walk into the dark and call the light. Quit being such a goddam chicken with your whole life. Live. Explore the cosmos of mind. Go where chickens fear to tread.

Maybe you have to hypnotize yourself to do it. Maybe you need someone breathing down your neck, chasing your sorry ass out of one light and into the next, to get a clue. Jesus! Offending the living shit out of you every time you turn around. Offending you until you're so tight with it no offense can be present. No offense can get in when you've been chased into yourself so far; pressed self into self until you're self passed through self, and when you think you are that far, this someone will shock you with how not far that far is. Feel your body go neuralgic when they get on you like Buddha's Bulldog, your chicken nature contorting your muscles. Watch the sparks flying from dull form from these diamond blows.

Maybe this will be when the Dalai Lama, Lao Tzu, Dogen and all the other Inscrutables finally start to make sense to you, when you finally give up our cosmos of prefab excuses to get at the truth. Let yourself be a bug on a slide under that dread cosmic microscope. Get a clue. Freedom will pick you. Can you stand it? Quickly! Quickly! Answer before you think.

Sorry, if you're still thinking, you're still wrong. Our minds are much more intelligent than our intellects. Thinking is memory, computation based solely on experience. Notice it! Get the difference between computation and inspiration. Inspiration is everyman's key to the divine. Understand the term "divine inspiration". All inspiration is divinity. It is because its genesis is Not Self. If you get on this, you will find there are millennia between your thoughts: universes in which to work. Look where the inspiration comes from. Go into your dark, and wow --> the keys to freedom, big as heck. You will find that is the truth. Along the way, you see a throng of selves inside who desperately need tuning up. That's why you're here. No lie.

"Think about that which does not think." The true human. You know it's right here. It has no political affiliation, and need of no arms and legs, hasn't even got a gender --> much <-- and it's never been anywhere else. It knows astounding things without anyone telling it. It figgered itself out thousands of years ago, and physicists are just now freaking out about how all that mumbo-jumbo turns out to have been describing what they've been building huge particle accelerators to "discover". You are most definitely not it, but it is actually you. Get a clue. You do not exist. You are a fig newton of your own imagination.

It's completely wonderful around here without your fig newtons. If I've been sounding irked to you, it's because it really is this stupid.

What do you get when you cross a chicken with a brahma bull?

Sausage? A Herzog movie?

H-h-h-h-h-harrowing reluctance squished into a skinbag with b-b-b-b-b-bloodcurdling audacity.