I am reading a lot of books simultaneously these days, almost as if I am returning to a place I left a long time ago, a cast aside fragment of who I used to be; an avid reader. Reading is one of my most consistent pleasures, an activity I can look forward to with delight, especially if I have found an intriguing new book at the used bookstore or library, and have an entire afternoon free to sit around, munch on snacks, and just read. I love to read, and I am not sure where I got this tendency. I am sure that, down the DNA coil, an ancestor of mine was a writer, perhaps a spiritual scholar, somebody who understood that the written word, if nothing else, was an incredibly dynamic way to forge endless connections between all the thoughts in your head and feelings in your bones. I read to understand, I read to plant new seeds, I read to relax.
Now, the reading I have been doing lately has turned me on to some serious topics, such as the mystery of time, the mystical nature of space, and the magical reality of the Dreamtime. So many of the ideas, feelings, and words that have been born from the books I have read over the past few years have coalesced inside of me that I feel like I am entering a new stage of life, one in which I would like to erase all of my previous words, as well as all my previous foolish actions in life, and start all over, anew, fresh as talcum powder on a baby's bottom. I know this is a common feeling throughout the history of humanity, so I am not as troubled by it as I could be, but man oh man, wouldn't it be nice to really start over? I want to let the world know that I am a new man, but of course, the world doesn't believe it until it sees it. In any case, we are always becoming new, being reborn, every second, every day, every decade. The newness is the breath of life, the gift of time.
Sometimes we feel like we are stuck in the same old routine over and over again, and I have felt that way a lot in my life. But I am beginning to See that, it isn't life that is monotonous, it is us. But the blame doesn't lie solely on our souls, the monotonous and bizarre patterns of modern life are enforced upon us by the entire thrust of Western culture, especially in the wake of the Industrialization of human culture, utilizing the Gregorian calender and the atomic clock to squeeze individual life paths into convenient little boxes that can be utilized efficiently to milk the last bit of energy from the planet. This, of course, is not sustainable nor is it desirable to most of the people of the planet.
How many of us want to be able to sleep until we are rested, when we need to? Why is this solely the prerogative of the wealthy? Shouldn't rest be a human right? There have been a lot of improvements in the work week, due in large part to the courageous individuals who sought to improve the quality of workers lives, in opposition to the machines that ran them. Behind these ideas are thousands of words, many books by many people who have realized the essential fallacy of the workweek, the calendar, and even time as proscribed by the machine. We are not machines, so why are we run by them?
When we latch onto the paradigm presented to us by the established machines of power, I feel that we have already given up. Of course, we have to latch onto the machine somewhat in order to function well in this culture, but in our personal life paths, we don't need to at all. But it seems that we are cosmic monkeys of habit, and when we punch out at the end of the day, we punch in to our own schedules, schedules still prescribed by the power machine, the media machine being simply the screen through which we are taught what to do. What to do with our time, time as a linear sequence of events that end in death. And in allowing this idea of time to rule our every moment, we are pushing the natural, spiritual path of human fulfillment out of our way as we pursue material wealth.
We are human beings, and we are conscious, we think. We can feel love, we can feel energy of all sorts, and we can be agents of a permacultural way of life, instead of blind servants to a dying machine. We can work on our life as if it were a miraculous garden, and with this commonplace miracle understand that the entire cosmos is life itself, awareness itself, the ultimate manifestation of the dream. Or we can ignore this and pursue our own power over death, the ego's never-ending life, in the paradigm of the machine.
The machine interacts with us through the screen, telling us that it is real life, and in some ways, maybe most ways, we would be better of as living beings doing away with the screen between us and actual life. Of course, the irony is not lost on me as I sit here, typing my thoughts on a screen. We have developed our technologies to a degree that they seem indispensable to our modern ways of life. I do feel that the most interesting old cultures are the ones that can adapt most successfully to the technological realities of modern life, and yet still retain all the spirit of their ancient ways, and in that sense I believe that our technologies can be returned to the status of being tools as opposed to being the whole game, tools that better our lives. Essentially we are all cyborgs already, what with glasses, shoes, cars, houses, all the technologies that allow us to live. That is a subject to be explored, one that is too vast for this blog entry.
I dedicate this blog entry to the eradication of modern time, and the return of the myriad time spheres of the earth; hummingbird time, walrus time, redwood time, grass time, love time, star time, heart time, sleeping time, cooking time, eating time, building time, sex time, dance time, singing time, sipping time, snow time, wind time, magic time, sad time, pain time, fish time, raindrop time, wolf time, shitting time, anger time, kissing time, raven time, truck time, oil time, limestone time, death time, hunting time, meditation time, writing time, reading time, weaving time, buddha time, cat time, fire time, and of course, the Dreamtime, our life time.
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