Existence

It is a new day. I have awoken with a mind that carries left over dreams.  I am in my Thor Motorhome.  I toilet.  Then I meditate and exercise.  My little dog chooses to sleep some more.  He has piddled at the door in the night. I’m irritated but then with the heavy rain of yesterday we didn’t walk so much but he did pee and poop. These are memories.  Yesterday is a construct. It is selective.  There are the facts of the day and the emotions of the day.  I can carry forward the emotions or begin a fresh slate.  The facts seems less mutable but I can focus on the successes or the challenges. My mind unfortunately has been trained to gravitate to the negatives. Each day with meditation and prayer I need to reset the mind to neutral or better , a little positive.  Life is better positive and if there’s been trauma there is a tendency to replay the negative past while forgetting the positive. To be alive means that one has at very least 51% . It is good to have an attitude of gratitude . The Law of Attraction says that positive attracts positive.  

My alarm is set for 630 am and the song Holy, Holy, Holy wakes me.  

On day at a time says that yesterday is gone and tomorrow is not yet known. What I have is today.  Brother Lawrence said practice the presence of God.  Be in the present.  Richard Alpert, the psychologist who worked with Timothy Leary and went to India to study yoga after LSD, became to spiritual advisor to the Grateful Dead.  His book I read back then was Be Here Now.  Elkhart Tolle our local spirit guide wrote the book ‘the Power of Now’.  I read it but my now deceased friend George listened to it in his car each doy going to work.

It’s one thing to intellectualize something.  I read Be here now over 50 years ago.  Today I’m actually being in the present more than ever before.  28 years ago I’d stopped drinking and smoking .  I was at an AA meeting in Chilliwack at the clubhouse.  I’d just spoken and  asked this young Canadian soldier I admired what he thought.  He looked at me tall clear eyed gruff voice, “well Bill, you’ve got one foot in the future and one foot in the past. You’re straddling your day and pissing and shitting on it.  Get your head in the same room as your ass is.”

I confess it took that plain speach to bring it home to me. I’d seen a black and white movie with translations made at the opening of the century. A pretty American journalist was visitting an ancient Taoist monk in a cave monastery.  She asked the monk through his handsome young novitiate and translated, “What is enlightenment.?”  The monk had problems translating and when the reporter insisted he share the answer , the translater says , the ‘master says he shits when he shits’.  

Today I am here. It’s a new day.  

I accept that I exist because I do but also I study Descartes famous for much but perhaps most his ‘Cogito ergo sum’.  “I think therefore. I am,”. 

In the biblical story of Exodus 3.2 , Moses encountered a ‘marvellous sight’.  ‘A bush wass burning with fire but the bush did not burn up’ Moses turned aside to see and God called to him saying this was ‘holy ground’ This was at Horeb, the mountain of God where the angel of the Lord spoke to him from the burning voice. The voice said, “I am the God of your Father, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”.He  said I am concerned for teh suffering of my people and have come to rescue them and bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey….I am sending you to the Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt .  Moses answered who I am that i should go to the Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt.  God said “I will be with you.’  Moses said , suppose I got to the Israelites and say the God of your fathers has sent me and they ask what is his a name what should I say. “God said to Moses, I am who I am…..I am has sent me.”  

After one comes two.  The creation myths say there is a god who made all but not that there was a god and building blocks. Rather that, to keep it simple, there is God the Creator who makes all out of one.  The one became many.

Martin Buber, the great philosopher who my now deceased friend Nathan, had as a professor, wrote “I and Thou’.  He posited that a child experiences himself then the other, the mother as ‘it’.  Melanie Klein the great child psychiatrist describe this as the child experiencing first the breast and when it was being suckled the breast was good and when the breast was absent and the child had hunger pain the breast was bad.  Hence the good breast and the bad breast.,

Buber described this as the “I and it’ phase. 

The Rastafarians use the phrase “I and I’ to signify the unity of God , Jah, and humanity.  By rejecting me and you this phrase I and I promotes unity.  Spiritual development moves from I and it to I and I and ultimately Buber saw the transcendent I and Thou.

I exist now.  But am I alone.  I tell my friends that I try to levitate the table each day and as I am so far unable I humbly accept I may not have created this existence or at very least I now do not realize my capacity as creator so I acknowledge ‘another’.  I and it or I and I or I and Thou.

Jesus taught be not afraid.  Paranoia is that experience of aloneness and I and it.  In Paradise Lost , the great English writer described Satan, the first angel of God who rebelled against God as preferring to look at his own shadow rather than turn and face the light of God.  

This is considered in psychological terms as the ‘ego’ or ‘false self’.  The true or authentic self is not arrogant but humble.