Inside/Outside: Is there a Difference? (Once in a Blue Agave Moon, ch. 6)

 

Random observations of the narrator.
A trusted confidante who knows me well enough to make such a statement once asked “Do you realize you have spent most of your adult life trying to get yourself out of your head?”
I thought about it for a minute…she knows me well enough to realize that the parameters involving my personal vision quest have not been adverse to the use of somewhat radical methods and materials in the pursuit of insight and enlightenment.
I might add that her question was not asked in derogation; she respects my sincerity and dedication to the pursuit of the occult, the unusual, and the cunning ways of Knowledge and Majick, the moon, Shamanism and sexual ecstasy.
At first I was tempted to take exception with the term “out of my head” because I could have countered with the remark that all the universe is inside my head, or rather, that it is created within the mind….
All I had to do was discover it.
I was merely an explorer.
Of course, in philosophy, the term ecstasy means “outside one’s self”….
Then I thought about the words of Zen master Seung Sahn Soen-sa Nim*: “…Inside, outside, put it all down!”
Labels can be dangerous because in naming something we claim to have prejudicial knowledge of what it really is, and that creates another layer of illusion between us and our world.
Nonetheless, my favorite muse also reminded me of my remark that I had never met a recreational drug that I didn’t like….now she had me there, but then again, although I used the term recreational in terms of common parlance, rather than as an exact term, nevertheless, if it is indeed recreational, then it is at least not professional…
Addicts are professional drug users; they devote their entire lives to the pursuit of their addictions, although there are many more addictions to things other than drugs that are at least just as dangerous, but ah! I do digress….
Seung Sahn was not adverse to the use of “special medicine” to be able to gain enough detachment (to see ourselves objectively from outside ourselves) to gain insight….
There we go again with the labels and the directions….
Put it all down.
We talk of higher consciousness yet we believe that only the most nominal version of reality is all that is real, finite, and measurable. Voices, phantom images, and revelations are commonly regarded as symptoms of psychosis.
A shaman, an explorer or an warrior knows the risks and experiences the fear just like everybody else, but because they aspire to be their own heroes, they embrace the challenge of the unknown.
Courage is the ability to overcome fear long enough to act, to continue, and to face the challenges.
It is indeed the journey, not the destination that inspires them.
Once that is experienced, there is such a thing as “Everyday Zen”.
It becomes everyday until something new arrives.
There is always more, and there will always be more until there is nothing…until there is something again.
For eons Man has sensed that we were not seeing everything there was to be seen or heard, felt or experienced and that there were other dimensions than time/space/distance.
Quantum physics confirms it by postulating that there not only is but that eventually it will.
Who will be ready, and who will make the cut?
And in the meantime, what will you do to pass the time?
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but with eight lives left, he’ll come back laughing and wiser.
If you want to imagine the difference between inside and outside, try to imagine the cat’s answer.

Namasté
नमस्ते
Chazz Vincent
04/20/2016
*Seung Sahn Soen-sa Nim: Koren Zen Buddhist Patriarch,
founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen
(….he’s worth the research…)
Sayonara Y’all!
…Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei….

Once in a Blue Agave Moon: The Tyranny of Numbers, ch. 5

You sacrifice freedom for security.
If there are too many of you in one place, you will learn to oppress them.
You will do it with impunity and a sense of self-righteousness as you do it because you will identify with the sameness of all of those in whom you see yourself reflected.
The more diverse the culture, the less the potential for such a preponderance of any one style or belief to exist so as to try to limit or control the way in which anyone else lives their life.
The smaller the society and the greater the diversity of its members, the less the potential for the prejudice or oppression of civilization to control the behaviors of others.
Many primitive cultures embrace actions and behaviors that are far outside western norms, whether or not they are homogeneous as a group.
But an artificially created society that is both spiritually and sexually splintered as The Fourteenth Colony was unique among most world cultures.
Of course, even with only two, there still remains the potential for a tyranny of one….

 

“for those who think, Life is a comedy…for those who feel, Life is a tragedy”

Someone close to someone very close to me was found dead on Easter morning. A suicide by gunshot to the head.

This past month has been a bit hellish, but ultimately, very life-affirming.

Only just now have I allowed myself to let my emotions be recognized.

So far, it looks like a three-headed dragon.

This is the first post I have ever made directly to this site without composing on ms. word…I didn’t want to over-think it.

I just needed to acknowledge this.

More to come.

Namasté
नमस्ते
Chazz Vincent

 

 

 

Once in a Blue Agave Moon chapter four: Location, location…LOCATION!

During the eighteenth century, the Lowlands Scots seemed to naturally gravitate to the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and the Smokey Mountains region of the United States .
Australia was originally a penal colony for the United Kingdom.
Similarly, Florida was the lint trap for everything that got shook loose from the rest of the landmass of the contiguous forty-eight states of the continent.
It hangs like a huge semi-flaccid uncircumcised penis, far too laid back to protrude upward very far into the Atlantic Ocean, more of a “Show/her” than “Grower” and complacent enough to just engorge itself into the warmer tropical waters, also attributing to the belief that “the lower the latitude, the stronger the sex drive.”
Everyone who comes to Florida has a cover story for why they moved here, but secretly, right before they left wherever they came from, something happened somewhere else, and it just seemed like everything was so much easier there.
They share a heritage of escapism which tends to create a mindset that remains a prevailing theme of those recently immigrated.
There is such a thing as the mentality, or state of mind of the founding culture of the location that is shared by a majority of the residents who were descendants of smugglers or wreckers; real full-time professional criminals who are trying to just lay low for awhile, vs. the full-time amateur criminals of convenience and circumstance, such as junkies and addicts, as well as every level of drug dealer, the “musicians” and “artists” who patronized them, whores, gigolos, long-and-short con men (and women), real-estate speculators, rain-makers, lightning-rod salesmen, snake-oil purveyors and of course, telemarketers, all of whom constitute a group best described as “casual criminals” and have as much regard for the “Law of Man” as an alligator.
And of course, first the Cubans, and the Haitians, seeking political asylum, the Colombians (for a whole host of varied reasons) and then the Mexicans, Guatemalans, and the Dominicans.
Almost nothing is manufactured in Florida…no factory jobs here to speak of, except the few sugar processors around Lake Okeechobee that haven’t already been phased out, and of course Motorola, boat and marine accessories and a few furniture manufacturers.
Most business in Florida jumps more or less directly from agribusiness (especially oranges and grapefruits) to the service industry/hospitality services, food service, entertainment, technical support for local businesses as well as the ubiquitous health service professionals; paramedics, nurses, doctors and patient care technicians and nursing homes, senior communities, and intensive care wards hence the moniker “Florida is God’s Waiting Room”….
Eventually, the glut of cheap relatively desperate labor for displaced ex-pats of every stripe resulted in the establishment of telemarketing centers in Florida.
It also meant that many who immigrated there were fleeing to avoid prosecution, or alimony or just a bad marriage in general. Even the cities were not as crowded or overwhelming as up north; people trying to get away from something seeking asylum or escape, where they believed the opportunities were like ripe, low-hanging fruit, like some latter-day version of The Grapes of Wrath.
No unions, fewer licensing and regulations, less and no state taxes.
So Florida, much like Australia, the Smokey Mountains, and California became a haven for outcasts, criminals, and ne’er do wells of every stripe looking for escape to a better life…”your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send these the tempest-tossed to me…”
(we’ll leave the light on…).

Once in a Blue Agave Moon Chapter three: Diversity

Diversity is a critical component in the evolution of anything.
So is adversity.
Without adversity from within or without the species or subset, there would be no provocation for evolutionary processes to be instigated.
External threats or hardships winnow and cull the weak from the herd.
The strong survive and thrive. The weak become one with the food chain.
Natural selection promotes incrimental improvements in the species in order to better adapt to its microcosm.
The strength of adversity is much like an alloy of a metal for improved tensile strength, shear strength, hardness, density or weight.
In a society, common purspose and mutual support provides flexibility, adaptive abilty, and resilience to external threats when there is cooperation amongst those diverse members.
On the other hand, from a purely Machiavenian standpoint, when one group opresses another group, there is potential for strengthening the opressed group, although it produces a degree of factionalism and tension or stressors to the group as a whole.
There is nothing inherently Humanitarian about evolution.
As the civilization of a society develops, It is more capable of sustaining and caring for the mentally and physically infirm.
As long as a society is wealthy enough and affluent enough it can easily support and nurture and portion of its population that is not capable of caring for themselves for any variety of reasons.
As long as someone is willing to pay someone else to care for these unfortunates, others who provide the care will make a living out of it, and the prosperity of the entire group is enhanced.
It takes a very enlightened, tolerant affluent and altruistic society to develop a culture that is inclined to care for all of its citizens humanely.
It would be easy to make the incorrect assumption that the members at the colony were a homogeneous group.
The stereotypical generalization of the ultra right-wing, violent, Christian, alcoholic, heavily-armed, home-schooled, racist Florida redneck comes to mind when most people think about hunting in the Everglades. Fifty years ago, that notion might have had a little more validity, but Florida is more of a melting pot than most other areas of the United States, (unless of course, you are a Seminole or Miccosukee Indian).
Most of Florida is a mixture of a space-age frontier town, Disney World, a smuggler’s paradise and tourist trap where every imaginable ethnicity and social strata rub elbows on a daily basis.
In less than an hour you can drive from the center of almost any city to west bum-fuck Egypt or Timbukthree. Similarly, in the same amount of time you can go from Miami Beach (aka little Tel Aviv) to Little Havana, or Little Haiti, although the distinct boundaries of one ethnicity or another is rapidly blurring.
Similarly, Kosher, Hispanic, Asian, Continental, or Caribbean cuisines are everywhere you look from South Florida to the Keys, Orlando, Tampa, Daytona or Jacksonville.
This has a tendency to produce a more eclectic atmosphere than one might suspect in Florida, and it is reflected in the residents’ tastes and comfort zones.
Religion (or the lack of it) remains the singularly most divisive influence no matter where you go, and of course, most sexual mores and customs are dictated by religion.
Elliott’s older son was introduced to what became known as The Colony several years before by one of his high-school classmates. His father was a welder from upstate New York who had lived in Florida for more than twenty years. His son had a blue mohawk and listened to Heavy Metal.
Although the expression “safety in numbers” has a distinct ring of validity to it, because no one lifestyle or religion was of any preponderance within the group, most of the residents minded their own business as long as no one was forced to confront any specific behaviors, beliefs,or customs and as long as they did not impinge on the privacy or comfort of any of the others.
The cowardice of numbers lies at the heart of bullying; there was no real preponderance of any lifestyle or belief system at the colony. Because of this, there developed an enforced tolerance of all opinions and beliefs that was not seen in previous societies.
Drug store cowboys and self-proclaimed rednecks are no more prone to prejudice or narrow-mindedness than Northeastern members of the “Intelligencia” or passive-aggresive Southern Californians.
Group-think mentalities need to have their prejudices reinforced by other fearful sheep of the same mind-set before they can be too much of a pain in the ass to anyone else.
The term “rugged individualist” best described most of the members of the Colony. There was plenty of insular space for all of them, and as long as everybody minded their own business, they neither took nor gave any grief to anyone else.
Peaceful co-existence had been the prevailing mood within the group long before they had decided to eschew urban un-civilization.
Their most common interest was in each other’s safety and well-being. The collapse of western civilization had leveled the field for everyone.
It was no longer a zero-sum game.