Saturday, May 14, 2016

Big Cheese

  Gosh, it has been weeks since my last posting here. If you would like my opinion, a certain plumber (who shall remain nameless, but rhymes with "Ike Ayber") has been playing altogether too much Freecell. . .
   It's kind of like grilled cheese sandwiches. When we were kids, Mom used to make these legendary grilled cheese bombs with Velveeta cheese and green chile, in an electric frying pan. She always slathered a big old slug of Parkay on the whitebread before flopping it onto the heat. After tasting it, a kid could easily conclude; "There must be a missing food group out there somewhere!".
  They told us at school about dairy, poultry, fruits and vegetables. We recall the section about nuts. . . But clearly, they forgot to mention this crucial food group, Velveeta grilled cheese with green chile on white bread! At one point in my life, that was about all I was interested in eating. A type of victual mono-mania perhaps was at work?
  Since then, I have noted this one-food idea in a variety of guises. At one juncture in life, it was all-about-reading, frequently it has rotated into all-about-work. I recall in my early twenties being just about totally absorbed in the fascinating topic of Julie S.
  Clearly (to any impartial observor) the single most whopper-doodle beautiful girl of all time. Life, reality (and everything else) pivoted upon her marvelous face, voice and carriage. As I recall, she considered me a complete lout-loser, and promptly quit responding to my letters. Heck, nowadays if I were so totally fixated on a girl, she would likely get a restraining order with me as a "stalker".
  Yet the point here is that in finding a thing to focus upon, I have always tended toward imbalance. The life load shifts and everything has to make room for cheese sandwiches, or books or Freecell depending upon when we consult the schedule making feature.
  There exists then, also within us, a blowback feature; a rejection of the choosing. For instance, at one point I thought very highly indeed of Cheetos, (the crunchy kind). Just about every day for lunch or for a snack, we were eating . . . quasi-ersatz "cheese which goes crunch". Today, I find them to be nauseating. They are not even food! Who even knows what this artificial cellulose guck is? Now, upon seeing a bag I recall how the orange goo sticks to the side of the rear molars. Ditto with Velveeta on white bread, it looks highly suspect, and I studiously avoid getting next to the stuff. That which was a strong pull in me, has become a decisive push.
  If you are at all like me then, there exists "phases", with "charge". If it is negative charge, then like an outsized vacuum cleaner it pulls the geek in question "in". Once a getting to the bottom of the draw occurs, then one is thrown clear by positive push clean out of that orbit. Upon achieving a certain distance from the old fixation, we wonder what it was which was so entirely compelling in the first place?
  We are mysteries to our own selves. True, we do "do things", and we do seem (at the time) to be awake and at the helm. Later on, it is baffling to say just why such was so "reasonable", or how it made any sense at all for that matter, at the time.
  My guess is that this sort of sleep-walking in broad daylight is fairly normal. I am frequently "hard on myself" for (once again) having derailed into some dumb temporary priority. "What in the heck was I thinking?" is the sound of it. So then, I infer that we are eccentric, or perpetually off balance. And this is not to condemn imbalance, so much as it is to note the surprise feature.
  Little kids when they are first able to hold things and understand some words are very interesting people. You can hand a small guy a set of keys or a coin. Next, you ask for it to be given back. The guy can do this exchange gig all day, he finds it delightful, and mildly surprising (each iteration thereof) that "it works!". Being surprised over and over again by the same activity or exchange is something that small people are clearly better at than we. For us to be sequentially so surprised makes us feel dumb, unobservant or forgetful; none of which qualifies as positive.
  In my book, it is a bit like an amnesiac who has forgotten his own name. Or, perhaps more aptly, like a runner having forgotten his legs? We have (or are) components, and these are not necessarily united in perspective, priorities or capacity. Deal with it.
  In the West, we have concentrated heavily upon the mind, and all things mental. If it were a cartoon, a brain on stilts is "who" we think we are. All social failings, all anger and frustration, all sadness is alleviated by "answers" in our assessment. Learning, education and knowledge thus are the premier values, and the fix for any given error or failing is uniformly to learn-more. In brief, we are in denial that we have (or are) "soul".
  In fact, there is a modern school of thought which adamently denies even the existence of soul, forget about operating out of, or "hearing" that view on things. Soul and mind, and these are but two of several "centers" which are our persons. In one sense then, we are (individually considered) communities. It is just that certain individuals thereof are more equal (in that gathering) than others, and so rage and strength carry the day here, all other voices are muted. We later wonder how we could have exploded like that? At one crossroad, the heart demands to be heard; and we find a type of sweeping compulsion, undeniable and clear. Afterwards we are again surprised and angry with ourselves for having been so "immature and easily fooled" as all that.
  We have forgotten that our selves are a community, a gang of perspectives, a plethora of priorities. We have suppressed the glad exchange as a "dull and meaningless ritual", and so court a true forgetting.
  There are lessons which we repeatedly fail to learn for the silly reason that they are not (mainly) mental/knowing types of lessons in the first place.
  That bright faced little yellow flower is not watered by anybody that we know of. In fact, it is a mere "weed", and still the yellow as (let's presume) a soul-beauty lesson is disregarded as "irrelevant". We are so busy with mental priority junk that heart priority becomes just baggage to ditch at the earliest opportunity.
  I am becoming more confident all of the time that this sort of ignoring of centers within our person is what we imply by the words "old or aging". It might be a bit like a knight which fails to recall that he is wearing armor? The crusty-hard is become the new normal, and so; tracts of inner acreage become abandoned lots inhabited by inner goons. It sounds to us like harsh speech, but it looks like a man afraid of being "late". . . Oldness then is a time-crunch and a desperation.
  We become "old" as we become unable to operate out any center but our favorite stronghold, and it is (as far as I can detect) entirely unnecessary to do so. What next occurs is that a kind of crisis manifests in our lives, a forcing of the issue, and for us to fall back into (for instance) the standard stance of mental grasp at the expense of soul grasp at that crisis point, renders us unable to move. We become rooted in a Velveeta and chile fixation, and also it is no longer what we "must have". In brief, life becomes "empty" for us.
  In my mind, the crusher here is that we are doing the best that we can, and also, this is precisely the problem! No amount of redoubling of effort thus can extricate us out of these sorts of traps. Now perhaps this is all a bit too grim for you? Maybe the author is just a tad depressing to read eh? And isn't it interesting to you, that at just this section of the C.P.E. in question that such thoughts arise? The mono-mania drive within us actively defies the multi-center reality just now being put forward. We are demanding that an inner unifying factor "must be" operational, and simultaneously, we cannot do so. Are we one, or are we many? And we find it difficult to answer that question with a "Yes!".
  So, strength is applied, force is introduced to guarantee a "unity", while we ignore that strength itself is a center in competition with thought and with heart. So then, we "flip" and start talking as if the heart and the mind were so disparate that a walking duality is the best we might ever muster. Simply, unity if ever found must be forced, and such never unifies! Multicenters do not talk the same languages, and a chaos is the inner furniture we build. It is like dreams then.
 In dreams, surprising scenarios appear, and at the same time we do not (while dreaming) find them to be unusual at all. A song, or a riddle, a puzzle or a mystery in the dreamscape is what we are focused upon. It never crosses the mind; "Hey, this is a pointless thing to waste time upon", and we are chagrined upon waking that we could not see well enough to notice the silly loop, nor did we require of the dream that it "make sense" for us. The short version being that the soul is speaking a language which our minds have forgotten, and it sounds like gibberish to the mind.
  If you had an Eskimo from Greenland sitting down to eat with a Wall St. investment banker, even if they both spoke English, there would be little for them to discuss. The two worlds are far from each other, and if dialogue is to happen; each must "try to grasp" the other's meaning, inference and perspective. This much is obvious even to us!
  But, we consistently fail to apply the same sort of method to the varying centers within us. The heart is "just stupid", the strength "is a bully" or fill in the blanks as you like best. My point is that if the banker figures the Greenlander to "be a savage" then nothing the Eskimo says "can" make sense, for the excellent reason that savages are just savage. That's the end of the discussion, prior to commencement. That "is us". The trick then is to gather the excellence from all points of the compass.
  The banker is great at annuities and compounding short term mortgage trading or some darned thing or another. The whale master can feel the earth groaning and soothe her ragged self. There is within us (as individuals) a community of excellencies, and each makes its own contribution, but the unifying feature cannot be a friendly co-operation!
  And I imagine it is just here that we err most eggregiously along these lines. Trying (very hard might I add?) to "make friends with" ourselves, and to "accept" our limitations, can never function as the "one-ness" feature.
  No, never!
  All of the above preaches, it proclaims, nay; it loudly asserts that the center is not "in" us! Gadzooks, this is permanent then? Before you panic, consider with me, the islanders of the South Pacific who (as far as I know) invented "outriggers". Such centers are not "in" the boat, and also they are built from the center of the craft outward. The stability "in" the canoe is "outside" of it. Likewise with us (the inventors of such artifacts), the center in us, is outside-of, and also-in us.
  Time cannot be all there is, for it presupposes; "What came prior to it, and what follows it?". So eternity is in time and also rooted outside of it. We creatures in time find similarly, our center to be an outrigger beyond us, and in us too.
  I would hazard here that such being the case, we ourselves then are functioning as a kind of predictive model of a coming gathering ahead of us in time, founded in eternity, while fully "finished" at present. A serial sort of sets of surprises to come, is the construct we are building? In theo-speak, we are founded and built "in the image". This having been badly defaced and hopelessly shattered, is re-founded in Image! We ourselves then become the predictive model of a marvel to come (having arrived!)?
  Recall the talk. He keeps talking about a gathering together, and a peace. It is a community-coming (and come) in which the True Center (Himself) is made plain. At that point, even we will "get it" and gladly acknowledge that; "No wonder I couldn't make sense of things! I thought I was "one" (and I am!), but here we view the True One (Who Is Many). He in us, and us in Him, we were never built to function "outside" of Him, and just precisely this mess is our "center" . . . in the old man. This center too, is passing away!
  The Father is not The Son, nor is the Spirit either One, and there are not three Gods, but only One. At some point, the mystery which is He, of which we are a depiction, will file. In Him, The One Who Is Many, is not at war. And in that day, it will make tremendously good sense, (even to us!) and we will entirely find it convincing, because it is!
  The hunting of "the thing" which we do in dreams, and in cheese and chile sandwiches while awake, will resolve itself, and of this we are quite certain. In the mean time, we are to learn to listen to the "weak" voice, we are to consult with Eskimos, and learn to recall languages which we have suppressed because they were "stupid".
  The entire array focuses at, and is built upon and is from the Cross of Jesus. The New Man finds his origin (biologically) in the old man, and The New Man completely surpasses the wildest imaginings of the old, both remain true.
  The old was a fief, and a steward of the True King. He was instructed, and was a representative head, but never the True Head Himself. The king entrusts the realm to lessor nobility, and all bow to the Emperor.
  The New Man is the True King in Person! Here we view the creature/Creator divide which was an infinitely large gap; permanently bridged! Baby, this is big!
  Big stuff indeed, in that such peace as all that, what with the thousand and one voices all singing the same song, and joyfully so? Scratch that, make it the millions, no; better even yet, the multiple billions of those outriggered sandwich eaters all singing on key? The real McCoy of "big deals" (Himself!) here with us? Live and in Person? Evermore "In, With, and Over" us!
  And it is The Sure Thing? Yep, for certain; that is big stuff!
  Big, Big, Big!

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