“You may control a mad elephant;
You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger;
Ride the lion and play with the cobra;
By alchemy you may learn your livelihood;
You may wander through the universe incognito;
Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful;
You may walk in water and live in fire;
But control of the mind is better and more difficult.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
The best road is always the one you make. There are many other roads, adventurous roads, overlapping roads, crisscrossed crossroads, but no road is ever better than the one you make yourself. The one you design from learning from the mistakes of other roads.
The one you plow with the plowshare of experience gained from the way of those who came before. The one you carve like a labyrinth through the heart of god. The one you kill the Buddha on, over and over again. The one where you hide like a wayside robber prepared to liberate others of their certainty.
The one where the universe is allowed to be you, and you’re allowed to be the universe; an ever expanding process of cosmic flourishing.
Like Alan Watts said, “You’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe.”
That’s the best road to be on. That’s the road where I’m writing this from. And I’m here to tell you that you have it in you to make your own path, to not be a sort of puppet on a puppet master’s road, to get back on the path of being a part of the process instead.
I’ve been to Hell, and I’m here to tell you, it’s a waste of your time and energy. It’s a waste of your fear and loathing. It’s an infinitely laughable cartoon, a badly told joke. It never ends precisely because it never begins.
The demons that reside there are hollow shells of nothingness with nothing for eyes that see nothing. Satan is a pathetic red fog of fleshy oblivion. I slit his throat and surfed the black wave of his blood back to Earth to inform you that he/she/it/they is/are dead, and really never even existed in the first place, but for the parochial thinking of outdated human thoughts.
I’ve also been to Heaven. And I’m here to tell you, it’s also a waste of your time and energy. It’s a waste of your angst and adoration. It’s a pathetic dream-world, an infinite jest, a placation of the soul. It also never ends precisely because it never begins.
The angels that reside there are empty husks of righteousness with halos that might as well be nooses choking them into eternal myopia. God is a pitiful white cloud of phantom nothingness. I slit his throat and surfed the red wave of his blood back to Earth to inform you that he/she/it/they is/are dead, and really never existed in the first place, but for the parochial thinking of outdated human thoughts.
“Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.” ~ Robert Frost
Indeed, I’ve overthrown so many gods that I’ve become one. But there’s a difference between me and them. I’ve plucked out the conceit of my goddery. I shit it out in the abyss. I buried it like I buried my ego, along with a fishbone and The Book of Certainty. I gripped the throat of my animal-happiness and I have not (I will not!) let go.
I’ve been on many roads: most of them crossroads, most of them illusions, most of them cartoons in the brain built by unhealthy men with unsustainable worldviews. I’ve toppled weltanschauungs, especially my own. I’ve punctured worldviews until they lay bleeding like flopped clocks in a Dali painting. I’ve pierced the heart of Truth so deeply that it revealed its unfounded secret: absolute vicissitude.
From all this tumbling tumbleweeding, from all this kicked up dust, I’ve fallen onto a self-made path of wanderlust. There’s no looking back, but in appreciation for all the painful steppingstones and cutting-edge philosopher’s stones that sharpened me into an instrument worthy of cutting deep into the heart of things.
So it is, I write to you from the path of my own adventure, and with a humor of the most high, I hope beyond hope that you too will find a path of your own. One not littered with the obsolete gods of your shortsighted forefathers. One not tainted by the antiquated devils of your myopic ancestors.
The world is yours for the making. The road begins within you and is built outward into that world. But only you can build it. Nobody else can build it for you. You and you alone hold the building blocks of change toward a road that may lead to a healthier world for us all.
I’ll be waiting for you in that place beyond good and evil, beyond moral and immoral, where the Amoral Agent shines like a lighthouse in the darkness and glimmers like a beacon of shadows in the too-bright light, where the infinite crossroads of our each-our-own roads overlap and join and become one: a bridge from human to ubermensch.
In the meantime, my manifestos will be written as death warrants to myself in the hope that others – more courageous, intelligent, and compassionate than I am- will take over. I may have a tin ear for language but I make up for it with a mercurial tongue and a trickster’s wit.
Since many of us are accustomed to watching, rather than doing, and yapping rather than acting, it is difficult to imagine a mighty torchlit-insurrection erupting on the superhighways of the internet. But you never know.
That’s me in the brambles twisting fate into Chinese handcuffs. My feet are so sharp from walking on the cutting edge that when I dance I cut the universe. I slice and dice it into tiny dancers of finitude that are okay with being a part of a greater infinity. I’m the sine qua non of sangfroid.
I’m the blood on the palimpsest you call a bible. I’m the knowledge that two plus two also equals five.
Like Mark Twain said, “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.” I exit hackles high, whistling a sojourner’s song.
Image source:
Closed captioned TV
Joseph Campbell quote #1
Arm-wrestling
Joseph Campbell quote #2