Gloria Mundi Rapid Transit
Because when the illusions get stripped away, only what’s deep survives.
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I’d like to take this just a step further.
The old Lakota medicine man Archie Fire Lame Deer told his biographer, Richard Erdoes:
I am no wino or pishko, but I am no saint either. A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and the fear, of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is no good as a medicine man.
I don’t suppose anything I say in words can get this exactly right anyway, but I’ll try.
If you try to give advice to someone who is suffering more than you have ever suffered, your advice is liable to come across as uncomprehending and shallow. You have to have known your own blues to sing the blues. And you have to be in peace to convey peace…
And that, it seems to me, is what allows monks to hear and understand and talk, peer to peer, with punks — and that’s what allows punks to become monks.
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Noah Levin’s book, Dharma Punx, is available on Amazon, as is the DVD of Meditate and Destroy, the 2007 documentary about him.
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Punk may still not be my kind of music — but I’m beginning to see the punk mohawk as a kind of instinctive tonsure…
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Themurr:
September 4th, 2012 at 4:27 pm
The question I have is how do you hold onto the state you’re describing? I think what you’re talking about is somewhat similar to going into the woods or the desert and slowly having all externalities stripped away until you have a moment where you see, very clearly a pale blue dot sort of moment. Once you leave the wilderness the feeling slowly fades and more and more you’re only able to pull back a faint echo of what it was. (this should probably be in the first person since I’m mostly relying on my own experiences, not sure how to do much differently on the subject but to lean on what I know and have felt even in the context of what others seem to have achieved with what you’re describing) Moments of grief and loss drive it home quicker and more deeply and leave a stronger echo, but it’s still an echo. Is it a matter of avoiding embracing the loss of hope, the utter emptiness that’s left, instead compromising by going through the motions, whistling past the graveyard as it were instead of consuming/being consumed by that state? Or are those moments of clarity just that, moments? Or am I so far into left field that I’m about to get run over by a scrum-half when I’m expecting bloopers at the warning track?