Truth-seeking

          to make the best of any given moment.

The place to begin is not outside ourselves.

Yet, most of us find it too tempting

                                                  and draw attention to whatever is before us

                     instead of diving within

where the source and resource awaits us.

We have no power to make another to be fair, loving, honest, supportive—

                     or to be whatever adjective we conjure.

                                        The question to ask is

                              what do I need to develop within me

in order

to get the lesson

of this situation?

          What arises here will most likely be a verb.

                                                            Realize each opportunity that

                                        comes your way

employs the economics of God…

because everyone gets a chance

                                                  for what is theirs to learn in any given situation.

It shouldn’t matter if another “gets” their lesson

          (except for Bodhisattvas, which most of us aren’t)

                              but

it does matter

if we get ours.

                              When we learn not to waste time figuring out

how others need to grow—a consistently frustrating path—

          we remove the distraction from addressing

                                        the one and only person we have the power to change.

Inside, outside, there’s a conversation going on today that wasn’t happening at all ten years ago and hasn’t been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began. Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure what it’s about is futile. It’s about a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback deja vu of our strange perplexing species. Something ancient, elemental, sacred, something very very funny that’s broken loose in the pipes and wires of the twenty-first century.

There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being. That this world is digital or electronic is not the point. What matters most is that it exists in narrative space.

The story has come unbound. The world of commerce became precipitously permeable while it wasn’t looking and sprang a leak from a quarter least expected. The dangers of democracy pale before the danger of uncontained life. Life with the wraps off. Life run wild.

Since we are what we are, what shall we be
But what we are? We are, we have
Six feet and seventy years, to see
The light, and then release it for the grave.
We are not worlds, no, nor infinity,
We have no claims on stone, except to prove
In the invention of the city
Our hearts, our intellect, our love.

There's a truly great Irish poet. His name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it."

What does that mean, to betray the age? Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.

Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.

Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. Benjamin Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age. May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.

What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now?

And a man said, "Speak to us of Self-Knowledge."
And he answered, saying:

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always know in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Mercy and truth are met together;

righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Truth shall spring out of the earth;

and righteousness shall look down from heaven.

...making your ear attentive to wisdom

and inclining your heart to understanding;

if you indeed cry out for insight,

and raise your voice for understanding;

if you seek it like silver,

and search for it as for hidden treasures--

then you will understand the fear [or reverence] of the Lord

and find the knowledge of God.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,

Myself must I remake

Till I am Timon and Lear

Or that old William Blake

Who beat upon the wall

Till Truth obeyed his call.