These first words I just typed-"THE VIEW FROM WHERE I LIVE"-feel to me as labored as if someone had said I must be profound and that this page was my last chance to prove that I was.
Before I left semi-consciousness, turned on a light, then penciled these words in my dream diary, I had already heard in my head words I liked about authenticity. They seemed to be what the universe is telling us if we really listen.
I struggle to find reassurance of "no ageness" ( I prefer "No Age" to "New Age." "New Age" seems to me to say that there was an "Old Age" and to make me constantly carry the banner of that kind of distinction-making). It was all here before we ever thought up "Ages."
There is a "Brave New Word" atmosphere today in consciousness that says "commerce" to me. The authenticity, the essence, of us all is being crowded out in favor of a "Brave New Word" about who we should be, not who we are...buy my course and prosper, read my words and be free. Instant messiah-mish-mash.
The slick slogans of consciousness commerce are in all the "New Age" mags and media events and drip constantly as honey from the tongues of pitch men. My mind longs to first meet again the sheer startle of the discovery that there is magic in every word we say and even more magic in the spaces between the words.
I, who had always said and written words only in the way of "using words" have now satisfied myself that words live and that they bleed if we misuse them and that they are the only coin we have with which to pass on the sacred life of soul except of course for the Yahweh of the spaces in between--that "nothing" is just as "Love of God" as "something." It doesn't matter whether the tree in the forest is still there when we're gone because this sacred life will still be there and that's the all of it. Enough said!--as my stepfather, Dr. George Burr Morris would have said.
What I think the view is from today, this instant in which I am, is that telling people, whether in book, song or story, that they should notice what you say because you have an entitlement from a recent Near Death Experience or because angels have told you what "angelness" is all about, is to offer only a crutch for sale--a soul crutch--this is just more Old Age churchiness dressed up as "New Age." It's why I like "No Age."
So many one-legged souls are looking for crutches because they have merely "misplaced" a leg for a while, that soul pitches proliferate (under which you can see the profit motive shifting tellingly around) and they are springing forth wherever we look. Life itself nowadays seems to be pushing "soul." But soul has no need of a salesman. Soul is "bare-ass-naked-what-we-are-where-we-are" and has always been most us, can never belong to anyone else because it is the corner of the universe we alone cultivate--it's our mystery, our magic words said over whatever time and space are.
I have always loved the cantankerous cusses who just tell their story like it is--whatever the consequences--and don't feel the need to have their views validated by anybody else. I admire and aspire to that lofty calling. The fact that someone outside of myself experienced some revelation doesn't cut any ice with me. I have to process my own magic, live my own love of life, play my own tune--the one I hear in my head, not the one playing in the next guy's.
I was writing about consciousness before it became the popular sport that it is today. I know that not only is it a way of life--it is life--whether any given individual knows that or not, it is life for us all. It is just that sometimes we notice the magic and sometimes we don't, but the tree is still always there in the forest. It is what a friend of mine referred to in a play he wrote as "Essence." There is this authentic soul beckoning to us constantly, telling us just to be, because that's all the sacredness that's needed--that's all the beauty that the world has need of--and we have permission just to be it, because being it is to know the Great Spirit.
Nobody can sell soul or give soul or beg, borrow or steal soul from us because it simply is us. Nobody else's commercial canticle can grant us permission to live from there. We need only put one soul foot after another and--voila! Soul!
And that's The View from Where I Live!
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