The Perils of Climbing an Invisible Mountain

Guys: This is my most loved blog article. So I stole this one just like the others.

The Perils of Climbing an Invisible Mountain.

by Les Visible (lesvisible.blogspot.com)

One of the first things you notice about climbing the invisible mountain is how many people are telling you, "You can't do it." or "You can't do it that way." Never mind the fact that you are discussing an invisible mountain; they will appear from nowhere with less actual substance than the invisible mountain and they will delineate, with shapes and gestures formed out of nothing, how impossible it is for you to climb this mountain. They will appear outside of you and they will appear in your head. They will have the characteristics of 'hit and run' graffiti and banner advertising and there may be lights flashing and there may be drinks served.

Nothing serves to create an argument like a space in which no argument exists. As soon as peace is in operation, pundits and pedants from the far corners of the world will appear to dissect the unity and it won't be long before politicians and salesmen and arms merchants and armies arrive along with row after row of specialists with measuring devices and clipboards. Some will appear in glorious anonymity- their pontifications to present and some few intrepid souls will arrive as members of whatever is standing in for the Royal Academy these days and they will all, after much arcane movement and conferring among one another, announce that you cannot climb the invisible mountain.

Certainly the majority of these yahoos will be immediately identifiable as manifestations of your fears and unresolved subconscious bugaboos. All will have some portion of the monkey in the mirror persona where they mimic your thoughts and movements in order to encourage or seduce you into a dance where you forget who you are and become a monkey. The clever tricks are legion and you have to keep in mind who it is that is being crushed under the stationary foot when Shiva Nataraja raises the other one in dance.

It will not matter what century you find yourself in; what the fashions and technology may be. The forces at work to convince you- dissuade you- and prohibit you from climbing the invisible mountain; even to the extent of putting an electrified fence around it and posting armed guards on the perimeter will always be around. It's not their invisible mountain but what's that got to do with it? It says right here on this sheet of paper that they have the right and you'd be advised to understand that and get with the program.

Some folk are going to come around with an armload of books written by some dead guy and if you don't respond with the right amount of hushed awe that they demand as the representative of this dead guy; who may have been a yogi or a writer about yogis or a minister or some society member whose parents friends were in publishing or just some guy who kept journals; as I was saying, if you don't respond with the proper humility to their claim that you can't ever be as good as the dead guy, or that it's really the dead guy's mountain or you don't catch on to the fact that they're really putting themselves forward as the better mountaineer then… you are going to catch some shit, make no mistake.

The shifting serpent of opposition can manifest in a million forms, each of them designed to probe for a weakness or create a doubt; convince you that you started the conversation and/or argument. The idea of opposition is created in the idea that separation can exist in reality and not merely for the purposes of illustration as our world so perfectly illustrates. In fact, no one is arguing with you, they're arguing with themselves. It's like the crazy guy on the streets who starts talking to you as if you were part of some conversation. That conversation has been going on for many thousands of years and it has always been crazy. It seems sane when delivered by a guy in a toga, or a $2000.00 suit- depending on your era- but that is because you bought into the power of appearances insofar as they indicate value; when value is placed on the object as opposed to the subject… which is my way of checking to see if you are paying attention and using words for my own purposes as I do so.

Why do they do this? Why should they give a shit if you climb some invisible mountain or disappear up a rope in an Indian marketplace? Well, there are many, many reasons. One reason is that there are rules in place that got put there by somebody in order to guarantee a certain uniformity of behavior on the part of the collective body of humanity as they proceed on rails between the points of birth and death. Some people get appointed to the job of enforcing these rules and a whole lot of people appointed themselves. Some people being miserable, really do love company. Some people will tell you straight off that climbing invisible mountains is bad for business; can anything be worse than that? Some will tell you it's unpatriotic or blasphemous or whatever it is in respect of whatever they are shilling for. There are those who will resent your having said or done anything about invisible mountains without having first sought out their advice and underwriting for the whole affair. Somehow you have diminished the light they were shining upon themselves when you went and shined that light on the invisible mountain.

You could hurt yourself if you fell off that invisible mountain. You could hurt someone else. What happens if impressionable children see you doing it? It is always best not to let people know you are climbing an invisible mountain. It is better if they think you are doing something else and it's always a good idea to have a cover story and an outfit. It doesn't hinder your ability to climb an invisible mountain if you are wearing a name tag that indicates you are Bill, an inspector for the phone company. You can even be the guy who talks to invisible people on the street; climbing an invisible mountain at that point is no big deal.

The worst of the 'nyah… nyah… nyah…" group are the ones who actively seek to kill your faith in your ability to climb that mountain; those who work to convince you that that mountain is not there, those who seek to engage you in argument and thereby prove their own bankrupt estate, those who seek to kill your Love and enthusiasm for the 'only' game in town; and there is only one game. These folk are those who failed at finding the mountain; those who could not see the mountain, those who fear the mountain and hate you for reminding them about the mountain.

All you got to remember is that it's nobody's business whether you climb invisible mountains or not. I don't care what kind of a badge they show you or whose army they got positioned behind them. I don't care how they talk or what they say. I don't care who they quote and I especially don't care whether they feel diminished by the fact that they can't even climb up out of their own bullshit much less up the side of your invisible mountain.

It's not easy climbing invisible mountains. It all goes by feel and it takes a great degree of faith to hold on to what you can't see, especially after you get some distance into the air. You may well wonder what happens when you get to that point when you reach up and find nothing above you to grab a hold of. I'm not saying this happens. Every invisible mountain is not the same. They don't conform to some sort of invisible standard.

Some say the last thing you catch on your way up is a hand. I believe that's happened in a number of cases. Some say what happens is that you disappear; whether by gradations or all at once, I suppose either is possible. Some say a door opens and you step through; this might account for the testimony of those who say you disappear, because if they can't see the mountain it's probably likely they can't see the door either. All I can say is that I don't know- but that's not likely to have any effect on whether I climb that mountain or not.

Whether one should climb that mountain or not is a personal affair; you'll hear there is no mountain. You'll hear you can only climb it once you have decided against climbing it. You'll hear a thousand farts in a windstorm and be glad that the wind was there.

Plagiarized blog article # 2

By Les Visible

I notice old people, how they get around and what seems to occupy their minds. What I notice even more are the way young people consider old people, the way they often treat them, as if by some magical event they will never be an old person.

People develop a style of living to which they become attached. They don’t want to give it up. I’ve heard people say, “Well, if I can’t live the way I want to then I don’t want to live at all.” Things we can easily get away with when we are young become increasingly difficult to maintain as time moves on.

People eat a lot of meat. Your digestive system throws up a lot of mucus to deal with it. Maybe you have noticed this after eating a steak. Because of poor dietary choice people create a swamp in their bodies. Things breed in the swamp. So you get people hacking into their hands as soon as the weather changes. The aging process accelerates.

The main reason that people get obese is from drinking soda. More than anything else it is your Big Gulp pit stops that give you the wide load. People don’t make that association. Some of them think diet soda is the answer. I’m not going to deal with aspartame here. You can find out the ugly details on your own.

Designer coffee is the rage now; Coffee Anan double dense fruit surprise or what have you. What coffee does is fire your adrenals. It’s like starting your car over and over until you might even burn it out. Nobody think about this. No doubt there was an article recently about how coffee reduces heart attacks or improves you sex life. Actually it radically decreases sexual function at a certain point, as do cigarettes.

“I did it my way.” seems to be the theme these days. Your body is like a car. A new car can take a lot of abuse. The one thing most important in car maintenance is changing the oil. Impurities have the same effect on you that they have on a car. It’s a simple thing to keep your car running well. If you keep pouring bad gas into it; if you don’t flush it out and pay attention then you need to go to the mechanics.

I watch spiritual teachers. What is it that they do differently? One of the things is that they eat very little and not very often. This would of itself provide a healthy and long life. What’s the point of working yourself to death while consuming bad fuel so that you can live with chronic health concerns in your golden years?

I hesitate to use the word God sometimes because of all the bad associations religion has placed into intelligent minds. Let us think rather of an all embracing consciousness that is in everything and that it is possible, by letting go of the individual identity, to achieve a cosmic identity by uniting with it. This essence, this all pervading awareness is closer to you, at all times, than you imagine. Sometimes you may be closer to it and you notice something. Other times you do not but it is still there. You wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t alive inside you. It is the very life you live. It is in your mind and intimately aware of your thoughts.

If you were to assume what I say is true; you don’t need any facts to back it up… if you would just assume this and remind yourself of it constantly a dialogue would ensue. Like priming a pump, you get no water at first. If you talk to yourself in the mirror for awhile you come to notice at a certain point that someone is looking back at you and listening. You can talk yourself into anything. You have, you do.

I have said before that Heaven is not up in the sky. It begins where your feet touch the Earth. You don’t go anywhere when you appear to die. You go where you are. You are in Heaven already or you are not. You could be there quite soon actually. It’s a matter of aspiration. You already aspire to things and there you are. There isn’t anything here that is worth having except peace of mind. Out of the tranquility of merger with the one comes the magical vision of a new and shining world. We cheapen our vision by the quality of our desire. Some fires put out more smoke than others. It depends on the fuel.

Besides a rigidity of mind and a tighter circle of patterned recurrence, old people can count on a number of problems that affect nearly everyone. One of these things is the loss of range of motion. This is where a dance of some sort comes in. Daily limbering will add years of effective life. Even if you have lost considerable range of motion you can get a good deal of it back. The defeat in the mind from the memory of the life that led us to the point of despairing in our own efforts is what resists our capacity to renew.

The lure of cheap food and entertainments coupled with the innate laziness of a person, who is planning to change tomorrow, have never been more ubiquitous. It all hurts. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

It is the pain we experience from ignorant desire that drives us to freedom eventually. Eventually, nothing is better than wanting nothing. There are hidden springs in the human system that pours forth incredible states of being. They can be tapped. You might have to dig out the well. You might have to dig. Eventually you will. Eventually the drive for freedom becomes everything. Eventually you can’t take the smoke and the noise any more. I’m not inferring that you can’t live in it and be out of it. These days sanctuary is a hard discovery.

I know these things because of my mistakes. I have made a lot of mistakes. Sorting out what doesn’t work often reveals what does. How often do you catch yourself in the midst of your life and ask, “What am I doing?” Everything we do leads to the specific resolution of what we do. Ignoring it, mocking it, disputing it, these don’t affect it. It is inexorable.

For a legitimate system of escape go to

BOTA

It takes years but it will delight those so inclined. Tai Chi is easily learned and satisfying beyond what you might imagine. It’s much more user friendly than yoga. Liberal macrobiotics is a fabulous health choice. It takes ten days for your taste buds to change. Remember this before you give up. A constant awareness that you are accompanied opens an internal phone line. The answers are all there to be had. It’s the motivation that is lacking. It is peculiar that people would prefer a state of bondage over the promise of freedom but so they do.

We don’t see things as they are. We see them through colored lenses. The whole of life is no more than a game of hide and seek. It brings me back to that Biblical phrase, “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things will be added unto you.” People don’t’ seem to get that. If you find the source, the cornucopia appears. You literally get it all. It isn’t necessary to see this in a religious sense. See it as a practical application of a universal truth. These spiritual teachers aren’t trying to get you to the dinner table with Pat Robertson. They just want you to grasp certain truths that will grant you the keys to the kingdom. All manner of worlds overlap here.

Some burn with an intensity for a love affair with the divine. Some dispassionately seek it through intellectual inquiry. Some discover it through the practice of particular rituals. That it has been discovered we know. We have the life examples of these people. Don’t say there isn’t anything out there, or in there, until you have looked; until you have looked as hard as you can. Or you can just remember that it fills and surrounds you all the time. It doesn’t have to be discovered. It has always been there. Practice its presence and it will reveal itself.

Looking for Happiness?

Everyone is convinced that they know what happiness is all about. They've felt it, and they know exactly what they want. And it is also a fact that no two people have the exact same ideas about what constitutes happiness. Here is an excerpt from a blog article I love:

"For those who are of and in this world there is one set of priorities and for those who are passing through it there is another. The hard men and women of the world cannot be convinced of anything but that the world must be shaped according to their needs. You cross them at your peril. Just as one who is caught up in the thrall of a nightmare will cry out and lash about them; so will those caught up in the dreams of merchants and banks and firms lash out from the fear of loss.

Some say the world is shit and you should have nothing to do with it. Some say we are all sinful. Some say good and evil are just constructs of the mind. Some say this and some say that. Some say you must surrender and some say you must strive. Whatever they say, here you are. So, where are you going and what do you want?

There are differences between saints and prophets and sages and mystics, just as there are between burglars and armed robbers and murderers; between wholesale and retail and second hand. Those who know very little, if anything, about these things believe that they are in a position to define and judge them. Often the hard men and women of the world point to those who would point the way ‘out’ and measure their behavior against standards of conformity; against dogma and doctrine and whatever. If they understood such things they would have little to say. They sneer at these things because the message in them compromises their justifications for the things they do. They are exposed by these things, so they make the truth an outlaw. They incite mobs and manufacture laws. All of what they do is to insure their own profit. The truth is your enemy if you are the enemy of truth.

So many systems of government and commerce have evolved out of the efforts of those who have engineered them for their own profit and sometimes to improve conditions for everyone. We all need to eat and somehow we need to get to the food and all of the things that contribute to the amenities of existence; therefore the markets and all of the shake and bake industries of form making and all of the industries that work within the many operations that spin in the realm of temporary wonder.

We fool ourselves and we fool each other for many different reasons that all have to do with what we think we want and the possibility that someone may keep us from it or get there before we do or take it away from us. The urgency and impatience of life are actual forces just like the invisible entities that haunt the highways and feed on the accidents, that haunt the battlefields and feed on the suffering and the blood, like the spirits in the bars that live in the bottles and the minds of the drunks.

We are not who we think we are and things are not what we think they are and we will suffer for just as long as it takes us to find that out."

Taken from http://lesvisible.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-we-fool-ourselves.html