....when the man woke blindfolded and chained his hearing was acute.
He could hear the breathing of another.
He said "Who is there?" "I can hear you breath across this room we are in."
An answer came in broken English, "I am your guard and keeper in my home with my brothers."
Through broken teeth the prisoner spat, "What kind of host are you not to give me water?"
The guard replied, "The one who holds a gun on you and thinks of all the children you have shot and bombed in my land."
"Do you hate me then for what others have done?' dribbled out of the prisoners mouth. "Give your guest food and water for I am hungry and thirsty and my head hurts from your rifle butt."
"I will waste no food or water on you for you will be hanged soon and if they do not do that I will cut off your head myself very slowly for I hate you that much."
The prisoner was quiet for a moment then replied "Your words come out of your mouth into the air and are soon blown away in the wind, ... let your acts speak to God and give your guest food and water."
"I will let my acts speak for themselves then and beat you some more if you like?" Said the guard with shuffling feet heard by the prisoner and prompted the quick reply...
"So be it! ... when you are done we will both thank Allah, you for being given a chance to act in his name and get rid of your hate and I to have been able to be here so you can love man again... an instrument of The Most High! and then you will feed me and give me water!"
Hearing these words the guard was taken by the holy spirit, unlocking the bonds from the prisoner and taking off the blindfold he reached into his knapsack and produced some water in a plastic bottle and a small loaf of bread which without a word he placed in front of the prisoner and stepped back from him to stare intently at him with tears in his eyes.
The prisoner drank and ate in silence despite the pain of open tooth nerves getting every crumb and drop of water down his throat just as the door opened and in came two other armed and uniformed men and in seeing the guard with head bowed in tears and the prisoner free immediately raised there guns and shot the prisoner and the guard in anger for setting him free.
....when the man woke blindfolded and chained his hearing was acute.
He could hear the breathing of another.
He said "Who is there?" "I can hear you breath across this room we are in."
An answer came in broken English, "I am your guard and keeper in my home with my brothers."
Through broken teeth the prisoner spat, "What kind of host are you not to give me water?"
The guard replied, "The one who holds a gun on you and thinks of all the children you have shot and bombed in my land."
"Do you hate me then for what others have done?' dribbled out of the prisoners mouth. "Give your guest food and water for I am hungry and thirsty and my head hurts from your rifle butt."
"I will waste no food or water on you for you will be hanged soon and if they do not do that I will cut off your head myself very slowly for I hate you that much."
The prisoner was quiet for a moment then replied "Your words come out of your mouth into the air and are soon blown away in the wind, ... let your acts speak to God and give your guest food and water."
"I will let my acts speak for themselves then and beat you some more if you like?" Said the guard with shuffling feet heard by the prisoner and prompted the quick reply...
"So be it! ... when you are done we will both thank Allah, you for being given a chance to act in his name and get rid of your hate and I to have been able to be here so you can love man again... an instrument of The Most High! and then you will feed me and give me water!"
Hearing these words the guard was taken by the holy spirit, unlocking the bonds from the prisoner and taking off the blindfold he reached into his knapsack and produced some water in a plastic bottle and a small loaf of bread which without a word he placed in front of the prisoner and stepped back from him to stare intently at him with tears in his eyes.
The prisoner drank and ate in silence despite the pain of open tooth nerves getting every crumb and drop of water down his throat just as the door opened and in came two other armed and uniformed men and in seeing the guard with head bowed in tears and the prisoner free immediately raised there guns and shot the prisoner and the guard in anger for setting him free.
After they died, they both met in heaven.
The end.
Truely soulful people can meet in the heaven of the mind (metaphysical/spiritual)before the actual demise of the mind/body organism(physical/material), therein all are equal in the eye of God.
No they or we or me, I or they or them. no more seperation et al.
Hope you don't mind if I respond with an excerpt from my webpage...
You probably consider yourself to be a single being, which is why you call yourself 'I' instead of 'we'. Your body; however, is a plurality - a composite of billions of individual elements or fundamental particles, each with its own set of properties. Each basic particle pre-existed your birth and will ultimately survive your demise. Each has its own unique history, a separate location and physical domain. Indeed, if the axiom of identity is valid, then one existence will always have a single set of experiences and a collection of existences will always have individual sets of experience equal to the number of elements in the set. Logically this presents a conundrum. How can you be a single existence if that physical manifestation which you consider to be 'yourself' is composed of multiple existences?
In order to reconcile this disparity, scholarly pundits with alphabet soup after their names profess that if you toss just the right combination of terrestrial ingredients into a primordial cauldron and stir it really, really hard for a very long time, you can produce a composite that thinks, propagates and experiences a unique existence as a single identity. That may sound silly (I call it the Pinocchio hypothesis) but which lowly layman in his right mind would dare contradict an entire horde of scholarly pundits, especially when they are immersed in alphabet soup. So, with an eye of newt and wing of bat, a pinch of this and a dash of that the pundits dub this egregious departure from logic the 'phenomenon of emergent properties' and they credit it with the creation of all life on Earth. Regrettably, they seem unable to fully explain the mechanics of this miraculous process that transforms 8x10^27 atoms into a single existence with an individual identity.
Hogwarts! If this is science, then Harry Potter is the next Isaac Newton.
The hierarchies of complex systems which arise from a multitude of relatively simple interactions - emergent properties - are not the properties or qualities of an existence. They are not qualities at all; they are collective behaviors that occur within a group of elements under given conditions. Composites occur when multiple individual existences are brought into proximity to one another. If you believe you are the corporal product of emergent properties then you are claiming you are an occurrence, not an existence. I have a major problem with that reasoning.
So what does this mean?
To quote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous character Sherlock Holmes in Chapter 6 of 'The Sign of Four',"…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Nice post, hogwarts and all.
Look in vain for "I": ~ Roger Paul Droit
It's one of the terms you employ most frequently. During the day, the word "I" crops up in nearly all your sentences. Since your most tender childhood you have ceased referring to yourself by your own first name. "I" has become the word by which you express your desires, disappointments, projects, hopes, acts of all kinds, physical sensations, illnesses, pleasures, plans, resentment, tenderness, your weakness for vanilla and your aversion to fennel. For a long, long time you have linked this tiny word to your multifarious mental states. It is intimately involved in your feelings and your memories. Apparently, nothing is possible without it. It is there in all your stories and all your judgements. Not a single decision, not the slightest rumination escapes it.
The curious thing is, everyone uses the same word. The most irreducible intimacy, the most singular existence, for each one of us, is linked to a word that we neither chose nor coined, and that everyone else employs in exactly the same way. A pronoun in the language. There's nothing less personal than this "personal" pronoun. The particular existence it refers to remains, linguistically speaking, completely interchangeable. It could be anyone who says "I'm happy" or "I'm sad." All of us, in all our difference, refer to ourselves by exactly the same word as everyone else. A most paradoxical situation. But you don't think about it, and nor does anyone else, of course. You have enough to do without worrying your head about questions of that order. And yet, try to pin down this "I." Does it exist? How can you find it? What does it look like? If you apply yourself to asking these questions, and trying to resolve them, you'll find that this "I" is neither simple to localize nor to authenticate.
This is not a brief experiment, whose limits are easy to circumscribe. It can come to seem, on the contrary, like a long pursuit. You need time, different occasions, a certain application, and stubbornness. So where is this blindingly obvious "I?" You will seek for a long time, in different places and under different aspects. And there is a strong chance that, at the end of it all, you'll return somewhat at a loss. Which is where things start to get interesting. Among the avenues of inquiry you might like to pursue, it's worth remembering the existence of the body. Is not this "I," which is both individual and yet assimilable to others, in fact identical with the body that houses it, with its habits, its weaknesses, its vulnerabilities and its particularities? But there's no trace of an "I" in your body. Not one of your cells lives longer than ten years. No part of your body has persisted unchanged. So what will you address as "I?" The form? The ensemble? The general organization? There remains, famously, the phenomenon of thought. All may change, but not your memories, not your sense of remaining unchanged despite corporeal alterations. But even here, you cannot put your finger on an "I." All you will ever discover are thoughts, sequences of thoughts, memories, associations of ideas, desires-all of them pressed into service by what you call your "I."
To all these sensations, to all these mental events, the "I" seems to provide a common denominator. But it neither supports nor drives them. It merely imparts to them something like a family resemblance, a shared aspect to what are very diverse notions and feelings-something like a color or an odor. A way of seeming, a style. Nothing more. "I" is not a someone or a something. And yet neither is it just a word. It must be a refrain of the self, a secondary quality, at one removed.
If you manage to carry the experiment thus far, you will need to know what to do about this sensation. What impact will this impossible discovery about your "I" have upon your existence? How will you cope once your "I" has gone missing?
Meditation is not what you think. (literally) (That's all: no-mind.)
Naturally, a quietus ensues, for no-mind dissolves the detection of boundaries; all as expected; no big deal but for health and restoration. Not a vision into elsewhere.
Meditation is not what you think. (literally) (That's all: no-mind.)
Naturally, a quietus ensues, for no-mind dissolves the detection of boundaries; all as expected; no big deal but for health and restoration. Not a vision into elsewhere.
HEeeeee eeeee heheeheeehhheeeee heeeeheeee g1 ~ graham
Meditation is not what you think. (literally) (That's all: no-mind.)
Naturally, a quietus ensues, for no-mind dissolves the detection of boundaries; all as expected; no big deal but for health and restoration. Not a vision into elsewhere.
Neti-Neti, Meditation is the absolution of all thought. It is a transpersonal experience, except the flesh and blood "I"( a misnomer anyway) can't tag along.
Linear Mode
