NOAH (KNOWING)

New Project: NOAH (KNOWING)

WAVES

Time drifts away,
as mist fades on the mountain.
The world itself is hardly more substantial.
The living water springing
from life’s fountain runs dry,
leaving discarded bones
bleaching in the sun.

Molecules of arms and legs and brain
are rebels all and would be free again
and the whole pageant of our days and hours
runs only till we lose our feeble powers.

We are children playing out our days
with sandcastles and fantasies
until the turning of the tide slides in to erase
what we have worked so hard to raise,
struggled to protect and called our own –
fragments of things, at very best on loan.

Upward our thoughts might usefully aspire;
nothing down here needs building any higher.

Deal justly with your neighbour
and make of him your friend
and, in your inner garden, labour
until you reach your end.

NEW PROJECT "WHAT TRAIN ARE YOU ON?"

“PROJECT” Etymology: “throwing something in front”. Like throwing a marker in the sand.

The idea is setting a goal and working towards it. Animals don’t normally do this consciously.  Humans do.

1.  To do it, you need to have a goal. And you need to know  what it is.
2.  You also need to follow steps which lead to that goal and not away from it to somewhere else.

And if you don’t (or maybe can’t) choose destinations, you may be drawn along by the whims of ever-changing desires. Or blown along by the winds of karma or the will of others.

The “train journey” is a metaphor. The destination is the goal. The stations you pass through are the necessary route to your goal.

Winning the Lottery is a good example of trains and stations. “If you’re not in, you can’t win”, is the slogan.

That is, you have to buy a ticket to get on the train. But you have to buy the winning ticket to get on the right train and win.

You can have many, many on-going goals, short term and long term. Tea at three. A week-end in Paris. Getting a degree. Getting married. Having a family. Retiring to Chiengmai. Becoming a millionaire. Winning Wimbledon.

But you won’t win Wimbledon by watching tennis from an armchair. It’s the wrong ticket. Think of all those hours of practise, the winners put in.

But for humans, all our many goals are temporary. They are not destinations in their own right. Achieve them or not, they, too, are stations we pass through.

These “destinations” all turn out to be stations on the real train journey for all of us. Our journey through Life. So  “What train are you on?”

This journey does have its destination, irrespective of the intermediary stations. If you get on the train at Birth, all stations lead to Death.

If you can read this, you did get on that train. This time round.

Actually, it is possible to choose not to get on at Birth. But, having got on, it is not possible to choose not to end up at Death.

This time round.

This is where our Projects came in. This Week’s Project began for us, it seems, on the 12^th of February 1986. It was Communication.

The intention was to encourage a happy, harmless and profitable Life, which would unravel real Truth and not end up just in Death.

There have been quite a few sharers in our Projects over the years and some seem have fallen by the wayside. They chug along, in various degrees of dissatisfaction, to the unavoidable loss of all those things that they have accumulated by intention or default. Death.

But there is an alternative and there has always been. The Pursuit of Truth, honestly practiced, reveals the existence of a train running parallel to the train of Life and Death.

The Train to the Deathless.

There are stations too on the track from Life to Death, which interconnect with the track to the Deathless. If one is aware of these, one can cross the platform and change trains at those stations.

The most important one is Seeing the whole and real Truth and the unsatisfactoriness of the conventional train one has been travelling on for so very long. If Seeing is 100%, one can spontaneously change trains forever.

Such a sudden realisation and total change of direction is very rare.

Subsidiary stations offer, as it were, short-term tickets to ride on Deathlessness and experience a more gradual acclimatisation.

The key one is Ethics.

Since Ethics is in tune with the Centre out of which all beings came, it means that thoughts, words and actions based on Ethics are not hostile towards any of those beings. And they are in harmony with Nature, in which all beings have their existence.

One can also obtain a temporary ticket on the basis of keeping Precepts or Commandments. But these depend on learning and knowledge and determination. They are therefore second-hand. They may be erroneous. Whereas Seeing is immediate, first-hand and effortless.

What is on your plate? Even language itself is unnecessary. Just look!

What train are you on? Intentionally or otherwise. Just look.

Print out available HERE

A FORK IN THE ROAD...

FOUR STAGES of Man - FINAL COMMENT

Ethics is the final preliminary to the human destiny stage.

Of itself, it can take a human all the way to freedom from suffering.

One step further is Awakening.

The tentacle, emptied of Ego viewpoints, is just an eye for the Centre itself. The function of the tentacle is, therefore, just to see accurately, so that the Centre sees accurately. It is then the Centre, with all its resources, that responds, not the tentacle.

Obviously if the tentacle is a doctor and the seeing is a road accident, he will respond with his individual skills, too.

But for the seeing of major expanses of evil and suffering, which can cause even the most able and compassionate man to lose heart (There’s nothing I can do! or even Nothing can be done!), accurate seeing is all that is required. The resources of the Centre respond. The burden of responsibility is removed from the individual tentacle.

The final, and intended, stage of human development is reached.

Q. And what about the Egoistic knowledge of outside that we have relied upon for so long for our responses to the world outside?

A. It is replaced by conscience = knowing from within (i.e. from the Centre itself) e.g. What is on your plate?

THE FOURTH STAGE

The Second Stage is, like the caterpillar's.  Eating. Eating. Physical and mental food. To make the body healthy and strong and the mind well-informed and ready for

The Third Stage. Digestion. With the body healthy and the mind fully fed (no more experience or information needed), so that the simple but profound Truth about everything dawns in

The Fourth Stage. The tentacle AWAKES!

STAGE ONE: EGG (NOT BIOLOGICAL)

BUT SIMILAR to the first stage Lepidoptera insects go through. Appearing out of not-knowing-where-from as an

                                           egg,

and on its way, through a complicated metamorphosis, to its unimaginable DESTINY:

                                                 a BUTTERFLY!         

AND MAN? Appearing out of not-knowing-where-from as an 

egg,

and on its way, through a complicated metamorphosis,

  to its unimaginable DESTINY as

 ?

                                                                                        NO!

THE FOUR STAGES OF MAN

Shakespeare’s version, the Seven Ages of Man, is the biological version of the Stages of Man,

        A Man's Life

        decaying 

        in Seven Ages.

        A story of flesh and bones.

        Dressed up,

        playing

        imaginary roles,

        on imaginary stages.

        It never gets beyond

        epitaphs on tombstones.

PRELUDE TO NEXT PROJECT

Prelude:

      SEVEN AGES OF MAN

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Monologue from William Shakespeare's As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII.

He died aged 52 following a drinking binge, but he got no further than his destination, a tombstone in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, which sums up the short-sightedness of his life’s achievements.

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forebeare

To digg the dust enclosed heare;

Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
 

NEW PROJECT: THE FOUR STAGES OF MAN

EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOUR

   

  It matters not how strait the gate, 

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate, 

  I am the captain of my soul. 

As with so many things, it is the ego that gets in the way of exemplary behaviour. Non-exemplary behaviour involves putting oneself first without having a good reason to do so. This can be wilful - people stealing or deliberately choosing the biggest portion. Or it can be unconscious or unintentional - people being loud without consideration for others on the train.

It is the tentacle not realising it is part of the Centre. If one is aware of the connection, then exemplary behaviour is automatic - it doesn’t require deliberation, just as the different parts of the body automatically work together for the common good.

The KARMA PROJECT showed it can be done. Take over the causes and the effects take care of themselves (Diet and lose weight?)
The current PROJECT, EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOUR, shows what should be done in order to be happy and help others be happy.
The next project indicates the route to humanity's destiny.      -Gnome

PRELUDE TO NEXT PROJECT: SEVEN AGES OF MAN