So the Dalai Lama Walks into a Bar…

I have days when a therapist would say that I’m experiencing depersonalization or derealization; ascetics would say I’m meditative or contemplative, Elijah in his mountain hideout.   My office window is both the literal and metaphoric location for this today: inside looking out over the park the street, the sidewalk, all the people cars kids birds.  Not participating, just observing.

It’s as if I’m pushing aside the curtain of the reality in front of me (if any of you are able to or have done so in the past, please don’t call in a pink slip here, k?) because I feel like there is something deeper going on, something very un-Oz behind the curtain. Perhaps it’s the opposite of mental unhealth in that I’m connecting to humanity and creation.   Finally.  Instead of just plowing through the day, I’m stopping and smelling roses and looking/smiling at people and holding gazes as we pass.

This is what it is: stepping into the world that I am one with and I want to share in the beauty and pain and truth.

I don’t usually agree with Plato, but maybe this is one of those times…looking further to find the True Reality where everything exists as it is, in the raw. Colors are brighter because they’re true, people are truth because there is something they are all saying and seeking and yearning for, because we are all connected to something regardless. Connected for many reasons but connected in such a way that each person is an opening to another reality and another learning. We’re all in this together, I guess, and I feel that.  We all suffer and seek and rejoice and that’s beautiful.

This moves me; I feel this beauty and this truth in my bones.  It is not meaning-making, but is, Plato might say, The Meaning.  A Meaning.  Shelley said it pretty well, too:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need know.'

Or this:  the Dalai Lama walks into a pub and asks to put an order in. Bartender says: what do you want?  Dalai Lama says, pizza, one with everything.

So this is pretty abstract, just a lot of thinkin’, existential detecting.  Your thoughts?

Ah, Misogyny…

Chivalry may be in its final, arrogant death throes, but misogyny is still alive and well here.