If You Want to be Free

If you want to be free,
Get to know your real self.
It has no form, no appearance,
No root, no basis, no abode,
But is lively and buoyant.
It responds with versatile facility,
But its function cannot be located.
Therefore when you look for it,
You become further from it;
When you seek it,
You turn away from it all the more.
- Linji

Contextual Musing X

Addiction to meaning and our flight from meaninglessness often require that we worship at the altar of singular truth; a deity which causes, at best, the destruction of community, and at worst, violence, hatred and death. How long will it take before we accept the notion that “truth” is subjective (an understanding directly related to our human condition), and refuse to impose empty structure on Children of God?

Musing and Photo by J. David Zacko-Smith

Inspired by a recent conversation with Ann Preston, and the writing of Ernest Becker.

Contextual Musing IX

Someday we’ll discover that everything we sought to define really needed no help creating, organizing or expressing itself . . . and that the only thing we’ve managed to create is unnecessary complexity.

~ J. David Zacko-Smith, September 14, 2008

Hiatus

I've been busy working on an article and book chapter for publishing, and thus I'm afraid my blogging here has suffered. I hope to get back in the swing of things sometime soon!

Fireworks

Gosh, it's been a long time since I posted to CM - Professional Edition. I took a nice long blogging vacation, and I have been writing so much in my "real life" that I haven't had time to compose a single new musing! A recent experience (and meeting) has made me contemplate many of the people and things that have come into my life through the years, and I have fully begun to appreciate the fact that I am truly drawn to people, things and experiences that are "out of the ordinary" and perhaps even a little quirky. I met a guy not too long ago who is amazingly brilliant, very sexy, and highly accomplished, yet able to be totally silly and flirty and fun - and I love that combination! So, I think I'll muse using Jack Kerouac, and say...

The only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,
mad to be saved, desirous of everything at
the same time, the ones who never yawn or
say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn,
burn like fabulolus yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars . . .

This one's for you Chris G. in Portland!

Contextual Musing VIII

If you ask enough questions you will arrive at the truth of the matter. Questions murder assumption and illusion, so you can see what’s real. No one and nothing is spared. Questions are blind. Questions are relentless. When our questioning leads us to understand that nothing is what it seems, we arrive at the only place where faith matters; blind belief either enables us to find the point of our existence, or, through it’s absence, shows the pointlessness of everything we know to be real.

~ J. David Zacko-Smith, Contextual Musings, 2007

Luke 11:19

My children -- what is it you fear that you run so far and so fast, that you bury yourself in the drama of others and the distractions of a post-modern age fraught with both trauma and beauty (which are, to those that know, one in the same thing)?

How can you know truth if you do not live it, see it, smell it, taste it, and touch it? How can you know what makes the world rich? How can you find truth if you spend all of your time and energy escaping from the very experiences that will lead you to it?

Truth can not be found in singularity, only in silent union.

The answers you seek (and this seeking is, my friends, the reason for your existence, and the reason for your tribulations) are not found in any place "out there", but they are found somewhere that I suspect is the most foreign and exotic location of all to you, deep down in the depths of your self.

If you do not know your essence, you know nothing. You most certainly do not know God.

And I say unto you, ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

Run and we shall perish.

~ J. David Zacko-Smith, Contextual Musings, 2006