AVANT SOUL

Folks who don't breathe, who have lost their sense of humor, tend to be the same folks who clench their tightened jaw, or their arses. Assholes hold their ground and refuse to let in new understanding or new mystery. Why we elect them is a great mystery as well.

That's why they're assholes, not only because they're greedy and immovable, but because their feet are not laughing. They've lost their ability to see that we share a common ground of nourishment and understanding. The reoccurring theme song of the asshole is, "This earth is mine, and You Can't Have It!" Never mind that we're all spinning around the same blazing sun which will someday incinerate us all.

There's nothing terribly funny about a hardass. Sometimes we must set out a "metaphysical whoopee cushion," if only so that the old fart loses that aura of insufferable, pretentious dignity, and *we* get a chance to BREATHE. The only thing worse than deadly seriousness is more deadly seriousness. You old fart!

To change your breathing, remember the deep-cored, bellied connection with orgasm, with joy, with ecstasy, with moments when you're so connected to your breath that you momentarily forget who you are: A runner surging for breath after cutting through the rope at an Ironman Triathlon World Championship.

Or the Sarah Hughes of this world, women athletes whose risk-taking & athleticism transcend any category of "female Olympic ice-skating champion" to become seemingly unlimited by physical confines. Consider the transcendent musician so "one with his instrument" that awareness is suspended beyond time — and we as listeners glimpse something intangible yet supreme, forgetting — as a treat — that we are placed within very temporal bodies. The most profound fact about mortality is that it isn't lasting. God says, "I've got a treat for you! ... It's truly a temporary situation, yet you're going to come to appreciate it for its transcendent beauty."

And what extraordinary bodies they are. A paradise for experience, youth, age, and the secrets of removing all obstacles.

Here is paradox: The body is transported through breath, focus, and awareness to go beyond focus. The mind is transcended through perfect attention to supersede even the limits of attention. Yet how can we "go beyond" the limitations of the mental? It's the question which art and ecstasy seek to answer, in treatment with the sublime. In the midst of the most miraculous and magnificent aspects of Creation, we are surrounded by assholes.

The being is lifted beyond beingness. Consciousness can move and go past effort into states better defined by what is expansive than by what is definable. Yes, your mind is sometimes like a fox in a hen house, but it really is a vegetarian. Leave those chickens of distraction alone. It takes practice, for inevitably the fox returns to the hen house. But with practice, you can move beyond the essential nature of agreement, the qualities you've agreed to within your basic character. Just because you've always complied does not mean you have to continue to agree. The secret sometimes involves knowing when to give resistance, and more often, when to make the most lasting and meaningful change, silently, within yourself.

Doorway of Understanding

First, it's a question of being in or out of shape. Then, it's an answer to being in, or out of shape.

Finally, for the advanced boys and girls, it's seeing the life-force, soul, or spirit behind the scenes, the fluid consciousness itself, which has no shape at all.

At that point, if you're not careful, the men in their white coats arrive to take you away, or they build a silly ashram around you and hang too many flowers around your neck. It's best not to lose your sense of humor if you happen to become more awakened. Because unless you "get thee to a nunnery," retreat to a monastery, or isolate yourself from the world, you must both continually interact with the best this dimension has to offer, as well as learn to navigate around its succubae, those who drain you of your life-force.

The simplest things remain the hardest things. To eat. To be aware of nourishment and why you are eating. To even know – and to be calm and serene enough TO SEE – who, or what, it is that you are chewing —

Yes, chewing through life, chewing through your meals, gulping through your moments and utilizing food as a drug. The most basic means through which you absorb food are these basic realizations: Food represents how you feel comforted; food represents how skillfully or recklessly how manage your assimilation; and food is a metaphor for nourishment, reflecting how "loved or unloved" is your daily allowance.

It's no wonder that Americans are so obese, because they're utterly consumed with needing to feel full from an overwhelming sense of spiritual inadequacy. Meanwhile, bomb the Saudis! Tear down the forests! Rape, pillage and pummell the earth! Appoint Gale Norton to the Department of the Interior, to sell and to hand out to industrialists our precious wilderness and national resources — which were intended to be preserved.

After all, man (or woman) is king (or goddess bitch), and what better way to show his authority than to abuse his power, think only of his own comforts, and make everyone else miserable! Pass the caviar, and if you're a woman into equal rights like Gale, you can act as stupidly, as greedily, and without any conscience, selling out just like the worst of the men.

How simple and how hard it is, that your "eating of life" perpetuates the circle of awareness which defines and brings into actual form your "emotional metabolism." Remember shape? Substance and emotion feed off and into one another, until you become the solid body of that which you have eaten or have felt. Emotions have "taken on" a flesh, a physicality, a substance brought about by feeling. How you express who you are is the nourishment for the shape of your entire being.

Let your food move more towards expansive joy and less towards the exclusiveness of righteous outrage.

Not that you should be falsely forgiving of injustice, but take care that whatever causes you indigestion, you do not ingest twice, or even thrice. In other words, move towards elixir, and exercise caution in becoming venomous against the poison. What's difficult here is that if you become indignant and desire to fiercely eradicate evil, you can become as piggy and self-righteous as the big (or little) buggers you seek to snub out.

The key here isn't to out-snob a snob, but rather to set an example through upliftment and being inclusive. This is especially difficult if you are surrounded by greedy pigs.

It's more than a case of "pearls before swine." To quote a crazy Zen sage, it is sometimes a case of "pearls before cross-eyed raccoons." Who can truly appreciate what you have to give and, likewise return and magnify your growth and integration?

If you're truly an insecure glutton, a glutton for food or a glutton for possessions, can you ever be full? If material things make you feel secure, what safety is there, here, at this place and time? Meanwhile, stuff your face! – Or surround yourself with another gadget that is somehow supposed to replace intimacy.

If we can't take it with us, we're left with the fulfillment we've become. Life is more than a meal of food; it's a meal as well as an offering of energy. How you feed others is a metaphor for how you nourish yourself.

Every religion says that their sacred leaders have the answers, that their authorities are the insurance brokers between you and God. This works for a surprising number of followers. Should you believe this, read no further.

Never mind that most of the priests, rabbis, deacons and reverends are people just like you and me, and when they remove their fancy robes and pious attitudes, they still answer to the same Eternal Source that you and I answer to. They have merely established that they're more qualified to answer to the Eternal on your behalf than you are. It's their profession. Are they more qualified? God only knows.

The question of BELIEF and spiritual authority is too lengthy, too pedantic a topic to be useful in this tome about removing all obstacles. The most serious obstacles which each of us faces on a daily basis involves how to live our lives meaningfully when we are sometimes surrounded by assholes. As always, the key here is to remember that the simplest things are the hardest things.

To breathe.
To eat.

To think.
To be of service,

To make a difference.

How it is that you will be remembered?

What (or who) do you embrace?

The hardest things are the simplest.

To move, or to be static.

To take, or to be generous.

To be lavish, or to give to those who can best receive and appreciate (hopefully but not always returning) what you have to give.

Being in physical form remains one of the simplest, yet hardest, tasks. To remain youthful and creative even as bodies harden and muscles get strong, then finally weaken and actually atrophy. As we age, our soul — our "inside" — can remain youthful. We either suffocate or let breathe the child inside, the spirit which has no age, yet which still maintains our ultimate responsibility.

We answer from within, not from without.

We respond as we sing and as we answer joyfully! (Responding, corresponding & being responsible)

To see what is eternal, and to visualize that which shall pass, and is temporal.

To grasp what makes a difference and what is merely indifference.

Time collapses and as you become more inflexible and rigid, you age. That which is eternal is not contained by the body and moves adroitly beyond the confines of structural limitations. The eternal is momentarily contained in lasting music, timeless thought, and immortal poetry. Whenever you express joy and gratitude, you move beyond the painful constraints imposed by the very nature of matter to settle in and "set in a rut."

What, then, is the likely conclusion to dealing with assholes? The key is to carefully evaluate their role in your immediate life. If you have elected them to office, and are politically motivated towards meaningful social change, then seek to kick out the buzzards! It isn't necessary to get involved in the political process on the national or global level per se, but in those local causes which personally activate your passion. Seek to implement change within your immediate environment:

1) Within your own town or city.
2) Within your own neighborhood.
3) Within your own household.
4) With the personal baggage which you, yourself,
    have intimate power over, and can effectively eliminate.
5) Within your own sacred spaces — be they your bedroom,
    your living room, or the spaces within where reside the
    denizens of emotional detritus. In other words, the junk
    and debris you've been tolerating in yourself for decades,
    and for some of us, seeming lifetimes.

Yet first we would want to clean up our own decay before we cry foul at the smelly waste of another's life. To achieve this is hard work, and yet it's significantly harder to keep repeating costly habits which allow any of us to stagnate. Still water allows pollution.

Those who garden will understand the proper uses for waste and for compost, for manure and for chicken shit. The most sumptuous blossoms can emerge with the correct cultivation of waste, and of phosphorus.

If there are assholes in your immediate family or soul group, the situation is a bit harder, a bit more difficult to move through, so to speak. What on earth can you imagine brought you to be born into this particular soul group of skanky individuals? What can you possibly still learn from them, or is it truly time to move on?

Lessons are repeated until they are learned, or until boundaries are better defined.

As always, inevitably, we learn most from those with whom we share a similar genetic background and the common blood of ancestry. In music, it's worth noting that the greatest and most jarring dissonances arise not from two notes which are unlike, but from two, or three notes, who are quite close together in pitch, with not much room between them. Both musically and in our cities, HARMONY is most often created when there's sufficient space. Without the freedom of movement, grave tension is inevitable. The most challenging difficulties and tensions occur when things are too close together, with not enough breathing room, yet must vibrate together in close quarters, in too close contact.

There is no final conclusion to dealing with the world's assholes, its petty gatekeepers and its rigid, unsparing power mongers. For every Gale Norton in the world, there is a Mother Teresa. Somewhere there is a poetic and cosmic balance, and it may not necessarily be in your neighborhood or dimension.

The secret is to surround yourself with reciprocating sweetness and move towards that which makes your whole being feel light. Not heavy or dense; yet dancing with joyful abandon. Not frustrated nor tense; yet serving the fulfillment which only comes from eliminating the inessential, from embracing that which inspires you to achieve completion — in this lifetime — within your belonging, your highest name.