holy fool pdf
TRANSCRIPT
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Confessions of a Holy Foolby
Evangelos
PREFACE
First let me say I believe God is everywhere (not almost everywhere). IfI'm correct in that belief, then we're all equally holy.
All the branches are divine.
So I'll never say that I'm better or worse than anyone else. I don't believe that
way. We are equal because we are one.
Thus even the least are holy.
I've been a fool all my life. I grabbed a livewire when I was a kid and it
screwed me up pretty bad. But, knowing what a fool I was, I collected a lot of
wisdom that I hope to share in this book.
A Fool is Known By His Many Words
I'm obsessed with words. I have been since I learned to read half a century
ago. I suppose that's why I think I can be a worthwhile writer.
The proof will be in this pudding. I hope my flaws as an author will not spoil
your enjoyment of this book. I will do my best to communicate my ideas so
that you can understand them clearly.
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If you are uncertain of my meaning at any point, I consider it my bad entirely.
So please forgive my sins in advance and try to understand what I'm
attempting to tell you.
Am I really this humble? No. But I'm making a point. I think it's the role ofthe writer to be humble and serve the reader.
I think the truest humility comes when we realize that we're not the source of
anything we are. Essentially I'm not the ultimate author of this book but
more like the word processor through which it is written.
Of course, the copyright is in my name ( I have a son and want to leave him
something when I die.) But I'm coming from more than ego when I write.
I call myself a fool and admit that it fits. I don't have any qualms about that.
Every day I'm reminded of what a fool I've been. But I'm not completely
foolish.
What I can share, I'll share. But take everything I say with a grain of salt until
it seems true to you.
Let your heart be your authority.
The heart is the queen
Of the mind every time.
The heart is the queen
Of the mind.
And, of course, words never saved anybody. It's the realizations that words
provide that spur us to different actions. And it takes action, wise action, to
change our lives. If we keep on doing what we've always done, we'll keep on
getting what we've always got.
While I agree with that bit of folk wisdom, I think it could be better said:
If you keep on thinking what
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you've always thought, you'll
keep on getting what you've
always got.
Our lives are what our thoughts make of them. Marcus Aurelius
A man is what he thinks about all day long Ralph Waldo Emerson
All that we are arises with our thought. With our thought, we make our
world. Buddha
In this book I'll use my words and the words of others to guide your mind to
helpful thoughts that can make your life better. Or you can do as I've almost
always done and memorize the wise words without following through andacting on the wisdom. I wouldn't recommend it. It never worked out for me.
That's the tricky part about wisdom. You have to actually do it.
Words are combinations of sonic vibrations (or, in this case, combinations of
straight and curved lines) that stand for concepts. Concepts are the language
of the critical mind and will only increase the thickness of your chains. I'm
not saying that you should not think. I'm only warning you about putting all
your faith in your own mind.
I followed the road of truth
To its end in the Wall of Paradox
Upon which is inscribed
Everything must also be the opposite
Of what it is if it is to be at all.
And, not able to get over that intellectually,
I crossed over the median
To the Road of Beauty
And found that not only does the Road of Beauty
Lead us to our destinyit leads us home.
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Lost in Thought
As I said, I grabbed a livewire when I was six and it handicapped me
mentally. It also brought on early-onset bipolar disorder when I was ten. I
never could fit in. I was so shy that I was totally awkward socially.
My father was ashamed of me and didn't try to hide it. He was a cop and had
anger management problems. So when I got out of school I'd go to the library
to avoid him. For two years before my Mom divorced him, he called me
stupid instead of my name. It made me want to be smart more than
anything in the world. I read hungrily. I truly believed that if I read enough
books I wouldn't be stupid any more.
After the divorce, Mom, my sisters and I moved to Mustang, Oklahoma, thena town with only three stores and one policeman. There was a lady named
Rebecca who lived down the street. It was the Sixties and she was a card-
carrying hippie who turned me on to marijuana (which I loved at first toke).
I stopped going to school to hang out at Rebecca's. She was semi-attractive
but quite obviously not attracted to me sexually. (I could really spice up the
story at this point by lying. But I've decided to be honest in writing this no
matter how lame it makes me sound.)
She had several cats and fancied herself a witch. I learned a lot about
witchcraft from her but I never took it all that seriously. One day she brought
out a little bottle full of tiny squares of paper. She told me to take one and put
it under my tongue. I asked what it was. She said, L.S. D.
Everyone in the late Sixties knew about L.S.D. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It was all over the cultural news
and even thirteen year old Okies knew what it was.
We smoked several joints, waiting for the acid to take effect. She put Magical
Mystery Tour on the phonograph. I remember it kicking in as McCartney was
singing Fool on the Hill. I went into a kaleidoscope of mingled sensory
impressions.
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I was doing okay for the first half hour or so. Then I saw my dad in his
uniform, screaming at me, telling me how stupid I was. It went on and on. I
imagined that I was a tiny mouse and my dad was a giant snarling cat.
However cartoonish, it terrified me. At one point, I started yelling No! and
Stop! and Rebecca turned off the stereo and put an arm around my
shoulders. That calmed me down somewhat. Embarrassed about crying out infront of her, I held my tongue. But inside, the nightmares of my father
continued.
The daytripping with Rebecca went on for the entire summer and I went
steadily downhill. At last it got to me and I was being badmouthed by Dad in
my head even when I wasn't tripping. I became bottomlessly sad. One night I
took almost all the pills in the medicine cabinet. I didn't know what any of
the pills were. But I slept three days. Poor Mom was in a panic because Iwouldn't wake up and she called the pharmacist.
According to the law, pharmacists are required to contact the police any time
they hear of a suicide attempt. A judge quickly signed me up for thirty days'
observation at the state mental hospital. In the late Sixties, the state mental
hospital had no facilities for young people. I was corralled with dozens of
crazy grownups. To make matters worse, I still heard my father's voice
berating me constantly only now he called me crazy as well as stupid.
I suppose all of the hours in the library paid off. One day I was told to go to
the psychologist's office. I was stunned when the psychologist let me in. My
Mother was there smiling sweetly at me. My father was there tooin his
cop's uniformscowling and sneering at me. The psychologist started going
on about what a high score I'd made on my I.Q. Test. At one point (I'll never
forget), he looked directly at me and said, You can learn anything you want
to. When the psychologist took a breath, my father squinted at him and said,
Well, he ain't queer, is he, Doc? I think if he was queer I'd have to kill him.
The psychologist told my father that there was no indication that I was gay.
But I don't think my father was satisfied. He never thought I was macho
enough to be his son.
I finally got out of the looney bin and went home. I still heard my father's
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voice putting me down all the time. I went back to Rebecca's and smoked
pot. But when she offered me L.S.D. I politely declined.
One Fourth of July we went to Thunderbird Lake on the other side of
Oklahoma City to ride horses. Then my horse spooked Mom's horse. Mom
was, up till then, the highest paid secretary at Kerr McGee Oil Company. Theway she fell exploded her right elbow. Though I didn't know how to drive I
drove her to the nearest hospital. It was one of the most intense experiences
of my life (and that's saying something). No longer able to work, Mom had to
move us in with her mother and father who lived in Wewoka, Oklahoma (a
Mayberry-like town in southeastern Oklahoma). I was given a little red one-
room shack in the back yard as my room.
It was the early Seventies. Those guys who could fit in were out at WewokaLake doing partying, doing L.S.D., listening to music and getting laid. I was
in the little red shack out back doing acid and doing experiments on myself to
make myself smarter.
Stupidest thing ever done really.
But I wanted nothing more in life than to be smart. I kept my mind focused
on thinking to avoid being aware of how sad I was. I repressed all emotion inmyself and acquaintances started calling me Spockrates after the
philosopher and Leonard Nimoy's character in Star Trek. I was on a wild
roller coaster of emotion but I let none of it show.
It was only a matter of time.
At a football game a lovely young lady named Rita came up to me and
showed interest in being my girlfriend. She worked at a burger joint and I
frequented the place when she worked there. I thought my life was saved
until the town's Halloween celebration. She called me and asked me to meet
her there. Happy at the thought of seeing her, I walked downtown and began
looking for her. When I finally found her, she was surrounded by less
attractive girls who were all sneering at me. In a speech that only took a few
minutes but echoed for years, she told me that she didn't want to be my
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girlfriend anymore because I was too weird. I said nothing, showed no
emotion, simply turned and walked away. All the way home I struggled to
contain my emotions. When I got back to my grandmother's and grandfather's
house, I went straight to my shack. I locked the door from the inside and sat
on the couch. I clasped my hands together and stared at my knuckles.
Then all the emotion I'd repressed exploded out of me and I tore the little
room apart. When I was spent I collapsed in the corner and swore I'd never
say another damned word to this damned world that hated me so.
I didn't speak again for nine monthsnot a word to anybody.
No doubt a serious over-reaction.
But as Lao-Tse said in the Tao Te Ching, There is great peace and power in
silence. Not talking gave me peace I sorely needed and the power to survive
my heartbrokenness. I am aware that few resort to such drastic measures to
survive lost love. But it was a way to survive.
When you don't talk it quietens the ego mind, the personal mind. Through
long association, the voice and the mind become intermingled and what you
do to one you do to the other.
I had no friends because of my strangeness so I was allowed to sit in my little
red hermitage and write and read and think without being disturbed. After
nine months my grandfather finally convinced me to start talking again.
Sometimes I wish I'd stayed silent.
[I will now insert a short story. I'm going to break up the nonfiction with
occassional stories to make things more interesting for the reader. If this
strangeness upsets you, please bear with me.]
ZERO TIMES ZERO
If I'd been born in Oklahoma three hundred years earlier, I might have been a
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medicine man. If this were an Arab nation, I might have been considered
touched by Allah. But American society only despises those with emotional
or mental challenges.
But, having been crazy all my life I've learned that if you take the literal of
the rational and the figurative of the irrational you can use both sides of it.
I didn't ask to grab that livewire. I was just a kid when Rebecca started
feeding me acid. I didn't ask to have my self-love slaughtered by an insane
cop father. I'm just like everyone elsedoing my best to deal with what was
done to me.
After not talking for nine months, my reputation for being crazy grew. It
became the cool thing to do to hate me. I began to isolate more and more andrarely left my own little world.
Killing the hours alone, I wrote poetry, thinkpieces, and songs. I drew and
read and dreamed big dreams. Not everyone who is poor and despised
dreams of becoming rich and famous. But I did. I couldn't walk across town
without getting sneered at. But I told myself that someday everything would
be different.
Until this time I had been only a social stoner, only smoking pot with others.
But I was now such an outcast that no one wanted to smoke with me. In those
days you could buy a Baggie-full of marijuana for ten dollars. All I had to do
to keep a steady high was mow one yard a week. That's when I became a
solitary toker.
It's hard to pinpoint a particular time when I really started going downhill
but this period was definitely not uphill. I spent all my time alone, lost in
dreams of a glorious future that would come and make everything okay. I was
too shy to look people in the eye but I convinced myself that someday I'd be
onstage. Part of being bipolar is dealing with delusions of grandeur. Besides I
think it's natural for anyone who's been poor and despised to want to be rich
and famous. But I took it too far.
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I began to believe that it was my destiny to be a superstar. I still halfway
believed in God. I told myself that my life had been so hard because I was
paying dues for some great future that would make me forget all my painful
experiences. And the further I fell the more I believed that I would someday
fly.
I was simply another zero dreaming of being a hero. I had no friends, no
lovers, and no hope except for the deliberately imagined sort. I spent the
lonely hours of my life practicing what I would never perform. I held onto
my dream of stardom like a drowning man holds onto a log. I couldn't even
look people in the eye when they were talking to me. But I insanely believed
that I'd get over all that someday and be an entertainer.
It's hard to say that this was the beginning of my decline because I wasalready falling but, at this time, I began a pronounced downhill slide. The
more I denied that I was doomed, the more I asserted my crazy belief that I
was headed for greatness, the more my life fell apart.
Strangely, the part of me that knew I was hopelessly ruined began talking to
me. It was what psychologists call schizophrenia. I started hearing a
different male voice who, like my father, never had an encouraging word to
say to me.
My father, who had moved back to Wewoka and went to work as a deputy
sheriff after the divorce had started telling people that I was his ruined son.
This voice I began to hear shared my father's opinion of me. And the more it
put me down, the more I dreamed of being king. The more I dreamed big, the
more quickly my talents improved. But it's not enough to be talented. You
have to have the strength to use your talents. That I lacked.
Forbidden Questions
I had been raised in the Southern Baptist tradition of Christianity. The first
time I doubted the faith of my family was when I saw Baptists burning John
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Lennon in effigy for expressing his views on the religion. But it wasn't until
this period in the early Seventies that I started to question the dogma I had
been fed.
It was difficult for me to believe that God loved me. How could I believe
that? My life had been unmitigated hell since my earliest memories and I wasexpected to believe that there was an almighty God on my side.
I couldn't believe that anymore.
Perhaps God loved everyone but me. It made a lot more sense to believe that
God hated me than to believe that He loved me. But that didn't make sense
either. Life started killing me when I was six. I couldn't believe that I had
done something to secure God's wrath before I was six. I had read ofreincarnation and tried supposing that I had been horribly wicked in my
previous life. But it seemed ridiculous to think that God would visit such
wickedness on children who can't even recall what they did wrong.
It was easy for me to think I was a stupid kid because my father had drilled
that into me every day for so long. I went through a while believing that God
hated me for being stupid too. But eventually I stopped believing that God
was justified in letting so many bad things happen to me. Rather than believethat God was hateful or didn't care, I chose to believe that the God I'd been
told about didn't really exist. I chose to disbelieve in religion altogether and
believe only in science. I read Einstein's The World As I See It and adopted
his view of Goda God Who is the Universe and Who is too big to care
about the personal problems of individual human beings.
The library was the one place where I felt as welcome as anyone else. And I
found that people who liked to put other people down usually didn't hang out
at the library. I liked the spinster librarian and would sit there for hours,
reading. I found that a great many famous people had not believed in the
traditional idea of GodBuddha, Einstein, Edison, Mark Twain, to mention
only a few.
At night in my shack I would think and write about God, asking questions
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that believers were forbidden to ask, such as:
Q: If God knows everything then why did He create the devil? If God knows
everything, then God knows the future. So, five minutes before God created
the angel who later became the devil, God would have to have known all the
damage that the devil would eventually do to his other children. Why didn'tGod just refuse to create Satan in the first place?
Q: If Christians aren't liable for the sins of the Inquisition or the witch-
burnings then why are they liable for the sins of Adam and Eve?
Q: Is God looking at babygirls being raped by their fathers, then looking at
his watch and saying, How horrible! If it was time for Me to come back yet,
I'd stop that!?
Q: What sort of God puts innocent babies in this wretched world and then
damns them because they become twisted by what happens to them.
I learned why most Christians think reason is of the devil. It's because if
you start applying reason to Christian dogma it falls apart like a house of
cards in a tornado.
The Spirit is Willing
In a moment of clarity I thought I should have something to fall back on just
in case I didn't become the next Elvis. So I looked into enrolling in a disc
jockey school in Oklahoma City. But the week before I was going to enroll,
my cousin came by drunk and told me that if I was still at his grandparents
house come the next day that he would kill me. He seemed drunk enough to
do something that dumb.
I didn't leave because I was afraid of him. My grandmother was in very
fragile health and it wouldn't have helped her if two of her grandsons had
killed one another in her back yard. So I took off. Before that time, I had
never hitchhiked father than OKC. But this time I kept going on I-40, headed
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west.
To shorten a long boring story, I became a hitchhiking hobo. I sank deeper
and deeper into living like a stray dog. My wild emotions kept torturing me
day and night.
One night a guy in a pickup gave me a ride. Without warning, he pulled a
twenty-two pistol on me. I suppose fear made me brave but it also made me
stupid. I got the gun away from him and then took his wallet, his keys, and
left him on the side of the road. I was a fugitive for about four hours before I
was apprehended. Soon after that I began a fifteen year sentence in the Texas
Department of Corrections. I had just thoughtmy life was bad before that.
Now, before you roll your eyes skyward, let me comfort you with theknowledge that the autobiographical portion of this book is almost over.
Even An Old Fool
When I got out of prison in 1996, I said, I'm not going to be wicked
anymore. I swore to walk a true love walk. I suppose I expected to be
blessed. I suppose I still believed somewhat in the idea of a God who cared.Whatever my reasoning (or lack of it), I felt sure that if I loved I would be
blessed. I've been out of the joint for fifteen years now and I still live by love.
It's habit now but I'd be lying if I said I've been blessed for it in any way. I no
longer believe in karma. I don't believe we're blessed or cursed according to
what we do. I believe we're blessed or cursed according to whether we
believe that we're cursed or blessed. I still walk a true love walk even though
I don't believe I'll be rewarded for it. It's not that I'm all holy or anything. It's
just that:
Even a reprobate knows
Love feels better than hate.
Besides, it's habit.
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Now don't get me wrong. I believe love is the wise and right thing to do. I
just don't believe that doing love will bring blessings besides those that arise
directly from doing love. If you do love and believe you will be blessed for it,
you will be. If you do love and can't believe you'll be blessed for it, you won't
be.
As you believe so shall it be unto you.
At this point, believing that I can be blessed is a sizable chore. I content
myself by dwelling on the little blessings I can enjoy.
I think it's horrible to say that Jesus loves the little children of the world. If
Jesus were one third of God, there'd be no such thing as child abuse. It's a lie.
The worst person in the world would end child abuse if she or he were Godfor one day. That it goes on means one of two things is trueeither God is a
heartless monster or there is no God who cares.
I've been obsessed with God for half a century. I now believe it was all
wasted time and thought. John Lennon sang, God is a concept by which we
measure our pain. I can easily agree. I believe the legends of God arose from
our personal awareness of our Infinite Consciousness. We are the one we
used to call God.
This autobiographical part of this book has mainly provided proof that I
deserve the Fool part of the title. But I'm tired of confessing my sins and
stupidities.
There's no fool like an old fool.
But even an old fool will wise up
If it hurts bad enough.
The Universe Inside Us
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In the middle of the thirteenth century, the Sufi Muslim poet Rumi wrote,
The entire universe is within you, ask all of yourself. Now even though that
was written so long ago, it agrees with modern quantum physics which says
Everything interpenetrates everything else. And Buddha said, All that we
are arises with our thought. With our thought we make our world.
Though my life has been particularly bad, I have no problem with admitting
that it's all arisen from my negative thinking. Like Edward De Vere (writing
as Shakespeare) said, There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it
so. It was the habitually negative thinking that I learned as a child which has
made my life so negative.
To someone blinded by the lies of separation neither the words of mystics or
physicists make sense. But once free of the delusion of separation theirclaims seem right. The paradoxical nature of great truth arises because the
universe is a union of opposites. If you view life as one great Whole then the
paradoxes in the Bible and the Tao Te Ching makes sense.
If we desire anything, the best way to achieve it is to believe that we already
possess it. This uses the power of Faith in Imagination to manifest your
desires. And
Whether you call it miracle or magick with a k
It's only faith in Imagination at play.
Wanting it, seeing it as something that will happen someday only postpones
it. But seeing it as already so brings it into being.
Every thought manifests.
There is a proverb of magick that says As within, so without. What we
perceive outside us is what we believe inside us. Only inside is real, as Osho
said. Outside is nothing but a dream. Though I'm not a Christian, I believe a
great deal of what Jesus supposedly said. Two quotes from Jesus support
what I'm saying here.
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As you believe so shall it be unto you, and Him that hath shall get. Him
that hath not shall lose even that which he hath.
As the New Testament was being written (or translated) a quote from the
Neo-Platonic philosophers was a popular saying around Rome:
If you believe you have it, you have it.
As modern science has confirmed the power of belief it becomes less of a
mystical intuition and more a verifiable fact. Belief shapes life. Our lives
become what we believe they already are. Of course it's not what we
sometimes believe that creates us and our world. Wavering faith availeth
nothing. But what we consistently believe manifests. And we don't receive
what we sort of believe. To manifest a belief we have to believe it one
hundred percent.
The Other Way Around
You can bet your bottom dollar
And your money's safe and sound
Whichever way they say it is
It's the other way aroundYou can take it to Las Vegas
And lay your money down
Whichever way they say it is
It's the other way around.
Lies about important things can destroy lives. People are told lies when
they're young and it causes them to make mistakes that can warp their
enjoyment of life. In this chapter, I'll point of some of the lies I've believed
that have caused me great pain. You may disagree with my beliefs. But
basically I'm just trying to warn you that certain bridges are out.
From the time we're born into this world it starts lying to us. We're born
knowing the ultimate Truth of Unity. And, from the moment we can
understand language, the world starts telling us the lie of separation. There
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never has been such a thing as separation. We have always been one with
everything and everyone. Only unity is true.
As soon as we can think, the deceived begin to deceive us. They don't mean
to lie to us. They are simply sharing their delusion of separateness with us.
Once you transcend the lie of separation, you can be one with all as we
were meant to be. Quantum physics 101 says everything interpenetrates
everything else. And that includes living things. We are one with the world
and with one another. We don't end at our skins. The concept that we've been
taught since infancyseparationsimply never was true.
And the only times when we human beings really feel good is when we
forget ourselves in a book, a movie, a game, or in sex. Only when we forgetthe lie of the personal self do we experience joy.
They tell us there's a God who cares about us the way a good father cares
about his children. I'm sorry. That's a lie. If, for whatever reason, you cannot
help yourself, you will not be helped. If there is a God, He only helps those
who help themselves.
People are always making excuses for God. They need help and the almightyGod can't be bothered to help themwell, it must not have been God's will.
And every time something terrible happens they blame it on the devil without
asking why God didn't step in and keep His wayward angel from hurting us.
Anthropomorphism means attributing human qualities to God or Nature.
God is Nature and Nature doesn't care. The truth is that if we abide by the
principles of the Presence we prosper and if we don't, we suffer. But if you've
been taught self-hatred and negative thinking, there's no hope for you until
you unlearn those mental behaviors start loving yourself and thinking
positively. Of course, if you believe God loves you and will help you that will
sometimes workas long as you believe it. But there is no fatherly God who
will love you if you can't love yourself.
Neither will anyone else be able to love you till you love yourself. You can
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love everyone in the world. But if you don't love yourself too, you'll be in
hell. In fact, until you love yourself you cannot properly love anyone else.
They tell you to put everyone else first. But if you put everyone else first you
won't last.
They tell you that religion and politics are good things when they're onlyorganized ways of lying to the people.
They tell you that if you fit in and do what everyone tells you to do that you'll
be happy and secure.
They tell you a load of lies because they believe the lies themselves. It's not
as if society is giggling behind its hands as it deceives us. Most of society
believes that the way to be happy is to feed your ego. But the only way to behappy is to forget the ego.
Love is the thing for us to do because Love wipes away obsession with our
personal selves. Love is based on identification, on seeing ourselves in
others. When we see another as self too, it brings us out of the lie that we
are separate. Usually our first experience with true Love is enough to change
our lives. But Love is powerful because it brings us out of our ego prisons.
The more we Love, the freer we are.
They tell you Love is only something you win or something we do but Love
is Who we are. Never underestimate the power of Love. What's given you
when you Love is more than any love can give you. By shining Love 24/7,
365, we become Who we are. Love saves. All we need is Love.
Love allows us to see beyond ego and know the liberation of Oneness. But
the world tells us it's all about I, Me, Mine. While you have to pay due
attention to your personal needs so they won't make you fixate on the
personal, you have to transcend the personal to be happy.
I was taught self-hatred and abused until I developed what I call negative
egomania. As the person who is super-popular can start thinking too much
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of her- or himself, the person who is very unpopular can also fixate on
personal self with constant thoughts of What's wrong with me? and How
can I fix me? Both positive and negative egomania are harmful. But I think
the negative sort is more damaging. There is no more miserable person than
one who is locked in constant negative thoughts about him- or herself.
They tell us that if we get a job and work hard that we'll always be financially
secure. Then they give all our money away to the super-rich but when it
comes time for cutbacks it's the middle and lower income Americans who
must sacrifice. The military loses billions in an immoral war and no one
even suggests that they should pay back the taxpayer money they lost.
The world runs on lies.
The world tells us that life is all about separation and there is no such thing.
The world tells us we can be okay if our neighbors are starving.
The world tells us torture's okay if we do it.
And most of us have been trained not to care as long as we have gas, cable
and food on the table.
I'll tell you one thing
And I'll tell you from the heart
We've got to come together
Or we're gonna come apart.
Can anyone bring us together before we destroy ourselves? It will be amazing
if humanity lives to see the twenty-second century. It's sad to see the few
robbing the many. But if the many are too ego-blind to resist perhaps we
deserve to be robbed. Many are going to be surprised when the economy fails
for everyone but the super-rich and we aren't as comfortable as we were told
we would be. We're all so blinded by the lies we've been told that we can't see
what's being done to us.
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The secret of life is that we get more of what we believe we've already got.
As Jesus (and the Billy Holliday song) said, Him that hath shall get. Him
that hath not shall lose even that which he hath. If not-having dominates
your thinking, your life will waste away to nothing. Your subconscious
mechanism will manifest only poverty in your life.
Counting our blessings multiplies them.
Counting our curses multiplies them.
Now, if you're having a hard time, it will take deliberate effort on your part to
think positively. I recommend looking at your life in four areasphysical,
emotional, mental and socialand then listing things you have to be grateful
for in each area. It may only be I can breathe freely. But the main thing isto focus on positive thoughts.
PHYSICAL:
+I can breathe freely.
+I have a home.
EMOTIONAL:
+I am made happy by playing with children and dogs.+I am cheerful in my sadness.
MENTAL:
+I am smart.
+I am creative.
SOCIAL:
+I have many friends and no enemies.
+I have someone to talk to.
That of course was only an example. You have to make your own list
because, for it to work, it has to be you thinking the good thoughts. Now if
you are a habitually negative thinker, it may take real effort for you to form
the habit of thinking in terms of what's good about your life instead of
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thinking about what's bad about your life. That's why I recommend forming
the habit of making lists about what's good about your life a few times every
day. Forming the easy habit of making such lists will help you form the habit
of choosing positive thoughts.
I also recommend asking the question, What else is good about this? inwhatever situation you're in. The question helps to focus the mind on the
positive.
And optimism creates good fortune.
All that we are arises with our thought.
With our thought, we make our world.
Every thought manifests. Without realizing it, we make every day of our
lives. By having bad thoughts about ourselves or others or the way things are,
we literally create the negativity in our lives. Alexander Pope expertly
described the positive attitude in his great poem Essay on Man:
All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;All partial evil, universal good;
And in spite of Reason, in errant Reason's spite,
One truth is clearwhatever is, is right.
It's all good.
The strange thing isit's true. The knowledge of good and evil is forbidden
to Man. We don't have the ability to calculate the difference between good
and bad, right and wrong. Everyone's had the experience of saying, Oh, all
right! This is wonderful! and two weeks later you're wailing Boo-hoo-
hoo! And everyone's had the opposite experience of saying, Oh, this is
horrible! My life is over! and two weeks later you're saying Boy, I didn't
think so at the time but that was a lucky break! The possible consequences
of any event are beyond calculation. At best, we guess.
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So, since we can't really know ahead of time if any event is good or bad for
us, to assume without evidence that life is good is a logical leap of faith.
Assuming that it's all good allows us to be open to all the good there is. It's a
matter of following Buddha's advice. He said, Want what is.
This admonition to think positively will seem silly to the lifelong negative
thinker. But when you fully realize that negative experiences come from
negative thoughts, you'll know it's worth the effort.
I want to risk offending the dogmatic by saying God doesn't care if we sink
or swim. The rules that govern God's Presence in the universe operate in your
life whether you understand them or not. Perhaps it's nice to say that God
cares about those who fall behind but it isn't true. If you fall behind it's theresult of your own negative thinking and until you change the thinking that
caused your downhill slide, you'll continue to fall.
I'm sorry if that disagrees with your beliefs. I'm doubly sorry if that offends
you. But I have to write what I believe and I don't believe that the almighty
God cares about us personally. I was a virtually fatherless child who was told
that there was a great invisible Sky Daddy who really loved me and would
help me. I believed that for a long time and received no help whatsoever. Infact, you could, if you wanted to, say that God obviously cursed me.
I don't care what excuses you make for your idea of God. For an almighty,
all-knowing Being, God never really helped anyone all that much. You can
believe whatever you want to. But I don't believe God cares about any
individuals. So, if I'm right (which I believe I am) we are totally on our own.
For all our prayers to the ceiling, if we don't completely believe that we've
already received the blessings we've prayed forwe don't get blessed.
Now, if you can ask God for help and truly believe you're helped, you will be
helped. More power to you if that works for you. But it doesn't work for a lot
of people who feel they have been cursed all their lives. I don't believe
everything they say that Jesus said. But I do believe this:
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As you believe, so shall it be unto you.
Let me reiterate. We are only blessed by believing that we are already
blessed. Belief creates reality.
Poverty Sucks
Along with billions of others, I was told that poverty is good for the soul. I
know that too much materialism is bad for a person. But I don't think that
poverty is good for the soul either. I think that doing without the things that
you want and need only draws your attention to those trivialities.
And they are trivialities.
Personally, I'm one seven-billionth of humanity. My tragedies are trivialities.
No matter how I piss and moan, it ain't no big thing if I'm alone and
unknown.
But poverty only draws your attention to the personal trivialities.
Plus, poverty perpetuates itself. If you think I lack, that thought of not
having will manifest itself in more poverty.
Believe me. I know what fifty years of negative thinking did to my life. I
hope you can learn from the experiences of others and bless yourself with
thoughts that you are already blessed.
These Trying Times
I don't know if anyone else has been reading the headlines. But, as a species,
we are in deep trouble. We face more life-threatening problems now than at
any time in our history. To address the worst first: there are seven billion
people on this little world. The world isn't getting any bigger and we
continually are. We, of course, won't stop reproducing and we're getting too
big for this little world. Now it's already crowded at seven billion. What's it
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going to be like when we are ten or twelve billion?
It's going to be hell.
Don't you love koala bears? Aren't they gentle and sweet? But if you put two
koala bears in a cage the size of this room and let them copulate and populateand don't give them a bigger cage, those sweet koala bears will turn into
cannibalistic Tasmanian devils just from the need for space. The more
crowded any creature becomes, the more desperate and vicious it becomes.
And that includes us.
What can we do? You can't say a woman can't have a baby if she wants one.
That's ridiculous. We could inhabit the sea. But that would be too costprohibitive for a temporary fix. We must terraform and populate Mars. That
must be the common mission of our global space programs. It's the only hope
humanity has.
Crime is another of our great problems that must be solved. For a long time
the problem has been managed without solution. But there is a simple and
cheap method that would greatly alleviate crime if we have the sense and
compassion to do it. All crime is committed by alienated people. If youidentify, if you see yourself in others, you won't harm anyone.
Identification can be taught to inmates in prison and children in school and
the crime rate would fall dramatically. The only problem with this idea is that
first the majority has to care about all the souls in prison.
The energy problem could be greatly reduced by using the wind crashing
against our cars in motion to generate electricity which could be stored in
batteries in the trunk. The energy could be used in the operation of our cars
and the excess sold at power stations. The first accessory for the car was the
windshield. Then we had no way of using the force of the wind against the
car. Now, by transforming the mechanical energy of the wind into electrical
energy, we can make electric cars more viable than gas-powered cars.
Electrical power is generated by using an already-present motion to make a
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magnet move against a wire thereby inducing current. The already-present
motion in this case is the constant crush of the wind against the car. With
modern technology we can easily turn the motion of the wind into electrical
power.
Problem solved.
Another simple idea is the creation of a networking site online in which the
common folk give life lessons they've learned that they think are worth
sharing. This would allow people who don't have good role models to get
good life advice. It could be searchable by subject and help a lot of people.
There are a lot of good ideas we could come up with and implement that
would make things better on all of us. But we have to care enough to followthrough and do them.
Questions
Recent research has shown that questions are more effective in changing
personal behavior than affirmations. In this chapter I'll experiment with our
minds by simply asking a series of questions. I hope you find it as interestingas I do.
Q: What if everything we've been told all our lives is a lie?
Q: What if we weren't separate?
Q: What if the government weren't for all the people?
Q: Why do we all think so similarly?
Q: What if we all came together for our common good?
Q: What would happen if there suddenly were no such thing as money?
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Q: Who would be president if no one voted?
Q: What can one person do to change the world?
Q: What if you were a dream someone else was having?
Q: What if education were about more than getting a good job?
Q:What if seeing Janet Jackson's titty were the worst thing that had happened
this century?
Q: What if corporations had to pay taxes to vote?
Q: What if you got more time in prison for abusing a child than you did forstealing a truck?
Q: What if we felt better as we got older?
Q: What if Christianity were really all about Love?
Q: What if dice had no spots?
Coming Together
It's not enough that we come together physically. We grow closer together
with every child born. We have to come together mentally again. We are so
divided that we can't do anything. As I write, the Congress of these United
States can't agree on something as simple as extending our debt limitations.
From all appearances, we couldn't come together long enough to put out a
house fire. The nation divided against itself cannot stand.
We can't hope to do anything personally until we solve our inner conflicts.
Likewise we can't hope to do anything as a society until we resolve the
conflicts we face as a nation and as a world. Instead of building up the walls
that separate us, we need to be building bridges that will unite us. We need to
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be focusing on our areas of agreement. We need to be working together to
meet the common goal of our common good.
This isn't something that we can afford to put off till it gets easier because it
won't get easier. We can only come together now before it becomes almost
impossible to do so later. It won't be easy now. We have become so separateand divided that it will take great sacrifices before we, as competitors, can
thrive as co-operators.
The only reliable first step to coming together is realizing that we already are
together. We must focus first on the many subjects on which we agree.
One of the first steps is to make sure that neither the military nor the
merchants have any say in our government. Neither pretend to give a damnabout the rights of the individual or personal liberties. A politician running
for president recently said, Organizations are people. Organizations would
always vote the way the board of directors say and that is oligarchy not
democracy.
The plain truth is that we will come together as a species or we will die as a
species.
Helping Yourself
Of course before we can contribute to society, we must first be effective in
our personal behavior. That is the same as saying that we must be together
before we can bring anyone else together. For personal rejuvenation, I
recommend specific daily meditation on oneness. Oneness is the ultimate
truth.
We have been told that we end at our skins and that never has been true. We
always have been inseparable parts of the living Nature. It is only when you
realize that you are more than your brain/body that you can truly live.
You are the world.
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If you are a Christian, you might try meditating on the omnipresence of God.
One of my favorite Bible verses is Acts 17:28:
God is the one in Whom we live, move and have our being.
Now you can say that we live and have our being in God in some sort of
other-dimensional way. But if we move in God then God is Nature. I'll
grant that God is more than Nature but God is Nature. Being one with Nature
is being one with God. Some folk have the idea that they have to be in the
woods or at the beach to be in Nature. But the cities we build are as natural as
anthills or beaver dams. We are always in Nature because we always are
Nature. And as such we are parts of one another. We are the same Spiritflesh
of God that fills the Cosmos. We are, as Y'shua said, branches of one Vine.
Only Unity is True
Remember Oneness? I know you do.
It rings a bell inside of you.
And mystics and physicists and babies agree,
We are One with the One Reality.
We are born knowing the truth of Oneness and the world lies us out of it.
Quantum physics says there never has been such a thing as separation. But
the world starts straight in, from the time we're born, telling us we're
separate. But if we don't believe in Onenesswe're wrong.
For most, as Bertrand Russell said, romance is the height of human
experience. Love is bliss because it makes us forget the delusion of the
separate self. We so love our beloved that we hardly think of ourselves at
all. Strange thing I've noticed, the only times we humans ever really enjoy
our lives is when we completely forget ourselves in a book, a game, a movie
or sex. The only time we really enjoy life is when we forget the lie that we
exist personally.
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When I ask you to forget your personal self, the ego-self immediately throws
up red flags. That's because the ego-self's greatest fear is not to exist. It
fears relinquishing its illusion of control. But our egos never had any control.
The one function of the ego is to experience. There are those who say that we
have the power to choose but I don't believe that. I believe as Bhagwan
Shree Raneesh did. He said:
True humility is knowing that we're
not the source of anything we are.
We've been told that we're the only source of our thoughts. But there's a great
deal of evidence that says that our thoughts are exchanged all around the
world and perhaps from even farther. Could it be that we think that all our
thoughts are ours simply because all minds are One and have like thoughts?What if our brains are receivers of thought and not just generators of
thought? That would mean that there really was no such thing as free will
and that we're all essentially blameless.
We were all once innocent babes.
The cop and the criminal alike
Once reached out tiny hands for giant fingers
The nun and the whore on the cornerOnce shined the light
of Sweetness equally.
What have we since become?
A mixture of what we inherited
With what we've learnednothing more.
For which can we be praised?
For which can we be blamed?
We were all once innocent babes
And we're still innocent,
Grownup babes with dirty hearts
Needing only to be changed by Love.