"on the street"
Posted by Eddie on 09/14/2011 14:25:07
Scot & Classroom Talk
“On the street”…
What an essentially simplistic way to express the psychological and
ontological state of man-kind that I have struggled with a simple way
to express in words for so long. You have come up with a way to
express the everyday state of sentient beings moving around on the
surface of this earth in such a simple way.
In my experience, the vast majority of those out here “on the street”
are hardly more than a mass of organic reaction mechanisms; some sweet
and even kind and others not so much so.
I not only feel, but experientially observe that for me personally I
became aware fairly early on in my life that I had been given an
extraordinary primary “gift” that I easy recognize ‘today’, that so
many others “on the street” do not ‘consciously’ experience. I
recognize their state because I have spent huge blocks of my life time
in that very same state of being.
Now I call it a gift because I cannot in any way recognize anything I
could have possibly done to receive it, before I had first glimpse its
connected presence. This thing I am calling a gift is a “living
presence” of a power that is not a person in the common sense of the
word, yet is a personage none the less. Some might say that I was
brain washed very early on in these regards. I might easily agree with
that analyze except for one very personal and fundamental awareness.
That is that this so called ‘living presence’ has an ontological
presence of its own that is distinctly recognizable by “me” as
not “me”.
I have since learned that to experience this presence on any sustained
level does require an inner quality that must be maintained and
continually developed. Paradoxically it’s still a free gift but I have
a responsibility of readying myself positional and capacity wise to be
receptive to it. For example it’s like if I had a house that had a
deep dark dungeon like basement in which I resided and I refused to
come up and out of it into the upper floors where the sun could reach
me. And even there just up on the first floor at the basement door
there might likely be some level of diffused light, but having gotten
that far I could then choose to move to a room that had windows, where
I could receive the presence of more direct sunlight. As I said I
would need to move closer to the windows and probably having been
confined to the basement for so long I would likely need to wash the
windows so that the sunlight could more fully shine through. Sadly I
spent most of my life running from or simply ignoring or simply
questioning the very existence of the living presence of this
personage. But as in the house I just described the Sun was always
there.
“On the street” is an extremely dangerous place to sleep, yet at the
same time ‘it’ holds the most potential for experiencing my highest
meaning for being. But for the person you all know by the label Eddie,
of which I personally did not choose, took the hard road so to speak.
What I mean by hard is that before I became willing to humble my self
and “wake-up” i.e. stop living in the basement of my self, as it now
seems in retrospect, I required a pretty sever beating out on the
street; which somewhat ironically, I now regard was likely in direct
proportion to my lack of ‘humility’.
But being beaten and bludgeoned by “the street” and even at times by
the sleeping street people themselves more so than not produced only
humiliation rather than humility. This pretty much held true whether
the bludgeoning was coming from me on ‘my self’ or from another or
life i.e. the street in general. Granted over a long period of time
after having been beaten and bludgeoned long enough, if the person
doesn’t die or go permanently insane, he might by the grace of The
Creator, experience the inner ‘state’ known as ‘surrender’. Then if he
is so blessed by The Creators grace, he might be able, on some
preliminary scale, to voluntarily begin to reach for humility from him
self i.e. willfully. Yet even if one can stay live and out of the
sanitarium up to that point, he will likely not recognize his state as
humility at first, but rather as plan “hopelessness”. Yes terrifying,
paralyzing hopelessness, scared witless out of his mind. Nor will
others necessarily recognize it as humility ‘unless’ they themselves
are so train by their own experience of having been where the other
has been, and found their way out through the help of a benevolent
Creator and the non-judgmental-ness and loving acceptance,
encouragement, instruction and kindness of those closest to them.
Humility can never, ever be forced on anyone from without. The very
act of trying, in any way, to make someone become humble constitutes
an external act of condemnation.
Conviction can only come from ‘within’; condemnation coming from
without causes its recipient to be on the defensive; (conviction is
based on love; condemnation is based on fear) which in turn creates in
them a resistance to the internal possibility of their receiving any
functional level of their own inner operation of conviction.
Condemnation is a mechanical reaction but conviction is a conscious
respondent function.
To remain in that basement I mentioned requires that I maintain the
idea, and the active position, that I am the center of “my” universe;
and to see and to seek my personal will as supreme to all else. To
hold or maintain this idea or attitude in ones mind for any extended
period of time is an obsession. An obsession of the mind is a thought,
or thoughts that override all other thoughts. By its very nature it
can only be ‘subjective’. To be free of an obsession of the mind an
honest and conscious ‘objective’ psychological position must
ultimately be received and then taken. A real “turning point” for ‘me’
was when I began to “see” my little me in my Creators Plan.
Eddie