Boats on the Water, Captain at the Helm and the Devil in the Deep Blue Sea.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

If you are not seeking inspiration from a particular source and unless your karma is very good, or you have been selected for specific work that is automatically attended with inspiration or... by some facet of mysterious grace, you will wind up with the default inspiration of your times and that can be good or... very bad, depending on the nature of the times. Imagine life as a boat sailing on the ocean. Imagine the ocean as being in a state consistent with the times. Add to this picture the many varieties of boat. Some are hardly seaworthy. Some are very seaworthy and... you can look at that as karma. In times of change, the ocean is unruly and the boats learn whether they are seaworthy or not. The fate of the passengers relies on the integrity of the boat and the integrity of the captain. If they are both strong then the fury of the sea becomes secondary because... there is at least one captain I know about who is the master of the seas. He can calm them with the raise of his hands. He can walk upon them if he wills.

According to my perspective there is no time when it is not profitable to have this captain at the helm of your ship. It is true that when the seas are calm such concerns do not arise. It is also true that the sea will not always be calm. It is then that you need that captain aboard your ship. It is so much better to have that captain already aboard the ship than to find yourself in extreme circumstances, crying out for that captain. Take my word for this. As one of the luckiest men to ever be on this planet, I have seen the truth of this more often than I can recall. The challenges are not what they were because, over time, the captain has muted them, or otherwise they have been dispensed with by having passed through them. There are degrees of 'presence' that the captain exhibits. For a time one might be far less aware of the presence. As time passes and the presence increases, so does one's awareness of the presence. If one persists in the practice of this presence, it will become total and one will not be able to tell the difference between themselves and the presence. That is THE objective and it is a certain result if one persists in the practice of the presence.

There are books and there are teachers. Some books are very profound but they cannot take you all the way. Some teachers are very profound but there is no teacher like the one whose presence appears within. There is no situation that the indwelling cannot handle. There is nothing that the indwelling is not the master of, most especially when the indwelling has become the master of you.

It would be good to point out at this juncture two of the main results that come out of practicing the presence. One can become complelely absorbed in the presence and lose all sense of former self and the separation that it provided. One can remain in a seemingly separated but highly evolved self. One's reasons for choosing one or the other (and, yes, this is a choice) depends on one's composition and the benefits that are gained from either. Personally I choose to remain spearated because that allows me to remain in the friend relationship. There is also the servant master relationship as well as the myriad possibilities that exist for back and forth interplay. Neither of these is better than the other. It's just po-tato and pa-tato.

Of course, this will not keep self appointeed experts from arguing that. It won't keep system experts from arguing about it either. System experts are those who have initials after their names like BS, MS and PHD. BS stands for bullshit. MS stands for 'more of the same' and PHD stands for 'piled higher and deeper'.

Personally... outside of the opportunity to hold the mind up as a mirror to the ineffable, I've only got pedestrian uses for the mind. It's a useful tool when one knows its limits. The mind likes to imagine it knows something, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. Whether any of what it knows is important, I couldn't say. Love is the supreme consideration for me and the mind is not the residence of love. I believe that the heart should swallow the mind, which also results in the mind becoming educated in ways it would never accomplish on its own. It's like the actual value of humility, without it you will not be able to effectively possess or exercise any of the others.

Humility, to me is the human equivalent of the way God behaves in respect of love. It is said that the ineffable is helpless in the face of sincere love and that when a devotee embodies it the ineffable can refuse that devotee nothing.

As much as the world may be spiraling downward into darker regions where more and more people are caught up in the thrall of material attractions, at the same time, those in pusuit of the ineffable are getting impressive promotions as if in counterpoint to the other. I saw a tale in the latest Smoking Mirrors comments section that set me back and gave me a clear example of just that.

Sometimes we struggle so hard and meet with an opposition as fierce as our fervor, no matter how great that might be and... we feel like we are treading water and getting nowhere battling with the current that flows against us. We think we have made no strides whatsoever. Then the day comes when the light breaks upon our path and we look behind us and are amazed at the distance we have actually come. It is similar to what happens when one goes up a gradual incline on a mountain road. You don't seem to be climbing at all... and then, at one point, you look back and are stunned at the expanse of the landscape far behind and below you.

In that analogy about the boats and the captain and the unpredictable sea, there is a large tanker ship that is steaming along over the waves. The size of it dwarfs the other boats and its passage causes them to bounce up and down on the waters, threatening to swamp them. There is something very wrong with this boat, which also radiates an intense magnetism that causes a large portion of the boats on the water to swim in its wake. The boats and those upon the boats have no idea why this is but it is.

This tanker is doomed. You could call it collective destiny. You could call it the destiny of materialism. At some point the tanker experiences serioous distress and begins to sink. Whenever a very large ship sinks, it sucks everything in the neighborhood of it down in a kind of powerful undertow. The tow is so great that one cannot swin out of its grip and that is why one should make every effort to remember to be in the world but not of it. Grace can lift one out of the reach of the sinking ship but grace is a mysterious thing. One never knows whether grace may come or not, until it does or does not arrive.


End Transmission.......

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