Enlightening Nonsense

Ogre had just picked up her dog, Boar, and her friend’s dog, Dolma, after boarding them for 2-weeks with the girl from Connecticut who takes care of Abandon when I am away. Boar is up there in years. I think in human years he comes to…uh, carry the 3…divide by 2—something like 1,050 years old. As a result of his age, just like an old man in a nursing home, he can’t seem to hold his shit and piss so easily. Unlike an old man in a nursing home, he doesn’t wear an adult diaper. This results in Ogre walking him four times a day. This can be tiring and tedious for her, especially when she goes out for the day and has to think about getting back home just to walk the incontinent bastard.

Another thing that Boar does is constantly howl. It appears to be an attempt for attention. As he is a little deaf, it seems to me also his way to hear his own voice in order to get his bearings, kind of like a bat sending out sonar. In dog philosophy terms, “I bark, therefore I am.” This can be extremely annoying and has resulted in Ogre losing her shit often at the crooning Boar—and Ogre doesn’t wear an adult diaper either.

Ogre, a professional photographer, had just had an all-day photo shoot the day before. The drive to and from Connecticut took her 6 ½ hours and combined with the realization that the Maniacal Moaner was back from vacation in Tic Central where he had to have a few embedded and engorged tics plucked off his body, by the time she got to me she was a little moody. Needless to say, I was completely insensitive to her heightened state of need and my idiocy only added to her angst.

Dolma is very quiet and while a sweet dog, a bit lacking in personality for my taste.  In human terms, she would be the quiet little nervous girl who mostly sits by herself and doesn’t bother anyone, perhaps cutting herself when no one is looking and making drawings in her notebook of herself hanging from the shower rod before eventually going on a shooting spree and taking out the kids her Prozac glasses makes appear worthy of a burial by bullet.

Boar on the other hand is quite the personality. He is always putting his nose in something in his never-ending search for food and will eat everything from carrot sticks to rusty nails if you put it in front of him. He plays a mean game of fetch and he “sings” non-stop. Unfortunately his song of choice is almost as painful as being forced to listen to Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better,” to which most, if given the choice, would gladly forego this torture for waterboarding. Boar was crooning his out of tune Richard Marx and Ogre was at her wits end.

“Why can’t you be like Dolma?” she said.

Now had I been more sensitive, I might have seen that Ogre was not in the mood for a lecture on respecting one’s individuality, be he a human or a dog. Yeah, didn’t happen. In my defense, hearing those words is almost like hearing the word “nigger” to me; while in the old days this would inspire me to grab my hood and bat and go out for a night of wilding, now it just makes me sick.

I would say one of the greatest injustices placed onto Man, perhaps even topping the election of the useless Barack Obama, is comparing one unique human “snowflake” to another. We all incarnate with our own unique expression of consciousness. This is not to be confused with personality, although personality may be one of the colorations of our consciousness’ expression.

While, yes, most of us have two arms and two legs and two nipples and two butt cheeks, not a single one of us was made from God’s cookie cutter, mostly because he uses it to make cookies and not humans and partly because no one would take him seriously as the “All-Mighty” if he needed a cookie cutter to cut out people. For the record, I’ve tasted a few of God’s cookies and, being polite, I rather eat a dirty sock.

In sports we compare scores in the form of statistics: homeruns, baskets, wins, losses. Governments turn people into statistics in order to keep the war machine going, because reading 3000 dead in Iraq is a lot easier to stomach than hearing a list that would go on for weeks if not months of:

Joey Schillinger, husband to Betty Anne and father of three children, Mary age 4, Bobby age 2 and newborn Sally, was turned into ground beef in the Iraq meat grinder. He was known for his practical jokes, such as when he flew the county cow from the post office flagpole with the slogan “In Cow We Trust”…

But a human being is not a statistic.

We compare height, skin color, breast size, clothes, nail polish, shoes, Intelligence Quotient, test scores, colleges, bank accounts, countries—the list goes on and on and yet no one ever seems to ask the question: Has any of this comparison ever made us any happier? Instead all we ask is, “How can I get to the top of the comparison chain?”

I guess I would be happier knowing that my surgeon graduated top in her class over failing out for lighting her farts on fire. But overall I stand by my assertion. If you’re only happy because you admire your soul’s expression in comparison to another’s… you’ve missed the mark. Instead of banning comparison—and thereby judgment, for how can you judge anyone for expressing their human snowflake flawlessly—we ban books and think ourselves somehow more “moral” as we claim to be “building a better future” for our kids, who we praise for performance measured by comparison rather than uniqueness.

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me, “You don’t sound like a swami,” I would buy a Weapon of Mass Destruction and drop it on this world of comparison. I don’t want to sound like a cartoon swami and anyone who does is more interested in strengthening his ego through playing a character than dropping his ego and living authentically. We are all so unique that no two swamis should sound alike. Most do because they are frauds or because they are being poor carbon copies of their teachers. If I had students that were carbon copies of me, I would not be honored but insulted. They would be showing me that they’ve entirely missed me and what I have to share. Imitation is NOT ”the highest form of flattery” but the highest insult to humanity. And besides, I’m annoying to myself—I don’t need anymore me’s around to be a pain in my ass.

Osho was asked if an ordinary person could become enlightened or if only one born a Buddha or a Jesus achieves this state. He answered by saying that it was an insult to call anyone “ordinary” and that while enlightenment may be for the special, everyone is special and until we stop insulting others and ourselves by even considering that we are “ordinary,” we will never be able to claim the full expression of our greatness.

Ogre was periodating and told me how she felt fat. “You are a perfect ‘10’,” I told her, to which she responded in her potty mouth way with something like, “You’re a fuckin’ douche.” [See “Potty Mouth" at http://rebelyogi.com/potty-mouth.html] Because she, like most women, have created in her mind an image of what is pretty based on anorexic models who would look perfectly at home in Auschwitz, she considered my “10” rating to be bullshit. But it wasn’t. At that moment she was a perfect “10,” not based on comparison to anyone else but because I saw her as perfect beauty, incomparable to ANYONE.

I don’t remember what I responded, probably something like, “Okay, how’s a ‘7’ sound, Fatty?” and the next thing I knew I woke up in the proctologists office with her shoe having been removed from my ass and Ogre shouting at me, “That’s one of my favorite shoes, asshole! You’re gonna have that that mother fucker cleaned!” As I was still a little high from the anesthetic, I was confused whether she was talking to my asshole or to me. At that point my asshole asked me, “Dude, I’m low on cash now. Can you spot me a twenty and I promise I’ll pay you back?” I was a little pissed, as last time he had me pay the dry cleaning for some woman’s blouse he shit on and I never saw a dime of that money, although someone had taken a video of the blousing as it is now termed and I have heard it has gone viral in Germany, home of scheisser porn.

I’m waiting for some God-fearing dummy to ask me, “What would Jesus do?” to which I’ll respond, “I don’t give a shit what Jesus would do! He’s not here and I’m not Jesus!” The day we all answer like this, not just with our mouths but with our hearts, will be the day when we stop talking the talk of Jesus and start walking the walk of Christhood.