Enlightening Nonsense

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“If you know yourself, there is no point in shaving your head. If you shave your head and don’t know yourself, then you’re a fanatic.”

—Bodhidharma, well-known Buddhist

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“If you know everything and you don’t know yourself, you know nothing.”

—Jesus, well-known Jew

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According to a calendar randomly created by man (I think his name was Buford Willoughby) that has no true bearing to anything in existence, it is the first day of the first month of the year ending with two ones standing next to each other. What does this mean? A New Ager will bore you with talk about “The coming Earth shift.” I would suggest if you come across a New Ager you do what I do: tell her you’re a devil worshipper and you are looking for an idiot who babbles about nonsense for your next sacrifice and would she mind sitting in a pot of boiling oil for you. The freak will probably run off crying, not because you offended her but because the thought of utilizing all that oil to boil her would not be environmentally conserve-ative. For everyone else, New Year’s is usually a time to set fresh unreachable resolutions that will only make people feel more pathetic and hopeless when they don’t attain them.

My good friend Owl was hooting away with her vast imagination to create a magical fundraiser for her Buddhist teacher, Lama Sum Chump, who was going to be going away for a 3-year silence retreat and, like all hobos who suck off society’s teat, she needed money to pay for her bummery. Owl recruited me to guide a meditation and I was given 15-minutes in a night that would include a singer, a dancer and an art presentation. I negotiated it into being a shamanic journey and talk and getting 37-minutes at the end as, like Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock, I wouldn’t settle for being anything less than the headliner.

When the New Age phonies on my mailing list found out that I was going to be a part of this project, they offered their unwanted praise to me for “doing good works.” These idiots don’t understand that any “works” I do where I am in flow are “good works.” In fact, the week following the fundraiser, I was going to be holding the same shamanic journey and talk at a KKK rally in the Deep South and considered that just as “good works” as a fundraiser for a hobo and the fried black man on a skewer is just delicious.

Since most people are either enrolled in The School of Teaching Through Torture (STTT) [See “The School Of Teaching Through Torture” at http://rebelyogi.com/the-school-of-truth-through-torture] or believe in its system of education, to them some fool running away from society and shutting her mouth becomes somehow worthy of a Nobel Prize, when all it really is is moronicy disguised as spirituality. I suppose being saved from one more person spouting worthless Buddhism is worth something.

Bodhidharma, considered the most famous Buddhist second to the Buddha himself said, “If you know yourself, there is no point in shaving your head. If you shave your head and don’t know yourself, then you’re a fanatic.”

Jesus, considered the most famous Jew second to Moses himself said, “If you know everything and you don’t know yourself, you know nothing.”

If you know yourself, which is the whole point of spiritual teachings (other than giving people prettier egos to hold onto), then all these vows and resolutions and rituals and outfits are at best decoration and at worst complete stupidity. If you don’t know yourself and you declare yourself silent or celibate, shave your head, wear a robe, light incense, smoke a bowl—you’re just what Bodhidharma would call a “fanatic” and what I would call a complete jackass.

Osho talks about how one can never determine today for behavior, actions or reactions tomorrow, that this is in essence freezing a river when the very definition of the river is in its flow. You make a yogic vow of Asteya, non-stealing. In a month you have no money and your little child is starving to death and while you could grab a few pieces of fruit from the local fruit vendor unseen, instead you “honor” your vow and let your child die. You take a vow of Brahmacharya, or celibacy, and then bump into a beautiful Playboy model who says to you, “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. I just want to fuck you,” and instead of enjoying an experience that God himself has dropped into your lap (by “God,” I mean Hugh Hefner), you run away with your raging hard-on and stick it in some little altar boy’s ass as, just like Bill Clinton declaring a blowjob not to be sex, all Catholics know that sodomizing a young boy is considered exempt as well. You’ll surely get into made-up Heaven because of your great adherence to stupidity.

Jesus said that if someone slapped you on one cheek, you should, “Turn the other cheek” and offer him the other one to slap. So does that mean that from now to hereafter you will always allow yourself to be beaten down like a little bitch? Your child is having a fit and swings her hand and it hits your cheek. Do you tell her, “Here’s my other cheek, Honey. Swing away”? Or do you shake the little twat so hard that your testimony before the court is as believable as the parents of JonBenét Ramsey after they killed her? “I don’t know how she developed the severe whiplash and swelling of the brain, your honor. Must be a genetic defect.”

If you want to turn a human being into a robot, give him an order, a job, a “duty” to follow without questioning. This is how you get workers around the country when you bring them back an apple you bought at their store with a worm in it saying, “I’m sorry, you took a bite of that apple and our rules state I can’t give you a refund.” And while their costumes might contain robes and mala bead necklaces and sandals, these so-called spiritual Nazis are no different than Shmucko making $8.25 an hour at the Wormy Apple Mart.

So what happens in her silent retreat if a little boy walks up to Lama Sum Chump and says through tears, “My puppy died and I need you to tell me that she’s okay”? I’m guessing Lama Sum Chump and the rest of the Buddhist skinheads would start playing charades and point up into the air, indicating that little Scratchy has become part of the ALL now and there is nothing to worry about. The problem is the little boy doesn’t understand charades and all your Bodhisattva vows can’t penetrate his ears without the carrier of words. So he’ll go off and probably kill his parents and then himself because of your dedication to silence over humanity.

Meister Eckhart from the 13^th and 14^th Century, one of the few mystic Christians who didn’t think preaching fairy tales about immaculate conceptions and resurrections and getting blown by little boys is the fast track to Heaven, said something like, “If I were in the midst of rapture and someone came to me and needed food, I would come out of it to feed the person.” Of course if he were a Buddhist and in silence he would give him the middle finger.

What would happen if Lama Sum Chump opened her mouth and said, “Your dog has just left her body behind so she can become a raincloud and cover all of us with her urine instead of just a few fire hydrants”? I guess she would break her “vow.” [INSERT SINISTER MUSIC HERE] Who gives a shit? Instead her silence will be as good as if she told the little bastard, “You’re dog is now worm food, kid. Now fuck off and let me get back to my silence!”

So many books and teachings have been about “Being in the NOW,” staying in the present, being in the moment, and yet these Buddhist fools are not being in the NOW/present/moment when they declare how they will be in the future.

At the end of the one workshop I went to that Lama Sum Chump taught, solely because Owl wanted me to go and I wanted to see what she’s been wasting the past five years of her life in learning, Lama Sum Chump was devouring some green vegetables. She said that since she is going to be in the desert for three years, she may not have access to greens like this, as if she were a camel somehow able to store in her hump a 3-year supply of greens in one sitting (did I mention that Lama Sum Chump has a hump?) Does this sound like anything remotely spiritual? It sounds like gluttony, to speak Christian sin. It sounds like attachment, to speak Buddhist and yogic sin. It sounds like desire, which we all know is a sin, that one should be happy with whatever the prick in the sky gives you and desiring anything more is just downright selfish. It sounds like she was eating with her mouth in the NOW and her mind in the future. How is this even remotely “Buddhist”?

Owl kept telling me of “last” meetings with Lama Sum Chump before she left for the dessert. By the tenth time hearing this I felt like I was suffering through Fantine’s “Come To Me” song from Les Miserables before she croaks where I got kicked out of the theater for shouting out, “WILL YOU JUST FRIGGIN’ DIE ALREADY!” But when I heard it was the last day before Lama Sum Chump was leaving for her retreat in Arizona and there was going to be a get together at a bar with her and her students who gave a shit, I figured this was probably it.

Owl invited me to go. I said yes. I didn’t decide to go because I gave a shit about her ridiculous vow of idiocy—because I didn’t. I didn’t even go to support Owl in what could be a difficult emotional send-off for her, although in truth, when she started to feel down about not being able to attend anymore weekly “send off” parties for her teacher, I was glad to be there. I went to ask Lama Sum Chump why the hell she was partaking of such a farce.

It happened to be the day the big storm hit New York City and snow was piled up high and the wind was blowing hard and leaving the warm cozy of my apartment required a next to monumental effort. I took a subway down to the area of the bar and after walking the wrong way because I could barely tell which way was up or down, let alone north or south, and freezing my hands off because I left my gloves at home because I figured while it was my decision to brave the arctic elements, that was no reason to drag my gloves into inclement weather, I made it to the bar.

After my hands and face thawed out and I gathered all of my toes that froze off and had the bartender put them in a container with ice for me for later, I shot a little pool and ate some of the free food that the Buddhists had laid out. Sure enough, I could have sworn I saw pepperoni slices on a plate, which while in direct opposition to the Buddhist vow of Ahimsa or non-harm, gave me a little hope that there may be one amongst the sleeping dummies who was like, “Fuck Ahimsa. If God had wanted us not to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them so tasty. You know what, I’m going to bring some slaughtered animal carcass to her send-off!”

When Lama Sum Chump was getting ready to leave and was making her final 10-hour goodbyes, I approached her and fired my question like a White House reporter asking George Bush, “Did you look for the WMDs in your ass?”

“Hi. I didn’t want to take time away from you to share with your students but I did want to ask you a question. Why? Why are you choosing to go into silence for three years? I asked Owl and she seems to think that the world is in tough times and you feel that you can anchor protective energy by going into silence. I asked another student and he just said, ‘For enlightenment.’ I think he was also wearing a helmet because he was a retard. So now I’m asking you.”

She said, “Well, the short answer I like to give is because this is the way I think I can help the most people.”

Because I had painful stomach cramps from the three platefuls of pepperoni slices I had shoveled down, I forgot to ask an important follow-up question: “How about the fuckin’ long answer?” or have her flesh out the short answer with, “Do you believe you will be providing this help while you are away in a desert with no one there but your personal slave providing food for you funded by money that comes from your non-begging bowl students—or after you return from your holiday?”

Instead I followed up with the “crystallizing the future” angle. “People take vows of ‘’til death do us part’ but how can one determine if in a few years, when her tits are sagging and her ass starts to drag behind her like a fallen car muffler, if one will still love her?”

“That’s only one vow,” she responded. I didn’t know whether she was playing politics with me or was just a master debater but it sure felt like this celibate lama was fucking me.

“But how can one crystallize in the present an unknown future?” I followed up.

She started going into some spiritual philosophy of how the present affects the future and how the future affects the present and, to be honest with you, I drifted far from being in the NOW, as I dreamed of the future when she would finally shut her mouth. I even considered paying for her immediate departure into retreat. Soon I found myself ruminating over episodes of South Park episodes. When I got through Season 14, I snapped back. Finally I told her that she was missing what I was saying, which only reinforced a common truth:

Most teachers don’t answer what the student asks or needs but only the prepackaged schpeel they came there to speak.

But in the real world, prepared speeches are just more “vows” that become immediately obsolete once they are prepared. That is why I generally never prepare much for my talks or workshops because, while you can come in with a rough sketch of what you want to discuss, the shading and coloring is provided by the circumstances of the situation that is presented to you in the moment. The final masterpiece is as much dependent on the appreciators as it is on the painter.

“How did your talk go?” asked Mrs. Clemens to her husband, Mark Twain.

He answered, “Which one: the one I prepared, the one I gave, or the one I wish I gave?”

I wasn’t one of her little Buddhist bitches who would just let her speak and nod like a dummy and when I got her back on track she gave me a piece of an answer that made a touch of sense.

“If you don’t set a time, then when you get there you just want to go out and shop,” she said.

I had to reflect on this for a minute, as I guessed that there wouldn’t be any strip malls for miles and I wondered what exactly one would shop for in the desert. But I did get her point that establishing a little discipline is often necessary in a world of never-ending distractions.

For instance, today I said, “Maybe I’ll just exercise from home” and instead watched an episode of South Park from the first season and picked lint out of my belly button. But is there a line where discipline crosses into dogma? While “I want to create a better world,” sounds all nice and good, “I want to kill all the Jews” might just be crossing a line, as why wouldn’t you at least keep two alive to keep on display in a zoo?

At this point she pretty much gave me the heave-ho, indicating in body and attitude that while I had voiced that I didn’t want to take her away from interacting with her students, I was doing just that. Maybe I underestimated her Charade skills after all. She indicated Owl and said, “She’s special. Take care of her.”

I just smiled at her, as I felt that if I said, “I didn’t take any Bodhisattva vow and actually find it insulting to try and remove another’s suffering for my own ego when that very suffering may be the catapult that will hurl them over the castle wall,” the castle metaphor might have seemed like it came out of left field.

I also gave her a small aloe vera plant cutting from my windowsill as a departing gift, believing from the bottom of my heart that in the desert the plant would grow unabashed and become a monster plant like the one from Little Shop of Horrors and swallow her whole, no one coming to her rescue because she would not break her vow of silence in order to save her own life.

After she left, Owl was getting a little emotional. Looking around at the others who were smiling and laughing, she commented on how “strong” everyone was. I gave her a Feelings 101 talk about how expressing one’s feelings doesn’t make her weak, that in my mind it actually makes her more authentic—which is one of the strongest acts of courage in a world of phonies. I also said that everyone expresses his grief in a different way—like how when I went to my grandmother’s funeral and everyone was crying, I expressed my grief in a different way by shouting out, “Finally, the old hag is dead! Man, even her rotting body smells like a French whore! Can someone skim the Will and see if I was left anything for my years of putting up with her tongue kisses so I can get the hell out of here and hang this suit back up in my closet until the next one of you people I care nothing about dies?”

I also told her that it was possible that a lot of them were putting on “strong” fronts for now but when they had time alone and took off their armor, that they might not appear quite so happy-go-lucky. Finally I said, “And maybe you’re just bleeding from your vag and your emotions are running high.” I didn’t learn that last bit in Feelings 101 but in Dealing With Crazy Women 101.

I thought Feelings 101 was a required course for every human and considered calling Owl ignorant with something like, “Five years of Buddhist teachings and you still think crying is a sign of weakness? Gee, sounds like you’ve learned a lot.” But I thought perhaps she was a little verklempt from it all and, being my friend and all, I gave her a Get Out Of Jail Free card (which I happened to have stolen from a Monopoly set from Wal-Mart the last time I went in there to buy ammo and have kept it on my person ever since in case I ever want to cheat in Monopoly.) I did “vow” that if she pulled this shit again, I would rip her a new one!

Everyone left and Owl and I hung around for awhile and chatted. It was nice to catch up and talk about this and that, as I hadn’t seen or talked to her since the fundraiser, as things happened that pushed me into my own retreat of silence, of which perhaps I’ll share another time, as a lengthy discussion about shaved balls and spitballs would probably distract from this already lengthy discourse.

In my very limited interaction with Lama Sum Chump, from the one workshop of hers I attended and watching her getting wasted in a bar during a blizzard, I enjoyed her fun-loving spirit, her big smile and her seeming to be somewhat “normal” with less pseudo-spiritual pretention. But I must say, when I hear of supposed “spiritual” people taking vows or molesting children, it just seems so childish to me and I wonder if all their years of dedication have developed in them anything more than a well-defined ego as a “Buddhist teacher” or “yoga scholar.”

I stopped living for the future a long time ago. And I stopped molesting children a few hours ago.

I stopped living for the future a long time ago. And I stopped molesting children a few hours ago.

Osho has said that if you feel like being silent, then be silent and if you feel like having a little chit-chat, then have a little chit-chat; there is no need to declare anything.

The key is to follow the Authentic Self on the inside and allow its natural expression. When you impose authority over the Authentic Self, only the stupid will see this as something of worth and will decorate the enforcer’s lapels with the colorful medals of “discipline” and “control” and “restraint” and “morals” and “ethics” and “spirituality.” The wise will see these people as murderers hiding behind ornaments of false honor.

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“Because harsh words disturb others’ minds and cause the Bodhisattva’s conduct to deteriorate, abandoning harsh speech which is unpleasant to others is the Bodhisattvas’ practice.”

—The Thirty-Seven Bodhisattva Practices by Ngulchu Thogme Zangpo, #34

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WHERE DO I SIGN-UP???

—Swami X