--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bronte Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I LOVED your Road Trip story! Talk about being in the groove! > Your friend Dakota sounds amazing.
He is. > But does he (do you) ride the wave of Tao with these > synchronicities or are you creating the events by > expecting them? A good question. I would say that Dakota expects them; his whole life is based on waiting for nature to reach out and "support" him. I'm not quite like that; these days I find that I don't have very many expectations, and yet I keep running into cool moments anyway. All in all, I like my method better, but different strokes, etc. > The latter wouldn't be the case in instances like the > girl who you gave the key to, as you didn't expect it, > you just went somewhere on a hunch. But even in that > case, was it she, in her need, who created the event? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Buddhism settles this issue by talking about interdependent origination; it's a combination of the two. As for the chicken and the egg question, the best answer to that one was an old cartoon I saw in Playboy. A chicken and an egg are sitting in bed, smoking a cigarette, and the caption reads, "Well...I guess we settled that question, didn't we? :-) > Dakota's certainty that he would run into Joni Mitchell > could be explained as expectation creating reality. I > wrote a ten-lesson course on that subject: "Imaginate > Your Way to a Better Life." Could be. It felt more like Castanedan "seeing" to me -- catching a glimpse of an alternate future and getting a feeling that it was a true "seeing." > I don't deny the reality of Tao-surfing, though. If > we create reality (and I think we do), we create it > on those waves. All hail to the Tao and the magic of > the moment! Thanks for some wonderful reading, Turq. De nada. I'm not convinced that we "create our future." I'm far more of an interdependent origination kinda guy. In my book no one -- no matter what their state of consciousness, no matter how powerful their Woo Woo Rays might be -- has the ability to "create" a future timeline unless the future itself decides to cooperate. The future -- meaning external reality -- has its own existence, and its own set of dreamers, all trying to "create their own futures." We are just one more input into that gigantic computer program, not the writers of it. Sometimes it works out according to our input, other times according to other people's input. The New Age crowd tends (IMO) to glom onto the occasions in which things work out the way they want them to, and believe that they "created" things happening that way. At the same time, they conveniently forget the far more numerous times when things *didn't* work out the way they wanted them to. Me, I'm happiest with remembering both sides of the equation and just trying to live well with whatever future presents itself, without expectation. The fascinating thing for me in the difference between Dakota and myself is that we're still great friends, we still are almost completely devoted to our respec- tive spiritual paths, and we had similar backgrounds. He was a TM teacher; I was a TM teacher. We never met during the TM days, but when we did we discovered that we actually had girlfriends in common. Both of us blew out of that movement early, and found our Way to the Rama trip. Both of us blew out of that trip at about the same time as well, for different reasons. He continued along the path of Guru-Of-The-Month, flitting from teacher to teacher...and it seems to work for him; he seems happy. I went the other direc- tion and focused more on life as the teacher, not teacher as life. We're like Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund in a way. But I'd say we're both old farts who are managing to have a lot of fun with our lives at an age when a lot of the older people we see around us aren't, so I think that despite the focus of our respective paths, the general direction of those paths is the same. Another example of the synchronicity thing happened to my friend Robert Crumb last year. He is working on a fairly serious project for him, doing his version of the book of Genesis from the Bible. And he's doing it seriously -- no parody or satire. But Robert is easily distracted, and the summer was going to be an endless stream of guests through his house, so he was looking for an apartment in the vicinity in which to "hole up" for the summer and get some serious work done on the book. So what does he find? An apartment being rented by an English woman with the last name of Crumb, whose mail they used to get by mistake when they first moved to France 15 years ago. As he's walking around the apartment checking it out, he notices the book- shelves and their contents. It turns out that this woman did her Ph.D. thesis at Oxford on Genesis, so the bookshelves are full of those books. She is an expert on the ancient languages of the time, and is fascinated enough by his work to offer to act as a consultant to him any time he needs one. Interdependent origination. Neither of them was look- ing for that particular conjunction of interests; they just happened. But because they were both inspired by the same thing, their paths crossed. Life is weird, eh?
