The Beginner's Mind

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." - Shunryo Suzuki-Roshi

Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow

I heard an interview with Jim Hightower today on the radio.
He has a new book out about grass roots organizing named "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow."
I was struck by the line "Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow."
How many times have we heard "Go with the flow."?
It takes no effort. It is the path of least resistance.
It may be the easiest action to take.....or not take as the case may be.
Of course, with no effort nothing is gained.
I am a business organizer and a personal life organizer, but I am not a community organizer.
I tend to avoid involvement with leaders in civic life. I would rather be left alone.
I want to go along my own path, "Do my own thing."
That is not "Gong with the flow." In many ways it is harder to go your own way when the current is pulling you this way and that.
I like the line "Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." because it is oh so true.
Isn't it easier to "Go with the flow." regarding so many issues of the day. I don't get involved in many issues because I'm busy "Doing my own thing." My lack of involvement may be "Going with the flow, so I can do my own thing."
This may not be the best course of action. I have admiration for people who get involved. People who "Fight the Power" as it were, but a person can only be involved with so much. I wonder what activists are sacrificing for their involvement. I can't decide.
I am reminded of a story from the Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner classic bit, "The Two Thousand Year Old Man." To paraphrase: the two thousand year old man (Mel Brooks) told the reporter (Carl Reiner) that he was dating a woman known as Joan of Arc years ago. He told the reporter that she was very committed person. One day Joan told him that she was going to save France, and he replied, " You go ahead and save France, I'm going to go wash up."
While the activists like Jim Hightower are shaking things up, challenging the status "flow" (saving France) I'm going to go wash up.

Morals

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
- Denis Diderot

Think About Thinking

"Once you understand that what you think about is what controls your life, you start getting real carefu1 about what you think about," Wayne W. Dyer, Ph.D.

Competence

There is no substitute for competence.
Howard Roak (Ayn Rand)

Everybody's cryin' peace on earth---just as soon as we win this war

Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eterity of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration; and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own animal dharma, or immanent law. Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the instrument of reason, language, man (in his merely human condition) lives nostalgically, apprehensively and hopefully in the past and future as well as in the present; has no instincts to tell him what to do; must rely on personal cleverness, rather than on inspiration from the divine Nature of Things; finds himself in a condition of chronic civil war between passion and prudence and, on a higher level of awareness and ethical sensibility, between egotism and dawning spirtuality. But this "wearisome condition of humanity" is the indispensable prerequisite of enlightenment and diliverance. Man must live in time in order to be able to advance into eternity, no longer on the animal, but on the spirtual level; he must be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to be able consciously to transcend separate selfhood; he must do battle with the lower self in order that he may become identified with that higher Self within him, which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he must make use of his cleverness in order to pass beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth, the immediate, unitive knowledge of the divine Ground. Reason and its works "are not and cannot be a proximate means of union with God." The proximate means is "intellect," in the scholastic sense of the word, or spirit. In the last analysis the use and purpose of reason is to create the internal and external conditions favourable to its own transfiguration by and into spirit. It is the lamp by which it finds the way to go beyond itself. We see, then, that as a means to a proximate means to a End, discursive reasoning is of enormous value. But if, in our pride and madness, we treat it as a proximate means to the divine End (as so many religious people have done and still do), or if, denying the existence of an eternal End, we regard it as at once the means to Progress and its ever-receding goal in time, cleverness becomes the enemy, a source of spiritual blindness, moral evil and social disaster. At no period in history has cleverness been so highly valued or, in certain directions, so widely and efficiently trained as at the present time. And at no time have intellectual vision and spirituality been less esteemed, or the End to which they are proximate means less widely and less earnestly sought for. Because technology advances, we fancy that we are making corresponding progress all along the line; because we have considerable power over inanimate nature, we are convinced that we are the self-sufficient masters of our fate and captains of our souls; and because cleverness has given us technology and power, we beleive, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that we have only to go on being yet cleverer in a yet more systematic way to achieve social order, international peace and personal happiness.------This is a direct quote of Aldous Huxley from his book " The Perennial Philosophy" published in 1945

Vince the Prophet is Now on the Web

Today, I finally was able to get the Vince the Prophet web site up and running.

After years of delay there is finally a place where the writings and philosophies of The Millboure Millennium Master will be assembled for the "people of planet earth", outside the West Philadelphia Italian Ghetto where he spent most of his life, to learn about the Poet, Prophet, Phoenix of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I am sure that Vince would have been gratified that his message was now available to millions of people on the web, although I am not sure that he could have ever comprehended what the web is. Vince was a simple man, who shunned technology and passed before concepts like the computer and the world wide web were widely understood or available.

He did tell my friend Bobby and I that we should be his publicity agents. And now we are able to spread the word, 21st Century style.

I had always felt that Vince was born for www distribution.

As we are able to post more Vince content in the coming weeks, I encourage everyone and anyone to check out the site.

www.vincetheprophet.com