--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> quoted Mark Morford, who said many wise things, the wisest being: > > Or you can easily argue that we are discovering shocking > new wonders every day but we have merely lost the ability > to be surprised, that given our media and our movies and > our terrific level of sad jaded ennui, nothing short of > giant amorphous aliens landing here in vagina-shaped > spacecraft and declaring the disastrous experiment over > and ushering everyone back into the jar would shake us > from our intellectual and spiritual lethargy. > . . . > > Maybe the dolphins already know. But we just haven't > learned to listen.
Mark, in his usual funny way, nails the same issue I noticed when "catching up" with a few weeks of FFL. One of the phrases that struck me while doing this was, "Fairfield Life seems to be the kind of place where people come to talk about the spiritual experiences of others when they're not having any of their own." So many people are searching for something *flashy*, something extraordinary that will shake them out of the boredom of their lives. Crop circles, "true" levitation, golden glowing visions of Brahman dancing a jig, saviors showing up and speaking all the languages of Earth at once as they tell us what to do and how to do it. In other words, childish fantasies along the lines of waiting with 'bated breath for the next Star Wars movies so that the special effects can take us out of ourselves for a couple of hours, and we don't have to remember that most of the other hours have been pretty boring, because *we* have grown boring, because *we* have grown bored. I'd suspect that the great revelation Mark is talk- ing about will be far more individual, and far more Zen. It'll consist of people finally noticing the wonder of breathing in and breathing out, and of the sound of the wind in the trees, and the way light dances on the surface of water as they walk along a river. It'll involve an appreciation of the sound of children's laughter and our own laughter, not some big booming Maitreya-voice from the sky telling us more stuff to convince us that we "know" things. Face it -- the more you think you know, the less you actually do. And the more convinced you are that you've got a handle on "Truth," the more bored you become *because* you think you've got things all scoped out. Zen -- an openness to the wonder of the everyday -- seems to me to be the way to go, clinging to nothing, open to everything as a source of wonder, not just the "special effects" of life. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
