Stopping to smell flowers and stare at insects and lose myself in plants is something to which nearly all individuals and nearly no collectives can relate. There are activities that are done as an outsider because of the outsider's relationship to the whole, and then there are individual activities that can only be performed by an outsider. Sadly, the glorious walks that occur in the middle of lush Los Angeles are of this category.
In a culture in which walking and sniffing and loving little bugs as one loves stars and people and angels and vaginas and soft winds and hard winds and stream-of-consciousness is not the the norm, there can be no normative subculture that practices such. A society that encourages people to love their environment, to cease to distinguish between living and material, sentient and mechanical, powerful and negligible will not stand. Oh, it ought to stand. It ought to stand to the sky and have angels brush its dandruff off with the bottoms of their wings. But it will not stand. Because the societies that have corrupted God will by force, by freedom of evil, by tyranny of will, by mastery of science, by cruelty, by heartlessness, by myopia, by guns, germs and steel will conquer them.
Christ and Buddha may have been spiritual twins. They may be bowling now in Satori-Heaven. But the historically manifested Buddha and Christ are night and day. Buddha remained gentle. No Buddhist armies sailed for the Western Hemisphere, killed the men, raped the women, assimilated the children and slaughtered the bison. No, that was saved for Christ's followers.
So all this walking and sniffing and loving? It is the down time that Christ received little press for, but the Buddha acclaimed through his wordless Flower Sermon. It is what we do as outsiders. For insiders have made a profession (of history and soul, of blood and sword, of atheism and nuke) of not sniffing. Non-proliferation of destruction, of killing, of hatred, of pollution, of all the black sludge that leaks from heartless hearts -- all this is the symptom of lack of sniffing. I quite honestly believe I am that irrelevant part of the world that is saving itself.
In a culture in which walking and sniffing and loving little bugs as one loves stars and people and angels and vaginas and soft winds and hard winds and stream-of-consciousness is not the the norm, there can be no normative subculture that practices such. A society that encourages people to love their environment, to cease to distinguish between living and material, sentient and mechanical, powerful and negligible will not stand. Oh, it ought to stand. It ought to stand to the sky and have angels brush its dandruff off with the bottoms of their wings. But it will not stand. Because the societies that have corrupted God will by force, by freedom of evil, by tyranny of will, by mastery of science, by cruelty, by heartlessness, by myopia, by guns, germs and steel will conquer them.
Christ and Buddha may have been spiritual twins. They may be bowling now in Satori-Heaven. But the historically manifested Buddha and Christ are night and day. Buddha remained gentle. No Buddhist armies sailed for the Western Hemisphere, killed the men, raped the women, assimilated the children and slaughtered the bison. No, that was saved for Christ's followers.
So all this walking and sniffing and loving? It is the down time that Christ received little press for, but the Buddha acclaimed through his wordless Flower Sermon. It is what we do as outsiders. For insiders have made a profession (of history and soul, of blood and sword, of atheism and nuke) of not sniffing. Non-proliferation of destruction, of killing, of hatred, of pollution, of all the black sludge that leaks from heartless hearts -- all this is the symptom of lack of sniffing. I quite honestly believe I am that irrelevant part of the world that is saving itself.
