Song Of The Day: It's a tie. Will It Go Round In Circles / Billy Preston

Word Of The Day: Rupp / In Britain, a public right of way designated as a road and used esp. as a footpath or bridleway. (acronym for Road Used as a Public Path)

Woke up at 8:30 AM by kisses from wife and daughter, got in the car, and we were off to the club first thing. We now work out as a family four days a week, my daughter goes to the nursery while my wife does NIA and I lift weights. I am so fucking cut. Not. Anyway...

Driving into town, I am staring ahead in silence, quietly observing what passes by in the window, and for no reason I decide to turn on the radio. John Lennon's singing

"I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, I really love to watch 'em roll / No longer riding on the Merry Go Round, I just had to let it go"

and I'm like: That's deep shit. This dude was a Mystery dude. We all know the Beatles had a deep entwining with esoterica, especially George and John. I wonder how much of the song Watching The Wheels is actually a conscious reference to the Dharma Wheel. My guess is that Lennon knew exactly what he was doing when he chose metaphors that offered popular, wide access to any random listener (Wheels, Merry Go Round), but also was totally tuned into the esoteric meaning beneath that one (turning of the Dharma Wheel, the Merry Go Round being successive incarnations on the way to awakening, and then upon awakening, realization that there is neither excarnation or incarnation, not being or non-being -which he refers to in singing "I just had to let it go".)

Maybe. And maybe it's all an elaborate interpretation on my part, just a projection of my own practice and approach to music. But most of the time (two minutes) I was listening to this song while driving, I saw Eddie K's face in my mind, in slow motion, during his performance years ago on Saturday Night Live, and while I was watching him in my mind (and back the first time I saw it), that was exactly what I was seeing, this guy is watching the wheels go round and round, no longer riding on the merry go round, but he's still here, still loving it awake more and more, but not caught in the circus.

it all was just a couple minutes in the car. i shrug it off, go inside, work out for an hour on weights. My wife is usually dancing, but today she's lifting with me. It's evident immediately that she's about as at-home in a weight room as I am in a dance class. When I try to dance, I look like an epileptic trapped inside an invisible disco ball. When she tries to lift weights, she looks like a Goddess put to work in a quarry. It doesn't add up, just doesn't even look right, her slaving away trying to push some stupid metal plates with pullies and levers. It looks right when I do it, not because I'm muscular or buff, but because somehow the metaphor of doing a dumb, hard, and repetitive action suits me. The metaphor that suits her is dancing, hopping, spinning, rolling, and joyously bouncing her body around a room. She's bored with weight lifting in five minutes (like me in dance class), and she starts making faces in the mirror, talking to the staff, experimenting with what her cleavage looks like when she contorts her body, asking for food, water, how long has it been, how long till we leave. She finally ends up going to another part of the club to do something more fitting her type. It's really quite adorable, but I can't focus with her giggling and sticking her tongue in my ear and saying "look at my boobs!" while I try to press my own body weight (98 pounds and climbing).

After we work out, we take separate cars, she's got to go run errands, and i've got to go back to the house. I climb in the car and hear Billy Preston come on singing Will It Go Round In Circles. He's singing:

I've got a song, ain't got no melody
I'm gonna sing it to my friends

I've got a story, ain't got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while

I've got a dance, ain't got no steps, no
gonna let the music move me around

Will it go round in circles
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky
Will it go round in circles
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky

And now I'm like what is up with the Wheels and Circles today? First John Lennon is giving me a Dharma Talk on the way in, now I got Billy Preston giving me the Straight Zen Injection with these fucking lyrics. I mean, those lyrics could have been written by Nantenbo or some shit. I've heard this song a 100 times, how could I have missed how incredible the lyrics are? Here's a quick look:

I've got a song, ain't got no melody
I'm gonna sing it to my friends

(that's a two-line Koan concerning the paradox of a voiced silence, the presence of an absence, and how that fundamental irresolvable dichotomy is actually the Perfected Complimentarity of IS, the song of the Non-Dual. what more can you say about the Absolute and the Relative than what Billy gave us in those two lines? Holy shit.)

I've got a story, ain't got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while

(Remember how Rumi said "Out beyond ideas of 'right' or 'wrong', there is a field. I will meet you there..." Yeah, me too. That is fucking DEEP. Billy has nailed it in two lines. When he says "Story" he means "THE Story, of being, becoming, and unbecoming, all at Once", when he says "no moral" he means "BEYOND morals" when he says "let the bad guy win every once in a while" he means "There is no 'other', you are the bad guy, the good guy, the victim, the hero, and each and every thing that arises. Don't be afraid of your Self.")

I've got a dance, ain't go no steps
gonna let the music move me around

(now, what's the full expression of these realizations? how do you demonstrate the embodied Void? Genpo Roshi said to us in a Big Mind session once,
"Can I talk to dropped-off Body-Mind?"
we said "yes".
He said "who am i talking to?"
we said
"dropped-off Body Mind"
he said "What does dropped off Body Mind look like standing up?"
we stood up. that was it.
and now Billy Preston is giving us the same directions: Express and embody the perfected combination that is form and emptiness, time and timelessness, relative and absolute, and fucking BE REAL with this shit. have you ever heard a line any MORE ZEN than "I've got a dance, ain't got no steps, gonna let the music move me around." I haven't.

It's not just mumbo jumbo and flights of fancy to notice these things. Dharma is everywhere, all the time. We are submerged in Awakened awareness 24/7, 365 days a year, signals are beaming to us from every point in the Kosmos, messages from our Self, holding the giant Magnet at the Point Of All Places, in the center of all things and non-things. That's You singing that Billy Preston song, that's You coming out of John Lennon's throat, and You listening, and You remembering, You forgetting, and on and on. When I say "You" I mean the "I" that's "We". All pronouns add up to 0/1. In IS there's a number that's both a one and a zero, both a number and an absence of a number (it would be a good integer for a Light equation, both a particle and a wave coordinate simultaneously).

We live on Earth, it's 2005, and this is a modern culture. Whether you're reading this from your computer in Detroit or Dresden, you live in the West in a the modern World. The Dharma is showing up right now, right her, in magnificent, surprising ways, all around us. It's blossoming in pop music, I hear it being rediscovered, reborn, and invigorated in bands from U2 to Live to The Waterboys to Ottmar Leibert to Saul Williams to Billy Preston and on and on and on. It's beaming to us from the big screen in films like Thin Red Line, I *Heart* Huckabees, Mulholland Drive, it's on t.v. shows like Six Feet Under and... well, maybe not very many t.v. shows, but tons and tons of music and movies.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for honoring and preserving tradition, and deeply nurturing the roots of the Mystery in its manifold heritages. But the Buddha was 2,500 years ago. He lived in a different culture, spoke a different language, inhabited a different biosphere, and inherited a completely different history and context. He realized and lived the Absolute truth, yes, but the Absolute is half the story. The Absolute Truth never changes, is undying, unborn, unmade, unspeakable, unknowable. The Relative -which is the other half of this Unity- is CONSTANTLY changing, ever-evolving, ceaselessly unfolding, and it is a WAY, WAY different World than it was under the Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago. COME ON. Perennial Wisdom? Yes, of course. Rigid adherence to a romanticized, spiritual retro-interpretation of a time that we never knew, can never really now, and has limited relevance to our life and experience today? No. No way.

Buddhism, for instance. Although its all about the living, dynamic reality of experiencing Reality "As It Is" and not as we wish it to be, or think it should be, or as we can modify it, in spite of it being the Religion of no- religion, the dogma of no- dogma, it is incredibly, deeply entrenched in a baffling nexus of assumptions, filters, and doctrines. It's not a Buddhist thing, it's a human thing. The problem is we mistake Buddhism for "It" or a certain period in Buddhism for being more "awakened" than this period we live in now, and the same holds true for Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Islam. Humans are retro-romanticists, and that Golden Past that everyone pines for, is, sadly, a chimera of staggering proportions, a collective delusion so pervasive it literally re-shapes the fabric of our experience of reality. The religions are a collection of hallucinations so perverse and vivid it may take thousands of years to correct their morphogenetic distortions. In short, we have broken the bones of God, the Subtle body of the Holy Spirit, or Dharma, or whatever was snapped, and it grew back all fucked up. Now we have to re-brake it and allow for a proper healing and alignment.

Here's one possible take on things: This is, without a doubt, the BEST time ever in the history of the planet to work in the Mystery. There have never been MORE awakened entities in operation on Earth than there are right now, right here, at this moment, in this culture. Sky-scrapers, t.v. sets, radios, neon billboards, poverty, urban decay, fantastic economic boon, whatever it is we see in the landscape and the innerscape, IS the fourth turning of the Wheel, and the Dharma has moved to North America. It is not going to look like it did before -THAT IS GONE- so let's stop staring at some picture of our dead relatives and waiting for them to walk through the door. They're DEAD, but they live on in us, and are reborn in our generation, just as we will be in the next. In this turning of the wheel, in the Dharma that is living and breathing and joyfully bouncing through New York, Hollywood, Kentucky, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, let's NOT LEAVE ANYTHING OUT. Let's make this the fullest, emptiest inside / outside nesting of Selves ever. We may, for the first time in the history of History, include everything, all cultures, all systems, all religions, all philosophies, all artistic mediums, all messages, all insights, and all MISTAKES - we can appreciate and use their strengths and weaknesses, their healthy contributions and their pathological liabilities, and FUCKING MOVE FORWARD and outward, and inward- all at the same time. We have the opportunity to participate in an omni-directional evolutionary BANG that's bigger than any Big we've ever known before.

But we're not going to do it by clutching some dead, romantic idea of the way things should be, look like, or feel like according to the PAST. There is no such thing as "two times", as in "right now" and "back then". Have we ever experienced anything in the past? No. Our memories of the past occur only in the present. There is no such thing as two places. Have we ever experienced anything in a different place? No. We're always where it is. Experience = location. We ARE all locations, and also the non-locatable Self, in the absolute sense. In the relative sense, we're not sitting under the fucking Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago. We're not in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, or Medina, or you name it. There are prophets all around us, carpeting the path with clues and cues, and if we want to Remember, we have to forget what it is we think we should be remembering or how it will be to remember it. Today I was driving my jeep on a new road through a suburban sprawl drinking a double espresso coffee, and I received a COMPLETE transmission of the Dharma from Billy Preston in the form of a 3-minute Pop Song. That's it. That's what it looks like, right now, today, for me in this culture. How cool!

We can recognize the Way NOW, HERE because it is unrecognizable to us according to that which we've already recognized, and that recognition is unmistakable and singular. It has never appeared the same way twice, EVER, and yet its living, inner Reality is immutable.

This shit is FUCKING HOT.

Can you believe we get to live right now, right here, in this amazing, Big MIND-blowing unfolding of God in asphalt, flowers, jet airplanes, transvestites, and elegant political upheaval? Can we read the Scripture that is written every day on each animate and inanimate object in the World? In our minds? It's all the Word. Make no mistake, this is THE pivotal opportunity, and our Life (one life, singular) is in the dead center of it. Don't blow it off, don't wait for something else. Let's die for Love, right now, right here, and dance the Dharma while we have these legs. The new sutras are on FM radio.