I’ve been reading a Sufi book called The Art of Being and Becoming and it’s syncing up quite well with what’s going on in my head lately. You take meaning and inspiration where you can get it.

What’s curious is that the mysticism, the understanding of the universe, described it the exact same thing described in all the mystical traditions I’ve read about. It seems to me to be especially close to Taoism which I’ve been a big fan, [note: Do you know who I am? [pause] I am a big fan of Radio Control!] since I read the Tao Te Ching back while I was wandering the Earth like Kwai Chang Cain in Kung Fu or maybe Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction who was planning on walking the Earth just like Cain in Kung Fu too.

You see…for anyone who thinks about wandering or walking it all comes back to Kung Fu.

I mean, what else do you get? There aren’t many wandering/walking motifs to latch onto.

Monks are always walking. You never see a monk driving a tank. You never see them flying planes, or swimming, or skydiving. Nope, the monks walk and wander so if that’s the only image you can reference when talking of walking and wandering that’s what you’re going to do.

Now, back to mysticism of which I’ve been ensconced entirely too much lately. It’s kind of weird because when you are in this place then everything starts to take on meaning. There’s meaning the this crowd tonight, in the bus demolition spectacle I saw this weekend, in my front yard and in the fact that I read a book, mentioned briefly in an earlier post, and the author commented on that post a few days later. How the hell he got there since I couldn’t find a search term that got me close to my website, is beyond my limited comprehension.

Thusly, I sit mulling my coffee and my book on Sufi thought and mulling the hot college girl sitting next to me who’s mulling Shakespeare and that college guy across from her and walking the Earth and all this crazy shit that’s going through my head lately. And I can’t help but be amazed that all the mystical traditions are the same and that doesn’t matter at all.

This is mystical traditions, not the religious ones with doctrine, right and wrong ways of thinking, clearly defined rules and regulations and overt power structures. Those organizations probably do serve a use purpose on getting people to bond and work toward common goals but they sure as hell have nothing to do with understanding the universe.

And what’s even more curious about this thought is that suddenly I’m writing all this without looking at the screen at all. I’m just watching the people and my fingers are flowing over this keyboard and that’s suddenly odd to me because there is a bit in the book mentioned above was a bit about flowing and being in tuned with the and for the briefest of moments, until I noticed it anyway, I was flowing in this space with the keyboard and the crowd and the observation thereof.

But I noticed it, became self-conscious of it, and now here I am making typos with nearly ever keystroke.

When I was in high school I decided I needed to learn to play guitar. I don’t know why. Naturally I took the hardest route open to me since that’s what I always do when I do something and took classes in classical guitar figuring that if I could do that I could do anything on a guitar.

I sucked. No talent at all but I kept plugging away at it, practicing ever day, taking classes, blah blah blah. Then during one class with this guy who had been studying classical guitar for years I played a complicated Andre Segovia peice nearly perfectly. I forgot myself for a tinest moment and I flowed. He was amazed, I was amazed. I could never do it again and I stopped playing guitar shortly thereafter.

Up until a year or two ago I used to flow whenever I sat in front of a computer. I could usually make it sing or at the very least figure out what the hell was going on.

For a short time, with the lost one mentioned earlier on, I think I flowed sometimes too.

Lately though, for the past year, the past three years maybe, everything seems to have become stuck. Like there’s gravel, not just simple sand, in my gears and I don’t know what the hell happened.

I bring this up because there’s a chapter in the book that speaks of vanity and self-consciousness and it describes me perfectly and it describes that sense of flow too.

I’ve known about this for decades and I’m exactly where I was in high school with a little extra added knowledge but no extra added wisdom. This is particularly vexing.

It might be time to start killing like Jules. I think I could work through some anger that way, clear out the gravel and I’m sure killing pays better than making food for fat healthcare workers, and then I’d be able to walk the Earth like Cain and learn some cool karate moves and then I’d be able to flow like water over the rocks and barriers of life.