Yesterday's trip over the hills to the Roman Wall to visit an old friend to press the juice from apples gladly given and received ... autumnal abundance processed as Winter arrives! Though the day is mild enough in early December and pressing questions of an existential nature are examined along with the experiential low tech pleasure of working in harmony with the Nature from which we were never really separate ... despite a few millennia of delusion imagining we were, fuelled by clever, artful specimens, arrogantly asserting our secession ... The Fall of Man, metaphorically expressed in the Garden of Eden, with Snakes and Sex and dire warnings of the existential perils facing the species as division multiplied, brains grew, developed new powers ... language evolved to create new worlds through description ... an error pointed out in the Dao, verse one, line one and substantially the only words we need: "The Dao which can be described is not the Immortal Dao!" ... the truth of which is revealed beyond the babble, in Silence ...
Wars ensued as humans killed each other on command ... despite Universal Law asserting Thou Shalt Not Kill, in any wisdom teaching worth its salt ... and yet killing never stopped ...
Meanwhile, in the current existential crisis, sometimes storied as World War 3 ... not the war to end all war, that was WW1 you may recall ... WW2 was basically caused by the Peace Settlement of WW1 with its gross imbalances promoting economic desperation in the losing nation, fuelling the Darker side of Man presented by Hitler and his gang ... and between us, we clever humans, killed many more due to much improved technology, killing on an industrial scale. Between WW1 and WW2 and ever since killing carried on through wars and starvation of innocents while wealthy humans wallowed in excessive wealth ... such blatant disregard of Natural Law outraged the virtuous, though action didn't match the words ... money, the love of which was rightly said to be the root of evil, sloshed around corrupting us in big and smaller ways ...whilst modern medicines and cleaned up settlements, notably the slums, launched a surge of humans like a virus, a pestilence on Earth, threatening Nature herself perhaps and certainly the comfort of those humans so in love with their money and the power it bought they decided to take drastic action in our best interests, since so many in the middle ranks were gaily buying baubles to compensate for the deep sense of guilt and existential angst brought on by realising that all the charitable giving was not solving the poverty ... meanwhile, the Planet we call home, was warming up slowly but inexorably, whether by human excess, natural causes or a combination of the two, threatening the comfort of the super-rich, defined essentially by having more resources than could ever be needed and relatively by perceptions of each other, which is to say, for a person living in dire poverty, most humans able to read this blog are seen in the same camp as the so-called 1%!
Mark sparked the question in the title of this post ... a reminder of such questions arising along the Way, deep in inquiry into the juicy places beyond language and languages. .. in the Silence where deeper realities may be found ... as well as delusions, of course!
Enough is enough?
How would we know until we tried both extremes? Buddha set the example, starting a Prince, renouncing that to experience penury, finding enlightenment via the Middle Way.
Quoting Buddha, however, is not to find Buddha Nature ... that must be found each time by living it in each culture by each seeker pushing the limits at each opposite, more or less, and finding the Simplicity suitable ... along with Compassion and Patience ...
That's enough for now, time is short and attention spans shorter still ... apple juice needs bottling and sharing before fermentation sets in ... though cider is an option, freezing too ...
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