No Longer Slaying Dragons

Sunday, August 4, 2013:

Enlightenment is real, and there are enlightened masters still on the earth. When you actually meet one, you will be shaken and moved in the depths of your heart and you will realize all the words, such as illumination and wisdom, that you thought were only ideas are in fact true.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Shaken and moved… isn’t that what we want from art… Shaken and disturbed instead, slaying dragons, I tried to shock and to amuse at once… but shaken and moved? No… but now a quiet haiku moves me. Otherwise; a painting by Picasso, Francis Bacon or Jean-Michael Basquiat; a poem by Alan Ginsberg or William Blake; the “I have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King; a song cried out by Billy Holiday; the trumpet of Louis Armstrong; a guitar solo by Segovia; a violin virtuoso the ilk of Yitzhak Perlman or Isaak Stern; a Bach Fugue; a John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie bebop; the piano keys danced on by Thelonious Monk; a Chuck Berry Duck Walk; a novel by Jack Kerouac; Elvis (before he got fat), Marlon Brando too; and so on: these, for all times, brake through the moral bleakness of my anger and contempt. I knew there was something to it when I was a young man, even though I thought of being shocked and moved... to being as disturbed as possible, in order to be shaken from the mundane.

            Sometimes I read blogs and posts on facebook and see myself twenty, most certainly, thirty years ago. I had to not only make a difference but I had to be different. Shocking and moving with political astuteness, I had only a surface recognition of spiritual mastership, thinking I was above the common crowd because I had a just cause. Disillusionment (turned to bitterness with both), artistic as well as social causes, took me out of the mix. My soul had sunk so deep that it had nowhere else to go but up. I then sought instead to be shaken and moved at the core of my being.

            I now believe it is a good thing that youth embraces a cause. But causes will cement our consciousness if we don’t find somehow to be shaken and moved from them. It was once said by somebody… it doesn’t matter who said it (it has been attributed to everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Abraham Lincoln); “Anyone who is not a socialist before he is thirty has no heart. Anyone who is still a socialist after thirty has no brain.” I would venture to say that heart and soul kept malleable… open to change… open to vehicles of change, is the secret that is not so secret, to enlightenment. Once that is done, no longer slaying dragons... once there, the bum asking for spare change might just be my enlightened master today and I see the Heart of Compassion everywhere.

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