“Like the belief of the terminally ill in medicine the belief of the legitimately frightened in the educational process is a comforting lie.”–David Mamet, TRUE AND FALSE.
“Can I sleep in the park?” a fellow slightly younger than myself (I was 22) asked. I said, “It is supposed to rain. You could get arrested. Why?”
He replied, “My father said, ‘My way or the highway.'”
I said, “You made the right choice. Come with me.”
He took me to a party where I saw a fellow reading this book. He introduced me to it.
THE I CHING teaches that if learning and doing are not united both are dead,
It teaches the best are on the side of the least.
It teaches that the best serve neither kings nor princes, that they do not ride in coaches but instead walk,
I thought to myself, “If I don’t look for a king or a prince to give me work how am I going to live?”
I decided to trust the ideas I found between its covers.
Two years later I read THE NEW TESTAMENT cover to cover five times through on a bus trip to Hollywood. In it I found the same ideas I had found in THE I CHING.
Paul wrote to Timothy, “No soldier on active duty gets involved in business.”
The third of THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE is the business man. After him comes Death.
In THE LAST JUDGMENT in Matthew’s Gospel we learn it is not whether or not we say, “I have Jesus in my heart” that matters. It is how we treat the least among us.
Since 1968 I have consciously chosen to live a life based on trust in the ideas I found first in THE I CHING and secondly in THE NEW TESTAMENT.
On the morning of the last day in my third lawyer’s office THE I CHING said, “Sign nothing presented to you today.”
That day his office did their best to terrify me into signing a confession of guilt to charges they knew I was innocent of.
A fellow who had found himself homeless through no fault of his own was staying here. He kept saying my third lawyer was a “dumptruck,” a lawyer who takes our money and gets us to plead guilty. My second lawyer had said to me on the eve of trial. “I don’t know what to do. You could fall on your sword.”
I wondered how many people who had trusted him he had used that line on.
I trusted THE GOSPELS.
I fired my lawyer(s).
The Crown told the court no evidence had been found to support the charges. They were withdrawn. When
I told the judge about my lawyers.
The Judge said, “They are all like that.”
I don’t believe they are however I have yet to meet one who isn’t.
During my trial hundreds of thousands of anonymous posters were put up around Toronto slandering me.
THE I CHING said the people who should be standing with you won’t be. It said, “You are alone. You must be strong.”
THE I CHING says I have a healing power.
After the death of one of my cats I adopted a very traumatized cat. I thought it would take over a year for him to come round.
After the third time he sunk his teeth into my hand I said to him softly,”You know, it’s okay.”
He melted. From that moment on it was head bumps galore. He spent every moment as near me as he could.
THE I CHING has been stating that that I should pray for my oppressors because Judgment is coming down.
That Judgment is not the wrath of GOD it is the logical consequence of their actions.
In Mark’s Gospel 16 I read, “He (Jesus) said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”
They say that because these signs are not evidenced in their lives.
They are evidenced in my life. They have always been evidenced in my life.
Snakes means children of the original serpent who deceived Eve. They are liars and murderers ( John 8:44 ).
How can I know this is true unless liars and murderers do their worst?
They have.
THE I CHING says the bell has rung, the hour has come.
It states that not a hair of my head will be singed.
I have bathed in the fire. I am living fire.
We all are living fire though only a few know it.
Those who seek truth do not see it. They find what they think is truth. They are so certain they are right they will kill us.
Those to whom Truth has revealed itself see it everywhere. We see no need to kill though often we have to leave people behind.
Matthew 7: 24-25 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a sensible man who builds his house on the rock. Down came the rain and up came the floods, while the winds blew and roared upon that house—and it did not fall because its foundations were on the rock.
This has got nothing to do with where we park our ass.
It has everything to do with where we plant our feet.
Annie Besant was an atheist. Her words ring the claxon: “Someone ought to do it, but why should I? Someone ought to do it, so why not I? Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.”
Louis Olivari was an atheist and a communist. His body became crippled. The doctors could offer no cure.
Against his will his wife carted him off to Lourdes for the miracle he did not believe in. She paid a young blind boy to carry her husband into the water. For perhaps the first time Olivari prayed. He said, “God, if you exist, please heal this blind boy.”
He asked nothing for himself.
The blind boy walked into water blind. He walked out blind. By accepting gold he had denied God.
Olivari was healed.
To the consternation of his atheist, Communist friends he became a witness for GOD.
As with him so with myself.
I am asking for nothing.
I am saying that in her last book, DARK AGE AHEAD, Jane Jacobs saw coming what I see coming. People, most people, said she was wrong.
t takes courage to wed learning and doing. It takes courage to call no one teacher and to let no one call us teacher as Jesus calls us to (we are not even to call him teacher).
GOD has placed that courage in you.
If you trust it you will make it through.
If you don’t, you won’t.
That word “spirit” means “air,” breath.”
Trust it.
“You will encounter in your travels folks of your own age who chose the institutional path, who became administrators rather than doers. These folks chose to serve an institutional authority in exchange for a paycheck, and these folks are going to be with you for the rest of your life, and you who come up off the street, who live without certainty day to day and year to year are going to have to bear with being called children by these institutional types; you will, as Shakespeare tells us, endure ‘the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.’ “It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.”– David Mamet, TRUE AND FALSE. (Edited)
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