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No Gurus

Published on May 17, 2012 by in Merry Musings, Video

My guru teaches that there are no gurus, and if you think you found one, you have demeaned yourself. The suckers in the soon-to-be-released documentary Kumaré are the textbook definition of that truth.

Kumaré chronicles the true story of a false prophet and the people who follow him. American filmmaker Vikram Gandhi impersonated a guru to challenge the idea that only one percent of the people on the planet at any given time can connect the rest of the world to a higher power.

Kumaré comes out on June 20th. It looks like a fun, yet uncomfortable, journey to “enlightenment.” Check out the trailer.

What a trip huh? There really are no enlightened beings–except for the people who know there are no enlightened beings ; ). We’re all cracked vessels in the dark.

However, that can be pretty depressing if you stop there. While we’re all broken, we are loved unconditionally by our creator. The light of that Love will fill us and shine through our cracks if we will just accept it.

I’ll tell you more about all that for a donation. I accept cash, checks, credit cards and whiskey.

Hey, check this out too. This is a MonkCast I did back in 2010 with Marta Szabo, author of The Guru Looked Good. Marta spent 10+ years in the ashram Elizabeth Gilbert featured in her bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love. Marta tells a very different story from what’s in that book.

08.27.10 – Marta Szabo & The Guru Looked Good – The MonkCast

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And it’s…

Published on May 16, 2012 by in Video

Thanks to Hurk for passing this one on.

 
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Einstein Twofer Tuesday

Published on May 15, 2012 by in Twofer Tuesday

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”

- Albert Einstein

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’–a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

- Albert Einstein

 
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The Apostle Paul

Published on May 14, 2012 by in Merry Music, Merry Musings, Spiritual Experimentation, Video

“I’m gonna tell my kids a bedtime story, a play without a plot.
Will it have a happy ending? Maybe yeah, and maybe not.
I tell them, ‘Life is what you make of it, so beautiful or so what.’”

- Paul Simon

I’m not the only one who hears God speak through Paul Simon’s music. In an interview for the PBS program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, interviewer Kim Lawton reported that Simon is gratified and mystified when people tell him they believe God communicates with them through his songs.

“SIMON: Is it a profound truth? I don’t know. I don’t know, but it sounds nice and the combination with the music and the words and all that produces a certain effect and I feel I’m like a vessel and it, it passed through me and I was the editor and I’m glad that people like it and yeah, that’s it. I’m glad.”

I keep going back to Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What. Over the past year, I’ve listened to this album more than any other. It’s a spiritual food I regularly get a hankerin’ for.

In “Questions for the Angels,” I am the pilgrim on a pilgrimage wondering, “If you shop for love in a bargain store and you don’t get what you bargained for, can you get your money back?”

God and his only son pay me a courtesy call in “Love and Hard Times.”

I stare into “Dazzling Blue” and muse with St. Paul, “Maybe love is an accident, where destiny is true.”

And In “Love is Eternal Sacred Light,” Love himself reassures me that I heard him right when I was writing my book: “Love is eternal sacred light, free from the shackles of time. Evil is darkness, sight without sight, a demon that feeds on the mind.”

You can listen to the whole album at Grooveshark.com (for now). Check it out, maybe it’ll be a spiritual meal for you too.

Also, here’s a video about the making of So Beautiful or So What. Good stuff.

Finally, here’s a fun video for the song “The Afterlife.” Damn I love this album.

I do have one question for the apostle Paul. Why does God keep going away in your songs?

 
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Wild Thing, I Think I Love You

Published on May 11, 2012 by in Merry Musings, Video

Is eternity timelessness? Maybe. If so, then now is all there is–the eternal present wrapped by the illusions of past and future. Then again, maybe not.

Either way, it matters what we choose to fill our now with. We are choosing our destiny, our eternity.

The best choice I’ve come up with so far is the Love Fractal: Live in God’s unconditional love until you want to love… then love self-sacrificially until you can’t stand it anymore… then fail to love… then soak in unconditional love until you want to love again. Living in the way of the Love Fractal fills our now with love, we’re either giving it or receiving it. That’s an eternity I can live with.

Anyway, here’s the video that got me thinking about all that this morning. I found it via the Ellensburg Film Festival. The video features Maurice Sendak, best known for his children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Maurice died this past Tuesday. He was 83.

 
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