Yes. Yes sirree, one word leads to another.
I've been thinking about freaking out. What exactly is a freakout? A bad trip. I mean, you're sitting there, right? Nothing's happening. But you're having a bad trip.
What's that?
What if you didn't care if you were freaking out? Could you still freak out if you didn't care that you were freaking out?
I mean, having been there in the midst of some very freaky bad trips it certainly is not in the least like nothing is happening. It seems like lots is happening and it's all really undesirable, and yet what is actually happening?
This is why bad trips are so educational. So good.
This is why huge amounts of suffering teaches you so much. What is happening, exactly? It's awful. You can't take it. But why not?
I guess it's enough to say it's terrible, God help me, get me out of here, please, anything but this. But what if you don't get out of there? What if you're never really out of there?
Ross, my golf pal, was explaining to me the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path of Buddhism recently.
He's not a Buddhist. He's simply a retired professor of philosophy. I on the other hand used to be a Buddhist. I was one. But he knows far more about it than I do.
But the idea of it is that the most significant aspect about being alive is the suffering, and the purpose of Buddhism is to address that suffering and somehow cure it.
Well, a lot of people don't even want to think about suffering and don't agree that that's what life is about at all. Particularly Americans.
The picture you get about Americans is of a phobia about suffering. But I'm sure the picture is wrong. Everything about popular culture in the world as described in the media is wrong. Nobody is like what everybody assumes everybody is like. Anyway, I don't give a fig about Buddhism even though my wife is a Zen Buddhist nun. In fact that's probably a significant reason why I am not interested in Buddhism. It's just that Ross happened to start talking about it on the golf course last week.
Deep breath.
Thank God there is golf. Thank God there are moments when I can look around on a brisk morning and all I can see are trees and birds and two or three people and I don't have to give a damn about any of this shit, and the suffering is all about whether I double bogied the last hole or not, or shanked my last approach shot, or missed a two foot putt.
Hallelujah, and thank God for such suffering.
Of course I don't believe in God. Nor do I disbelieve in God. Nor does anyone else. I mean, God is a word in the dictionary. And it refers to something. And every one of the zillion times someone uses the word God in speech or in writing it refers to something completely different and unique.
I'm embarrassed even to be wasting my time being bothered by such nonsense, and I'm embarrassed to be embarrassed.
Og gord purpud.
Make sense of that why don't you?