I tried to wiggle one ear up and one ear down
while squinting into the morning sunlight
I had a spliff burning
and I really had not understood buddy at all
in his explanation
of "God"
It was a bit too much of a meaningless ramble
repeating things other people had told him
I had listened well
I heard every word
but there is this spiritual path called Zen
and I studied it long ago
for a bit
and in that austere simple struggle
you learn that words can be strung together
that seem to make sense
but yet within the structure of the paragraph logic
complete contradictions can be formed
because words are just a tool of thought
they are not thought themselves
Yet I had listened to the young man for at least five minutes
and listened well
but he was really just babbling
numbers and infinity and bullshit
too much shitty drugs
not enough reading
"god is the Wizard's machine" I said.
He looked blank.
"Dorothy. The wizard. Off to see the wizard."
He still looked blank.
"Wizard of OZ"
"Oh I heard of that, never seen it
its like old stuff or something..."
"Yeah. Exactly."
This
was going to be a bit more difficult since he was unfamiliar with the
particular cultural reference I was using to illustrate the metaphor.
But I had to try, regardless of his inability to grasp it without prompting.
I needed to practice my delivery for the next person anyway.
"So.
Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion go off to find the Wizard.
They are off to find God.
They
are on their Journey to find God, because everyone knows that god can
do anything and each of them has a personal thing that they think God
can help them with, to go home, get a brain, get courage, get a
heart...etc.
Right?"
"Yeah, yeah, man, yeah and theirs the monkeys and shit eh and the witch"
"Yup.
Lotsa fucking monkeys." The insinuation went right over his head like a
Boeing. I didn't elaborate on the monkeys. This guy would have trouble
focusing on a full wrestling match.
"So.
They travel across the landscape doing this and that and all this shit happens and they finally find the Wizard.
And
they walk inside, and there is the big huge face on the wall spouting
smoke, and the big booming reverberating echo-voice of GOD/the Wizard
booms out at them and they tremble and shake and the colored lights
flash and the smoke billows and the thunder roars...
until Toto
pulls apart the curtain on the little booth and we see the old man
operating the great Machine, fiddling and turning the dials to make the
God machine go."
He's looking sooooo blank but trying at this point.
He realizes he's failing a comprehension test of some kind, its showing
in his eyes.
"So.
They come all this way to find something,
they go to the big Temple to find God/the Wizard. They are met by the
Priest. The old man. The caretaker of the Temple.
The Priest operates the God machine,
he
understands ethereal projection, telepathy, archetypal personal
transformation, shapeshifting, energy pattern manipulation, kundalini,
meditation, along with stagecraft, ritual practice, and the psychology
of spectacles and illusions, and he/she pushes those levers to make the
God Machine Show that gets everybody quaking with fear so he can live
nice and quietly in his big temple with minimal fearful intrusions.
Everyone
around fears the Temple and the God Machine but everyone is trained
that they have to go there to get what they think they need"
He wasn't getting it so I gave up.
Total blank.
At least Homer could understand Cheebuz.
Not this kid.
"Ok.
The
truth of it is after everything in their adventures, when they find
god, and realize he's just a wise old man with some people skillz, they
actually do complete their quest.
They each find the thing they were looking for
inside of them, with them
they already had it
they
needed the Journey to the old priest to find God, in order to find that
God is a projection of the old priests, and really they just needed to
go to an old wise man in the first place to get some advice on how to
find what they already had."
I relit my spliff
because it had gone out
I don't think he was able to hold the nuances of that one.
I need to sharpen the story a bit for the younger generation
find a different
cultural reference
