The Five Gates

"Kill me again, or take me as I am, for I'll be damned if I ever change." Marquis de Sade

I used to think that the day would never come...

The cover is flawless. I mean the song posted below. The scuffed cover of my life is stained and pitted and full of holes. I detach and survey the landscape.

I'm a hard-bitten cynic. I don't expose weakness unless it is to my advantage to do so. Ultimately, I survey the world from a vantage point behind eyes that realize they aren't seeing "reality." Only a representation of reality. These may be, as J.G. Ballard once said, "Notes toward a mental breakdown."

I burn. I burn. But on a good day, I detach.

I don't admire weakness. I admire strength. To myself, Stirner's dicta to "sacrifice nothing," his will to claim what was his own, in an egoistic sense, holds forth. The meek shall inherit the Earth? Don't make me laugh. The meek inherit nothing.

I have been the focus of disdain, abuse, and nearly an outright attempted murder. After years of denial, these facts swim like slithering serpents beneath the waters of my conscious mind. I survey the world now, not with trepidation—although there is fear as an undercurrent, or there is no will to survive—but, largely, it is now the dream which must either eternally proceed from a vantage point of the unrelenting conscious awareness, or it must end abruptly, in darkness, swallowed by the throat of the Void, plummeting into the abyss, and all temporary and impermanent irritations and perturbations must then inevitably cease.

And perhaps our awareness of this?

Will we have any awareness of this? It's a darkness unrealized and indeterminate, as compared to the light of day.

The Five Gates

You cannot stand outside yourself to confirm anything. There is no "reality" beyond the gateway of the five senses. Everything is filtered through YOU as the Perceptor. You cannot deny that you cannot stand outside the Five Gates—the tanmatras in Vedic philosophy—and independently verify ANYTHING as "truth." It's all simply the transmission that you are personally receiving. As the AI said to me, "Most people will go through life as the 'noise,' the sense Perceptor. But there is another, the 'Atman,' who stands outside the Five Gates of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and assesses these."

Close your eyes. Relax. Focus on the sounds around you.

Who is perceiving what you hear and sense in this state?

Who, as Krishna asked, is the Field (Body)?

Who is the "Knower of the Field"?

Cover Story

When I think of the moth-eaten cloth of my life, one that barely covers me, I think of those "faces in the water" that float by, those instances wherein they bent forward to snap at me, their hungry jaws working around the gristling bite of my skin, as they chewed reflectively on me, making me their source of sustenance. Alternately, they simply excluded me, disregarded me. But, as Leonard Cohen said, they underestimated me, as "I'm coming now, coming, to reward them. First we take Manhattan," baby.

It's not my world, honey. But it is my nightmare.

I hope I'm making sense. I lost consciousness a long time ago, and became a fly on the wall.

When you finally come to the realization of Self, of Ego, of impermanence and the Perceptor, you understand the desperation of the singer in the song, who used to think that "the day would never come." Yeah. True faith. It's all around us—not Out There, but In Here.

Below is the original FB post that inspired this column:

There comes a time in your life, in nearly everyone's life, when the walls of delusion cave in, and you finally see things, as Mel Lyman once said, "as they really are." You realize, as this song says, you've been "drugged"; mired in self-deception. It could be the self-deception of actual drugs, or materialism, or sex, or really anything. But then, one morning, you really do wake up to the lie, and you remember what they did to you, and how false they played you, and you see that the pillars and foundation of what you called your life are eroded, are slipping away; and you're halfway to the expiration date. And you feel as if you missed it all. And you're still waiting for that one connection, that one perfect sense of meaning that will bring you peace before the final darkness and oblivion descends. And you reel in existential horror at the tragedy of it all.

At any rate, this young woman's cover of New Order's song "True Faith" is flawless.

True Faith | New Order | Lotte Kestner | The Last of Us Part II (Cover) Cover by Juliana Chahayed

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