Holiday Greetings From Google…And Someone Else

As you can see, Google is sending holiday wishes out to its customers — the “card” in the graphic arrived this morning. Peace on earth, upward linear movement to all online marketers. May your days be merry and bright / and boundless top line revenue height. “Do no evil” cannot, after all, be incorporated.

We are purportedly celebrating the birth of a fellow who would have dropped this card into the sand with a grimace and a sigh, perhaps adding, “forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What else might this young man, this wisdom-teacher of old, have said to the marketing profit merchants of the West? My source in what follows is not among the synoptics; I have gone to the Gospel of Thomas instead:

If your leaders tell you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’
then the birds of heaven will precede you.
If they say to you, ‘It’s in the sea,’
then the fish will precede you.
But the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.
When you know yourselves, then you will be known,
and you will understand that you are children of the living father.
But if you do not know yourselves,
then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.

One can see now why the early Church suppressed this wisdom and murdered its adherents. Socratean insight has no place in the Cathedral of Profit and Loss. Look at what this Yeshua actually taught: poverty is not, after all, a goal, a consummation of spirituality. The only poverty is the want of self-awareness. The abundance of Nature is within and around you; if you seek it only on the outside, then you are lost; if you live on a line on a chart, then you live in poverty.

How easily do we slip into the pit of poverty when we incorporate our beliefs — either in the Vatican, on Wall St., in Washington, or in Mountain View, California. In the cynical vision of groupthink, abundance becomes the depravity known as wealth; profit is fueled by fear. Around or a little before the time of the birth which we celebrate today, Buddhists offered another metaphor on the fear that makes profit-charted Christmas cards; Alan Watts will explain for us:

In Buddhist symbology the idea…is represented as a kind of being called a preta. A preta is thought of as a hungry spirit, and these creatures are represented as having enormous bellies, but mouths and throats only about the diameter of a needle, so they can never get enough. That tiny mouth and immense belly represents the…feeling of having no present…

…If you identify with the linear conception of yourself, with your story, and with the abstract ego, you feel inadequate, and therefore it becomes necessary to try to make up for that inadequacy by using energy to attain more in all sorts of ways.

Look back over the prior year: has it not been a season of pretas? AIG, Goldman, Citigroup, and all the rest of them: beings with enormous bellies and narrow throats, creatures trapped in that poverty of self-ignorance, which Yeshua warned us is the deepest form of want. The walking-dead of corporate America, buried in the graveyard of “the linear conception” and its spreadsheet-vision of human beneficence and success.

Can we be nothing more than this; wish nothing more of ourselves than this, on this of all days? Clearly, we have reached a point where not even a living god could successfully rampage among the money-changers’ tables on Wall St., as Yeshua did in the temple of Jerusalem. Our temples and their contents of greed are too vast and rigid to easily turn over now. Yet we as individuals can separate from the fear that rules them, simply through the practice of self-awareness. It isn’t hard; it only asks that we look equally within ourselves as we have done and still do externally.

I think we can do it, and I think there is benefit to be had from it. And so, after the teaching of Yeshua, I would like to offer my wish to all our readers: Gnosi Se’auton. May you know yourself; may self-awareness in the breathing, dancing, multi-dimensional hologram of Nature become your practice, your blessing, your life.