The First Principle - What's your perceptual framework for meaning?

Once a novice asked a Zen master, “Master, what is the first principle?” Without hesitation, the master replied, "If I were to tell you, it would become the second principle.” The first principle cannot be said. The most important thing cannot be said, and that which can be said will not be the first principle. The moment truth is uttered it becomes a lie; the very utterance is a falsification. So all the scriptures of all the religions contain the second principle, not the first principle. They contain lies, not the truth, because the truth cannot be contained by any word whatsoever, the truth can only be experienced. The truth can be lived, but there is no way to say it.
Osho Rajneesh, an Indian mystic affirms that silence is the only door, the only approach to the heart of the first principle. The primordial state of our being can only be reached when we "get out of our head,"  ending the tyranny of habitual thought that causes are monkey minds to grab on vine after the other. 


Thinking is secondary, existence precedes thinking. First you are and then you start thinking, on average 80,000 a day. Osho calls thinking a shadow activity that follows you, unable to exist without you, yet you cannot exist without it. To quote Osho, "Through thinking you can know secondary things, not the primary things. The most fundamental is not available to thinking; the most fundamental is available to silence. Silence means a state of consciousness where no thought interferes. The first principle is not far away, it is not distant. Never think for a single moment that you are missing it because it is very far away. It is the closest thing to you. It is the obvious thing. It surrounds you.  It surrounds you just like the ocean surrounds a fish. You are in it. You are born in it and born out of it. You live in it, you breathe in it, and one day you disappear in it. It is not far away, not that you have to travel to it. It is there. It is already there around you, within and without. It is your very existence, that first principle. All the enlightened people have passed through a very strange experience: They cannot remain silent because now they know something which they would like to share, but when they try to share they find that it is not the same when you say it; it is something else. The real thing is left behind, only the word reaches the other person"

The moment we divide reality, it becomes the second principle. AS Osho says, "The second is a shadow; the first is the original. Zen has made one of the greatest leaps of human consciousness when it says that the world is God and there is no other God. The creation is the creator, there is no other creator. The very creativity is divine. It is not like a painter who is different from his painting. It is like a dancer who is one with his dance. God is one with his existence. God is his existence. In fact, to say "God is" is tautological, it is a repetition, because "God" means the same thing that "is" means. God is isness. All that is divine."  

Life, Love, Death: Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

             We are bombs with infinite fuses for creation, destruction and preservation, constant human explosions emitting our essence into people, places and thing, destined to impact the landscape of world consciousness. The field of combat is littered with the carrion of cognitive dissonances as well as the blossoming flowers of authentic being. Sometimes we let our inauthentic ego get the best of us and target others instead of our own underlying suffering , or let delusive ideology be a B-52 that discharges our steely hot anger and frustration on innocent parties. So what good upstanding bombs would we be if we did not examine our own wiring? Can we really choose what sets us off?, when and how we detonate and what is worth detonating for? Or is the myopia of a zenophobic, jingoistic, androcentric, and most frighteningly a-spiritual world enough to force us into a blissful ignorance of non-consideration and misplaced empathy?

            Our life was detonated at the moment of conception, it has already happened and the energy within us is going to leave that bomb one day, death it is going to happen – it is a certainty. It is far from morose to acknowledge that birth marks the first step taken into the grave. The day you were pressed into existence, half the journey is already complete; the remaining half will take a little time... or a little more, before the last fuse is lit. With life, death has also penetrated you: Now only one thing remains that you can do, something that depends on you, and that is love, to love the bomb you are, and the wiring you have the potential to alter to become the most compassionate, wise dazzling being possible.

 And because discovery love depends on you, and which fuses you decide to light, there is every possibility you may miss lighting the most sublime fuses we inherently possess.

That is the agony of love: YOU CAN MISS IT. If you don't do something, if you don't become alert, IF YOU DON'T CONSCIOUSLY & DELIBERATELY MOVE TOWARDS LIGHTING YOUR OWN LAMP OF AWESOMENESS YOU MAY MISS YOUR CHANCE, 

There is every possibility that you may not be able to trigger your character, your novel existence. Hence the fear, the trembling, the anguish and anxiety about whether “you” will be about to make “it.” Yet, the trepidations imprinted on us by those who wire us do not have to define us to the extent we have left them.

Our wiring says, "Will I be able to move into love?" "Will I be able to flow into love?" But side by side with this agony, there is an ecstasy -- that one is free. This freedom, this transcendent, indescribable way of approaching all phenomena is open to everyone yet squandered through the craving of ignorance, greed and hatred on personal, state and international levels. In this anarchic world directed by the success of the powerful elites, your personal narrative, characterized by a yearning for freedom counter to the separateness of fear, is the key, the tool, to understanding the potential for efficacy you possess is much greater than what society has told you it possible.

Hope is when you stop worrying about the bomb others want you to be and love the bomb you are, desiring to manifest aesthetic excellence and be the self-fulfilling prophecy towards that end. As Henly wrote prophetically, 

“I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul.”

          Embrace the boundlessness of self-determinant agency and explode in the myriad multivalent directions devoid of fear. For it is fear that compromises our wiring most of all to separate us from love. Yet, our bomb cannot even activate without fear, which exists because of freedom. Mastery of freedom, precision and discrimination of our wiring restructures our minds for total ecstasy sans anxiety and makes the journey worth sailing skillfully.

If love was also predestined, as life and death are, then there would have been no fear, but then there would have been no ecstasy either -- because ECSTASY IS POSSIBLE ONLY WHEN YOU ACHIEVE SOMETHING, when consciously you choose something, when deliberately you arrive somewhere, when it is YOUR journey and you are not being dragged. That's the beauty of love and that's the danger too,

The time is now to detonate, you bright bombs of breathtaking ebullient bliss!