21 July 2010

God and Man

Let me tell you something that’s very important. If a man has a problem, and works all of his life on that problem….knowing that he cannot solve that problem, but he can move that problem a little further down the road…. And each time a man becomes a man, whatever that is, it hasn’t got anything to do with sexual preferences, it hasn’t got anything to do with what a guy wears, or how he talks or how strong he is.  It’s the mind of knowing in the truth of righteousness, and being able to analyze, the power of observation, to observe, and the realization that is… one Life: God.  And when God is realized in the man, it’s not a denomination or a story book.  It’s not an illusion or a game or a play.  It’s not for attention or approval.  It’s not for man.  It’s only for God that God is God.  God is not God for man.  God is God because God is everything that is, and there’s no man in it.  It’s eternal….Life…. it’s in the man.   And it says this, to my intelligence:  I’ve been a lifetime in a cell trying to figure this problem out.  Not trying, just automatically.  I can’t sleep without thinking. I can’t live without something beating in my chest or functioning in my soul and my life that says this:  There is only one way.   There can be no dissension. There can be no division; there can be no question about it. What is must be to be what is.  If life is going to be on this planet, it has to come in perfect order with the atmosphere it breathes.  If it doesn’t have that, then there is nothing else.  Everything must be sacrificed for one principle in one order, in one life, in one air, on one world, in one Earth, in one mind, that has nothing to do with human beings.  Human beings are the problem.   They’re the ones that are creating the decisions that are destroying the life on earth.  And all life will be lost on Earth if you don’t deal with the human problem.  Human is the problem, people are the problem.  The oil doesn’t hurt people. It’s the people that are maneuvering the oil that’s hurting people. 
You know when I say something, I mean what I say and I say what I mean.  I’m telling you, stop that goddamn fossil fuel or it will stop life on the planet Earth.  If you’re going to have air on this planet, you’ve got to change, or…. go.  One way or another, sooner or later, the Will of God will be realized on this planet.  It’s got nothing to do with how many websites you’ve got or how many people are reading your books or talking about what’s written on your t-shirt, or how long your hair is or whether you’re gonna be a friend with somebody or an enemy with someone else or…… All that human garbage goes back to the Pharaoh, -arrow, that shot off into the sun when the Pharaoh said that, “There is no one but God, and you do the Will of God or you do not exist.”  It goes back to the slaves, and you see that the slave is happy, and he welcomes his harness that pulls a wagon that’s going to pull him out of that fuckn’ fossil fuel, and put him back on the road to life. ATWA is the final equation, for the Pharaohs’ grave is the darkness of the prisons.  For eternity is within cockroaches, spiders, and bugs.
 I gave all mine to an old blind man who had fought all of his life, who gave his life and his sons lay in the graves of eternal life.  The Grateful Dead said, “Alcatraz was just a pelican standing on a mountain, looking at the ocean.”  The bird is God. We must work for the birds and all the different animals that are gods.  The Army?... look in the zoo,  for your General, and say that we know them animals are our gods, in our heads.  And get back to the planet as fast as we can, for air and water. And STOP CUTTING DOWN THE DAMN TREES for stupid things.  You’ve already got all them things, man.
 You know basically, the average person that don’t know anything, has to be working to do something. And all the jobs have already been put out in place by the dead.  What’s needed is, the CCC, the Conservation Corps of the world, must start new jobs and must be in new economies, with new credit cards and new banks and new numbers, to the conservation of all life on the planet.  We started the CCC in California, and it was given to the veterans with wheelchairs out of the wars. Those are realities that will help survival on the planet Earth, man. Sooner or later it’ll be realized.
- Charles Manson
  June, 2010

15 July 2010

Trees by Hermann Hesse

A California Redwood
(National Geographic)










For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. 

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.


Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.


A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.


When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.


A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.


So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.