Riffin' On the Spontaneous Emergence of Circus Tricks

“This confidential knowledge may never be explained to those who are not austere, or devoted, or engaged in devotional service, nor to one who is envious of Me.” 18.67 Bhagavad Gita Conclusion- The Perfection of Renunciation

You see, I’m a touch of a “musician”, a guitarist about twenty years into the habit, and currently at a place in which I’m beginning to first take things “out on the town” in an attempt at a semi-professional sort of jaunt, and quite recently I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing sharper, nothing as derisive and universe-consuming, nothing quite as utterly shitty, as discovering that a peer/contemporary has a really nice rig.

           It’s not a thing of pettiness or personal defect…it doesn’t bring out the worst in you, and in fact, it seems designed in such a fashion to do the utter opposite, even. This is a thing of determinism amongst an unwitting school of fish, spontaneously heaped together as an unofficial art collective littering the various unpaid open mics piggybacking on the service industry concepts in the town, and, quite hilariously, there’s nowhere to go but up, at a pace which, if experience is any indicator, is ever-increasing exponentially, at that…

                Talk about seeing the universe in motion, the effective congress of the eternal forms charted by the conventions of the arts with the lives/work of individuals… the sheer boundlessness of the human bandwidth ever evident in the elasticity in quality of experience available to one whose self-definition sees them touching the entirety of the affairs of all of Time, even the parts of it which have yet to come yet also exist utterly knowable somewhere within the bounds of the void that is the Source…

                Which is to say, somewhat as an aside, with these words and these ways, rationality, we can really dream up frameworks that somehow see Self, in a less defined framing, as omnipresent…in a victorious/interventive fashion at that…which is eerily a huge part of devotion to Christ, the idea that somehow He transcended time as a witness to the entirety of existence in a Messianic fashion, and as such is obviously a shadow looming over us at any moment…

                Believe it or not, the art collective, the group of content creators on youtube, the beat poets hitting the coffee shops…the acoustic kids hitting the open mics…the cultural conventions of these forms are rigged up in such a fashion that this lifestyle culminates in a personal journey engaging the Eternal Witness in such a fashion that you come to realize Oneness with this Omnipresent force. The conventions of songwriting and having a dynamic stage presence, the conventions of being successful in the arts and having the capacity to really touch the lives of your fans in a meaningful way, is contingent on universal truth… it’s contingent on spiritual success/testifying somewhat to the truth of Life itself.

To be a good musician is to be a good person…as well as to go well beyond the more 2 dimensional, public conception of what being a good person means, going so deep as to realize that being a good person actually requires, when it comes down to black and white of it, being all loving, and all powerful, in addition to somehow being present to witness all bouts of suffering which ever transpire, as well as being the cause of said suffering, in addition to the only acceptable positive resolution of It…it requires you to be a God, which is something we are fundamentally, but that we have the capacity to pervert through ignorant action and general confusion as Beings existing in a culture which has largely stigmatized personal resonance with Source deep enough to be construed as “Oneness” in some sort of perverted stressing of the pervasiveness of sin.

           Being a good person/musician would actually mean being able to justify all of the dark things which ever happened ever, or have yet to happen, without validating unnecessary suffering or perpetuating it… and would also mean being able to explain life in terms of some sort of great victory, as it actually is, without losing sight of the clear vision of how to make it oh so much better, if not eradicate our personal capacity for suffering entirely… and somehow, the best of our musicians really do this with their craft. They do this with the songs, and then they do this with themselves as people and how they go about executing the songs out on the road… it’s the entire walk of life.

                And in our time, the production shines upon us or rather… the mirror grows self-aware of its Source. These conventions of recreational performance which manifest spontaneously so as to give us an interface which to both create as well as to create in a socially intensive fashion… were predicated on the reality of our culture, what we were looking and behaving like as we spent our time on this Earth as humans living together…

                Which is to say, we too somehow come to consciously slip into it…as identity…as personal aesthetic… as daily habit… in each and every thing that we dip our fingers into, as well as the work of our hands…

                This “confidential knowledge” is available “only” to the “austere”…to those “devoted” or “engaged in devotional service”. What is it to even really be “devoted”...these words chuckle they’re only in service to these monolithic baddies which encapsulate it all, and that’s it right there “de-vote(ed)” ; it means “de-to (formally) vote (vow)”. Sometimes “consecrate” is used in its place as an adjective of definition. To be de-voted… to have a yogi kiss a cow on the mouth, to tell a rather nuanced and elaborate secret in a crass and outright way… to be  “de-voted” was to consecrate the personal identity by vowing utter Oneness with the Monotheistic God Himself. You have to recognize yourself in a deep way as being One with God…with the Father…with the Source…however you encapsulate it…

                And, realistically, that’s the beginning of the “real” “path” usually… and it’s a long journey fed by a lot of living, day in and out…

                Anyways, that you need to claim utter Oneness with God to effectively potentiate your inherited nature is why today’s passage claims that “this confidential knowledge” isn’t available to those “envious” of Krishna…they need to be utterly One with Him, incapable of said envy.

                And when you’re in an art collective, at times that means getting good. Under draconian measures, seemingly… it all fires the neurons nonetheless, as art does, but sometimes that form you need to resonate utter oneness with is just like…otherworldly. (and so often times, when a rational path of mirrored execution can’t be dreamt up, people  turn to superstition and evocative imagery…they consume food in a goluptious manner as if they can willfully suck the nutrients out of the food even quicker, so as to hulk out… people turn the bottom of the bottle to the ceiling and hold it for as long as humanly possible… we rather automatically try to play some sort of spontaneous emergence of a “knock-out” game in which we find ourselves largely unconscious…)  

                Now  that’s precisely the real form, isn’t it? The entirety of the Beast… in the throes, with its fair share of utter mental disassociation, effortlessly, with the listless beauty of Zen performing simply impossible feats, time and time again, one on top of the other, in some sort of real testimony to the sheer capacity of capacities…

                I meant in regards to getting good by any means necessary, not so much intentionally burning yourself to a husk in deference to the vastness of the territory of the Unconscious…just like meditate or turn it into a conception of a Deity and pray to it or something if need be…

                And that’s the art collective, being “in the throes” “effortlessly” performing “impossible feats” “time and time again”. And for some reason some people think that idea or type of idea is inherently cool, but it’s utterly devoid of all of the social accolades that ultimately our sustainable pleasure as social beings are contingent upon, which flows seamlessly into the defects in the archetype of the starving artist and so perhaps I’ve always been star-crossed for either some sort of complicated variation on multiple personality disorder, or, at the very least, a daunting mid-life crisis.

                 I guess like…the circus tricks were only possible because they were spontaneous emergences of a freak universe meant to help individuals survive where industry/our economy had failed them, and yet we all want to be capable of that, and for some reason, particularly in our consumption of media, we all deeply ideate the notion of living that kind of life, being out on a whim, pulling it together because of some sort of intimacy with the very ways of unfolding luck Itself, in addition justice/what is right…

                I guess Riffin’ On’s final question today is that those living this kind of life…is this the kind of life that kills you?! Or do merely become beautiful?