The Tao of Mark Twain

[mwight]

The Mysterious Stranger

 

by Mark Twain

 

No. 42

 

Chapter 11

 

(note the character Satan refers to a non-evil young nephew of Satan)

 

For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for his return.

 

"And you are going away, and will not come back any more?"

 

"Yes," he said. "We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant--pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more."

 

"In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?"

 

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is no other."

 

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true--even must be true.

 

"Have you never suspected this, Theodor?"

 

"No. How could I? But if it can only be true--"

 

"It is true."

 

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, "But--but--we have seen that future life--seen it in its actuality, and so--"

 

"It was a vision--it had no existence."

 

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. "A vision? --a vi--"

 

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."

 

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

 

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space--and you!"

 

"I!"

 

"And you are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me....

 

"I am perishing already--I am failing--I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

 

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago! --for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

 

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

 

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

 

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

Edited August 15, 2007 by mwight

[mwight]

He does a lot of God bashing, but I still love the story.

Edited August 15, 2007 by mwight

[mike andre]

Hi mwight,

 

 

You've made refernces in other posts about the system of neigong you are studying. I was wondering if you could offer any information about what that system is and who you are learning from.

 

thank you,

 

 

mike andre

[mwight]

Hi mwight,

You've made refernces in other posts about the system of neigong you are studying. I was wondering if you could offer any information about what that system is and who you are learning from.

 

thank you,

mike andre

 

No sorry I cannot.

 

 

I can tell you however everything I have learned I have also found in similar texts, the pieces are all there.

 

After I have done all I can with this branch of neigong, I do plan on training with Robert Peng, and then perhaps later Dr. Verdesi if I can afford it.

[Todd]

I remember writing a paper about Huckleberry Finn in high school. It was an analysis of the sporadic poetic imagery to be found in the text. I correlated the occurrence of this imagery with information about his life from the introduction to the book. I think I was basically trying to say that he had competing drives-- one to continue to be a writer of popular fiction and to gain money and renown thereby, and another to express the immediacy of ecstatic experience and awe. I was generally a disinterested student, but I worked long and hard on this paper and when I got it back, I received the lowest grade I had ever received on a paper, "C+".

 

Its cool to see that maybe my intuitions about Mr. Twain weren't completely false.

 

Thanks for posting the excerpt.

[Taomeow]

"Most people imagine god as a cat with his paw in the fish tank." -- Terrence McKenna

 

And why is that? Why, if it's all a dream, billions have been dreaming the same dream for the past fifteen thousand years? and nobody, before that?..

 

Looks more like the kind of dream induced by sending a signal from a central computer to the microchip imbedded in a cyborg's pineal gland. Do check yours, and if you find one, pull it out --

 

then you'll hear the music of the spheres and know the universe is real. "It's beautiful, you balmy bastards, this is not a dream." -- George Starbuck

[Flynn]

Taomeow,

 

How can any of us be sure that anyone else has really dreamed the same dream for thousands of years? Perhaps we just dreamed that they have...

 

It all goes back to the question of verifying a consciousness other than your own. I personally have not yet developed a way of doing this, thus I remain open to the possibility that I am imagining everyone and everything else.

 

Mark Twain was a great writer, and he touched on many of the topics that made people uncomfortable in his time. A completely unrelated peice that I enjoyed was "The War Prayer", a short story that I recommend to anyone who likes his style.

[Oolong Rabbit]

Mark Twain was a close friend of of one the Theosophical Society's founders: Henry Steel Olcott. This would certainly be a very clear link to Eastern religion and philosophy, so the similarity is no accident. Probably pretty revolutionary stuff for the west in those days.

[Trunk]

Mark Twain ..

In his autobiography he mentioned two paranormal events, that I recall:

1. Early in their marriage, his wife had fallen while ice skating, and was bedridden for some time - no one was able to help her. A healer came to town and someone said, "we've tried everyone else, let's try the quack". They did, and the healer was very clearly talented. Immediately partially healed her, said the cure was partial and that he'd reached the limits of his ability, and described what he thought her probable permanent condition would be - and, viewing from near the end of his life, Twain said that the healer had been correct. Twain asked the guy how the healing worked, and the guy said that he didn't know, but that he thought it was some kind of electricity.

 

2. Twain had a vivid prescient dream about his brother's death.

[thelerner]

He was The Man of his day. Bringing stories of foreign travel to American masses in Innocence Abroad as well as his many speeches. He brought science fiction w/ his A Yankee in King Arthurs Court.

 

He was born during Halleys Comet and predicted correctly he'd die when it returned. (thats the legend, not sure if its true). There was a story of a mesmerist coming to his town, hypnotizing someone and having them drink vinegar as if it was water. The story goes Twain volunteered next, drank the vinegar w/out blanching. He told his brother he wasn't hypnotized, he did it using sheer will power.

 

Anti war, anti slavery, anti conformist, anti religion, enemy of hypocracy's of all flavors. He was quite a man.

 

Yours

 

Michael

[Todd]

"Most people imagine god as a cat with his paw in the fish tank." -- Terrence McKenna

 

And why is that? Why, if it's all a dream, billions have been dreaming the same dream for the past fifteen thousand years? and nobody, before that?..

 

Looks more like the kind of dream induced by sending a signal from a central computer to the microchip imbedded in a cyborg's pineal gland. Do check yours, and if you find one, pull it out --

 

then you'll hear the music of the spheres and know the universe is real. "It's beautiful, you balmy bastards, this is not a dream." -- George Starbuck

 

Funny you should mention cyborgs. I've been using the cyborg metaphor for my experience a fair amount recently. Naturally, I've been using it differently from how you just used it. To me, the cyborg parts of myself were the ones that were true, and the human parts were in reaction to being in contact the cyborg parts. Imagine a metal breast with a ragged edge of flesh bordering it, inflamed and twitching occasionally. This metaphor seemed natural, since truth doesn't have any problem with untruth... only untruth has a problem. A macabre metaphor when it is separated from the felt sense of hyper-aliveness of truth--- moving so quickly that it might just seem still.

 

Well anyway, thats was mostly just a place holder for deeper experience... a way of avoiding a deeper what is.

 

As far as everything being a dream or not, you are absolutely right. Everything is not a dream. Everything is most definitely something. If it were not something, who would be having this conversation? We could get into the semantics of, "sure its something, but why can't we call that something a dream? Perhaps it is useful at a certain point to call that something a dream? After all, isn't a dream something?" That aside, lets just say that everything is not a dream. However, as you have often said, most people do not experience everything with nearly the immediacy and richness that they could. The reason for this may just be all the things that we assume to be true about ourselves and the world that are not actually true. Since they aren't actually true, and we insist on assuming them, the natural result is that we don't see and feel things quite as they are. This distorted perception feels like disconnection.

 

The question, for someone who wants to feel more connected, becomes, "How do I realize that the untrue things that I assume to be true, are not actually true?" Thats a good one. We've a got a lot of answers to that one. Cultivate until your energy gets so strong that it burns all falsehood away, and you merge with the universe, yet remain distinct. Give up everything and let the world take you. Say God's name ten million times. Do good works. Love your neighbor. Recapitulate evolution, integrating all species that ever were into your personal being, becoming the pinnacle of life.

 

I can't speak for anyone else, but none of those seem to work, as long as I haven't examined the basic assumptions that are creating my experience of separation in this very moment. They might work for a bit, to create an experience, but they always seem to fade as long as we aren't prepared to go all the way into our more basic assumptions about existence.

 

This is where descriptions of the world as an illusion come in handy. If a person hears this at the right time, in the right state of mind, then they might just begin to examine everything that they once held sacred. I can't speak for Mr. Twain in this regard, but as far as I can tell, references to the illusory nature of existence are only useful when they are used to inspire such unrestricted questioning of the nature of existence. "What in the hell really exists!? I hear this, "everything is illusion," and it strikes chord with me. In fact, I've always known, somewhere, that nothing is quite right, even when everything seems to be going right. But here I am, asking the question. I can feel myself-- being. But what the hell is really happening? Where does this feeling come from?"

 

Funny thing is, that though someone who takes that all the way might describe the result as realization of nothingness, here they still are, talking to us. Nothingness and illusion are just words, which only describe movements of being. Nothingness is just a movement away from illusion, described as nothing since it is actually the ceasing of false movement. However, it easily becomes another illusion. Illusion is tricky like that.

 

Thats enough spouting off, but I'd like to add my appreciation to Taomeow for the prodding. We'll see if I grab onto these words, as I have onto others in the past. Its a good learning experience to watch myself start believing thoughts, even as I am trying to open a door for others to question their beliefs. The key word there might be "others." This dialog may also just be uncovering tendencies to belief in me that would have remained hidden if not for the stimulus. Though it may also just be a cul-de-sac. Either way, thank you.

Edited August 16, 2007 by Todd

[Taomeow]

And I thank you for your thoughts, Todd.

 

Well of course I have a general theory of everything of sorts, but I know it's incomplete, so I don't have a complete response to the "what the hell is going on" question. I use taoist arts, sciences and practices and some other goodies from other sources as tools to help me fill in the gaps in my perceptions, cognition, and -- most importantly -- memory (not my personal memory, which is decent, but the collective memory of the human race, and of life on earth in general, and of life in the universe in general.) For there's no understanding today from looking at today. What is going on is usually what has been going on for a while, and the closer to the origin of this process one can get, the better one's chances to understand the present picture.

 

Of all the things that the Ten Wings (e.g.), the oldest surviving commentaries on the I Ching, call "the virtues of tao," I am presently trying to focus on the one virtue completely overlooked by most seekers who seek elsewhere: Heng. Endurance. Duration. Reliability. Tao's virtue is that she isn't new-age-style flaky. Tao is Heng, you can count on her. You can count on tao to finish what she starts, to deliver sense when a promise of things making sense has been made, to not call you and cancel on you at the last moment when you're all set to go to the show. Dreams aren't like that. Dreams are flaky. Now you dream this, now you dream that, I once dreamed I was a character in The Simpsons cartoon, totally 2-D and kinda grokking it -- I painted myself onto a wall when I wanted to hide from another character, e.g. -- so, yes, it was possible to be something else in a dream and totally perceive yourself as "real" for a while... the litmus test for telling this kind of real from the real real is, the unreal illusory dreamlike-real doesn't last, it has no Heng, it has no glue. And therefore is devoid of the main virtue of tao.

 

Tao has glue, once it starts you as a 2-D character of The Simpsons, you last, as Bart or Homer or Mr. Burns -- and once it starts you as a 3-D character in your present material life, you last a bit (or a lot) longer and in a more comprehensive fashion if all goes well. All going well so that such a project of tao's as "my personal this-here life" can last for as long as she intended it to was probably the main concern of the "holy sages" of taoist classics. They didn't get much more ambitious than that. A good life with reliable Heng is good enough. Pending that, nothing else is, far as I'm concerned. Life has to be taken care of as though it is absolutely real and absolutely matters -- because it is, and it does.

Edited August 17, 2007 by Taomeow

[Todd]

Which have you found to be more useful in your life, questions or answers? Which one, in your past or current experience, lasts longer? A particular answer or the feeling that expresses itself as a question?

Edited August 18, 2007 by Todd

[Taomeow]

Which have you found to be more useful in your life, questions or answers? Which one, in your past or current experience, lasts longer? A particular answer or the feeling that expresses itself as a question?

 

Interesting question!

 

It depends...

I've noticed that answers and questions are linked in some almost metabolic feedback loops -- i.e. to a certain point the more questions you ask, the more answers you get, then at some saturation point it all flips over (inverted-U effects of nearly all neurological interventions are metabolically common, by the way -- i.e. if you keep increasing the dose of any brain-mind-affecting substance or phenomenon, you will keep getting more pronounced effects up to a point, then increase it some more and -- oops! -- the opposite effect!) When it flips over, you stop getting answers no matter how many questions you produce internally and/or express externally... Or, say, you've accumulated answers to give -- and at some point this process has downregulated your level of question-production, sometimes all the way to zero. We've all met people like that, right? -- they always have all the answers, never any questions. Or the opposite. Not just people though, phenomena too.

 

Here's my favorite question/answer duo:

 

"Which arrow flies forever? The arrow that has hit the mark." -- Nabokov

[Todd]

The metabolic feedback loop metaphor is a good example of the intertransformation of Yin and Yang. Good stuff to us TCM students. If we ask ourselves fifty questions in a minute, there will be no sense to any of them, and nothing much is likely to come from them, except perhaps a headache.

 

What interests me is how questions produce answers. I've always felt that the good questions take awhile before answers come forward. Surely you've experienced this. Good questions stop us, and then we wonder. Out of the wondering often comes an answer, which can be so thrilling. We are so glad to have the answer that it is pretty easy to overlook the wondering.

 

In my experience, the purest pleasure comes not from the answer, which is thrilling, but from the wonder, which flies. It is easy to overlook that the thrill of answers emerging from wonder, emerges only from wonder. Answers are like the contrails of wonder, and as soon as we shift our being from the flight of wonder to the vapor of an answer, then we have no choice but to watch it fade over time. Luckily for us, we aren't actually able to shift our identity from questions to answers; it just seems like we do... there is no separation. The seeming can be quite painful though.

 

That is getting a little ahead of ourselves though, into answers, which never did anyone who believed in them much good. So how do questions produce answers?

 

Have you ever noticed that answers that are quickly given to tough questions are likely to be without much worth? This is the realm of conventional faith. These sorts of answers usually boil down to something like, "Because so and so said so," or "Because thats what I believe," or "Because thats what I think." Original thinkers (as well as artists, and even athletes, or just anyone who does something really well) are all relatively comfortable in the space in which a question exists, but an answer has yet to arrive. This is more common in their field of expertise though. I'd bet that you experience this sometimes, maybe even really often, before you write a post, or as you are in the process of recovering a memory, or as you do any of the things that you are good at.

 

What would life be like if we realized that this doesn't have to be only an occasional process, dependent upon certain predisposing factors?

 

It doesn't have to be. It is already what we are, and it only takes our willingness to see that. Willingness comes only from experience, and experience only comes from willingness to see what we see. What we see is a question. Every question is a manifestation of wonder, which flies.

 

Who would have thought that it could fly forever?

Edited August 18, 2007 by Todd

[Taomeow]

Right, and wonder is not even a quest for an answer. Wonder is the answer?

 

I have this image of myself, aged four, standing in some grass higher than the top of my head, holding a grasshopper I've just caught, a subtle, plain, dark-and-light-grey spotted creature with transparent sapphire-colored underwings, with vicious and yet harmless jaws biting into my finger without causing any pain, with sentient multifocal eyes, sharp claws on the back of the hind legs scratching me in a cat-like fashion, with delicate whiskers, antennae, tiny hairs, miniature crocodile scales, soft innocent belly, armored athletic chest, hand-like familiarity in the motion of the front paws, and a positively human air of being pissed off about the whole deal, and make-believe ferocity of a captive dragon. And I am suspended in a bliss of wonder for all eternity. Yes, to this moment, and perhaps forever.

 

All those dissectors of live reality ISO "answers..." ...all those "scientists..."

...their inability to know this bliss is their punishment. A horrible one.

 

So how do questions produce answers?

 

A really great answer comes to me in a process I call "sudden crystallization." It happens when I've saturated my mind (or, to be more precise, my body-mind-spirit) with questions pertaining to a certain inquiry without rushing towards any answers. Just a hypersaturated solution of questions with no answers. Then one day a speck of meaning falls into this solution...

...and wham! -- instantly everything starts connecting with everything, and in a second I have this crystalline structure of an answer that has built itsel out of the hypersaturated solution of questions, and now it's impossible to doubt -- it's just there, built into my overall structure. I can examine it from every which angle, top to bottom, inside out, every side, focus on an individual crystal sparkling inside it in its proper place (its ONLY proper place) or take a bird's view and look at the whole --

it doesn't matter, it will never change now (even though it pulsates with life and motion, it will fundamentally retain its completeness, much like the ocean can change without changing), it is real, it will endure. Later, it may connect, in the same fashion, to another, different, but deeply related structure like this. Until and unless it happens, I don't trust any answers anyone or anything produces. (Including myself.) But when it does happen, it's non-negotiable. THE answer that can accommodate not one question but each and every question of a particular type...

 

What about you?

Edited August 19, 2007 by Taomeow

[agharta]

A really great answer comes to me in a process I call "sudden crystallization." It happens when I've saturated my mind (or, to be more precise, my body-mind-spirit) with questions pertaining to a certain inquiry without rushing towards any answers. Just a hypersaturated solution of questions with no answers. Then one day a speck of meaning falls into this solution...

...and wham! -- instantly everything starts connecting with everything, and in a second I have this crystalline structure of an answer that has built itsel out of the hypersaturated solution of questions, and now it's impossible to doubt -- it's just there, built into my overall structure.

 

 

Or, as Linus Pauling said, "Chance favors the prepared mind."

[Todd]

Taomeow,

 

Do you see any contradiction between the first part of your post and the last?

 

I think you described the process of finding an answer quite beautifully. Crystallization out of potential. The longer we spend in potential, the more encompassing the crystalline structure can be. I would disagree with one thing, though. The crystallization can never become a source of truth. The crystallization is actually the movement away from truth.

 

If we live in potential, then the crystals are closer to truth, but they can never produce life. They are dead. They are dependent upon the potential, dependent upon what gives rise even to wonder. There does not need to be a crystallization for the potential to exist. It is the only thing that actually exists, and it requires no effort to exist. That is why it lasts. Anything built by effort is subject to the law of entropy. Haven't you noticed? If we quiet down our efforts, we might notice what actually lasts, what actually exists.

 

Tough pill to swallow though, huh? I sympathize. I'm not even sure it should be swallowed, though it seems you have already been tasting its benefits.

 

Sean once said something that I ended up remembering: "My intelligence is really just a measure of how long I can go on about something before I hit I don't know, which is the ground." You already know what I don't know feels like, so those words might have meaning to you. Why keep looking for something else?

Edited August 19, 2007 by Todd

[Taomeow]

(replies, changes her mind, deletes)

Edited August 19, 2007 by Taomeow