The Buddha said –Desire causes Suffering –

I say suffering comes from expectation,

Taking the present moment for granted,

Waiting for what has always been

To reach manifestation.

When we live in the future and the past,

We fail living in the eternal present,

Expecting what has been to be maintained,

As if God were a creature of habit,

But change happens and nothing is forever,

Not buildings, not glaciers, not friendships, nor one’s health.

When we accustom ourselves to past realities,

We are guaranteed to be shocked within our self.

That job you had was washed away in the recession,

That beach house swept away in a tsunami,

The once mighty and great diminished,

Now rendered like a baby crying Mommy.

Yes life has suffering, it’s universal,

The Buddha’s word on that is surely final,

But how to avoid it, that’s the key,

Staying in the here and now is a major trial.

 

NBS

VE

Now

The genius, alone in the crowd,

Social distancing not a problem.

Kafka’s Gregor, transformed into

A cockroach in Metamorphosis.

Socrates made the ultimate

Statement of defiance.

With hemlock, he took his own life.

 

The genius of Jesus,

The Sermon on the Mount,

Misunderstood and betrayed.

Leonardo, who can he relate to?

Van Gogh, who would listen to

His paintings? He lent them his ear.

 

Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright,

Alone with thoughts beyond

Their contemporary world.

Einstein, Freud, Nietzsche,

Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare

Is all poetry.

 

NBS

VE

5/14/2020

 

 

To Cathy:

 

Leonardo searched the cemeteries.

Lautrec consorted with prostitutes.

Michelangelo lay on his back until crippled,

Painting the ceiling of the Cysteine Chapel.

Picasso painted faces as cubes.

Dali said he was the psychedelic drugs.

Cezanne painted landscapes out of perspective.

Pollock dripped paint on the canvas.

Warhol painted soup cans, Marilyn and Mao.

Basquiat died before 30.

 

The artist externalizes their psyche,

Their imagination running wild.

Difficult to live with,

Exploring their emotional spectrum,

Channeling their intuition,

Then at last finding perfection

In a finished work.

Recovering, starving,

Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime.

Today they sell for many millions.

You’ve gotta be crazy to be an artist.

 

NBS

5-3-2020

VE

 

 

 

 

 

In Rodin’s sculpture, the Christ bears the cross

In stone.

Tortured, carrying the cross up the stairs,

Then nailed to it,

Then stabbed

In front of his mother,

His followers, the public,

For all to see.

His doubt.  His death.

 

His crime?

His power recognized,

The threat felt,

The fear of loss

Of power and wealth.

His humiliation and execution ordered,

So easy to crush the resistance.

His sacrifice, blood, pain,

Cast into the fire of life.

NBS

4/17/20

VE

Play the music, harmonize,

Love, hate, fear, and ignorance,

In the heart they reside.

Compassion, sympathy, and empathy,

Make a symphony.

Let the music play,

Let the music be.

Listen to the orchestra

Behind the scene.

Music in the heart

Balances everything.

NBS2

4/13/2020

VE, AZ

I felt the line go silent,

My sister sinking into a whirlpool,

Our fingers touching, our grasp slipping,

And she was gone, into the void left

When souls disconnect.

 

How many times in our lives

Do we disconnect, from

The deaths of others,

The loss of integrity,

The violation of conscience,

The loss of faith?

 

How to reconnect?

Therapy, meditation, nature;

Deep soul searching,

Self-acceptance, and

Are you ready for it?

Reconnection with the Great Spirit,

With Tao.

 

All connection is through the Tao anyway.

In the 19th century, Darwin laid out

The theory of Evolution.

Bishop Ussher had calculated

A world 6,000 years old.

Nietzsche wrote that God is dead.

 

The era of science as religion had begun.

Thesis – antithesis – synthesis, wrote Marx.

Religion is the opiate of the masses.

None of them understood

The nature of spirituality.

‘The Tao that can be told,’ wrote Lao Tse,

‘Is not the eternal Tao.’

He understood, 600 years before Jesus,

That spirit is the essence of

Conscious awareness.

It is the source of

Subjective experience.

Everywhere we look, we see God.

To write about it is next to impossible.

 

Like this:

A candle wavers in the wind.

We are leaves,

Connected to one tree,

Fish in the sea,

Lightning and thunder,

Earthquakes reveal its power.

 

Pray just to connect to it.

Worship, just to acknowledge it.

Serve, just to align with it.

It exists.  Believe in it.

 

Neil Bethell Sinclair II

4-1-2020

Victoria Estates

In advertising, smiles hide

The true intent: breaking sales resistance down

To the exchange of money for the acquisition of

Products useless in functionality.

 

Actors parrot, mimic real people so

You can imagine yourself needing

Pills to stop an itching leg, for example,

With no thought to making a wise decision.

 

So we are taught by example

To lie in everything we do.

So reality TV is anything but

Honest or real, more a charade.

 

Culture commercialized, artfully insincere.

The whole society will come crashing down.

Advertising everywhere, naming rights of stadiums,

Product placement in films and television.

 

Sincerity is the connection

Between the heart and the soul.

Falsified, it withers

The sense of the sacred, of true belief.

 

When we speak in sincere tones,

We communicate from our hearts,

Our connection to the Great Spirit made,

The magic of life discovered.

 

This is the true power of speech,

Whence comes great  song and poetry.

Without sincerity we merely repeat a ditty

Concocted by a mercenary wordsmith.

 

No less so is all art with an ulterior motive,

Contrived subject matter in a forest scene,

Idealized cabins with a creek and flowers,

Pathetic surrealism that ruins the dream.

 

nbs

VE

12-29-19

The Dance of the Heart

 

The heartbeat of the world,

Life pulsing, pumping,

Trees growing,

Sun shining,

Crickets chirping,

Crows cawing,

Wolves howling,

Whales singing.

Continuous,

Blood flowing,

Lungs breathing,

Life forms living.

The heart dances silently, steadily,

Billions of hearts beating

In time, in rhythm,

Drumming to the sound of

Life.

NBS2

Victoria Estates

12/27/2019

 

Oh Jesus!

 

Two Millennia have passed.

Your vibration yet echos,

Throughout the world.

Your ashes and dust mix, blend

With the sea spray,

Floating on the winds.

 

NBS2

Victoria Estates

12/27/2019

 

Life has its pleasures,

Its feasts, its adventures, its comforts.

Its joys, its secret rendezvous,

We are all programmed by Nature

To satisfy our inborn desires.

 

Yet Nature and Life may block our secretions,

Our goals, our objectives, our targets.

Frustrated, we turn to other methods

To titillate and scintillate our senses:

Food, drink, drugs, and driving;

Sex real and imagined;

Rage, violence, and destruction;

Freud’s sublimated impulses –

These cause civilization’s discontents.

All manner of socio and psycho pathologies-

The rapists and the killers,

The con artists and grifters,

The fakes, thieves, quacks, and impersonators –

All frustrated at a very early age –

Diverted from nature’s organic path,

Chasing substitutes for ordinary pleasure.

 

NBS2

Prescott, MAG

9-16-19