Quinn the Eskimo and Bodhidharma

• 4 August, 2022
• Buddhism
• consciousness
• culture

And how does this relate to the war on 'woke culture'? Keep reading and you'll find out.

Okay so let's start with the song. My premise here is that Bob Dylan was referencing 1960's counter culture which arose out of the Vietnam War and 1960's American culture. More specifically this could relate to the sacking of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert from Harvard in 1963 for experimenting with psychedelic drugs and the whole spiritual movement based on eastern philosophy and religion that was going on at the time. Leary was the central figure in 1960's drug culture, Alpert was also part of the same drug culture, as was Terence McKenna who later graduated from Berkeley in California. Alpert travelled to India after meetings with gurus to become Baba Ram Dass.

Baba Ram Dass (Alpert) was part of a movement to popularize Zen Buddhism in American culture at the time, and gave talks and lectures along with other figures such as Alan Watts, a former Anglican minister who emigrated to the States and sought to popularize eastern culture and philosophies such as Zen and Taoism. Then you have the two Krishnamurtis UG and Jiddu from the theosophy movement which ran counter to this emphasis on Zen, which was imported from Vietnam, where Thien Buddhism (a derivative of Zen and Chan Buddhism), which was the precursor to the later Therevada movement at the end of the 1960's and into the 1970's by people such as Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. These movements were the ancestors of my own Therevada roots in 1980's London as Babu, my mentor, was a close friend of Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who worked with George Harrison and the Beatles years previous (but this is tenuous).

This is how we get to Bodhidharma, the legendary figure of Zen (Chan) Buddhism. Bodhidharma is popularized as the 'Bearded Barbarian' and was characterized as being ill-tempered, wise, and non-conformist. I won't go into details about Bodhidharma (but you can find Youtube videos of Alan Watts talking about him, search for 'Alan Watts zen') but I will give you some attributed quotes:

• "All know the way, few actually walk it."
• "Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen."
• "Vast emptiness, nothing holy."
• "Poverty and hardship are created by false thinking."
• "Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom."
• "As mortals we're ruled by conditions, not by ourselves."
• "Deluded people don't understand that their mind is Buddha, so they seek Buddha somewhere outside of them."

Now, and this is just my interpretation and personal take on this. If you listen to the song 'The Mighty Quinn' (if you click the link a YouTube lyrics version pops up in a new window) and you listen to the words, you can be forgiven for thinking that Bob Dylan via Manfred Mann is advocating Zen Buddhism. Try it out and see if you can make the connection.

So onto my main point

I've just given you an example of mind control and how creating an illusion just through making a connection between unrelated things can make you believe something is real when it's not. In reality there is no connection whatsoever between Bob Dylan, Manfred Mann, Bodhidharma and Zen Buddhism. Bob Dylan is not a Buddhist. He's an incredibly creative American singer, songwriter and poet who is also an artist.

Am I worried about this war on 'woke culture' that certain politicians seem to be waging? No I'm not. Not at all. I'm not popular among politicians, mainly because as a mystic I'm aware of just how ignorant I am in reality and for that reason I consider it imperative that I keep an open mind at all times and am connected to my environment and aware of the possibilities. Fear motivation doesn't work on me. I cannot be easily frightened or terrorized, and as such I cannot be controlled or influenced in any way by anyone, in authority or not.

I am my own highest authority, and when it comes to lending authority to other people I'm downright stingy.

But I'm afraid that many people can be controlled, simply because they can be made to fear and motivated very easily through fear motivation - especially by politicians and the media. This is for no other reason than their enslavement to Ego and societal role, and the various role attachments people base their lives around.

So let's think about role attachments

A role attachment is when you are emotionally and psychologically attached to a role. Any aspect of your identity can be tranformed into a label and therefore translated into a role. A man, a woman, a Christian, a socialist, a Buddhist, a shop worker, a politician, a policeman, and so on. This is because life is about being and doing, and being and doing cannot be separated, and so any label or aspect to your identity can be associated with a role and a pattern of behaviour.

Now if you're so heavily emotionally and psychologically invested in your Ego and your societal role, so that you are completely emotionally attached to your role what you're doing is all of the following:

• You're not identifying with your humanity, you're not in your natural state of mindfulness, and your mind is drawn into the duality of fear and desire.
• You're conceptualizing yourself, because your role or Ego is a concept, so you're making yourself out to be an ideology and a belief system. This is buying into the grand conspiracy of life and playing what I refer to as The Social Game. The rule of this game is very simple. I will play along with who you think you are if you agree to play along and accept me for who I think I am.
• You become enslaved in a 'behaviour rut' where you're expected to conform to a certain pattern of behaviour to meet societal expectations of other people.
• You get drawn into identity politics and the whole discussion of who you should be and how you should behave. But see if you're that heavily invested in your Ego and role attachment, you set yourself up to be drawn into a conflict over identity politics.

Essentially you're putting yourself into a no win situation. At no point ever is your Ego and sense of identity ever going to be greater than the social consensus. Inevitably you're going to come across people who are different to you, This also means that inevitably you're going to be drawn into conflict with people who won't accept you, won't like you, and if you get drawn into conflicts with such people or living in fear of such people you're giving them control of your thinking, your mind and your life.

The truth that cannot be spoken

The real truth that cannot be spoken is that nobody is in control, of anything. All environments are multi-dimensional and are made up of many different things, or variables, working together in relationship or synergy. To think that you understand society is as delusional as believing that you understand the universe, this planet or yourself. It's delusional because in order to claim that you understand something like the universe or society is to buy into the false beliefs of continuity, permanence, and cause and effect. It might seem so on some basic, fundamental physical level, but your conceptualizing whatever environment or collectivity you claim to understand, and such things as the universe, Nature, this planet and humanity are not concepts. They're real.

The basis for all existence is chaos because the basis for all existence is consciousness. I keep repeating this over and over and over again, all existence is change, all existence is relationship. Trauma is the solitary force in the universe and out of trauma you get relationship and also the creativity and interaction that defines change. Now there may be entities and collectivities out there who are seeking control, such as the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, political parties, and so on, but to seek control or claim that you have control is to buy into an ideology, take on enormous amounts of aggravation, and set yourself up into conflict with others.

This process of control freaks trying to take control is an exercise in futility because at some point the environment will grab hold them and throw them up against the wall. At no point in the evolutionary history of human beings on this planet have they ever had control of this planet. The illusion of power in the individual is a very powerful and dangerous illusion, it seems attractive to some but it always corrupts, and often ruins people and their lives. It invites misery, suffering, and promotes inhumanity, cruelty and bigotry. You're creating an illusion and trying to control that illusion is like trying to control a dream. It cannot be done.

If I were dependent on the notion that human organizations and institutions are necessary to pull us out of the deep shit we've collectively fallen into I would be despairing. Nobody is in charge or in control. Not the Government. Not political parties. Not the World Economic Forum (WEF) or IMF, the Church, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Bilderberg Group, or anyone else. So does this mean that everything is like a runaway train and out of control? Yes, and this is the way it's meant to be.

You see, who's control is everything out of? Did you ever get to control society or this planet? I know I certainly didn't. You and me were never in control to begin with, so why are we upset that everything is so out of control? I think if everything is out of control and falling apart then everything is as it should be and it's a win win for we human beings. It creates all the possibilities and opportunities for us to come together to create new relationships and meaningful, significant change which in turn create more possibilities and opportunities and the cycle repeats itself. Over and over again.

This comes down to a matter of individual perspective - do you see a problem or a possibility? I know what I see, but what about you?