The Dialogues (Of T Bone Goldfarb)

By D. Julius Loeb

For modern Western man to be socially disenfranchised, isolated, confused and clinging like a primate to any warm object is not a new literary idea. If fact, this novel takes the position there are no really new ideas. The fictional protagonist in this writing clings to the old masters of literature and philosophy as a means to bring some order to his world- our world of idiotic political sniping and meaningless materialism. Inevitably, of course our hero's self imposed exile drops him into the currents of inescapable depression and social nihilism- a perfect comic opportunity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452085920

D. Julius Loeb

D. Julius Loeb describes himself alternately as a writer and oil painter and is unashamed to call himself a poet and an "almost grownup" baby boomer. This is the author's fifth novel. Loeb has also published a collection of writings, poems and paintings from two 2004 art shows, He is currently working on publication of paintings, poems and drawings from more recent shows. Loeb lives and sometimes works in he Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. Loeb has academic background in art and history, studied philosophy and is a student of Eastern traditions.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

(WHY WE DON’T KNOW SQUAT!)

WHAT HAPPENED?

THURSDAY EVENING

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

SUNDAY EVENING

WHAT DAY IS THIS?

BEN

I AM ONE OF THE KEEPERS

FRED

MY FELLOW KEEPER

MY DISPUTE WITH THE NIGHT

A FOOL’S JOB

NEEDING TO TALK

EARLY ENOUGH TO BE LATE

AT THE HASTY TASTY DINER

THE APARTMENT

SOLITUDE

THINK I MIGHT BE LOSING IT

LETTERS

WAFFLES AND THE COMING OF A LITTLE MADNESS

THE SHADOWS SPEAK TRUTHFULLY

I HEAR YOU KNOCKING

EPILOGUE

INTRODUCTION

 (

WHY WE DON’T KNOW SQUAT!)

There are no really new ideas. I am a student of philosophy and have been since childhood (my first childhood). In our empty alabaster American-European traditions sandwiched between the inarticulate prattle of today’s undignified and uneducated tripe, few even dare believe themselves capable of true intellectual insight.

Arrogantly, we believe that our ideas are freely constructed of new cloth rather than rehashed and reassembled concepts put forward by earlier minds—the great masters of knowledge. The overlap of isms, the heavy academic borrowing between separate fields of inquiry, should make self-evident that the places of higher learning—universities and brothels alike, deal more in recycling than in discovery.

Well, we may not be capable of original thought, but we certainly are capable of original experience—our own to begin with. I am one of a few among a few. I am a keeper. I belong to a group—unaffiliated, small in number, and frightened—a small group of people who seek to preserve the knowledge from the fecund past. I read and store many books. I am a keeper of the knowledge that is passing out of fashion and out of view—a distant lonely woman in the rearview mirror. She is waving; Remember me is all she asks.

I don’t know why or how I began meditating on a daily basis. It was probably the influence of some mystical alcoholic woman friend that got me started. That would be typical for me. I really don’t recall what fascination it originally held—sitting like a stone idol on cushions, sometimes in a roomful of complete strangers. Of course, most of the time, I meditate in the rich comfort of my rural home, in my special chair in my morning room with the big glass that lets in the sun and shades of green from many different trees. Also this room is witness to deer eating my neighbor’s roses and morning birds squawking—carrying on like madmen running from a church fire. Through all, I sit and meditate. I do not chant. I have been instructed in chanting, too, but I reject all dogma—I don’t darken church doors or synagogue pews, and I have even walked out of a Buddhist ceremony that got too weird with its platitudes and certainty.

I am not irreligious. Not at all, really—but I have never found a religion that delves deeply enough into the visceral essence of things. After all, these seem precisely to be the sorts of queries into which religions are chartered to inquire. Organized and regimented religions seem to skate along the edges of truth but never give themselves up to the experience of falling in. The big religions, like multinational corporations, hold to self-evident scripts and never go beyond the yellow tape separating the casual believer from the existential boring down that is requisite to curious reasoning and mental balance.

You will no doubt be wondering what this imbecile believes may be the missing element for properly spiritual inquiry. Well, I am not ashamed to say, I mean the simple and honest but unabashed experience of the thing. I am inclined toward the kind of fervor demonstrated by floggers and monks and holy rollers—but without the schmaltz. I mean deep, intellectual contemplation and heartfelt stillness that lets in something beyond the ordinary sanitized readings that are offered up like a handbook for working in a bicycle tire factory.

There are some things—ideas—that I have stumbled upon that are, for me, equally comforting and disturbing. Again, these thoughts are not original to me.

In his overwhelmingly insightful book The Untethered Soul, Michael A. Singer[1]∗ describes the voice inside our heads. All of us have this voice, which engages in endless mental dialog inside our heads, and never stops. This voice takes both sides in a conversation, it won’t shut up when you want to go to sleep, and it is incessantly chattering about the most absurd, paranoid, delusional drivel. What Singer suggests is that if you look at this inner voice objectively by pulling back and seeing it for what it truly represents, you will discover that it is, at best, right about as often as it is wrong—or even wrong most of the time. You live with this constant inside voice; Singer calls it your roommate. However, if you acted on most of its incessant speculation, you would find yourself in deep trouble. In fact, Singer suggests this roommate you live with is a lunatic. We all live with a certifiable nut, or at minimum, a real idiot!

I find this concept both absolutely true and hugely refreshing. It’s not really me coming up with all these stupid ideas, never shutting up and always second-guessing. It is that idiot voice in my head!

I am having such a good time on vacation—Did I turn the oven off?—I guess I should have packed the other swimsuit; this one makes me look about ninety years old. God, this kind of thing is always happening to me! I guess I can wear a big shirt over it. I wonder if people on the beach will throw rocks at me because I look so pale and stupid in these swimming trunks; they must be two sizes too big for me!

But here is the other side of that coin. Singer nudges you into recognizing you are fundamentally different from that idiot voice in your head. You are not that chattering voice. You hear the voice, but it is not you, not who you are. You sit behind that voice. You observe that voice in your head. By some mystical grand design, we all know that the voice is not us—really. We may listen to that voice or ignore or argue with that voice, but we know at some very deep level—that thing that is me for each of us—that there is a consciousness that is observing the scene—plausibly aloof from the dialog. That conscious entity that is the observer is nothing less than the soul consciousness we can experience in quietude, meditation, and reflection.

Any person who meditates half-seriously has had the experience of trying to still the mind, quiet the voice in order to contact the space inside that reflects compassion and enlightenment. You cannot imagine what the inner idiot comes up with when you sit quietly, getting in touch with solitude and feeling sensations through the Chakra centers, concentrating on breathing.

Hey, you! Hey what are you doing? You were supposed to mow the lawn today. Hey, the dishes from last night are still in the dishwasher; I think you forgot to turn it on. You should lose weight. Gosh, when you sit in that yoga position, you look like a pregnant Jewish Buddha!

After much introspection and reflection, I seem to have actually understood for some time that there is a me inside me that is not tethered to my corporeal personality. This real me is capable, for example, of seeing how stupid I can be in an argument with someone I care deeply about, while I am defending a ridiculous position because I can’t figure out how to stop.

There is a great amount of recent writing that elevates, or takes flight from these realizations. When you experience your true self as an observer or an actor playing the part of person you were born into, you know that the Soul is a real, not imaginary, thing. Ideas like reincarnation have resonated with human beings for centuries because of a fundamental misty memory of past lives and life between lives. Dr. Michael Newton[2] is the scientific author most credited for work on past life regression and, most notably, the life-between-lives regressions that have patients credibly describing events from a time between lifetime incarnations. Again, Dr. Newton has serious scientific and scholarly credentials.

So what is consciousness, beyond the ordinary senses? What do we see in the world of illusions when we translate with our eyes the energy forms into objects—matter?

Plato describes, in his allegory of the cave, people who are convinced of the reality of the shadows cast on a cave wall, having never ventured outside. They are convinced, as we all are, that this present set of experiences is real and that the reality of the Saturday afternoon football game is all the mystery required for enjoying life.

Well I, like football too, but is it possible that this stage show—the illusion of limited human perception—is a small seed in a scheme in a vortex of millions of galaxies in a universe in motion?

Is it possible, as with particle accelerator collisions occurring, that those smashing energy particles produce new universes within universes? Energy (which cannot be created or destroyed) must morph into new form, and all this soup obliges the simple truth—that every small energy string—every life and life form—has a purpose in the scheme.

When we sit around the large conference table and set our notebooks and drinks on the varnished dark wood top, we rely on certain common perceptions. All the actors around the table seem sure, even if they don’t know why the meeting was called, that the table will support their soda cans, coffee mugs, and papers, and that the leather swivel chairs will support the weight of each personal behind. But why is this even called into question? Well, you must realize that the table is made of matter and matter is really formed out of energy, and the specific energy of the conference room table is atoms, made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. These atoms with their electrons spinning in orbits have vast spaces between them. They are not solidly packed to form the fibers of the table. By a huge mathematical factor, there is more empty space—or void—between atoms than the entire atom mass combined making up that tabletop. The hardness and solidity of the table you set your stuff on, convinced it that will not fall through onto your lap, is an illusion.

Over the centuries, philosophers have been taken down strange passageways throughout the tumultuous history of ideas. Two of these philosophers, George Berkeley and John Locke, were contemporaries caught up in the problems posed by human perception. An outside world exists, but it is a world that produced ideas and these ideas cause ideas in people’s minds. The outside world was, according to Berkeley, composed in actuality solely of ideas of physical objects and we perceive ideas of these ideas. There were no physical forms in the outside world, only ideas. Some force gave order to the world of ideas, Berkeley argues, so that we mortals could relate without going crazy, so the experienced consciousness—really, the sensory importation of ideas—appears properly sorted to the human mind. To Berkeley, that great organizing force turns out to be (of course) God.

To me, this sounds very much like the Buddhist idea that this world is an illusion. Physics relies on the idea that everything, including all matter, is really energy. String theory says that numerous parallel universes exist simultaneously and may interact with one another.

Another of the new millennium thinkers for whom I have profound respect is Gary Zukav. Zukav’s scientific understanding lends much credence to his view