I pepper my writing with allusions to paradox as seminal to divine evolution. Here’s another peppercorn for your grinder. I listened to a 1963 Studs Terkel interview with Bob Dylan. At one point, Dylan commented about a line from his song “A Hard Rain’s a’Gonna Fall” His observation struck me as wisdom that we’d do well to add to our rocket fuel. In the song, Dylan writes, “The executioner’s face is always well hidden.” Then he tells Terkel, “Yes, it’s all over the place, it’s hidden.”
Dylan never interprets his songs. He leaves that up to the consumer, to incite personal creativity; hopefully, to the same level of poetic creativity that subjects him to the long hard road. Any poet worth his salt doesn’t understand his own poetry. The Poems are cascading instances of the One, whose infinitely mysterious urgings bring about the good Life. A’course each of us is such a Living poem partaking of our Author’s amusement. (I write “a’course” here, as Dylan’s talking style, in an effort to latch onto some of his realming mindset.) My observations about his lines—in the song and as his comment—will have earned a gold star if Dylan, having read them would say, “Yeah, that’s a inerstin’ way a see’n it.”
The paradox Dylan alludes to arises from the image of an executioner who is everywhere. Normally, an executioner is thought of as a person dutifully killing another person, one on one. But, paradoxically, there’s an executioner everywhere; actually, two of them. The maya of false conception is everywhere; out there to do you in. Then there’s the Destroyer Shiva, who is everywhere, whose supposed killing actually bestows Real Life. But, wait. There’s more.
The BIG paradox is that maya as executioner is not one who seems to take you out. No, maya alludes to the elements of misconstruing consciousness that convince you that you continue to exist. Yeah, that’s right. That executioner actually sustains “you.” Some executioner, huh? Seems to have her wires crossed. Paradoxically, the righteous executioner is Shiva, who reinforces your role in the game of Life by eliminating the sense of separation. That’s the flubbed up consciousness that births a busybody “you.” But Shiva won’t lay a hand on that because as far as He is concerned, false conception isn’t and never was even there. More precisely, the consciousness mode of conceiving false conception is what is ever absent. Yet, Shiva, as executioner, indeed, gives you the chair: the three-in-one flaming throne upon which You sit in your Causal Body, enjoying the show as the Great Silent Watcher.
Succinctly, bollixed consciousness executes you by convincing you that “you” exist. Righteous consciousness executes you by utterly consuming “you” so that you Live forever. Paradox reigns.
In your everyday life, killing you as a walk around human person has nothing to do with the momentary execution that, as Dylan observes, is happening everywhere. Your aspiring selfhood is executed whenever you hood the forms that you observe in maya’s executioner garb. But, spiritual aspirants would rather see God face to face. They dismissively refer to maya’s executioner hood as the “veil.” They are wont to “step through the veil” to realize their Living Truth. All spiritual practice takes that its culmination.
Owing to thousands of years of our cooperation with maya’s executioner veil, it is awfully hard to miss. We bump around in it all the time. As Dylan implies, the executioner’s face is always in your face, right there nose to nose, as the maya of false conception impertinently seeking entre to your unitive salon. Yet, not to worry. You’re the One who holds the Real power in Life’s game. You can always chorus with your heart, “I’m not gonna take it anymore!” Spiritual victory blooms when you harmonize all of the elements you perceive into a mandala that makes your way straight. Then your awareness partakes of Life as the straight knowledge that master Morya adjures us to embrace.
Straight knowledge avers the Way’s personally enjoyed Living Truth, leaving human opinion curbside. Yes, yes, yes: the Way, the Truth, the Life: the antidote to the false, death imposing executioner. Your spiritual Path, embracing THAT trinity paradoxically imbues you with the Real executioner, Shiva, who throws you into the brambles, right along with Bugs Bunny. For, in Life’s infinitely unintelligible chaos lies the liberating Path through freedom’s ever-present offering of the omnipresent, mysterious white fire cores composing and patterning your Real Image.
Yes, Dylan titled his song well. A hard rain is going to fall every moment. The hard rain that befalls you comes as your grace laden returning karma. THAT Life giving rain waters the seeds you have sown. It’s up to you to weed your garden every moment so that its bad karma doesn’t reproduce. Then the infinitely mysterious seed of Life that returning karma carries will bloom as Soular joy in its stead. You weed your garden by surrendering the maya of false conception’s passing fancies. Just like in meditation, you observe them, realize—not intellectually—that they are empty, and let them go upon their merry way. That over-the-top sur-render renders that THAT. It identifies you with Reality’s executioner, Shiva, who is actually the divine Mother’s midwife clearing the way for your newbie to appear.
I’m quite sure that Dylan doesn’t think in the above terms at all. He may be surprised at my assertion that the “blue-eyed son, the darling young one” that the song is written to is, of course, the Real Self, who emerges each moment out of the First Ray, only to encounter all of the imagery the song describes.
I’d love to interpret Dylan’s entire song here, but that would entail my violating copyright. Just take my word for it: every line in the song portrays your encounters with the maya of false conception. Every worded phrase can carry you to inspiration’s depths. Go there to allow your intellect to convert the song’s glyphs into thought’s filthy lucre so that Shiva can then convert those conceptions into golden illumination’s rays. Let those beams propel you through your momentary dawning sunsets.
Yes, don’t just sit there. Find the lyrics on the net, and delve, for Dylan is a common man’s messenger. Remember, though, that messengers just deliver; they don’t interpret. This reminds me of the time, while I and Ma (Elizabeth Clare Prophet) were editing a Pearl of Wisdom (a published ascended master dictation) that I asked her about an abstruse spiritual concept. She shook her head at me, and said, “I don’t know!” Asking, “How should I know that?” she declared, “All I do is take dictations.” I stopped asking her deepish questions after that. Ma had deftly delivered the command of my Presence to find my own unique meaning within. Books and teachings are wonderful adjuncts to the spiritual Path. They can point the Way. But you are unique, and the only Real meaning you can find belongs only to you and You, All One.
That interchange with Ma is similar to Dylan’s answer to a Nat Hentoff question during a Playboy interview. Hentoff asked him what the book Dylan had just completed was about. Dylan said, “It’s not about anything. It’s just words.” So, you see, we are all messengers, after a fashion, partaking of daily events that can point us to our centrosome. From there, we can deal with maya’s utterly meaningless chaos, out of which our divinely resourceful talents can wreak Beauty supreme.
I AM enabling the Word to pierce the veil as I dance I AM THAT I AM with the divine executioner, who executes life’s phantom-birthing executioner, enlightening Life, itSelf.
