Sunday, January 20, 2008

"When I Meditate" New Version!

I.
Hold up, Gerry; hold up, band. I’d like to say something- in fact, I’d like to take y’all to church, if you don’t mind. I had a vision just the other night where I saw a cluster of clouds getting darker. What happened was the colors were becoming inverted. Then it all went black, with only tiny dots of lights remaining. Then, it all slowly became light again. I felt as though years and years had passed; in fact, I was convinced I was watching the fate of humanity. The way I see it is that things have to get worse before they can get better. First, doing good appears to be doing bad, and doing bad appears to be doing good. Then we pass through the dark ages. But it’s always darkest before the dawn.

We as a human race appear to be getting confused! They ask me, am I a Protestant or a Catholic? A Christian or a Jew, or a Muslim or a Buddhist? A liberal or a conservative? A Hispanic-American or a white American? A warrior or a saint? A jock or a bookworm? I am a human being! An individual. I want what you want- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, I know I like both guys and girls, but I’m not bisexual. I am a child of God, just like you. These labels were created out of good intentions, but they just confuse us, and now they damn us by creating the mentality of “us versus them,” and “good versus evil”. So long as we fight tribe against tribe, we stay small time. First we tried to build the tower of Babel, and now the tower of polarization is reaching its peak. Well, my state isn’t red or blue, and my country isn’t God’s chosen land, and neither is Jerusalem. My Zion is anywhere I lay my head, because anywhere I lay my head, I’m gonna call my home. My home is my sacred place because it houses my body. My body is a sacred place because it is my temple. My temple is my sacred place because my brain is in there. Did you know that chimpanzees can feel empathy? If you cry in front of one, it will embrace you. Did you know chimpanzees can learn sign language? They say that the human brain has a portion of it in the temporal lobe that was made to experience the divine, called the “God-spot.” My God-spot rises above the tower of polarity that the rest of humanity scuffles to build. Everything in the universe is God, and God also transcends the universe. The most I can do is transcend my body to become one with the universe. The most I can do is meditate. But before I meditate I like to start off with a prayer:

Lord, remind me that all this stress is self-created
This state-of-mind I’ve incubated will in turn nurse me into my old age
Cause life is what I make it
Given the will and strength any day I’ll change it
It’s good to know that all these limits are self-imposed
But there’s only so much my brain can take-
Balance-
That’s why I meditate
To use the divine parts of my mind
I break the shackles of language and time
There’s no more drama in my life
I can see I’m eternally yours, Lord

So let me take you people for a ride on my plane
It’s astral
It’s more than ancient, it’s not a game
I go back to the God from which I came
Everything else is an illusion
Except for temporary pain
Pain is inevitable, but not the suffering
I can transcend it all with patience and discipline
Faith and positive thinking
Getting’ out on the dance floor and shakin’
Or out in the ocean catchin’ waves
Running, writing, and good conversation
It’s personal with universal implications
It’s the light inside of me
So allow me to report back what it is I see:

II.
The part of me that is not in my body is still me but an out-of-body experience of me
Everything around me is me and I am it
When I judge you, I’m only judging parts of myself I no longer see fit for my personality
But I can see myself in you and you can see a part of you in me
When I meditate, I am the space between us all
I am the chicken and the egg-
And the broth!
When I meditate, I levitate any obstacle in my way
I turn into a hurricane and walk through walls!
Uprooting ideologies-
There is nothing you can build that I can’t reduce back to zero-state
When I meditate, I shape-shift and ruin moments and break shit
When all day I’m constant and that’s in my unconscious comprehension process
When I meditate, music is my language
The rhythm is my heart-rate
The harmony is my intent to socially reciprocate
My melody is my hopeful prayers to the divine architect upstairs
It could just be a future place where I wouldn’t mind to reincarnate
When I meditate, I spar with contradictions, doubts, hypocrisy, and unnecessary addictions
I dodge verbal grenades [dichotomies] and tackle my fate [meet God half-way] and get back up after dog-piles or an elbow to the face
When I meditate, I decongest traffic pile-ups in my psyche [regress into unfinished or un-dealt-with issues to resolve them]
I break down complicated suites into patterns and simple melodies
When I meditate, my blood flows all into my brain and gets subliminated into my spirit
My roots turn into wings and I fly back to the creation of the ancient pyramids and Rome IS built in a day!
You see, when I meditate, time and space don’t matter to me
I am ultimate energy
When I meditate

III.
And then my travels take me to the point where I gaze down from the astral plane onto the physical, casual plane; I am on the borderline that separates “me” from “no concept of self”, and it is at this point I see a chain reaction- a domino effect- that ripples like the currents flapped from a butterfly’s wings and picks up into a windstorm that reaches category five hurricanes, and I realize this:

When I meditate
I cause a million condoms to break simultaneously
When I meditate
I cause a million guns to go off accidentally
When I meditate
I cause a thousand faiths to be tested
When I meditate
I cause a thousand dreams to become lucid
When I meditate
I cause a hundred scientific epiphanies
I cause a hundred stars to align somewhere in the galaxy
When I meditate
I cause fifty honest breadwinners to lose their jobs
I cause fifty drug addicts to become priests and nuns
When I meditate
I cause twenty-five drunks to ignore their conscience
I cause twenty-five disillusioned radical Islamists to turn into peaceful prophets
When I meditate
I cause ten writers to articulate a piece to the meaning of existence so real
I cause ten architects to jump off of the skyscrapers they built
When I meditate
I cause one’s desires to become manifested in an immaculate conception
I turn it into an incubus so don’t forget it
When I meditate
I cause one virgin to become pregnant

When I meditate, I concentrate on my breathing
As I inhale, the walls get sucked into me like a temporary black hole
Back to the zero of my soul
When I meditate
It happens in a vacuum
Nobody influences me
I got no responsibility
My only worry is nervous excitement
As I sail along the tide of astral enlightenment
As my atoms dance to the beat of the universe
I know nothing of opposites, I am the source!
My spine rides the wave of my internal tsunami
Gravity keeps my body down as I sit in the lotus
But the colors of chaos set the mood
My mind becomes a psychedelic volcano
My spirit, a straight line bisecting my vibrating halo

IV.
Yeah, this is all fine and dandy, but I got to have one foot in the real world, right? What are my intentions? Well, you see I grew up in the church, the good ol’ BSA- no, not the Black Student Alliance- the Boy Scouts of America. Aside from teaching me how to do masculine things like…building bird-feeders and being one with nature (that was supposed to be ironic)…I obeyed the Scout’s law: to do my duty, to God and my country, help other people, and to obey the law of the pack. Now for a seven-year old, what is God and what is my country? Well, God to a seven-year old is like Santa Clause, who somehow spies on everyone all at the same time and gives them the gift of grace if they’re good little boys and girls. America to a seven-year old who lives in New Jersey and doesn’t get out much is, well, the tri-state area. So I did what I could to help people. But why? Why do good? Because it’s practical, logical, and I would want people to help me. But who do I help? I can’t help everybody, shoot, I got problems of my own. In fact, one of those problems is you tell me to do my duty to God and my country and yet I never read the Bible nor the Constitution. To this day, I’ve only read sections of these documents. But I found God. I’m still working on figuring out what it means to be an American, but so far Ron Paul and Barack Obama seem to know what they’re talking about. Still, what do I do my whole life? There’s so much stuff out there, and it could all benefit me and I could use it to benefit society. The give and take. Where is the Jedi school I can sign up at? How do I give back to society?

Well, I’m a be who I am
And live as righteous as I can
Before my body returns to hydrogen
Inertia pushes me to try again
Before my soul goes back to zero
I’m a be my own hero

My heroes were never perfect
But they tried to shed the yolk of self-destruction
They tried to resist temptation
And everyday they grow old but stay young at heart and-

Everybody who I tried to be
The heartless dolla-dolla gangsta who don’t take no shit
The non-hypocrite activist
The ever-ridiculous stoner
The always-serious poet
The know-it-all philosopher
The melancholy recluse
The diligent scholar
The Olympian athlete
The model with the perfect body
The smooth-talking lover of both sexes:
The dog of man, the savior of women
The Devil’s advocate
The skeptic confident in his doubt
The indifferent and apathetic taker of anti-depressants
The soldier of love
The machine of war
The so-called rebel who is really just a parallel conformist
Nothing but a clump of dirt!

Jesus, I could never be them
I am the snake who sheds his skin of doubt and social conditioning and traditions of lies, fears, and suicidal tendencies
I’m not the same person I was five minutes ago
No, I will not be the same tomorrow-
So love me now!

Hate not me but my actions
Criticize not me as a person but what I chose to say and do
Don’t try to change me
If you have to try, you never will
The only way I’m changing is if I want to
That is, if the dynamics of contradictions demands it
I became the person who I feared the most to see if anyone would try and stop me
But I found out that the only one with the power to do that is that man in the mirror
And I’m tired of living in vicious cycles of misery
My thoughts aren’t always correct, but they’re never wrong
Think about it: my thoughts aren’t always correct, but they’re never wrong
Trust me, if you had to walk the same path that I walk
You’d have the same dark thoughts as me [my traumas]
But you’d also have the same beautiful hallucinations as me [my imaginations] and-

You’d understand why the best of me is in constant jeopardy
Whenever one of my friends die, I start to think desperately
Writing, hoping to justify my hope; I mope around, arguing the voices in my head when I really got no reason to be defensive
I shouldn’t have to explain myself!

But I want people to understand
How a monster became a man
Baby, I’m doin’ all that a man can, doin’ all that a man can…

V.
I said I’m doin’ all that any man can, can, can/
I said I’m doin’ all that any man can/
I said I'm doin' all that any man can, can, can/
I said I'm doin' all that any man can...

VI.
I walk through walls
Like a hurricane
There is nothing you can build
I can’t reduce back to zero-state
When I meditate

The End.

Original Intro:
I.
How is everybody doin’ tonight?
I’d like to talk to y’all about knowledge- I love it
I can’t get enough of it
And I know that even though sleep is the cousin of death
In my dreams I still obtain what? Knowledge. That's right.
Because some knowledge words can’t express
I had a vision some nights ago where God told me that
Before things can get better, they have to get worse
And I look at history and I say: How can it get any worse?
We dropped the atomic freagin’ bomb!
Then look at the Middle East!
Our government! Mexico, Haiti, Tibet, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, all over!
AIDS! Crack-cocaine! The school violence! Katrina!
If things are going to get worse, I don’t know what could be worse than that that doesn't involve us all dying in some terrible age of murder and storm
I think it’s got to get better, and that warriors of the light will prevail
Now I’m not dividing us all up between the light side and the dark side
Because we all drift off into the dark side every now and then
The war is inside of us just as much as it is outside
I don’t want to disassociate myself from the evils of the world
Everyone and everything is connected, we are all an extended family
But we enable all these tragedies to happen, so we got to wake up!
And that’s what this poem rap thing I’m about to recite is all about
It’s a wake-up call for the mind to end this global suicide

Line that became excluded:
when I meditate I realize if my imagination were manifested that the whole world would be so open to manipulation we wouldn’t know how to handle it

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