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An unprecedented spiritual expression
offered by Todd Vickers

ARDHANARISHVARA

  "It is ok to be a great seeker of truth and to spend one's life in all kinds of spiritual gymnastics trying to awaken. This is very respectable. To awaken to the truth, and then to express it is considered arrogant and ostentatious. In other words, the way to keep everybody calm is to not awaken"

TRAGICALLY SOPHISTICATED
Content Copyright 2000 © Vickers Publications. All Rights Reserved

I would like to address an often-unnoticed dis-ease. It is a self-perpetuated and uninvestigated sophistication, and it oozes captious rhetoric. The sophisticated person seeks absolution only in the mind and its strategies. These strategies will usually be in accordance with the popular wisdom of the particular crowd they associate with and the differences are only strategic from group to group. This malevolence masquerades as intelligence and sincerity. It is the kind of communication where one supports preconceived or arbitrary notions and beliefs and all questions are calculated to support these ideas. For example, one asks a question when they are sure to reject anything but a confirmation of the preconceived idea. Only now they look open-minded. This is not a sincere and authentic question. This is a set up to agree with them and then they will reward this agreement with prestige and by default they will be aggrandizing themselves. If the answer does not confirm the preconceived notion then there will be a subtle or not so subtle rejection prior to any inquiry.

When sophisticated ideas or beliefs are challenged by life the response won't be of truth or genuine inquiry. It will be inclined to stress faults and raise objections often-using plausible argument and/or false or invalid inference and only the facts that seem to affirm the preconceived ideas. For example, a sophisticated person who reads this might convince themselves that I am guilty of what I am attempting to confront in this expression because I use uncommon words. This would be done before any investigation of themselves took place, thereby stripping me of credibility and thus nullifying any need to inquire further. This is the kind of slick shit I am addressing.

This is also typified by the tendency to rarely ask or speak anything without having a backdoor of plausible deniability, or the speaking becomes so esoteric that nobody can decipher what is actually being said. This is often easier to feel than it is to see, much less to confront. The more sophisticated the speaker the more adept they will be at writing or speaking as a means of persuasion. This "skill" is extolled and coveted by many. People believe and feel that if they speak simply or plainly they will be thought of as stupid, and indeed this can happen.
When a person is fixated, or aspires to this kind of sophistication there is very little, if any, open-ness, yet their identity is of being open minded and even courageous. I have had a few such people interested in my expression and even extolling my words yet I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is actually very little if anything of what I am saying actually reaching to their being. My expression becomes nothing more than fuel for what is already the cause of their suffering. This reality makes me very sad. The repudiation or affirmation that arises from this sophistication is worthless. One is shit and the other is sugar-frosted shit.

Many people have suggested to me to temper my expression with this kind of sophistication as they know that I am articulate and could quite easily participate in this kind of non-sense. It has also been suggested that I omit those facts of my life that don't appeal to the sophisticated, and as a result I would probably become more popular, yet I refuse. I don't need to convince anyone of anything. This expression is not a will to power, although that is what sophisticated people suspect - and this suspicion they are happy to spread, and that I can do nothing about.
People with a will to power are very sophisticated and they placate people's egos and support dreams and fantasies. They lie frequently, of course with plausible deniability and they don't disclose their lives to scrutiny and that is why they are so admired. I have no interest in this kind of shit. Like I have said before, I have nothing to offer, and that is a blessing. If what I say is not provoking inquiry into the silence and freedom of your own being then that means I am not helping you. The provocation of this inquiry is not to achieve anything. It is to realize what is already the case.

This fetish with sophistication is so pervasive that even the simplest truths get lost. It seems that it is rare for one to even say, "I don't know" when that is in fact the case, and if one does say it then it is some kind of artful manipulation. There is so much self-deception and denial, and also so much fixation on being cool, hip, and sophisticated, that tragedies of the heart are the norm.

Remember it was the Sophists that condemned Socrates to die for asking disturbing questions. Even after the Oracle of Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man in the world, he said he "knew nothing," a rather unsophisticated response. It was not because what he was expressing was untrue or petty that he was killed. It was because what he spoke could not be dismissed by the sophisticated. It threatened their whole trip. This communication from a man who admitted he knew nothing.

There is one more quality of sophistication that must be mentioned. Sophistication is necessary for rationalization, and because a sophisticated person hides their malevolence, they are convinced they are being good. They will have no mercy because good people don't need mercy. This is why sophistication is merciless. That is how a man like Socrates can be condemned to die. Sophistication is not wisdom. It is a cowardly compensation for a lack of wisdom. These cowards always associate with other cowards and blow smoke up each other's asses about the grandeur of all this sophistication in its various forms usually money, power, and prestige that is real or imagined. This is a jeweled begging bowl. There seems to be something significant about the insignificance of what is thought to be significant. In the presence of wisdom this sophistication is threatened and begins to burn like an albino in the sun.

Let me appeal to your unaided reason for a moment and suggest that sophistication is never simple. Truth is always simple, it is what is. If you have an interest in this then notice that in one moment of no-mind you can't locate anywhere that truth is not. No-mind is equal to no delusion. This is your nature.
Todd Vickers