Tales of the Fairground - Preface

 

 

 

 

Beyond the age of Kings, man has come to his own in terms of guiding his own mind. This has freed the mind from past fetters of the absolute and allowed the individual free rein in understanding and determining his own future. But how many people actually understand this?

 

Like freed slaves or the pharoah's runaways, we sometimes exhaust our ways in attempting to put ourselves in order and rush to get back into bondage. Like children with our own pocket allowance, we seem to be wasting our efforts at pies and cakes that best appeals to the sweet tooth of pleasures. But there is more to discover.

 

The mind, without a ruling monarch to reign over it may well resemble a carnival or a fairground. It is a veritable feasts of the senses, brought to delight by our own wishfulness and excitation. Wonders ... like Ali Baba's cave, meets our sight and we are, in the light of freedom, like young girls reaching for the handsomest guy in the whole world to be our friend.

 

Such a man, was Joey Grimaldi, an English actor and entertainer, who may have been one of the first individuals to introduce to the world, the garb and personality of the clown. The vocation of a professional clown makes us laugh at ourselves and introduces to us the possibility that the mind, in combination with the heart and our soul's ( Jivan ) impulse, is our natural state of joyful perceptions.

 

It is possible to join hands with the clown in us and dance around the burning ring of false realities. Or we could bring an education to ourselves on the nature of society and the individual will and then, on such a stable base of mind, view what science refers to as random, but human insight experiences as a play of the life impulse in the world. It is the beginning of intelligence.

 

We can do this by exercising some moderation over our impulses and ensure that it stays within the confines of the law and social ethics. We need to rein in the excesses of drugs and wantonness. And then perhaps we may enter, what an American folk singer referred to as, ' the playground of the mind.'