Jack Kerouac: Beat Generation Beacon?

Enjoy a video about jack Kerouac at the bottom of this entry.

Jack Kerouac continues his letter:

"We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.

It is all one vast awakened thing.
I call it the golden eternity.
It is perfect.
We were never really born,
we will never really die.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea
of a personal self,
other selves,
many selves everywhere,
or one universal self.
Self is only an idea, a mortal idea.
That which passes through everything, is one thing.
It’s a dream already ended.
There’s nothing from staring at mountains months on end.
They never show any expression,
they are like empty space.
Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away.
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space,
which is the one universal essence of mind,
the one vast awakenerhood,
empty and awake,
will never crumble away because it was never born.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.“

Sweet!

Born Jean-Louis Kerouac in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac met Allen Ginsburg (American Beat poet), William Boroughs and the infamous street cowboy from Denver, Neal Cassady, in New York City after attending Columbia University -- on a football scholarship.

in 1950 he published his first novel, The Town and The City, regarding hs attempts to balance his wild urban life with his pedestrian, old world family values. Allen Ginsburg had Columbia professors help him get it published.

Thereafter, Jack began a series of cross-country road trips with Neal Cassady, described as a car thief and ladies man. During these adventures, Jack developed a new writng style, deeply influenced by the prosaic letters of his friend, Neal Cassady; it was a spontaneous, free flowing prose that defied re-write, edit or second thought.

He presented the result as a single unbroken roll of type written paper to editors, who widely rejected it for seven years. Thus, was the birth of his most famous novel, On the Road.

Landing in San Fransisco, he became close friends of with the young Zen poet, Gary Snyder, uncovering bold glimpses born of his studies of the Buddhist tradition. His work is immortalized in the brilliant novel he wrote of a mountain camping trip he took with Gary Snyder through Yosemite in 1955 entitled The Dharma Bums.  It is a beautiful document of the stumbling attempts he and his friends made on their journey to Self Realization.

His eventual fame palgued him. He fell into a downward spiral of alcoholic drinking, and, though he repeatedly tried to break the habit, he died of massive stomach failure in 1969 in St Petersburg, a victim of relentlesss drinking.

In spite of his demise, his glimpses ring true. Click here for a PDF entitled, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and see for yourself Jack Kerouac's discovery.