Baba hears a lot of this. . . .

"Baba, what's it feel like to be the famous Ray Riffles of Applestock '66, but having lived on into 2002, still slogging through your daily routine, thirty-six years after all the fireworks went up?"

Am I wrong to be vaguely offended by such a question? I mean, "still slogging through your daily routine...." Llike--why are you still bothering to breathe?

My answer:

I have no daily routine, so why don't you go f__k yourself!

Just kidding--that's actually an allusion to an old Zen joke that nobody ever seems to get. =:) Frankly, most people don't have a clue about what it's like to be alive IN ANY SENSE AT ALL (that almost always includes the questioner, too, who is invariably a humanoid). That means any answer I come up with will be opaque or incomprehensible--or both--to almost anybody in the world. So why do I keep trying? Because, like Jimmy V, I never give up, nevah, nevah, nevah, nevah, nevah. Still with me? Then here we go. . . .

My answer, REALLY:

How does it feel? It feels as if 1966, spectacular though it may have been, was just an ordinary way station on the road to today, this moment. And the young Ray Riffles? A mere pencil sketch of the man he was to become (ME. . . NOW). Pro historians enshrine and elevate "the mythic cultural turning point" aspect of Applestock '66 because they'd lose their jobs (and benefits) if they told the truth, and revealed all human history as nothing but a set-up for the Present Moment. Bottom line: PME (Present Moment Enhancement) is History's ufltimate social benefit and the only practical use for that discipline.

Which brings me to Baba's First Law of Universal Experience:

Any Present Moment--mine, yours, George Bush's (it doesn't matter whose)--is, in a given context, the only manifestation of time that has meaning. "I. . . . ME. . . NOW. . ." simply connotes the following:

An infinite number of individuals ("I") experiencing themselves ("ME") moment by Present Moment ("NOW"). . . unto all eternity, world without end.

So it ought to be clear (unless you are a humanoid, that is) that 1966 is nothing more than an abstract number representing something that once WAS, but now ISN'T. It's not rocket science, people. All of history crumbles to a silly powder beside the monumental "NOW...NOW...NOW..." beating in the collective lives of a discrete anonymous humans --this includes all humans alive on the earth in any given Present Moment.

Even YOU, Reader, moment for moment, can stand for the sum total of all human experience. Be proud. And never forget to repeat after me: I. . . ME. . . NOW. . . I. . . ME. . . NOW. . .