Kerouac – God is Pooh Bear

Towards the very end of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel On the Road, he writes several memorable lines, which he read famously on The Steve Allen Show in 1956. One passage is as follows:

“In Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh-Bear?…

The comment that God is Pooh-Bear has caused a lot of confusion over the years, with many people claiming that Kerouac thinks that God is a fiction. But to believe that Jack Kerouac felt that God was a figment of our imaginations is to terribly misread him. The so called “King of the Beats” felt God intensely, within each and every hobo, wino, and hard-luck soul he met.

Kerouac defined being “beat” as being reduced to the essentials. But what does that really mean? And why was Kerouac so attracted to people who were beat? Those who have read Benjamin Hoff’s Tao of Pooh probably have an intimation of the answer. In Hoff’s book we learn how Winnie the Pooh is symbolic of the sage who lives in the immediate moment.

When we are reduced to the essentials (beat) we have no choice but to live inside the immediate moment, and thus are close to God, as is revealed by Jesus’s parables of spontaneity. Close to God, though, does not translate to Being with God. For that to occur we must let charity, patience, and love drive our actions rather than the demands of the ego.

We must throw ourselves into the spontaneity of Christ (our true selves), as so often Pooh does in service to his friends and neighbors, without ever giving it a second thought.

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To read about William Butler Yeats and Christ’s Second Coming please go to: Jesus’s Second Coming.

If You Meet Jesus On The Road, Kill Him

A famous old piece of Zen wisdom says: “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” There are a couple of reasons why we are called to take Buddha out. The most commonly cited reason is that the prophet in the road is not really Buddha at all, but a figment of our imaginations–a psychological projection of the person we want Buddha to be. To approach the real Buddha we have to eliminate (kill) these projections.

The other reason for killing Buddha in the road is that by doing so we drop our last crutch and begin walking our spiritual path with full freedom and independence. In other words, we kill Buddha in the road to attain Buddha-hood ourselves. By killing Buddha we honor Buddha and ironically give him life.

This teaching actually finds great resonance in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In the Gospel narratives, the disciples insist on seeing Jesus of Nazareth only through the prism of their own psychological projections, expecting him to assume the crown of an earthly king,¹ all the while refusing to truly honor Jesus by accepting the kingdom of heaven within, where Christ reigns eternally.

So, today, let the Progressive Christian be the Zen Christian: If you meet Jesus on the road, kill him.

Where you want this killin’ done? God said, “Out on Highway 61.”
– Bob Dylan

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1. On the following day great numbers of people who had come to the festival, hearing that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, took palm-branches, And went out to meet him, shouting as they went: “God save Him! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord: the King of Israel!” John 12:12-13 [↩]