this is work in progress or homilies or miscellaneous items

that don’t warrant a page by themselves

or seem to fit better here

pending poems  index

chronological order is from the bottom to the top of  the page

audio files can be complemented by listening to them with the eyes closed

there’s something toxic about something false being passed off as true

ezekiel’s cherubim and wheels, the monsters and brutal turning circles of life we all deal with, the eyes of the absolute everywhere

i really like  this scene  from the 2020 emma, a sense of a woman going from the support of one man to another comes across quite clearly

with mansfield park, jane said good bye to reality and sensibly just wrote nice ending fantasies after that, more commercial surely and more pallative for herself

so much of her life is rewritten more happily in these books

more driver  education

almost the worst trap of "zen" is the flagrant dishonesty in claiming its not a religion and doesn’t have beliefs

one of the core beliefs is in the historical existance of a real person called "shakyamui buddha" which is a toxic lie, no such person ever existed

once you scratch the surface, there's a heap of other beliefs, for instance the soto belief in zazen as some final state of being and eihei dogen's role as a an uncriticisable "prophet"

any ceremonies, statuary etc also are implicit beliefs in the efficacy of the same

all clouds of bullshit hovering over "nothing", mentally ill and diseased, the putrid miasma drifting through the lives of those involved, the last people you would take the word of as i learnt to my detriment

you can fight religion till the cows come home

it still wins

many against one

i have never liked buddhism, to me it has always been total rubbish and upon investigation owes a huge amount to to the greek philosophy that came with alexander the great in his conquests and "shakyamuni" is not an historical character but part of the usual religious soap opera fiction, in this case, even the appellation "shakyamuni" is lifted from one of the persian kings

it disturbs me that these people venerate complete bullshit and lies as though the farce means something ,  never bothering to do any real research or investigation and as a consequence are stuck out in some far away "disneyland" of inane absurdity

what are they doing?, its just mentally ill

you can’t change people, life is this pattern of continual regression and repairing the consequences only to regress again

isn’t all religion false advertising and actually "lying" ?

you can’t change the world, i just take what is useful as do most people, problems occur on agreement of what is regarded as "useful"

the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is detectable for up to  three hours  in aerosols, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel

study

the virus can’t go through skin, but can the mucous membranes of the mouth, eyes and nose

just ramp up the virulence and its the next gen bioweapon

“ a hierarchical bayesian model, called  latent process decomposition , is introduced in which each sample in the dataset is represented as a combinatorial mixture over a finite set of latent processes, which are expected to correspond to biological processes

parameters in the model are estimated using efficient variational methods ”

prostate cancer  is a good example of a complex conjunction of latent combinatorial processes

"karma" and "rebirth" can mean a lot of things, but i can’t see any validity to a literal interpretation of these concepts, they are entirely inconsistent with anything except an imaginary world view

i don’t think they are accepted in "western buddhism" anyway, though they may be "de rigueur" in asian and tibetan

is what we see

all there is ?

no its not

such a simple thought

yet so far reaching

i think poetry is a form of computation

not numeric but verbal

the splicing of sums

what is narcissism ?

am i narcissistic ?

are you narcissistic ?

what is narcissism ?

tchaikovsky’s "hymn of the cherubim"  sung  by the ussr ministry of culture chamber choir

coronavirus

have infectivity, will travel

virulence may vary

if you have people around, nothing makes any sense at all

if you have people around, nothing makes sense at all

if you have people around

nothing makes sense

or

anything

at all

if you have people around

nothing makes sense

or

anything

when you look at the chan/zen records like say the BCR or mumonkan, they do place a strong emphasis on "the enlightened man" being " Unmoved" in distress, what that tells me is there’s a large element of crap in those stories, however this notion of some "practice" or "attainment" or whatever leaving one "unmoved" by the vagaries of the world is a more fundamental problem of "effability" vs "ineffability", interestingly islam unsuccessfully attempts to address this by using a prophet rather than the "son of god"

"practice" is a distinct play for "effability" and i’m not surprised  (ed. brad warner)  you show yourself sensitive to the issue, because ,  by promoting "practice" you do ask in terms of what and what for, if some say it makes one more stoic, you, on the other hand are trying to nudge it back into "ineffability" by saying "not so" and actually the paradigm also plays out in terms of guided meditation versus an "instructionless" shikantaza

because soto treats dogen as essentially a "prophet" they don’t accomodate his changing viewpoint throughout his life  (how can a prophet change his viewpoint ?)  and i feel that while dogen in his earlier years definitely weighs in on the side of effable, in his later years he took the more sensible approach of avoiding the question entirely

what can i say brad, you have a good feel for the rough patches in your buddhist zen beliefs, but don’t seem to take an investigation any further

when there is a contradiction in the base, you are going to spend your entire life fighting a losing battle

you just have to look at the hundreds of thousands of christian, islamic, judaic and buddhist books to know what "losing is",  all, with the exception of ten or twenty, being a complete waste of time and are more akin to luis borge’s "the library of babel" than anything else (a good read btw)

an man on the r|optometery  message board  was accused of "ableism" for being concerned about the possibility of passing a girlfriends extreme myopia  (- 18D)  and the other degenerative effects in the eye from that onto their childen

it is quite a reasonable concern given that his sister was a minus 8D, however recent research has shown a lack of violet light in childhood leads to underexpression of a gene that supresses elongation of the axial length of the eye

genetic conditions can sometimes be easiest discerned in a grandparent, but of course you can get mutations in the grandchild and her parents, siblings of course are huge indicators, but it may be that the condition is not genetic

he has a rational concern and its the sort of calculation women certainly make

there is a difference between thoughtless discrimination and rational concerns, the accuser was misusing a valid social construct for her own emotional needs

i do think in general much more thought needs to be given to the likely quality of life a child might have before conception, one certainly sees some bizarre cases of parents failing to abort

there’s something  in this landscape ,  exactly what i don’t know

a couple of vincent van gogh quotes found by jason

one may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no-one ever came to sit by it.  passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way

i experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful.  i am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

(explaining a fugue state)

“ what does your wife say ? ”

i don’t have one

and

one doesn’t have me

so many people

wanting to entangle me in their lives

i try to keep out

if you are talked out or have nothing of import to say

then step back

and observe

my immune promoting supplements are taurine, topical 40% hydrogen peroxide, germanium, K2, B12, vitamin A and copper sebacate

the  bullshit

the  reality

at its core a slick group connived fraud with auction houses and galleries as the institutional players

you just have to step back and look, 90% of this modern and even not so modern art is not worth a cent, an inflatable balloon fuelled by easy money, drugs, the stupid rich and cunning poor and not so poor because of their cunning

art suits you i think because you weren’t exposed to english as a baby

you will always have shortfalls in english expression

jason later wrote a poem about it

as a baby i was spoken to in portuguese

later forced to speak english

mastering neither

lost somewhere

in

between

like a mute

i speak in other ways

jpg

it always pays to reread what one writes to fulfil an editing function

“ an idea is a point of departure and no more.  as soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought ”

a pablo picasso  quote  and its what i notice about great painters like van gogh and monet, they know how to express themselves at a very high level which is more than i can say for these modern slick con artists like damien hirst and jeff koons and their rubbish that the media just lap up, insincerity in every word

napoleon is a surprising purveryor of very good quotes

i notice in writing you need to draw from a lot of sources so i read quite a bit

its no good going "soto" style  —  just you alone with the universe, that way things take a thousand years to figure out and we don’t live that long

also to be a successful artist, you have to be able to spin the bullshit or at least argue cogently and that takes a lot of background knowledge and dealing with people and all their crazy sophistical tricks

sugar shortens your life by disrupting  the purine pathway  thereby causing the accumulation of uric acid

why children are much less affected by the coronvirus is they have less of the ACE2 receptor  (that the 2019 coronavirus  binds to )  in their lungs

i don’t know why creationsts skip viruses being made by god, but they do

he’ll have to up the virulence on this one, not a real plague by any means

louis rossmann cycles around  an empty  times square late at night

to write about

emotional turmoil

or relationship break-up

the food of popular lyrics

i can’t , i don’t know why

oh

i

have

to be in "samadhi" or "bliss"

the mis-understanding

mis-understood

so far out

its hard to fathom

the first rule of sophism

don’t ask

if your best interests

are served

by deception

using words in a new way

to uncover

something

unseen before

you can tell the real poets

they successfully pinch your "stuff"

not many of those

fortunately

irina bogdanovich is a hell of a  contralto ,  there’s a whole world of great eastern european performers we are not really familiar with

patricia janečková  soprano

when the muse strikes it strikes

i had a long day in town yesterday and so went to bed early and woke several times in the night, but in one of those times poems or homilies keep coming and i jumped out of bed to write them down

28 over an hour or so, jumping out of bed each time

34 in total including those written in town

life

a race against time

time wins

you can’t beat it

unless

you go outside

time

what is god ?

a word made meaningless

by the ignorant masses

beliefs and opinions

untempered by observation

humans live and die

believing anything

i used to think all censorship was bad, especially as i was usually on the wrong end of it, but later setting up my own reddit board, i was obliged to ban actually most people posting  (the mongol hordes coming across from r|zen)  because their agenda was that of schizophrenics, only concerned with entrenching their own ideas and absolutely closed to taking seriously any other viewpoints, in other words they ruin the board with their aggression and stupidity

so my view now is that censorship is necessary, but its skill that needs to be developed, when done well its not really censorship, but simply keeping a message board low maintenance for the owner and productive for genuine readers

being so concerned about censorship, i have observed over many years now your  (ed. brad warner)  very hands off approach ,  (lol, i have just remembered the hardcore zen blog message board days, a real "wild west" is there ever was one)  and wondered about it, ideally you would have skilled moderators "pruning" the message board, but the level of skill required is so high and rare that the appointment of moderators just leads to them creating a message board that reflects favourably their own ideas, so i don’t know what you do, you would think a supposed "serious student" of zen would be able to "skill up" but they never seem to which is just part of my general conclusion of the reality of zen which is that its just a bunch of bullshitting pretenders never prepared to put any real work in

so in terms of your vlog, zen is an illusion, it certainly can’t be taught and as we live there are always mountains of rubbish to trawl through to find the requisite diamonds, but nobody sane does it, its all the wrong reward/work ratio, you have to be sane within the insanity, can you even convey what the diamond looks like and why reality spins around its depth of sparkle, i don’t think so, needs to be discovered

i think my conclusion about censorship is you have to do it yourself, once you appoint moderators you in effect get a communal ownership reflecting communal interests and the real zen is solipsistic, not communal, so you have the censorship side of things right, it just reflects your style and situation, commercial realities impose limitations

the net, if you choose to use it that way is quite good for building social expression and analytic skills, even chronic narcissists can benefit

when you see people being defensive ,  you have to ask yourself ,  what are they being defensive about as their real motivation is usually disguised

belief systems are adopted as a substitute for real thought and sooner or later it catches up with them

the intensity of sophistical endeavor in today’s society is just amazing

the young seem weaned on it

why such an intensity of sophistic focus on what can only be peripheral to you ?

i’m sorta interested

how you can be so concealing

and narcissistic

and put such an intensity of attention

into sophism

that is against

your interest

and benefit

doesn’t the degree

of ratbaginess

fraud

promiscuity

infidelity

and

perversion

in

religion

raise

any

questions

with

you ?

apparently

not

with

most

emily dickinson

barely wrote enough

to be a poet

far from being a recluse

her life

was

actually

quite busy

not sleeping for a while

then sleeping

the brain

washes

all

its

laundry

the attraction of greta thunberg

is her  philosphical take  on things

she’s a clunky autistic

but all the same

a thinker

she got lucky with that sailing trip

it will never leave her

the real difference

between

amateur and professional

is not social categories

but doing enough work

to create a statistical spread

of quality

when you are wounded

best lie low

the scavengers

await

what has zen taught you ?

to be concealing

and fake everything

these people treat the celibacy

of the old masters

as an irrelevant triviality

while they fuck their way

to oblivion

the creeps

creeping around the web

because in real life

no-one will go near

their trail of slime

the half dishonest

are worse than

the fully dishonest

they

sucker

you

in

more completely

the U.S. english education

talentless prima donnas

made

more

narcissistic

and

glory

in

it

keep away

there's nothing worse

than dealing

with a mental breakdown

after they

become wreckage

huntington’s disease

has its shadow lands

unfortunately

the muted blast

for those

without

the

full

expression

what the net has done

is bring the artistically talented

in much closer contact

with

the

curmudgeons

its

a

form

of

death

for

both

the people on these

"special interest"

message boards

their fawning replies

when agreed with

and

extreme aggression

when contradicted

they are

the

absolute

pits

if i tell you

to go away

i don’t mean

come here

i

mean

"go away"

the doormat rebels

so many concealing frauds

on the net

expecting me to run after them

mummy’s boys and girls

indignant when i tell

them

to

piss

off

entitled arseholes

don’t get

they are not

wanted

but won’t change

they love themselves

as

they

are

an arts education

majoring

in

con - ceit

an arts education

majoring

in

self - deceit

today’s generations

brains of vapour

narcissism

and

indignation

so abrasive

when contradicted

even your reply

has an outstanding level of deceit

its narcissistic

and concealing

we all have our griefs

its not a road we can share

the loss is our own

and doesn't

transfer

canada

a nation of druggies

money

and

brain damage

so many people

with no interest

in anything

except

their own stupidity

the religious

have

no interest

in anything

except

their

own

stupidity

the world seems unreal to me

can i help it ?

the world seems unreal to me

some days

things feel edgey

everything not right

but that’s not how it turns out

quite a bit right in fact

the unstable world

a shell

spinning on the sand

turned by the waves

i was in the woolworths car park

out of nowhere

a young canadian man comes up to me

asking if i know where he can buy some weed

i tell him

you canadians are always on drugs

he didn’t like that but wasn’t fazed

they never are

my mother was right

the clothes i wear make me look like a drug dealer

a mirror world

i was expecting inversion

or some difference at least

but no

its exactly the same

ed.  i was waiting at the hairdressers and i noticed four large mirrors in front of the chairs reflecting the trees and outside through the windows behind me and thought, that’s a mirror world and its just the same

as you get older you notice how hard it is to argue with people in their prime

right or wrong, they will outlive you for a start

so ,  brad is  demonstrating zazen

my  comment

you’re a bit slouched to the right and i think slow kinhin is a good idea to demonstrate in the context of zazen as well as people might get the idea that you can sit for unbroken long periods when the reality is its not "safe"

also not everyone likes being so close to a wall visually

that bell bowl tone is not great, you can have a big fund raising to replace it and sasaki style, skim it off to fund the "geisha", sex and money he was the most genuine and only honest "zen master"

i notice in the other comments, its still all "an observer sport", nobody actually does it, that’s actually a bit weird, something the net has done, made zazen an observer sport, prior to the net the only context you were likely to observe zazen would also mean you are doing it

"brad has been sitting for ten minutes and is definitely entering "samadhi", but no, is that right eye tiwtching  —  mara at work here, we’ll just have to hold "our breath"  (little self depreciating laugh) ,  yes the eyelid has stopped moving, samadhi it is, no, the back is too bent, the excitement is building, but there’s plenty "of track " left, we’re on the edge of our seats here, samadhi or not ?"

what’s interesting about modern physics is a road of comprehensive understanding recedes as fast as it approaches

japan seems to specialise in weird corners of the entertainment universe, a hypnotic work by eitetsu hayashi titled  fertility of the sea on taiko drums

why is an intelligent account of actually getting the coronavirus so rare ?

a billion words and  this account  by dr clare geradao of her infective course is the only one that makes sense i have seen

ah, she was quoted directly and at length, the stupid journalist has messed the rest up with the usual misinformed blather

definitely not fun, i wouldn’t have taken the paracetamol though, it disrupts the bodies natural immune response

jason  writes

waking up this morning i have a couple of ideas to make into art

i think they’re not that good and don’t write them down

well now i’ve remembered that a couple of of "not good" ideas are better than nothing

what i do for "meditation" is go and sit out on the woodpile for say an hour or longer usually post midnight, there’s just the night sky, often a bit of moon, no sound of traffic, only the frogs, crickets, a dog barking in the distance ,  owls, whatever,

i’m not conscious of "meditating", i move occasionally ,  i’m not really doing anything except hanging out there, not bothering with the world too much

i quite like doing it, its not painful or joint damaging, i don’t do it because  "i have to"  but i want to

you do a lot of this and it takes a lot and something slowly happens

you have to do a lot of this, just doing short amounts doesn’t work which is why the old masters were celibate

it just doesn’t translate to the bullshit married with kids business and all the pretence of sanctity and the zombies mumbling clichés to each other

i think zazen did open me up to this because i wasn’t used to the degree of self observation you get with zazen, but within a couple of years you should move beyond it

what i notice with "net zen" is i almost see no-one who has actually done any real self observation, they are all busy engaged defending their self esteem or ideas or wrong minded experience

pathetic pretenders, disgusting people with no self understanding at all, utterly unable to answer even one point in my posts

how about "the coronavirus visualisation"

just imagine your lungs filling up with who knows what

you are having trouble breathing

you are going to die

you notice that you are not dying

you notice that you don’t have the coronavirus

there you are, cured of having something you never had

that’s zen

when the trust goes, the relationship goes

what men are for from the female perspective is to be manipulated by them

caution   :   integrity may vary

what men are for from the female perspective is to be manipulated by them

you’re a fool to ever trust anybody fully

even mothers turn on children

you’re a fool to ever trust anybody fully

higher-order aberrations and  irregular astigmatism  are why i’d never get lasik or any corneal refractive surgery done

the eye is a pressurized balloon, you can’t expect too much stability from it

“ yet tens of millions have had corneal refractive surgery, and have not experienced any destabilization with negative effects even 20-30 years after their treatment ”

my  comment

that’s not correct, relatively stable within five to eight years i’d say, but not after that, and actually some people have trouble from the start

i don’t feel the industry is being honest about potential long term problems and also cataract surgery being promoted for "glasslessness" and not the replacement of opaque lenses also fits into the category of  "iatrogenic"

interestingly the original model for the cornea goes back to wolfgang goethe, that true polymath who came up with the idea that inflatable domes naturally separated into meridians, its mind boggling if you think about it and when you understand its implication you would be naturally cautious about any refractive corneal surgery

the other side is it can give real medical benefit where there’s severe vision problems, that is the risk is balanced by substantial reward, same with lens replacement for high grade cataracts

my feeling is that refractive eye surgery and lens replacement are straying too far into the "cosmetic" area where medical risk is not balanced by benefit

from a personal point of view of one who has held back, its all to my benefit as the income from this "overuse" is driving the rapid development of the maths, equipment and procedures, the safety and effectiveness of the industry operations are steadily improving, and long may it do so

the unsung benefit of glasses is they don't interfere biologically with the eye, even contacts have their problems

if you ask what is infinity, what is  uncomputability  etc. ,  the whole thing is unending, you are stuck in recursive "voynich"

this is where einstein stood out, he managed to work a way out of the recursive properties of light

theories are a "meta" on actuality, that distance will always lead to imperfections in the meta

its just as well metas contain intrinsic errors, otherwise there would be no existance

when you get more familiar and experienced with something, the notion of favourites falls away, everything has something to offer in terms of strengths and weaknesses, even the very bad

“ maybe no one reads the tsurezuregusa here  (ed.  brad’s vlog)  as who is interested in idle ramblings or zuihitsu literature ? ”

you’ve never read it have you nor are familiar with the fact its one of the most famous books of world literature

there’s no kudos in being dumb and ignorant except amongst zennists is there ?

dogen, ryokan, hakuin, three very literary and artistic people, yet the stinking mobs in their blinkers think there is nothing outside their own ignorance

ZEN IS A LITERARY CONSTRUCT, LIKE ALL RELIGIONS

the usa made no attempt to indoctrinate japan after WW2 in the way they did to germany and courted one of its biggest  war criminals   (the emperor was another)  to meet its own political ends of gaining the countries support in the cold war

it explains a lot about how japan is today and yukio mishima was not entirely a crazy anomaly, though dated

unbelievable, rommel wasn't such a great general, what he had was the advantage of detailed tactical information on what the british were doing because the italians and germans could read the code transmissions by the US military attaché  bonner fellers

what i look for in art is depth, complexity and aesthetic

that’s the trouble with modern art, its shallow, simple and has no aesthetic

the japanese are very  eclectic  in what they absorb from other cultures, the original borg

a poem by courtney peppernell

the stars have died

and left their light to you

remember this when

you feel weak, worthless and blue

my  reply

in you starlight lives on

all you have to do

is

see it

françoise gilot on using  metaphor  in painting

the days evaporate

friday brings the weekend

saturday and sunday evaporate

bringing monday

which

evaporates

“ i need insane poetry

i am working on the next part of my dungeon and dragons campaign.  one of the side missions has the players discover a book of madness.  if you read it, or listen to someone read it, it sounds like the greatest poetry ever written !  it is actually just the insane ramblings of a mad man.  over time, it will drive others to madness as well

i would like some odd/insane/nonsensical poems that i can read at the session ”

i’m a madman

discovered in that madhouse

a D&D campaign

when it ends

the madhouse abates

except for

me

weaving my woof

under

your dreams

an odd thing is neither of the children of pablo picasso and franciose gilot  (also an exceptional painter)  had any interest or real ability in painting at all

it seems everything is constant warfare

don’t you get tired of it ?

i do

sometimes i just drive like a train in the wrong direction

i can’t help myself

this is what we all come from ,  an unwinding  and recombination of DNA

the body speaks like a person

do this

don’t do this

ignore at your peril

the body speaks like a person

don’t do this

do this

ignore at your peril

nature speaks like a person

do this

don’t do this

ignore at your peril

nature speaks like a person

don’t do this

do this

ignore at your peril

to say life has a point or is pointless

makes

the

same mistake

to say a life has a point or is pointless

makes

the

same

mistake

sometimes a poem is like following a fractal through

a sequence of coherence

in

a mill of randomness

the religious add up their sums

and get an answer

ignoring that there is

no answer in their lives

that the endless arrives nowhere

a bit of a riff on the notion of  "balance" ,  that much touted panacea of modern life

"the good die young"  what  "balance"  is there in that ?  don’t look for it and it won’t bother you

wonderful materially successful people and poor arseholes and vice versa, its all there and no-one has any influence on it

"lady justice" wants carefully looking at and the scene in the ancient egyptian book of the dead in which a deceased person’s heart  is weighed  against the feather of truth is about all that can be said

you can and can’t extricate intelligence from experience

people’s intelligence varies because their experience varies

it folds into different types

you can’t extricate intelligence from expereince

people’s intelligence varies because their experience varies

it folds into different types

jason supplied the first two lines, i finished it

ultra sane

comically insane

the world a fake

a real

a laugh

a cry

ordered

a mess

let the earth

touch

the sky

from the  court record  of july the 29th, 2019

“ the plaintiff's memorandum demands millions in settlement, while the defendants have said they will pay nothing, demanding in fact to be paid quite a large sum by the plaintiff. additionally, one of the memoranda begins with an expression of difficulty in "finding the appropriate tone for the settlement letter" because it supposedly is "so disingenuous and contradicted by the evidence"

of course, the lawyers for each side can assert these polar positions if they choose. and perhaps the expressions of annoyance may be merited in the appropriate case. they often are. but when we examine the polar positions of the parties, it does not seem that at this point in time a settlement conference is likely to have any chance of success ”

akiane  bitching , but i think the root cause is she has lost the "prodigy status" and its just bad or mediocre art like anything else of that nature and the money dried up leaving a lot of resentment with the business partners

you’ll never get a cent back, the whole matter is too ambiguous to get a favourable resolution in court and even the judge is saying its a waste of time, and that's not just reading between the lines, he as good as says that

how many proverbs are there to the effect the righteous do not prevail ?

well, that’s what they mean, the righteous do not prevail, when the money dries up, so do the agreements

genius requires a lot of traversing through the wastelands of schizophrenia, better done as an observer than a participant

what we call language is just a particularization of a genetic cognitive construct

no one language has any particular supremacy over another, they are just various verbal embodiments

if they know the grammar  by eight months ,  then its already there in the brain, there’s no way a very plastic learning process could give that sort of language sophistication so quickly

study

mexico is a  scary place ,  there’s no law and order

just shows what happens if gangs run things, the "cartel" is just another "gang"

brad warner is really depressed

his  vlog

my  reply

lol, i was able to visualise you giving a vlog looking miserable from having the actual virus and saying how it wasn’t so bad, but was really quite bad but were able to survive this because of the practice

happy corona virus !

you are actually really depressed, i don’t know that’s its a good idea to vlog when you are that depressed from the public image point of view, a bit real for all the fakes reading here for their entertainment and "fluffy pillow" comfort

exercise is the best anti-depressant and sitting down for too long is a depressant, i actually wouldn’t sit zazen while you are like this, but do, say a walking meditation or just "move"

ed.  i didn’t post this but i think brad is suffering to some degree from the neural imprint of huntington’s, the rigidity and non adaptability

exercise is the best anti-depressant and sitting down for too long is a depressant

religion

a literary farce

projected

into

the real

results vary

from

tragedy

to humour

to

murder

to the asinine

how can people spend their lives  on this rubbish  ?

gluing scraps of paper together to make meaningless ?

“ it can take a year to go through one sheet of paper ”

che guevara was a scion of the middle class, how he ended up a feared guerilla is beyond me, except he moved well outside his sphere of competence with the  inevitable end

to be a successful or competent artist or writer you have to produce enough work to get the "statistical effect" to come into play

the problem is one can never tell what work one does will really take with others because in terms of one’s own perspective, they are all sort of the same

but if you produce a lot of work, a few will really take and you can’t tell ahead what they will be

there’s a lot of areas of life this holds for as a general principle, even the raising of children and why one should be so careful not to favour one over another

apparently ramana maharshi is "re-interpreted" by his "disciples" rather than translated and i think dogen is substantially re-interpreted too and japanese "zen" itself is to a degree "re-interpreted" according to western philosophical ideas as a result of its "reforming" in the meiji era

its an outstanding example of the narrow minded stupidity of soto that no-one reads the tsurezuregusa, almost contemporary to dogen and written by a buddhist monk in kyoto, you get a feel for how strange and different the culture was

i think the trouble with soto is they never grow out of meditation, its useful to a certain point, but beyond that is the road to crazy and boy, real life observation says that happens in spades

its hard to find a more hackneyed and overworked cliché than the  "i don’t know"  on the spiritual circuit

in fact what seems to define the  "spiritual circuit"  is stupidity, pomposity and institutionalised plagiarism

because of the induced brain damage, MMA is a form of true  gladitorial combat ,  a partial killing of the person

very different  reactions

we are constantly exposed to clouds of infectious aerosols, in fact doctors waiting rooms are particularly bad

a different context for the coronavirus

the civil war  in taiz, in yemen’s south-west

children need  violet light  exposure to stop becoming short sighted

that coupled with circadian rhythm synchronisation makes "blue blocking" a more complex issue than appears

you know its a good play when you can’t bear to see the end, it is  so traumatic

lasik as i understand it is not permanent, like you are doing well if it lasts eight years and i think it increases the "fragility" of the eye

you can be miscast in terms of the novel, but its not miscast in terms  of the film  which is its own story

i think what everyone misses about jane austen’s stories, are the extent to which they are drawn from her life and the people in them are relatives and people she knew

she was also a socially constructed celibate, that’s where the intensity comes from

uv protection from optical media is beneficial, the problem is when the cutoff moves too far into the circadian rhythm signalling blue or actually even  into the violet

existance is no mystery

there is something else

that

is

a mystery

a quiet evening

past midnight

two cats

going berserk

climbing a tree

we are all on the tip of an improbability

so extreme

it undermines our existance

everybody so full of themsleves

despite the disasters

how many full moons have i seen ?

how many more will i see ?

tonight i wondered

people differ in their views of nursing homes, probably age and need reduces one’s skepticism

“ our  results  suggest a noninvasive training strategy for adult human amblyopia based on an inverse‐occlusion procedure combined with physical exercise ”

here’s another one ,  dichoptic  movie viewing

just in the last couple of years, there are several new strategies for amblyopia, the general thrust appears to be the emphasis on cortical plasticity

“ it is now well established that amblyopia is associated with cortical dysfunction at monocular and binocular sites ed.  in the brain ”

the art world  is all fraud ,  i bet no money changed hands, its a "jack-up" for publicity

everybody will be in on it, the supposed buyer, the gallery, the artist, the article writer

if you are over 74 and male, have coronary or lung problems, or smoke you have a statisically hugely greater chance of dying from the coronavirus

its just nature’s way of clearing out the "rest homes"

adolf hitler  rocking  at the 1936 olympics

that was before he got  into drugs ,  more like an "autistic rock"

pervertin wasn’t developed until a year after the 1936 olympics

bill gates rocks too

ed.  this seems to have been misunderstood, the point being that hitler and bill weren’t on meth but do an autistic behavior, something on occasion i have noticed myself doing

i am so critical of other people  eating the lotus ,  but i am, myself a great lotus eater

I      II

its taken a long time for me to get a bead on brad warner, but i think he suffers an intellectual downsizing from his very poor vegetarian diet

that is, poor, even in terms of vegetarian restrictions

zen, is of course for the intellectually  "downsized"

rowan farrow is almost certainly woody allen’s son, look at the ears and nose and actually, ability

its an interesting  fratricidal  mess

you can tell a golum

he’s a golum

he’s not going to stop being a golum

indeed he thinks it admirable

jason’s latest  drawing  is in the right direction, denser and more complex images

an artwork has to be constructed to the artist’s meaning, yet able to convey it to "outsiders"

the point of a poem

is not to resolve

into  "meaning"

the trouble with people

is  you

lose

yourself

sometimes i think such nonsense

i catch myself at it

it blows my mind

slow motion  droplets collisions

anne sexton’s suicide was chilling, planned over six months right down to getting her daughter to agree to be her literary executor

a very determined self-execution, she pretty well told everyone she was going to do it too

if you want to understand existance, its at the end of a long chain of very low probabilities, but looking from the end of the chain is not surprising because one can only look from that end

j.m.  daughter of the hurunui, rangiora and the wild west sea

they do earn their money on "reality" shows

they go in a fool and come out with a nation-wide reputation as a fool

religion is just intellectual "slumming", by the "slum dwellers" as it happens

i quite like  this  because its saying the universe is in a relative state of order so there is a slope for it to flow down the gradient to disorder, in the same way biological life does

there’s this very successful mechanistic explantion of the "why" of life and consciousness so no supernatural notions of external cause are necessary, but there is something else going on and i wouldn’t say it is entirely unrelated to the mechanistic explanation, perhaps in abstract principle like observation affecting outcomes and uncertainty

another  article

i think a good poem is quite densely packed with a multitude of meanings and when you unpack it to give a meaning, you are only giving part of the story

i think if you are writing and self-publishing like me, you have to have a definite self-editing process to be "healthy", which in the end, if done properly comes out to be much more effective than another person editing

i begrudge the time i spend "editing" and "laying up" my "suitcase" pages and not the writing, but that’s the healthy balance

or like fernando pessoa and emily dickinson i could just toss it in a trunk and in emily’s case, ask for the writing to be burnt, fortunately her "friends" had more sense, i don’t think her immediate family would have had the same sense

years ago i read the account of nikolai gogol being persuaded to burn the second volume of  "dead souls"  by an idiot priest, that account made a big impact on me, i never destroy any of what i write and even some photos taken years ago of my time in springwater, i have regretted my chucking them away in the grip of some confused thinking

the world lost a masterpiece with that burning by nikolai and the priest

an italian complaining about a depressed mood following getting new eyeglasses with zeiss duravsion

my  reply

its not the uv being blocked that causes mood changes, but blue which the brain uses to synchronise the circadian rhythm

digital devices do not have a significant amount of blue in terms of "eye damage", but they do in terms of the brains synchronising of the circadian rhythm which is beneficial from morning to evening, but needs to be shut off several hours before bed

the  transmission graph  for the zeiss duravsion blue protect which definitely takes out significant chunks of blue, appropriate for areas for bright sunlight, but not low light conditions

the insane can’t change

that’s

why

they are insane

brad warner, in my view you are showing mental health problems from vegetarian nutritional insufficiencies, you are in some really crazy space that the net and your reading audience validate somehow

another way of putting it, is you are intellectually "slumming"

as regards your "mental health" i don’t have the slightest expectation you will take what i am saying "on board", but this is friendly advice and not a put down or disparagement

the weirdness of the royal family

the media

this strange distorting mirror

you couldn’t pay me

the day burns time

burns  burns

the night softens it a bit

the day burns time

burn  burn

the night softens it a bit

supermarkets have their

own hours

days

and seasons

the swamp of humanity

passes

through

ed. rather than "swamp" i was going to list "the varieties", but the list got too long and politically incorrect

the solitary, families,the harassed, deformed, robust, frial, fragile, sane, not quite sane, gregarious, impaired, functional, children, adults, the very old, handsome, bueatiful, ugly, non-descript, hopeful, hopeless, manic, depressed, the fat, the thin, the skeletal, the obese, girls, men, women, boys, adolescent  (actually not so many of those, some form of self-selection out i’d say, not short at the KFC after school though),

trans, not quite trans, heterosexual, not sure of hetero, the lame, the wobbly, the walkers, the striders, children running, demanding, asking, adults tired, deflated, the sick, the crippled, the athletic

women’s magazines

scratchy females

bitching

ed.  i was admiring the way the british female and even ex-colonial press is sticking it to megan markel because she is out of class, out of race and out of "britishness" and most dangerously, has "charisma", it all sorta glares at you as you glance at the magazine rack in the supermarket

pompeii, herculaneum, boscoreale, stabiae

middle class worlds

disrupted

pompeii

a middle class world

disrupted

vesuvius

a middle class world

disrupted

dozing in the car

surf in the distance

a family passes

give me the surf

“ i marvelled at a shoreless ocean

and a shore with no ocean

the breaking of dawn without darkness

and a night that never ended ”

that is not from the koran, but  ibn 'arabi  and you can see that islam would have issues with it

islam is surprisingly or perhaps not so surprisingly hostile to the sufi which is ,  in a way ,  its mystical poetic branch

maybe that last line could have been

and the night that never ended ”

you can explain the universe and brain mechanistically, though you can never fully explain either, but this is itself explainable by the target being destroyed by the approach to the target which is recursion and actually the limitation of explanation since what is explained is part of the explanation and ultimately not mechanistic

aging and its certain maladies

the shrinking of the vitreous

“ i can’t understand what you are saying ”

wherein lies the fault ?

“ i can’t understand what you are saying ”

where lies the fault ?

hurunui  mechatronics

one’s feet

in the sadness

of

the

world

juliet mclachlan

a child poet

writes

gifted

yet there’s something i can’t quite put my finger on

the door to the north

is to look through a window

but to step

through

the

door

is different

the words twine of themselves

and a different sea and sky show

nike knows how to spend  quality time  in the universe

i knew some-one who lived in kenya as a child in the early and mid-sixties, she and her brother had the most wonderful time, africa in its benign years, well post the mau mau uprising anyway

there’s no comfort in the bad familiar

why do we bridle so

at the novel ?

if i can’t write poetry

i can write prose

and i can always write prose

if poetry is about "truth" then mental illness is important because people who are mentally ill are outside the boundaries of "normality" and you have to go outside the normal to see "truth"

"normality" from the point of view of truth is actually mentally ill, but of course the "normal" will never see this, its their nature in being normal and of course are very punishing to any hint of abnormality

i think successful poetry crosses both the normal and abnormal in a more or less functional way, always the challenge with abnormality and mental illness is to function and you need to appear normal to some extent, even though you are not

perhaps the best example of "cross-over" is virginia woolf who transited in and out and finally out of mental illness (an excpetionally strong swimmer who had to load her coat with stones to be sure she would drown, too sad for words)

syliva plath’s poetry does not come from mental illness, but the functional occupation of all territories of being and in the end she got spread too thin with its inevitable consequence

why the university system is such a disaster with literature and the cloned idiots it is producing is because you can’t corset the abnormal to look like normal they way they do

to me, mini-monovision with a low glistening iol is the most robust option for cataract

i’ve gone with 1D of myopia for a while and sorta liked it, but settled back to .75D, but if you’re comfortable with one, the vision is better, it may cause more eye strain, i’m not sure

the golden rule however is to put the operation off for as long as possible, the technology is always improving

full monovision can give problems with  depth perception

all i can say i have never noticed this effect at 1D

i think the "sweet spot" for mini-monovision varies with the individual and really the only way to tell is wear glasses with the extra myopia for six months

this is the problem with drugs, skew insight leading to craziness, how people can spend their lives stuck in this sort of bullshit  is beyond me, but they do

“ what have i learned about zen ?  well, the most significant moment for me was honestly  a mushroom trip.  boring, but there you go.  the experience i had showed me first hand that the mind is not what i thought it was, thought is not what i thought it was.  i saw my human perspective melt like hot cheese, revealing a vast, intimidating existence that has been running like a well oiled machine since time immemorial without our help.  we arise from it.  it is us.  we can’t break it, and we can’t fix it.  its like a lightning flash ”

what i have noticed is people with a lot of difficult life experiences don’t necessarily learn from them, you have to process and learn which some never do, alcohol and drugs of course are anesthetics that facilitate this blind ignorance, if only the druggies weren’t so missionary about screwing everyone else up

interestingly, though charles bukowski was alcoholic, he did learn, i think the writing processed it for him and he went through so many unpleasant extremes things had to be clearer

but all the same he would have been a better and more interesting poet if he had not drunk, he was a true genius and could have had the stature of shakespeare/sir henry neville

victorian and edwardian england

a writers and artists tableaux

the like of which

has not been seen again

victorian england

a writers and artists tableaux

the like of which

has not been seen again

“ the ink dark moon ”

yet it sounds better to say

the dark ink moon

its ok

its not ok

you might as well spin a coin

 what is the reality ?

some say its ok

some says its not ok

you might as well spin a coin

 what is the reality ?

vegetarianism always runs into the problem of  "invisible culling"  which is the downsizing of various feral populations to stop  "herbivation"  of plant crops

i have to do it myself to keep my less than stellar vegetable garden out of various mouths

on a broader scope there’s a surprising number of animals ,  (elephants, killer whales, whales, dolphins)  who have a sufficiently similar consciousness to humans for their killing to be literal murder, and then you have humans in wars being literally murdered or starved etc

i just think the whole thing sounds unresolvable to me, beyond my control and i am under no obligation to compromise my health, digestion and cognitive function by the restricted diet of vegan or vegetarian

the mystical solipsist view actually requires the opposite, that you eat to maximise your long term health

i think there’s always a degree of schizophrenia associated with vegetarianism because it ignores the human context that prioritises the human and yourself over other species, though i don’t prioritise humans over other clearly equivalent species like elephants or killer whales

zen  —  the religion

of the stupid

a story made real

they do not understand this

ken wilber

the non-thinking man’s

thinking man

dying of some disease

he passes it around

a door sill

 how worn ?

back and forth

we miss what this is saying to us

a salutary lesson about ezra’s pound’s later life is the extreme extent to which he manufactured his troubles

the italians weren’t keen on him broadcasting, nor was wartime italy friendly to him, and yet he stepped out against the current into what ruined his reputation and put him in danger of the death penalty

his fame worked against him, yet also saved him because of his supporters who were able to get him incarcerated in a mental asylum rather than face charges of treachery

how much simpler to have made a rational assessment of his beliefs and the likely outcome of any war, but of course he was quite schizophrenic by that point and had made the mistake of migrating from the much more interesting "literary schizophrenia" into the dull moronacy of "state and politcal belief sanctioned schizophrenia"

writers, poets and philosophers engage with politics at their peril, its too strong a brew

there’s an interesting story about marie curie, a young polish man who would have married her except his wealthy family objected and he acquiesced, in later years he would go and sit and look at a statue erected to her for hours

i think she would have been happier in that alternate life, he of course had become aware of his mistake

she literally created the mobile X-ray service for wounded french soldiers and it was a significant help in reducing fatalities from surgery compared to the british

spring

blossoms everywhere

the sterile sea

flaunts its whitecaps

"ER"  would have to be the most toxic show ever, the mindset of pretending cretins

i like  this poem  by ōtomo no yakamochi about a guard leaving for a frontier post

a poem by ōtomo no yakamochi

meeting in dreams

is painful indeed

starting awake

and reaching out

the questing hand finds nothing

my  reply

who i met in a dream

i never know

because of course

they are me

who are you fooling with your missionizing ?  another day, another crap artist

you can’t take a drug that interferes with dopamine levels without long term serious side effects, you want to do a bit of research if you are taking adderall or its equivalents, there’s some real horror stories out there

each breath  is unique , i was thinking how fucked up meditation is from a health point of view with its restricted leg circulation, damaging the hip and knee joints and neurologically insane practices like following or counting the breath

if you are thinking of taking legal action, just remember that law is always half scam, that’s across the board and every aspect of it

only crazies read boring twaddle like ken wilber

the really insane think it has value

you don’t have to ask  "what do women think ?"

all you have to do is listen to poetesses

its there in spades

“ is there any established tradition that comes close to your own ideal of  ‘ mystical inquiry ’  ? ”

that’s an interesting question because what i notice about how i differ from others is i recognise that all the mystical religious traditions must have their validities and literature does as well

however ,  historically very very few people ever get truly "enlightened" ,  like 99% of zen is crap so across the entire historical records you only get a very few people that ever understand, the sixth patriarch and joshu for instance in zen (eihei dogen is sort of half and half, he should have lived longer), john of the cross and st teresa of avila, catherine of sienna, emily dickinson, the sufis sa'di and rabia of basra, there are more but its not a large list

so basically any religion  (zen is a religion)  is largely crap and plain wrong, but within them there’s a few over large expanses of time who actually understand what it is all about

of course these religions had their heyday in medieval times where people were compelled to follow them, now these days with no compulsion its senseless to belong to whatever nonsense they push

i think medieval times, between wars and diseases had genuine questions about death, like only a third of children ever made it to adolescence and people mostly never seem to live beyond their fifties so you got huge resources  (witness the cathedrals)  put into religions, or more modestly eihei dogen getting funding for his china trip and eihei-ji

but the core of it is there’s very few people who "understand", and all we know of them is their writing or writing about them  (joshu’s case for instance, could he even write ? )

its like anything else that is effective, its a craft and what you do, you need to read quality and do a lot of  "contemplative"  work, its real slog and requires a lifetime

what i notice is that people just read junk and don’t do any contemplative work and/or just entrench their brain default circuitry in meditation, a form of schizophrenia actually

drug users just look for fancy wallpaper to justify the way they so destructively use their time

it so simple, but only a very few ever read quality and do the requisite "contemplation" ,  there’s millions and millions of "pretenders" out there, its hard to get used to, but that’s the way it is

you stand above religion effectively and religion is just material you have to sift through

at some point explanations fail

and people have to deliver

when they can’t or don’t deliver

then

you

know

the explanations

are

worthless

evening has a sacred zone

the light unearthly, yellow

it exists for not too long

like us

my reply to warsan shire’s  poem   “ women who are  ‘ difficult ’  to love ”

strange and beautiful is not what we want

homely and familiar checks the box for most

those with sense anyway

the others find themselves on a different planet

hostile and full of unknowns

a precipice one constantly has to pay attention to

lest one slip

cast one

into

the abyss

everything is endless, yet we ourselves have an end

what does this mean ?

what happens when we die ?

does that question have any meaning ?

we run into the walls of meaning itself when we ask that

my  "style"  has a cast

it reveals who you are

some people

are better

concealed

the net

people with alcohol problems

people with drug problems

people with personality problems

all wanting to waste your time

i’ve had plenty of people try to imitate my "style" ,  they all fail because they can only  "burble"

the undercurrents of insight and well worked out conceptualisation are utterly beyond them

“ can the gut microbiome recover on it own after antibiotics, how many months can this take ? ”

a lactobacillus acidophilus only yogurt will be helpful

jason  writes

sometimes i have dreams that give a feeling, its not all visual

it probably happens to most people where you have these dreams that when you wake up you know are sort of different

well i was walking around the house the other day and this feeling from this dream just hit me, i must’ve had the dream at least ten years ago, maybe eight

i remembered some scenes from the dream, but i’m writing this a day later and its already pretty much forgotten

the road of grief is one we travel by ourselves

grief is a road we are the only traveller on

everybody has their griefs

you can’t share them

anger at the world

a burning meaninglessness

that goes nowehere

if you have two languages and one can be translated into another, then obviously there is a deeper structure common to both

what is that deeper structure ?

its staring you in the face, its the sense and you can have the sense traverse across an infinite multitude of languages

interestingly if you look at the boundaries of what can and can’t be translated you run into the fact the quality poetry cannot be fully translated and therefore is not constrained to sense, but in some mystical way is superior

people who smoke pot when they get traumatized

never feel their trauma fully

and

so

their

life

goes

in

a

circle

its important to distinguish between micro or mini monovision and full monovision, this is because full monovision creates too much stress in the eyes from the large difference in magnification between them and also is dangerous from altered depth perception when driving

on the other hand a  "mini/micro"  monovision of  -.75D  seems not to have these problems and gives good depth perception and enough magnification for anything except close reading

the micro/mini nomenclature is not that consistent, you could probably take it as from about .5 to 1.5 of myopia, my personal view is you shouldn't go above 1 and i have .75 in my left eye which has worked well for me, possibly going to 1 would give better close vision, but having had 1, i am happier with .75

i think adding say .1 of myopia to the other eye might also be useful, but they no longer manufacture in such a fine gradient, .25 is the minimum

full monovision or just plain monovision i think goes from about 1.5 to up to say 3

"why shouldn’t drugs be one part of a spiritual path"

because they damage the brain and give the wrong sort of insight

my reply to sylvia plath’s poem  "elm"

the bottom

turns out to be

a fall

endless opening out

or closing

too

much

to

live

i have figured a lot of people on the net have personality disorders, you have to be more than careful

of course real life is like this to

when reality goes sour

fantasies become sickening

on reddit, you bail them into a corner and they run away with a downvote to signal their resignation

"jostaberry"  i think is a rhyming slang form of the whimsical  "just a berry"

ah ,  not the case 

“ the name jostaberry was created via combining the german words for blackcurrant and gooseberry, namely johannisbeere  ("jo")  and stachelbeere  ("sta").  following german pronunciation of  "j" ,  it may be pronounced "yostaberry" in english ”

"mysticism"  or what zen is really about is almost entirely cognitive and experiential, it is a craft and the work of a lifetime

drugs are the classic pilgrim’s progress,  jumping the wall ,  the avenue of entry excludes authenticity

all the effects of drugs are to put a spanner in the works of the brain and you always get a degree of permanent damage

to me the only thing against a drug is  "does it do permanent brain damage ?"  and i don’t know one that doesn’t and the much vaunted  "LSD"  seems to make for self-righteous morons

what i also feel and as eihei dogen came to understand, is that the cognitive work is so difficult and time consuming, that short of celibacy and a life long involvement, you are just wasting your time

i know entry into a celibate priesthood before or around adolescence is no longer culturally applicable, but there may be events in your childhood that set you on a road of inquiry

obviously "harm" is a "spectrum" ,  psychoactive chemicals like DMT already being made by the brain are no guarantee of "harmlessness" ,  how it would rate comparatively to say several glasses of wine i would have no idea

i used to be prepared to give ayahuasca the benefit of the doubt, but like LSD the people that claim some sort of "mystical" understanding are the usual idiots, but as to the degree of harm its difficult to assess, its "users" are so sneaky in their presentation of effects

my primary point is the failure of these psychedelic type drugs users to be anything but misguided pests in terms of understanding what the mystical is about and this is exactly what you would expect since chemicals with random brain effects are never going to even slightly simulate a lifetime of intelligent and searching enquiry and "craft" development

far from seeing the inadequacy however, these people just "pretend" and as i say make pests of themselves trying to "sell" whatever "cognitive failures" they are pushing

what i am saying is the concern that a drug may cause permanent brain damage, you can look at alcohol as a brain damaging drug, some "recreational" drugs perhaps have a use for ptsd or say migraine in the case of microdose LSD and some psychiatric drugs are known for being particularly harmful

its all a complex moil, but for me, if it damages the brain i don’t take it, for instance i don’t drink alcohol

that’s just a practical side from the point of view of health and keeping one’s brain intact for  "mystical inquiry"

i really have no beef with people anaesthetising themselves from reality with alcohol or drugs except they seem to make a pain in the arse of themselves on message boards and in life being very needy from curtailed functionality

that is all by the way

the real issue is that drugs do not give correct insights into "reality" and are counterproductive in terms of "mystical inquiry"

you have to do the work and get the "craft" of that "inquiry" to make that call though

an interesting case is konrad ryushin marchaj, erstwhile abbot of the zen monastery at mt tremper who was obviously getting very dissatisfied with all the bullshit going on there, yet was unable to see and say the crap for what it was and did ayahuasca and left  (was pushed out for heterodoxy)

it was helpful to some extent, even a large extent but he’s still far from thinking straight in terms of mystical inquiry

maybe steven batchelor is the same, with drugs he saw buddhism as the crap it was, but he’s still not on track

yes, i know your type

anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot

in reality

you are unpleasant and incapable of grasping an argument

the strangeness of

seeing the wetness on the floor

the towel is damp

yet i have

absolutely

no memory

of

taking a shower

ed.  it amazed me, a complete blank to the extent that except for the evidence i had no idea i had taken a shower

the clone thinks

thinks like clones

the clone thinks

think like clones

the talentless patronising

repulse

i don’t think knowing the maori language is helpful to the promulgation of maori culture

a language that no-one understands and will eventually die is alienating

knowing two languages are a burden and hurts the bi-linguals, not the conventional view, but observation from life has left me with this opinion

of course knowing two languages is sometimes essential, then the benefits outweigh the costs

just about everybody could have done with useful advice at certain points in their life they never had

and so the world goes on

sounds at night

a dog barking at wallabies in the distance

a frog with quite a loud chirp

cats chewing on a wallaby carcass

wind in the gums further up the hill

soundless a meteorite

flashes across the sky

the fence rattles

the education system

is turning out

clones of their memes

there is nothing new about pandemics

the roman and byzantine empires

were brought down by a succession of pandemics

and one particular plague

in the case of the byzantine empire

our loss

the world is a whirlpool of contrariness

difficult to deal with

everybody comes up against the same thing

you can’t change the past an inch

buy

don’t build

your own antenna

there’s a lifetime’s work there

he married her for her money

he fucked up the money

and now he’s off

a beautiful man

she had to have him

despite the red flags

now

many

years

later

a disaster

and

divorce

now a divorce

blinded by male beauty

he always was  "unusual"

god, a hoarse throat

and

i think

i’ve got

the

corona

virus

jamelle’s  reply

don’t reckon you have.  when we were travelling n singing every week i often git crook with a hoarse throat.  two old auctioneers came to see us one day at camp and i could hardly talk.  they told me chocolate is the best cure and that’s what the do if crook before an auction.  it worked for me andy

my  reply

its ok this morning, the poem is satirical and i think prophetic of what is to come

some idiot continues to take umbrage at my saying  the poem  "two mothers remembered"  by joann snow duncanson can’t be re-written effectively in the male voice

quite a good  reading  of the poem

my  reply

you can’t seem to understand what you read and continue in your wrong-minded, abusive and patronising way and i assume you are like this in real life

to go from female to male is more than changing a  "POV" ,  it is as i say  "cataclysmic"

there is not male and female on a background of some supra-sexual non-identity, there is only male and female and if you read the plays  (in fact by sir henry neville)  he modulates between the two and never falls back into the mistake of  "supra"

not understanding you attempt to ridicule and beat down, what can i say ?

the travesty of alzheimer’s

they are and aren’t

we both bleed

o l d e r

there, that’s the male voice

it

looks

nothing

like

“ the microscopic toner nanoparticles that waft from laser printers may change our genetic and metabolic profiles in ways that  make disease  more likely ”

there’s  no way  you should a mobile phone against the ear/brain

the di mateo and gagliano each suited different types of music and i thought the stradivarius was off tone a bit, but you can’t expect the sound to be the same as when it was made, the resonant characteristics of the wood will be quite different now, so much time has passed

lol, even the violins change on you

interesting price scaling   :   $100 to $10 million, a factor of one hundred thousand, only normal by astronomical standards

no. 1  ($10,000  di mateo) and no. 5  ( $100,000 gagliano)  are best ,  each for different types of music and i didn’t think much of the stradivarius  (no. 4)

you can’t expect the stradivarius to be any good, the woods resonant characteristics will be totally different from the original, so much time has passed, this example is off tone

so the best quality, like a lot of things is not at the very high or low price ends, but often r mid range or a tad higher or lower

i don’t get as panicked about things as i used to, but investigate further and accept the way the world occurs more and understand the huge energetic costs of swimming against the current, which actually is often necessary to survive

the symptoms of a viral illness are in fact part of the bodies immune response to it so if you suppress the symptoms, you suppress the immune response, the most classic case is south sea islanders going into the sea to cool off from the high temperatures of newly introduced european diseases and dying from that cooling

people seem to have a differing response to the corona virus which it sounds like we will all inevitably get, but pneumonia is likely, pandemics destroyed the roman and byzantine empires, we can just be thankful the corona virus is so mild in effect which it may not necessarily remain so, harmful mutations are possible

there’s a current stupidity where male versus female is viewed as minor differences, i regard them as cataclysmic

for funeral eulogies, just go down memory lane a bit, that’s all that’s required, wanted and fit for purpose

the flowers unpicked

the plums ungathered

their fragrance no longer brought into the world

it withers away with her loss

ed.  this was inspired by, and is somewhat a re-translation of a poem by alphonsus de guimaraens

the cinnamomums shall cry for her being not

as their flowers wither at the fall of the day

off the orange groves plums shall drop

reminiscing her who would reap them away

the stars will say : alas !  we are no more for she perished, silent and cold as the winter

and laying their eyes on her as we have before they shall mourn for their smiling sister

the moon, as the caring mother she was, who watched her grow and cherish, shall wrap her in lillies and petals of rose

my dreams of love will be expired

and archangels will say in the blue, upon seeing her, thinking of me  :  why did they not come together ?

i don’t know that mathematics is a language in its own right, rather its some sort of subset of language, exactly what, i don’t know

my comment on a brad warner  vlog

i do think an involvement in any sort of religious group teaches social skills and  "oversharing"  is simply a social skills problem, its always a line everyone walks and some people are too concealing, you need to discuss stuff about yourself occasionally and so you can be harmed by being too reticent

likewise you can be too revealing to people who can or will use that information against you

its an ongoing skill development and i really feel my involvement in zen dramatically improved that for me

i notice that a lot of the  "net only"  zennnists have very poor social and dialogue skills, totally unable to have a productive discussion, just aggressive missionizing of whatever craziness and unable to look at something rationally

i think what andrei tarkovsky does is try  to bring back  the meaning of the past, something beautiful that is gone

i think what andrei tarkovsky does is try to bring back  the meaning of the past, something that is gone

i don’t know why people have such trouble with noam chompsky’s theory of "universal grammar"

its like perception, its an inherent construct of the brain

this seems to offend some, why is hard to see

what is there to say ?

there’s no relief from the pain and failings of old age

well, there is a relief and it comes like the dawn sun limning the hills

why should such a glory be so painful ?

what is there to say ?

there’s no relief from the pain and insufficiencies of old age

well, there is a relief and it comes like the dawn sun limning the hills

why should such a glory be so painful ?

the natural world

everything eating everything else

with no apologies

they too

need  to  breed

the inks are toxic and carcinogenic, they have nanoparticles in, mess the immune system and create social barriers, the art is always bad, all you have to do is not get it done, tattoo-ees are in some respects crazy, its actually a form of self harm of which body modification is a stronger extreme

if you have ever seen any serious body modifcation and understood its a continuum you would never touch a tattoo in your life

its amazing what sticks in memory, i remember a poem by wang wei who was lost in the woods on his way to a hermitage with evening falling and he was worried about tigers

he just sat down for a while and his panic passed

well as it happens tiger’s peak activity is during the day and noon and  drops right off  in the evening

men and women

thrust together

by evolutionary necessity

neither particularly likes the other

its designed

to look

more

than

it

is

which

is

happenstance

men and women

thrust together

by evolution

neither particularly likes the other

its designed

to look

more

than

it

is

which

is

happenstance

we have the genetic coding for the deep structure of language, we don’t have it for a specfic implementation, wars are born from this, i won’t call it a failure

one of the primary reasons for a religion which is no longer understood in the western world because of the separation of state and church was a belief in the afterlife making men ready to die for their country or cause

this goes right back to the ancient egyptians

its interesting that the soviet union was so brutal to retreating soldiers in the battlefield or even just their own men being taken prisoner and returning was necessary because of this lack of belief in the afterlife and extreme force was required to coerce men to put their own lives in danger

ISIS plays up the afterlife  (one particularly appealing to young men)  heavily, but its dissonant in today’s world and a reason it only exists as a fringe minority

we are less than rational creatures, underlying beliefs, however wrong still can have strong influences on behavior

beware of circular stories

your own life, books, the lives of others, religion

perhaps what a novel really is, is a story that endlessly repeats

it runs through, then when you pick up the book again to reread it, it just runs through again to return to where it started

  —  jane austen and all the film versions of  emma  and pride and prejudice

this really conveys  the size  of an elephant in relation to our own

poets

pretend versus the real

1 million to 1

the net sometimes seems very strange, ann sexton’s  daughter ,  still alive, well and  "consulting"

she has that  "manic look"  her mother has for sure, not quite the same intensity though and perhaps just as well for her

some sort of refugee from the hurricane that was her mother, but alas, lacking the talent

the dreaming poets

their trash

validated

by

journal publishing

i got a miffed reply

my reply

 stung huh ?

why

well

you

know

um

huh,  X is jean conrad hottinguer, Y is pierre bellamy is and Z is lucien hauteval

the   XYZ affair

some of the planetary formation processes are surprisingly quick compared to the biological

there are insects in amber going back 100 million years and earlier, yet the earth  aggregated  out of the protoplantary disc in five million

to those that think straight

live straight

the world crucifies

traumatised by its own

dysfunction

if something can occur and does

why

should

we

be

 surprised ?

if something can occur and does

why should we be surprised ?

my brain is far more elegant than my thoughts

i don’t know how this can be

writing is like a drawing or painting

you can scribble anything

that doesn’t make it a dali, monet, chagall, picasso or vermeer

the net morons with their tomes of barf

reject any notion of skill or craft

that they say it   –   is enough

in their eyes

narcissistic validation is what they seek

of necessity their product must reek

you don’t even need the universe

all you need are the four walls of a kitchen

to know

something odd is happening

what’s in the fine print

collomer lenses  increase  IOP by a mm of Hg, that raises a red flag imo

they have never been 100% safe

the evening star

seems to be falling

through the tree’s branches

appearing

disappearing

appearing

the evening star

seems to be falling

through the tree’s branches

i was driving through a back way to a town a bit further up the coast than i usually travel

so many years since i had done that

a trip through memory lane

farms and their houses pass leisurely by

some-one had up signage for suicide prevention resources on the side of the road

facebook even

i took a double take

it

used

to

be

a

taboo

subject

if you always go the same way

it will crimp you

when i drive

the landscape

informs me

artie lange  is really quite interesting, looks like an accountant, but he’s certainly not

what i notice is that bad as some drugs like cocaine are, they don’t fuck up your health like serious alcohol use does

eihei dogen is the most unabashedly mystical of all the famous zen "masters"

if you think that what it is about

is day in day out contemplation

well

you are right

and wrong

the gums in an unearthly

reflected light

along the horizon

an

intense orange

a long distant sunset

not red

but an intense orange

a long distant sunset

not red

but orange

i look once

i look twice

the world still holds together

how deceitful

i look once

i look again

the world still holds together

how deceitful

an anne sexton quote

the boys and girls are one tonight

they unbutton blouses.  they unzip flies

they take off shoes.  they turn off the light

the glimmering creatures are full of lies

they are eating each other.  they are overfed

at night, alone, i marry the bed

what i dislike about  "dharma talks"  or  "teishos"  is they take advantage of the suggestibility and plasticity induced by the meditation and retreat to shove complete nonsense down your throats

it has taken me decades to walk that bullshit back, the problem with zen is the  "transmission system"  has meant that only the most dull morons become zen masters so its all swamped with complete idiocy

it takes ten years to start to become good at something

it really does

if there’s an oscar for actress with the least intellectual depth anya taylor-joy would  win it

“ the biggest beauty mistake i have ever made i think potentially is not learning how to apply make-up ”

my mother’s poem

the bumble bees are bouncing on the cat-mint plants

each slender stalk weighted for a moment

then released, trembling, like lilac flowered springs

her comment :

i’ve been watching the bumble bees, they love ourcat-mint its quite a strong smell but they don’t seem to mind, little black bodies busy at work

hot and dry here, keep moving the hose

a benefit of  "kinhin"  from an old chinese source describing it as done in india  as per  brad warner

“ first it cures diseases and second it helps digestion ”

monasteries have always been notorious for infectious disease, the strangest, yet most unappreciated thing about the modern world is our long life expectancies, there seems to be some prohibition against mentioning that eihei dogen died of tuberculosis, why is that ?

the stench of decay and disability is too much for our sensitive noses ?

too much reality for all today’s fakes chained up in their pretending

the yasutani lineage does a slow walk followed by a fast walk

jason  writes

what really clicked for me today is realizing that going to a scenic place on my own and doing my own sort of retreat would be better than going to someone else’s

my  comment

i don’t think i could go on a group retreat or meditate again, they are things left in the now distant past

the question i have is whether they were necessary stages or not

but guess what, its not my problem to sort out

the basic difficulty is the level of indoctrination with the retreat

that takes decades to unwind

its hard to believe that just about everybody in the  "spiritual circuit"  is a stupid moron pretending to understand something they are clueless about, but that’s the fact which eventually leaves you rather alone

that’s not to say you won’t benefit from some dealing with these types

the internet is not your local experience, remember that and be cautious

sometimes the most extreme person on the planet is facing you

in rare cases

the

universe

the internet is not your local experience, remember that and be cautious

one of the problems with fantasies is they tend to be  "inverted"  compared to real life

entertainment fiction is particularly prone to this, star crossed lovers becoming uncrossed where irl they become more crossed

high levels of violence causing no damage to the participants

one wins against many, i don’t have to say much about that one do i ?

women with unlimited shelf life and socially sophisticated men with good verbal skills

the inversions are endless

the inks are toxic/carcinogenic, they mess the immune system and have high levels of nanoparticles

ever wonder why heavily tattooed people are so off the planet ?

its prevalence in the recidivist prison population is not an accident

keratinocytes form  neuronlike  connections with melanocytes, the skin is an organ, you wouldn’t tattoo your heart would you ?

there’s no answer in terms of place, its just a dream

jason  writes

arriving at the beach i’m not feeling too well, there are a lot of beach goers for the middle of february but its an uncommonly nice day of almost 50°F/10°C

anyway i walk on the sand to the water and once i get to the ocean there’s a breeze that washes away my worries

i keep walking along the water, the smell of the ocean brings good memories

at first it seems like there’s a lot of crazy people walking along the water, i wonder if the sane people are walking on the boardwalk one hundred yards away

i walk for forty-five minutes and turn around, i now notice couples dressed nicely

my shoulder isn’t feeling well so i decide to pack it up after an hour and a half

walking back i think i just want to stay longer !

photo

my  comment

this is really what 'spiritual work' is about, why there is a trillion dollar industry called  "religion" ,  self improvement, new age, whatever is beyond me, except its intrinsic to existance

all the zillions of man hours by the frauds are nothing compared to a single drop of this "washing away" or fugue

i can’t post anywhere without being harassed by these bad tempered  "wastrels"  seeking to beat my authenticity down

very  good advice  on being an electrical apprentice, but is generally applicable

some of the comments are good too

man i did a dumb thing last night, got my first mobile phone and thinking the micro-B USB receptacle had a little internal flange to press to remove the back, put a very small screwdriver in to lever it

looking at the flange under the magnifying glass, i have messed the contacts ,  but it still seems to charge

i’m gonna get a bluetooth headset i think to keep the radiation intensity at the head down

aaagh, well it has messed the contacts a bit, but it still charges

a correspondent writes

andrew i don’t know why i worry so much

conventionally i might be a failure but unconventionally i’m not

i went to the beach today for an hour and a half and once i got to the ocean i felt like a lot of worries just  ‘ washed’  away, as i was leaving i just felt that i should stay longer

my  reply

yeah i do that too and usually i stay longer

its a sorta  "fugue state"  and that’s what it’s all about, usually it generates some writing too

the meaning of a good poem transcends the language used to express it

the meaning of a good poem transcends the language used to write it

jason  writes

its pretty simple if you want a better life

don’t drink or do drugs

i’m no saint but i know its the truth

“ are you enlightened yet ? ”

to the extent pot and games are not my life

can you say the same ?

these twits who piss their lives away and get shitty with anyone who shows there’s more

a great reading by rachel mckibbens of her  poem  "after the siamese twins made a scene at the airport security"

women

cows looking to breed

why do you think they have milk ?

call me misogynist ?

men

dogs

not looking to breed

but it happens

call me

androgynist

women

cows looking to breed

why do you think they have milk ?

call me misogynist ?

men

dogs

not looking to breed

but it happens

call me

misandrist

its many, many years since i have read attar, so long i can’t remember any of it

sholeh wolpe  reads  from her translation of  "the conference of the birds"

it makes a lot more sense to me now than it did then, but i think something must have filtered through at the time i first read it

people react bady to facial tattoos, the stupidity is unbelievable

do they think it will just wash off ?

we are hardwired to search the face for behavior cues and signs of illness or disease

do they think they can beat a million years of evolution ?

i think some women can have too strong a sense of a child being entirely their own and not half their father

present pain

outweighs

previous gain

its not what we are that is so interesting

its what we are not

at least to ourselves

always walking down the wrong road

to what effect ?

it wraps up

nullifying

i begin again

this

is

my

life

life is strife

today mutates yesterday

yesterday mutates tomorrow

and the end comes to the beginning and the beginning comes to an end

life is strife

today mutates yesterday

yesterday mutates tomorrow

the ends come to the beginning and the beginning comes to an end

life is strife

today mutates yesterday

yesterday mutates today

the ends come to the beginning and the beginning comes to an end

the new emma  (2020)  looks startlingly  well cast  with anya taylor-joy in the titular role

i think there’s something with the younger generations, they expect things to be immediate when it takes a decade of work

its a criticism i make because i am so familiar with endlessly making that mistake myself

basically i have a daily regimen of supplements i take with the occasional extras

i never drop everything entirely, though i do try to work out what suits me best on an ongoing basis and this has held me and my health in good stead

there is no fixed point in life; health, home, family, relationships, children, some resonance with a geographical place

when we die, we could be anywhere

blue light protection for prescription glasses is just a marketing gimmick, any realistic level of blue blocking would mean the glasses had a strong orange tint

also blue is used by the body and brain to set circadian rhythm signals, so short of bright sunlight, you don’t want to exclude it at all

one of the interesting things and benefits of the net if you self-publish on it, is if you post on a few message boards, you can create an editing function on your work

i find the problem with retreats is the way you get indoctrinated

they may open up avenues, but they also close off avenues

the only place i ever came across with retreats that had no indoctrination was the springwater center which is basically zen without the religious belief system, there was a schedule , but i never found the retreats onerous and of course it was in beautiful countryside you could wander about in, you didn’t have to sit at all, though you could if you wanted to, but i never did

i also went to a retreat at a cistercian monastery where they left you alone with the option of talking to a priest  (catholicism is very hierarchical, you had to talk to a priest and not a monk) ,  it was actually a free retreat and the monks were not a bad lot with a lot of women around which opened my eyes a bit about the celibacy business

unitarianism has a surprisingly similar theology to islam, perhaps due to its roots in eastern europe and the islamic influence there

if you are considering lasik or lens replacement, remember that our eyes are delicate mechanisms we are so dependent on for our quality of life, there’s a lot to go wrong, benefit needs to balance risk

if you look back over your life

anyway

you can’t change it an inch

if you look back over your life anyway

you can’t change it an inch

the "spiritual path" involves a lot of looking back at your life and adding up the "open sums", this is not a process that can be rushed

a religion

does not ask what it is about

it is preoccupied with its own forms

and meanings

if you try to figure things out

you are chasing a will - o' - the - wisp

if you don’t figure things out

you are dangerously stranded

on

an

insane

shore

there are whole worlds ,  universes gone

before we came on the scene

there are whole worlds universes to come

after we have gone from the scene

 what does this mean ?

night fell

clunk

498 pages later

the sun rose

the ungreat american novel

recently discovered

in my brain

i’m not going to try russia

i can’t speak the language and there’s real competiton

наступила ночь

комиссар поморщился

взошло солнце

с лицом Сталина

you can’t write other than what you write

if you could write other than what you write

you

would

be

a different

person

lens replacement elevates the risk of some eye diseases, its not as benign as made out

during the viral season you have to be careful of supplements like fish or krill oil which suppress the immune system

vitamin K2 boosts the immune system and is needed to balance up vitamin  D

anne sexton reading her poem  her kind

scary as shit from the male perspective

if you are educating yourself on something i find if you look at a lot of different videos ,  you just take a bit from each, they don’t have to be perfect, just teach you something

when i started sitting zen, the group i was with was "leaderless" ,  the remnants of a group interested in joshu sasaki who never visited, i got lucky because for a few years this was the best group i was ever involved with, then it all went to hell as several competing adherences to different "roshis" caused schisms

there’s something in the authoritarian structure of zen that leads everyone to want to be a "roshi" and this apparently means you are required to make the group into your version or start a new group

those were the days, everyone was equal and kept their views mostly to themselves and there was just a weekly sit with the occasional retreat, then "the machine" started to take over

i have never ever come across this "free zen" again, its all dominated by institutions now

endless meta about things

when

you

actually

do

the

work

it

looks

different

endless meta about things

when

you

actually

do the work

it

looks

different

endless meta about things

when you actually do the work

it

looks

different

the external world

a mire of complexity

the internal world

simple patterns

 re-occur -

inverted image

a spider on the window pane

i put a card edge up to it to walk onto so i could flick it outside the house

it was on the other side of the pane

our house  turns out to have been joni mitchell’s with boyfriend graham nash living there with her

one trap for the inexperienced with the arts is it looks like there is an unending blob out there, but once you narrow it down to spheres of competence, there’s very few and their views are workman-like and predictable

what is confusing is the vast bulk of the craftless all shouting ,  "i’m the one"  whereas competence sits back and lets its work speak for itself

sylvia’s mother  actually says

brad warner baring  his breasts

its interesting that she/he wants to appear as a male, concern with appearance is a very female trait though, men don’t really care and this actually i think is why  "trans"  seems to be a schizophrenic bolt hole, there’s no such thing as black and white male and female in these cases, the developmental nature means that you necessarily have a strong mix of male and female traits

the intense focus on appearing to be the opposite sex is a female trait which cuts both ways, women wanting to appear as men and men wanting to appear as women

operations and hormones, except in a few childhood cases are just a further excursion into a difficult no-man’s land with strong negative health consequences

the most interesting thing about "gender blurring" by which i mean brains that are not distinctly male or female is the huge intellectual power its gives, leonardo da vinci, sir henry neville/shakespeare, sir isaac newton, a lot of great artists and thinkers, if you scratch the surface, it starts to all look very  "blurred"  which does not necessarily mean homosexuality at all

somethings you can’t rush

inspiration for a poem for instance

it turns up

when it turns up

falsehood is true

and the true is false

what a world

trying to makes sense

of

this

a bit of a riff on a  wall hanging  in marianne faithfull’s apartment

“ i was abused as a child by my father, and i remember being able to relate to  luka  when this song came out

i was sixteen years old in 87'.  i am now the father of five, and i did not abuse my kids

i couldn’t forget how it felt to be a small weak child with no way to stop being hit, and not understanding what i did that caused me to be hurt

thanks suzanne for your poignant song about child abuse ”

suzanne vega singing  tom’s diner  and she also gives the  "backstory"

something is not wrong for being what it is

its wrong

because its wrong

something is not wrong for being itself

its wrong

because its wrong

monkeys have a degree of speed,  acrobatics  and dextrous co-ordination that humans can only marvel at

with poetry

why is there so much rubbish around

 and very little that makes sense to oneself ?

dandilions

a ball of fluff

i blow it to the wind

it doesn’t really disperse

transmission and zen truths

until you experience transmission you won’t believe it and what’s more since hardly any zen masters have had the real thing and are stupid arseholes, they will try and decoy you off it

you actually need quite a few transmission events to get a real bead on what is happening and life

until then you will gabble putridly or do as some do, take the road of ignorant silence called "grunt zen"

when you have had a series of "transmissions" you will write, think and speak as a patriarch and feel contempt for the usual bad translations and garbled nonsense of the so called zen records

keep your distance from the pretenders, they are toxic

like anything else its a craft and you have to do a lot of work to get facility, so much so that its easy to understand why the only decent zen comes from celibacy and in the historical case of ch’an, from a very young age with a lot of travelling

zen requires a long life span, there’s no other way

“ cataract surgery is an independent risk factor for  retinal detachment  due to postsurgical anatomical and biochemical alterations in the vitreous

anatomically, following the removal of the native lens, there are changes in the vitreous volume possibly affecting its mobility

in addition, critical biochemical changes including differences in proteome, viscosity, and macromolecules in the vitreous humour were found and may lead to a posterior vitreous detachment, a known risk factor for RD ”

the period for this happening is surprisingly long with the average being 1.5–2.3 years

its the association of poetry journals with the academic literary world which has become unspeakably toxic that attracts my ire

its a world of mistakes, if you don’t see that, blindness does not begin to describe it

in criticising the very low standard of contemporary poerty, its just an observation and in making it, i know what to avoid being sucked in by

the pompous inane self-certainty of the untalented

social skills go a long way, self righteous indignation goes nowhere

this 376 foot long  "yacht"  is completely  over the top ,  makes the same mistake as steve jobs’s boat, not capable of handling heavy seas

a swimming pool for god’s sake, what’s the point of being on the sea ?

religion

the fiction

of the communal

communion

with

infinity

its

fiction

marriage -

marr-iage

its actually a partnership for the raising of children

masked

by

love

you want it darker

 hineni for what ?

the light bleeds

as badly as dark

you want it darker

 hineni for what ?

the light bleeds

as badly as the dark

a response to leonard cohen’s  song

this world

a cycling from infancy to prime to senescence

it thinks there is something going on

there is

but what can you learn from it ?

the joy of birth is drowned in the tears of senescence

i walked out the door

there was a purple light

i haven’t seen it before

it was like walking in velvet

“ journal  (ed. poetry)  publication has long been, and continues to be, the best way    .   .   . ”

to be part of an unctuous, untalented clique

“ no, mostly because it sounds like you know almost nothing about publication.  there are so many unaffiliated small presses that calling it a  "clique" is  stretching the definition to the breaking point.  there are thousands of journals out there, and i can say with relative certainty that whatever style of poetry interests you, from identity poetry, to insta-movement, to formal, to absurdist, to metapoetic, is represented by some journal somewhere.  where are you reading your poetry where all the talented, less-oily poets are sharing their work ? ”

the marvellous thing about writing is you can read across the ages from a generation ago to sappho and heraclitus

"from identity poetry, to insta-movement, to formal, to absurdist, to metapoetic, is represented by some journal somewhere"

you don’t consider these cliques ?  the present generation is too intellectually downsized by pot and a bad diet

i’m just after interesting and original ideas and expression, and there’s very little of that around in contemporary poetry, the scene is just swamped by worse than the mediocre

the wannabe literati

chasing no money

wonder why

the piggybank

is

dry

mediocrity is doomed to itself by its non-exploratory-ness

you are doing the right thing by investigating the options and not rushing into it if you are facing a cataract operation

ophthalmologists are not gods, but the usual flawed humans and given the cost structure of the industry they work in, only have a very limited amount of time and attention to give you

there is a lot of very good research available on the net in this area

the cornea is an inflatable dome, i really would avoid doing anything in the way of lasik or incisions to it, long term its just not that stable

its always a big help to being familiar with the life of the author to get the flavour or character of their poems

i wonder what the  "backstory"  of william wordsworth’s poem  "the solitary reaper"  was ?

your comfort with your level of ignorance is astounding

i feel videos of poems read aloud need to expand the meaning of the poem, and not be some rather senseless wallpaper

i think in my entire viewing experience i might have seen only a small few that have done this, the rest are bad wallpaper

in making such a video, you are offering an interpretation of the poem, so its needs to be coherent and on target

i think poetry has to use sound to amplify the intensity of meaning

forced rhymes don’t do this

some bullshit reply to me  (below)  on r|poetry, it beats me why they do this

“ that’s the inherent beauty of the ‘artistry’ of language, isn’t it ? great masters  —  shakespeare, frost, dylan  —  never “forced” a rhyme  .  .  .  they didn’t have to, did they ? ”

the notion of  "great masters"  is a somewhat passive and depressive view, if you write yourself then you take a more functional approach

"shakespeare" makes more sense if its really "sir henry neville"

poetry takes you into other worlds

the poem is the thing itself

the other world

reading boring people

being boring and stupid

today’s

intellectuals

perhaps the uncertainty of quantum mechanics is a reflection of the  "arrow of time"  and the crossover between reversible physical laws and this irreversible world we live in

is sex worth the dicussion afterwards ?

no

a good case study of what constitutes copyright  "protection"

leonard french finds that the expression  in this case  is different which you might expect with an experienced copyright infringement avoider like pixar

copyright does not protect ideas, only expression

i think with my writing that the ideas are so welded into the expression that from a copyright point of view they are well protected and the endless availability of orginality has never left me looking to violate anyone else’s copyright

the plaintiffs  "unicorn"  is a standard motif and not a unique expression at all, no doubt itself a violation of someone’s copyright

the golden rule of  "copyright"  is there has to be substantial monetary benefit to justify the court’s attention, that benefit is not there in this case

there is  some research  going on for a nonsurgical reversal of cataract, but no immediate prospects on the horizon

a surprising number of questions have their resolution, not in an answer, but the discovery of the inadequacy of the question

sometimes you can create questions when really there are none

just stones bouncing in a rattle

sometimes you can create questions when really there are none

sometimes you can create a question when really there is none

the flaw in the boltzman brain hypothesis is that such brains coming into existance is impossible, not simply improbable, the existance of such a brain would be a contradiction in such universes as they might arise

the universe in which they do exist is of course that of defunct hypotheses, an impoverished imaginary one and lo and behold, they do exist there

let me give my own law, that something cannot exist where  [the existance of]  its similars would undercut the basis for its existance

phedinkus, malarkey and ackamarackus, new words for the armory

i can’t say

i won’t say

i don’t say

rachel mckibbens  reading  her poem  "oxnard"

about as blood thirsty as you can get and sorta  on target

yes rachel, no bullseyes but on the boundary between being wrong and right, not bad for a woman with five children

you look at pictures of holy men and women with halos and other paraphernalia of righteousness

from another perspective they are the images of insanity

you’re a millenial with your  “ don’t bother me with sorting my own questions out ”  attitude ?

brad warner, what do you, sawaki and uchiyama have in common with eihei dogen that  shohaku okumura  doesn’t ?

i don’t know why you walk around this, eihei didn’t

uchiyama

praying mantis clinging

to the white paper i glued to the shoji

at the end of autumn

where does it come from and to where does it go ?

poem by Yokoyama Sodo

so many claim to travel east when

they are travelling west

they even will call the setting sun rising

what is this world ?

ours

god is everything

and nothing

something

and

its absence

sweet and sour

bitter and triumphant

sane and insane

see you can only express it in irreducibles and recursions

that’s what god is then in life

the irreducible recursive

and what is that ?

again and again

it comes back

the law of contrary effects should induce a note, or a symphony of caution about having  "favourites"

odd ocular phenomena can be hypnagogic if it occurs in the transition region between sleep and being fully awake when the brain is in a confused state of visual processing

toni packer said that philip kapleau made up the enlightenment stories in his book  "the three pillars of zen"

i think she was still bitter about what he did to her because she didn’t want to go to his funeral, even though in the end she went

#me too

in my research on getting my cataracts replaced i see a lot of people harmed by bad advice from ophthalmologists, in the end its the patient’s fault, they didn’t research adequately even though that research is difficult

its because they bear the entire consequences of a bad decision that they are at fault, not some fake social or moral allocation of blame

it is utterly inconsistent, incorrigible really, to be supposedly concerned with the "truth of life" yet have untrue underlying premises like the fictional historical existances of the founders of a religion

a way of looking at substance addiction, particularly smoking, is it inducts a form of schizophrenia

a reasonable person does not get caught in addiction, but of course, schizophrenia is not reasonable

you can make a mistake for twenty or thirty years, unless you address the mistake it remains a mistake, its as simple as that

i remember my father used to throw me into dangerous jobs on the farm, not deliberately, but because he was so experienced he didn’t account for my inexperience creating a dangerous situation

judi drench reading an excerpt of  the poem  "my homeland"  by miklós radnóti

she has the marvellous ability to be "empty" herself which lets the pathos of the poem come through

another poem of his

forced march

biography

i have learnt this climbing and things, you have to ask yourself what happens if things go wrong, what is the fall back position because one day the worst will happen

religion is an illusion sustainable only by censorship

with no censorship

the

illusion

dissolves

the 10th jataka tale, the buddha is put in a cage and used as a lure by some hellish demon to decoy all the twits into zen

it worked so well it created  "quality control"  problems in hell with the demons nonplussed by these people prepared to torture themselves

the buddha claimed no responsibility as he was well fed and the cage was comfortably furnished, these people deserved what they got and as he was an illusion anyway, how could you hold an illusion accountable ?

you can’t escape

your similarity

to your parents

dealing with people from every occupation, ability, disability, life stage, status, situation, gender orientation, degree of friendliness or hostility, wealth or poverty  —  endless whatever

doesn’t teach you a thing

except to avoid them

you can see how a bit of carelessness can cascade to a heap of shit to deal with

universals are completely disconnected from particulars, yet universals are still universals and particulars  particulars

universals are completely disconnected from particulars, yet universals are still universals and particulars still particulars

“ why do you think you responded in such a heated manner ”

because you’re a passive aggressive fake, seen it so often and its typical of the self knee-capping taught in religions

you won’t even blink reading this will you ?

your type is dependent on censoring to make you look good, well, for whatever reason brad is not censoring  here  so you try to impose your own subtle shit to maintain your unreal world

you’re a standard anti-schismic meme bot designed to relentlessly attack via argumentum ad hominem and not able to address content at all

in earlier times people like you lead your victims to be burnt alive

these people whose world is one of passive aggression and dissembling behind masks

watch out for them, they mean you harm

i find u.g. krishnamurti more interesting that j.k. because he says  "you can’t convey anything",  which basically unseats the religious position on practices, "doing things"  etc

so while jk gave retreats ug just travelled around bludging and telling people they were wrong, nice work if you can get it

it always amazes me there was never an assassination attempt on him given india’s religious climate

so one of the things i took from him is that extreme estrangement from religion which i think is useful ie the religious game is just one giant sophisticated con and in my view this includes zen

“ you never miss an opportunity to throw some shade at zen ”

you’re some sort of  "zen right or wrong"  evangelist ?  if something’s right, you are not defensive about it, on the other hand and what must be your case is you know the problems first hand and so are justifiably defensive

that’s how it comes across

in your case zen has made you a bullying inarticulate thug which actually is the nationalist zen part of the package impelling japan into WW2

don’t you ever wonder about how fucked up you are ?

i haven’t looked at federico fellini’s films for while and i thought, well he’s supposed to be genuis, but is he ?

so the first two shorts from 8½ i looked at

the first three minutes

the harem scene

yes he is a genius, totally different from any other filmmaker, a gentle irony and intelligence pervades everything

people can be too thin skinned, they can also have too thick a hide

i am wary of those with too thick a hide

those with a thin skin, at least you can see what is going on

i think  this show  is as fake as hell, all the values are jacked way up by the expert, brokers and seller

this is the  actual value  of the gutenburg leaf, sold for $29 thousand allowing for a 20% "buyer’s premium"

sara mohr-pietsch gives an  interesting tour  of maurice ravel’s house at montfort-l'amaury

artistically, an interesting period to have lived in, a certain  "community"  aspect not here today, or not at least with the same concentration  of talent

if you are doing O.K. somewhere

don’t  .  rock  .  the  .  boat

pilgrim’s progress is one of the great mystical works, hugely underrated

a kickstarter  film  has been made

his portrayal of people is so true to life

still, you can see the religious madness of the period

entering the other world

between the lions guarding the gates

one does not emerge

scratch free

looking under every stone

from one end of the river bed to another

still there is only me

looking under every stone

from one end of the river bed to another

still there is only you

philology is the study establishing the past meanings of words and text from cross referencing with the then contemporary and other relevant sources

for some reason zen and ch’an translators seem to assume that only modern mandarin and japanese were ever spoken or written in medieval times

the meaning of old texts is a murky pool and can take a lot of work to clarify, so much so that translators avoid its rigours hence creating works almost entirely fiction

TV shows like the late late show, conan, ellen and oprah are actually a form of streaming, no wonder the net is taking over

i can’t post anywhere without the crazies rushing in to tell me how wrong i am

my reply to yet another, i think i am going to try this line of  "we have low opinions of each other, why are you replying me, i’m not initiating any reply with you"  more often

“ its reasonable to ask some-one not to reply to you, i have asked you, the world is not short of timewasting schizophrenics like yourself

i really think that of you so there is no point in your making any more replies to me, especially since you also have a low opinion of what i say

ta da ”

to understand life, some of that understanding is counter-intuitive

this trips people up, an insurmountable barrier

life as normal is highly abnormal from the counter-intuitive perspective

the posture is not important for meditation, the only important thing is not do anything in the sense of being occupied with the usual tasks

going for walks by yourself, just sitting in a chair, walking around the house, lying down, whatever, are all meditative

if you have a sedentary job, "sitting" is dangerous to your health, we are a species evolutionarily designed to be constantly moving

luis van ahn  (duolingo)  on the  necessity  of speaking english

you know how it is with explanations

one day you have one explanation

the next day its different

i don’t know how one takes any of them seriously

its like this with cats

the house cat

doesn’t exist

years ago i backed over the only serious candidate

the feral cats come and go

depending on how i feed them

mainly wallaby carcasses

they have a sporadic continuity

like they exist and don’t

we join the dots

to make meaning

of what

really doesn’t

is there life after death ?

its sort of hard to get.  life is continuity and death is discontinuity, but life has no meaning in terms of discontinuity

so continuities after death are only in terms of life, the usual family and friends, the continuities of remanence and footprint

a more meaningful question is, is there any continuity in death, in terms of death ?

i think there is

the great thing about arguing with idiots

is you know they can’t steal your intellectual property

they have no judgment

there’s no such thing as meditation

that’s why its  "instructionless"

“ the counting of the breath is only a preliminary for beginners.  its a very kind way as an introduction ”

there’s no such thing as a  "beginner"  in meditation

you haven’t worked anything out yourself and as result wallow in a mire of stupidity making it your mission in life to strew misinformation

to try and convince me in this matter is to utterly unappreciate the solipsist natue of reality

you are not simply  "unenlightened"  you are "anti-enlightened", wtf, you have no shame to waste your life this way

ah, yes the illusion of  "yoga bodies" ,  like young americans don’t have the worst circulatory health ever

in olden times, monks worked the day in fields, the blobs of fat that pass for "average americana" lack the degree of fitness to make any degree of sitting meditation safe

"shikantaza"  is about the only thing soto has right, when i started zen i was given zero instruction about what to do which is as it should be because the best translation of  "shikantaza"  is  "instructionless"

its also the only safe way of meditating, people who count the breath or visualise, do the horse stance in front of "blasting music", lucid dreaming, psychedelics or whatever get really messed up

millennials

an ethos of no craft

mention it

and they look at you

blinded

millennials

an ethos of no craft

mention it

and they look at you

blind

fakeness

doesn’t bother the fake

like a corpse

not denying

the rotting flesh

celibacy

a driver for what ?

live separate and continuous

non-procreative

creativity

celibacy

a driver for what ?

non-procreative

creativity

kim addonizio

one of charles bukowski’s

broken women

except she wasn’t quite broken

though a drunk

kim addonizio

one of charles bukowski’s

broken women

except she wasn’t quite broken

though drunk

rain after the drought

some greens up

some rots

recovery takes

a

while

rain after the drought

some greens up

some rots

there is nothing more terrifying

than endless writing

more pours forth

from

the

pouring forth

there is nothing more terrifying

than endless writing

more pours forth

from the pouring forth

someone i know

had a stroke

and fell to the floor

almost immobile

and asked her daughter for help

the daughter didn’t help

they didn’t get along

our health is a bunch of settings

they can be in harmony

or not

“ pessoa’s suitcase ” a trap for the unwary

“ pessoa’s suitcase ”

a

trap

for

the

unwary

what i say cannot go viral

because its not toxic

what i say cannot go viral

because

its

not

toxic

billie and finneas eilish

studio-less

intially self-published

they broke the system

these  "spiritual seekers"

proxying nonsense

off

nonsense proxies

rather than tell me you think i am mistaken

why don’t you research the topic ?

these net-ninnies who expect me to do all the work to sort out their fatuous ideas

who says time can’t be reversed ?

it can be reversed

the stream floods

from the waters in its catchment

the stream runneth forever

from the waters in its catchment

the net fakes are of two types

those that shrink when exposed

but still can’t grasp their fakeness

and those that continue to

impose

with almost no encouragement

wallaby brains

two days in in a row

make me

hop

this sort of writing at 5am

on a night

too hot and humid

to sleep

i don't think IQ is a real thing

intelligence is multi dimensional

each has their dimension

those that make the tests

do well

on the tests

and

not

much

else

i don’t say philosophy is useless

one can make a use of it

why the future is always different from predictions

is it already has the predictions built in

why the future is different from predictions

is it already has the predictions built in

“ flowers for algernon ”  is a real thing

life is full of asymmetry

where we expect symmetery

why this is

i do not know

i have written so much it seems i can’t say anything more that has been unsaid

but there is always more unsaid than has been said

i have written so much i can’t say anything more that has been unsaid

but there is always more unsaid than has been said

“ the way you use the terms blindness, schizophrenia and retardation

is demeaning to those with these conditions ”

they are unfortunate, i can’t see how they can be otherwise

to be human/alive is to constantly traverse all three

not asking how its wrong

the blind stumble on

thinking  it  right

what he she i it thought it was

it wasn’t

what it wasn’t

he she i it

thought it was

the definition of thought

you think a thing

it is

you unthink a thing

its not

the definition of thought

you think a thing

it is

you think a thing

its not

time racing by

and we even fill the little that’s available to us with entertainment

just doing nothing

is entertainment enough

see what flows

these clone wannabe’s in the  “ spiritual scene ”  and the patheticness of not even making that

education is a disaster area

its a bomb

that blows the pysche

of

all who go through it

no recovery

education is a disaster area

its like a bomb

that blows the pysche

of

all who go through it

no recovery

with the coronavirus, every person infects on average three other people  compared  to influenza’s 1.2

its very contagious but not that fatal, only marginally worse than the flu

i think if it became a pandemic, the worry is not the virus itself,   but mutations

“ it was better to think of the emergent wuhan strain as a “cloud” of closely matched pathogens rather than a single virus

in a “high-host-density environment” such as heavily populated china, it could rapidly mutate and become more deadly

you may well find that more virulent viruses emerge from that cloud  ”

when something doesn’t make sense more than it makes sense

you know you are on the right track

when something

doesn’t

make

sense

more

than

it

makes

sense

you

know

you

are

on

the

right

track

the topic of  “ enlightenment ”  sure brings out the schizophrenics

probably necessarily so

an incentive to stop smoking ,  protected stem cells  can regenerate the lungs

the people who built stonehenge were a  different race  to our english ancestors

the newspaper industry wouldn’t exist at this point except for historical remanence

when you are talking to someone on a message board, if they demonstrate bad faith by not answering a pertient question you ask, then its time to ditch the convo, these schizpohrenic "pains in the arse" just waste your time

“ practice is experience so zazen is enlightenment ”

huge jump mate  (ed. brad warner paraphrasing dogen)

the fools

pursuing something

they can’t grasp

making the grasping their

claim

for

enlightenment

we go through life continually creating new open terms in sums we never add up to cancel out

this has a deleterious effect on the brain

its an odd thing to go to bed

and then to sleep

we should weep to wake

endless the night sky

we don’t say the night sky

we are the night sky

what do the overall patterns of life mean

you can’t really say

what do they mean ?

lucid dreams

the brain’s chaotic mess

made conscious

seated meditation is to deny  “ extended mind ”

its quiet now but the day has shredded me

i don’t feel settled

thwack, dung bettles hit the corrugated iron fence

not much else happening this summer’s evening

past sunset

in

the

boondocks

lone thin crescent moon

no, there’s one small star

the siloutetted gums stretch out against

an

intense

orange

horizon

the religious world

only dealing with what it knows

and

eschewing

the

unknown

one day

followed by another day

followed by another day

days haze

one day

followed by another

followed by another

the haze of days

a monk asked the zen master how long would it take to get enlightened, the master replied, when the temple no longer needs maintenance

years later as he was dying and worrying about the state of the roof he recalled the master’s words  (long since dead)  and had a sudden insight

she writes a poem

she’s sad

she writes a lyric

the mood shifts

but

not

for

long

a poem’s sadness

has an unseen joy

lyrics are empty

the lack of depth kills

the

soul

it

shrivels

and

winds

dry

today’s

generation

busy busy

always busy

why would one not be busy

 going somewhere ?

my view is that  "zazen"  is an introduction to the contemplative process and after several years you should be able to do this

i am ambiguous as to whether seated zazen is any use, but i certainly did it at weekly group sits and our annual sesshin when i started

i always sat seiza and my job at the time was physically active, there’s no way if you spend most of your day seated i would regard zazen as safe and in fact some-one i knew of  "renowned"  as a great sitter was killed by a stroke very young

the odd thing about soto zen is eihei dogen wrote and read so much i think he hardly ever sat once back in japan and i have noticed today’s teachers hardly ever sit, they spend /waste all their time in interviews and talks ,  so actually go backwards from a position that was never advanced in the first place

zen ,  or that of it that knows what its on about which is not much is fundamentally mystical, eihei dogen for instance talks about his visionary experiences, yet nowadays soto zen is mistakenly presented as being about endless sitting, what can you say, i never gave the visionary side thrupence in the beginning because the ignorant teachers don’t know shit ,  it takes decades to understand their significance

until you have these experiences yourself, you won’t understand their significance

there, i’ve probably already told you more than you can cope with and no doubt i will get the usual savagely aggressive replies  (ed. on brad’s  vlog )  by the morons who waste their lives and time and don’t like their feathers being ruffled

interestingly, there’s a theory that hominins forced lions to become more social animals since they had to co-operate to stop the hominins  from pinching  their prey carcasses

zebras too must have been of the hit list because they have an instinct to stand well away from human habitations

my worst nightmare  when i was travelling around australia, if i got stuck, since i was by myself, there was no hope

i was just ultra cautious and just about always only took sand as  “ safe ”  if i could see the tyre marks of other vehicles

stopping can be a problem too, wet sand melts under the tyres

looking at the depth of the tracks in the mud, they should never have travelled on it in the first place

“ does omega 3  (or other nutrients)  have an affect on neuroplasticity and thus on vision therapy effectiveness ? ”

some fish are much higher in omega 3’s than others, salmon for example

you want to get a good quality brand of supplement, omega three oxidises quickly

there’s at least 7 vision processing layers in the brain, they do an amazing amount of work

where i live you can buy brains and eat them, those that are not sold to france; they do make a difference

the surreal non-interactive world of modern media

the morons gape

consuming, not creating

is

all

they

do

boo-books

boo-booking

echoing around

the

valley

boo-books

boo-booking

echoing

around the valley

the gulag of life

merciless

you can’t give an inch

go forwards

to

go

backwards

people’s sense of self worth is fragile

crush a fudamental point of it

and they will hate you forever

i don't know why men are so dumb about women

if they weren’t

they

wouldn’t

breed

i suppose

more than anything else

the

net

is

the

rule

of

the

schizophrenics

there’s so much in life

you don’t have

to

say

a thing

facts

speak

for

themselves

there’s so much in life

you don’t have

to

say

a thing

a flutter of red

for a moment

gone

the winds shred

the trees

of leaves

elisabeth "lilo" gloeden at  her trial  for hiding a general involved in the attempt on hitler’s life

the problem with soto zen is dogen hardly ever sat, but in reality was hyperlexic, the point is visionary experiences which go with a re-alignment of understanding the world into something more coherent from a mystical point of view and writing and contemplation are part of that

endless sitting is not to understand what it is all about, its a paradigm for the depressed stupid

"god is dark matter"

how’s that for an unabashed  "hook" ?

dark energy and matter versus   re-arrangements  of the existing order of things

its interesting because its a paradigm in mysticism, the positing of an entity like god to explain things, or there really is no god and you just need to re-arrange the existing paradigms

my practical expereince is the answers are in the re-arrangement of the existing, an  "entity"  is nonsense, but the removal of the idea of an entity is part of  "the re-arrangement"

the science is favouring dark matter at this point, the existance of dark energy is more nebulous

the catholic chuch has a different  conumdrum

damage  +  intelligence   =   artistic

damage  +  stupidity   =   religion

all the fuss about edward the VIII's abdication, it had little to do with his wife being divorced except he married a silly woman, it was because of his nazi sympathies, he in effect publically said to hitler on his post abdication tour of germany that he was prepared to be king if germany invaded britain, that is, he was a collaborator

the rātana church is a surprising recreation of gnostic christianity, its amazing because it ties in with a version of christianity that has been pretty well lost for 1700 years

tahupōtiki rātana must have been familiar with some of the information being published at the time, he did a world tour in 1924 including china and japan with  a singing group, it was really something

the rātana church is a universalist bridge between european and maori political and religious cultures, and in theory, not isolationist at all

though the church itself is not so significant now, the country has a lot to be grateful to tahupōtiki rātana for

philosophy is at its core schizophrenic and the reason i say this is its essential characteristic is for each philospher to move away from public domain semantics  (commonly understood meanings)  to create an highly individual system and vocabulary of meaning, heidegger being an egregious example of that, and of course he was clearly schizophrenic

poetry on the other hand, through a more sophisicated and transcendent use of language remains within the public domain

there’s three good living american  "poetesses"  who have been around for a while, i don’t know why i missed them before

dorianne laux

kim addonizio

rachel mcKibbens

there’s quite a bit of  "life trauma"  between them

religion

is the distillation

of

life’s

insanity

plus and minus

mainly

minus

where does loss come from ?

where does gain come from ?

one from sanity

the other

insanity

i am planning on living four billion years

astrophysics tells me that this is problematic

and my stem cells are exhausted by  100

i know

i’m going to spend a million years getting older

its happening

why are people who do meditation so narrow minded and closed ?

i can tell you what is missing, they don’t read widely, so have nothing to work on and just entrain the default circuit of the brain, zen doesn’t encourage wide reading because once you do that, you will say to yourself, its 90% bullshit, just like any religion

the patheticness of the religious wannabes

they don’t produce anything

not music

not poetry

not sculpture

they only produce

bullshit

lurekrsim  replies

how do you view

music of bullshit

poetry of bullshit

sculpture of bullshit

wanting to not be a wannabe

my reply

wanting not to be

a wannabe

just fakeness by another name

when

you

do

there

are

no

questions

it

just

amazes

me

so

easy

to

do

a little

something

they

pass

on

“ i think that why zen is often called a non religion is because it doesn’t say that you should just blindly believe things, it just encourages you to practice and see the results by yourself ”

isn’t practice a belief ?  i’ve seen the results, it makes outright crazies of the only slightly insane

“ anyway, what i was trying to tell you is that if you would interact with someone and that interaction was going to harm you, then walk away from that person, conversation or interaction

walk away in the awareness of what you’re doing, experiencing, live, taste the pain, have the direct experience of it ”

that’s "cult rationality", superficially reasonable, toxic in reality

olga scheps  playing  a slow piece, if you know what it is, please let me know

all this stuff  sounds like a religion, i don’t know how anyone can claim zen and buddhism are not religions

what do titles, ceremony and chanting/music/singing have to do with anything except filling your mind so you don’t think ?

mertens conjecture  fails

maths even i can understand

there’s heaps of  virtuoso players  around, but those with a composer’s brains are few

there’s heaps of virtuoso players around, but a composer’s brains are very rare

no-one wants to do the real  "spritual"  work, they all just want to pretend and put all their effort into shoring up the appearance and none into the actual work

charles-henri sanson, from breaking on the wheel   to the guillotine

the subtle rhythms

of

fire and ice

pulse

through us

“ why the heck did bodhidharma go to china anyways ? ”

i think its a metaphor for what actually happened, he was a persian  (where green or blue eyes are not unknown)  travelling along the silk road from a greco-bactrian kingdom and brought greek philosophy with him and this mixed with buddhism and daoism gave rise to zen

a lot of zen is garbled philosophy with its adherents pretending its meaningful

my one real life experience of the mafia is i was in rochester in summer and walked close to an outdoor table at what i later learned was a mafia cafe

i must have spooked the guy at the table and he straight away went into a sort of body movement that to me meant he clearly had beaten up and possibly killed people and was highly skilled at the physical aspect of it, dangerous as fuck, he then clicked i was harmless and backed off, and he had probably been confused by my body language with me being from another country, whereas rochester natives would have known to give the people in that cafe a wide physical berth

this is my problem in life, i always seem to go through the extremes, if you get involved in an activity you have to ask what the extremes are, so now i do

by god, he was fast and smooth in his movements, i guess he took me for an assassin

has zen taught you nothing more than to be fake, i notice religions certainly give some degree of a sophistical "toolkit", not that it is ever applied convincingly

the only way you know god, or buddha, or the absolute is through fugue states of infinity

there, i’ve said it, i won’t say you don’t need to understand more, but you could stop at this point

the morons chase erroneous words and concepts forever thinking this goes somewhere, but all they do is lead you away

at an abstract level the theory is all the same, but it can only be represented in the particular

an old buddhist poem goes

refraining from committing various evils

carrying out all sorts of good actions

personally clarifying this mind

this is the essential teaching of all the buddhas

that poem is in fact a restatement of the "free energy principle" which is becoming the accepted theory of perception, that truth in perception ties in with a constant process of error correction by discovery (doing good and not evil in terms of the poem), its not simply a question of taking up some theory about reality which of course is what happens in religious circles and as a consequence, they, by eliminating "discovery"  (actually they always have a fake substitute)  are always going to be wrong, and this of course includes buddhism

there is in fact a good physiological theory of consciousness called "the broadcast theory" that is never mentioned in the media and has a number of variants under different names, but they share a "core" view of consciousness as being an artifact of a broadcast information function in the brain

this "broadcast" function is selective, like we never see the retinal information before the 3D and spatial processing for example, but we see the objects in space

the current feeling among researchers is that the brain does a vast amount of unconscious processing which fits well with the theory and in fact most of the brain is unconscious processing and the notion we only use a fraction of our brain is misguided

from a hermetical point of view the recursion of consciousness meditating on consciousness makes it all a blind alley, people are free to waste their time on panpsychism and i could never ever get any sense of buddhism having some sort of view that made any sense on the subject, though perhaps never making any sense is a subtle comment

interestingly the broadcast theory grades consciousness, like a fly has consciousness, but less so than "higher animals"

so, yes a dog has buddha nature

another interesting thing about this theory is you can have two entities with similar ways of behaving and problem solving, but one can be conscious and the other not, so computers and artificial intelligence are not conscious, but if they were implemented in fast enough hardware or biological structures that used information broadcast they would be

i feel eihei dogen mixes ideas about solipsism, perception and consciousness in a confused and non useful manner, he should have lived longer to straighten them out

its a fair question, but you are so intellectually unadventurous, you will never figure it out and i’m not telling

ed. bascially i do a lot of commenting on the web and in all that time, especially in the more hostile exchanges only one or two people have asked why i do it and its a reasonable question and i avoiding saying why

actually the questioner persisted with her insane dribble so i told her, its for the writing

you can be in an insane asylum without being mad yourself

you are so intellectually unadventurous, you will never figure it out

take

it

from

one

who

has

it

right

you

haven’t

got

it

right

it

doesn’t

read

right

the

words

are

clunky

and

don’t

match

ed.  on people who try to copy my one word a line style

you

haven’t

got

it

right

take

it

from

on

who

has

it

right

it

doesn’t

read

right

the

words

are

clunky

and

don’t

match

take

it

from

on

who

has

it

right

it

doesn’t

read

right

the

words

are

clunky

and

don’t

match

everything

coming

going

fading

arising

this non-persistent

universe

dorianne laux  doesn’t open the window for god

reading

olga scheps  playing  rachmaninov’s prélude op. 23 no. 5 g-minor

a man looks at a woman

bemused that such a thing could come to be

he, a man

she, a woman

rachel mckibbens  reads  her poem  “ what is yours, is yours ”

dishonesty drives people to validate themselves

a late afternoon sleep

two hours

when i wake

i feel like the universe has crashed

and

rebuilt

itself

again

you can’t tell a broken brain its broken

because its broken, it thinks all other brains are broken

you can’t tell a broken brain its broken

because its broken

it thinks all other brains are broken

the broken brains on the internet

they seek me out

to make a pest of themselves

the broken brains on the internet

they seek me out

to make pests of themselves

sylvia

you hit on how things are

then you bite off too much

that busyness

killed you

there is no such thing as a fresh start

you carry yourself all the way

frederic raphael is a marvellous  reminiscer

what i notice with the net, is the people who grind you most with their stupidity can be the most productive, you learn something the hard way and you remember, it doesn’t go so smooth things just glide over

when reason fails

run away from them

people who are too similar can resonate maladaptively

there must be to much gain in certain areas that leads to   imbalance

we live in a world of mediocrity

that hates anything that exposes its own limitations

the giveaway of course

is the energy it devotes

to destroying

quality

you’ve created a  “ meta ”  that’s really just a work of fiction and try to live in it, i’m not telling you anything if i say it doesn’t work

you don’t want to understand a word do you ?

the translations of pablo neruda suck

either that or the poems really do suck by themselves

how pathetic to waste your time missionizing others as a proxy for you own work and endeavour in the spiritual area, so fake you are