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

the world is built of words and ideas

what is so suprising about that ?

the world is built of words and ideas

what is suprising about that ?

whether or not the "teller" believes the lie to be true is irrelevant

because

the error accumulates in you

i’m not an advice giver

i rarely take it so it would be hypocritical of me to give it

there’s nothing wrong with vengeance but the best form is to step back and let them do themselves in

no blame and no effort on your part

philosophy seems to have the wrong mix of "rigor" and imagination

its either rigor with no imagination

or

imagination without rigor

"the testing of sirens"   a poem  by kamala das

new zealand

add a maori word

and its a done deal

the ocean was not crossed

by this nonsense

my  comment

its interesting that this emphasis on each language having intrinsically different "values" or authenticity has its roots in a dispute about what language is going back to the 1950’s

noam chomsky’s  view of langauge is as an organic development springing from genetic constructs being the "a priori" condition with no particular "priority" on the external form, eg japanese compared to english

the other view is more of language as a system of philosophy that has developed and hence is amenable to a ranking of order in terms of quality, eg maori being supposed somehow to be more "authentic" than english

new zealand bureaucracy with its characteristic wrong mindedness has of course plumbed for the latter view burdening the population with a neurolgically very costly and futile multilingual burden, when plainly the interests of social cohesivenss and utllity are best served by monolingualism

i will point out that nothing is lost by only having one language even in terms of other cultures since all langauages are basically  (though not quite)  interchangable, indeed the preservation of a culture will be enhanced by monolingualism since members of the culture are no longer labouring under the high neurological costs of multilingailism, nor having constant defections of younger generations out of the minority subculture since they are forced to make a choice in terms of the benefit of the dominant language

different cultures are in effect social stories which do represent different philsosphies and therefore, unlike language have prioriites of value

you might contrast pacifist versus "war mongering" subcultural differences in germany prior to WW1, clearly, from any point of view in the light of what happened, the pacifist subculture had a higher "value" than the other

interestingly the effect of the internet has been to enforce the dominance of english and form a "uni-western" culture to such an extent that the englsih speaking countries are starting to meld political and defence systesm creating the dominant geo-political grouping, just as well for australasia i’d say in its over-vulnerable exposure to china

"brexit" can be seen in this light

its interesting to consider that the disasterous politics of central europe may spring at its root from the high degree of multilingualism that just living there enforces to communicate, that the neurological cost of "multi-lingualism" there, while havihg an obvious benefit also has a pentalty of a lack of objective thinking about what are more optimal solutions to the cultural and racial mish-mash

the preachers

scrabble for meaning they cannot grasp

so they

pretend

jason  writes

at the cemetery i felt nothing

i’ve had more "spiritual" experiences by myself in my own room

the failure of rules

why do not their purveyors act as if every rule is not flawed ?

the failure of rules

why do we act as if every rule is not flawed ?

closing the curtains

opening them

the view is unchanged

appearance  disappearance

the sums of life

we fruitlessly chase

the moon goes then returns

everything moves in cycles

what does this mean ?

“ adults of reddit, what is something every teenager needs to know ? ”

alcohol and drugs damage the brain

they make you less of a person permanently

there’s a lot of new science showing that jolting contact sports including soccer  (heading)  also damage the brain

there’s a lot of sanctioned and unsanctioned hazard out there

in the amazon

the sun and clouds are different

more surreal

so is the living

the living can meet the dead and though the dead met you, they never knew

the problems with the "zen records" are threefold

the first is that basically they are a literary form, a constructed story, novelistic, its origins are in the academic literary t’ang bureaucracy, so that is no surprise

so they have fictional and real elements, for instance the record of joshu seems seems real but most of everything else is about 70% pure fiction, often justifying the various doctrinal disputes over the millennia

so, ewk for example takes it all as real and acts as a priest "interpreting" "the wisdom", a conventional religious position

not only do you have problems with complete fictionalisation, but errors of transcription and copying and also the errors of the supposed person actually saying it, for instance they may not know what they are talking about

in my view huang po and da hui are not really enlightened

as i said its a lifetime’s work to sort this out and you need to look into the best of mysticism, for instance sa’di, wang wei and emily dickinson are very good

the third problem are the intrinsic inadequacies of translation which usually reflects the translator’s biases and often polemic agendas and the loss of the cultural context which has a lot of the meaning of what was initially said

you ask about "being objective"

its simply an an analysis of "is it so ?"

is what i have written ,  so ?

the pompous asses on message boards

each valuing their own opinions

shine to themselves

and no-one else

it is actually a form of trauma

being multilingual

accommodating others when you shouldn’t

your own grief

tears

cascading

down

the

staircase

accommodating when you shouldn’t

your own grief

tears

cascading

down

the

staircase

i quite like sylvia gosse, especially her  painting  of a fountain in saule

imo, "zen" is basically working on difficult existential questions for ten or thirty or sixty years

you have to live a long time like joshu i am afraid

for me it was a major breakthrough to understand there was nothing hidden from me and my writing is a working through and really that’s all there is to it

ennui, i have spent a lifetime pronouncing it wrong, its correct  pronunciation  is hardly surprising given its french origins

jack the ripper was a butcher, a mentally unstable polish immigrant called  aaron kosminski  

if you look at the official police photo of mary jane kelly its obvious, not the work of one with surgical experience, but a strong man used to carving up bodies wholesale

who knows, this walter stickler  painting  may have actually been a lodging of his ?

he likely only killed five or so women, so given the many other murders mistakenly abscribed to him, there were obviously a lot of deranged men around, perhaps fueled by an immigrant influx into london, making identification difficult and this gave opportunity

you have a different cast of mind, it comes across quite well in the vlog, all you have to do is persist with it
the  book publishing  industry has more or less collapsed, but of course you are very effectively published on youtube, i wouldn’t overlook that

being multi-lingual does hurt the expressive ability imo

your vlog is as good as it gets, opportunities will open up

you can’t predict the future accurately, yet sometimes you can

to predict the future accurately is a form of time travel and paradoxical, the future is ,  by its nature unknown and it needs to stay that way to be the future

you can look at the past, present and future as being very known, moderately known and unknown, that this is in essence what time is

there’s no explanation that is adequate

i just can’t emphasize this strongly enough

no aeroplane noise

no car noise

the air so still the chimney smoke rises directly up

just the frogs, plovers, native hens, boo-books and distant stream

half an hour past midnight

full moon and cloudless sky

no people

this is what i like

outside is the half life

of one and the other

this happened

i write the poem

and the alignment shifted

sorta lost

sorta comes back

fruits with  high rates  of ethylene emission

i’m on a mission to ripen my papaya quicker, bananas don’t seem to do the job

electric kettles with a "pocket-type" level gauge where the water is isolated a bit from the main body of water won’t ever reach boiling point and so don’t necessarily sterilise the water

this is an issue if you have an untreated water supply

if you pour all the water out of the jug immediately after boiling, the "pocket " water will mix and sterilise, but if the kettle water has time to cool then the temperatures may be too low to sterilise the "pocket" water

i have a bore supply and was not amused to work this out, fuck you kambrook and the $47 it cost, i read the manual, they know about the problem because they have an exclusion saying that only drinking quality water should be used

i have made a temporary modification, its hard to get around the two small holes punched in the wall of the jug for the flow into and out of the pocket/gauge, but who knows, it may be permanent ?

the old stainless steel type jug were the best, no interior plastic, but can you buy them these days ?

no

“ the cornea is the most  densely innervated tissue  in the body with a nerve density of 300–600 times that of the skin

a large number of studies have demonstrated that in addition to providing sensation, corneal nerves play a significant role in the maintenance of corneal epithelial health

these nerves, which promote epithelial proliferation and viability, have been shown to be reduced in a variety of ocular and systemic conditions, resulting in compromised ocular surface and reduced tear function

examples include corneal insults such as infections, injuries, or surgeries, systemic disease like diabetes mellitus, and any damage to the trigeminal nerve

in addition to these conditions, the density of corneal nerves has been shown to be reduced in dry eye disease ”

if the above seems somewhat obscure, don't rush into anything that sculpts the cornea like lasik

sometimes you go to sleep and wake

you have been to another universe and back

slightly the worse for wear

music is a language

an emotional language

but its also cognitive

you tube

is a form of travel

"over the boundaries" women

adventurous men

from the insane

to the very clued

it amplifies

the intelligence

a leopard

a chequerboard of fatality

for some

involuntary infinity

that’s a tough one

you look for god

you can’t find him/her

what is there ?

the babbling of idiots

why is this ?

even that question seems empty

you can’t break continuity

because you are continuity

perhaps

the comprehending heart

lacks passion

but has something else

because it touches the void

write for yourself

and nobody else

write for yourself

and no-one else

solitude

that so averted

is the truth

solitude

the so averted

is the truth

i have admired, but never wondered where the ram’s horn shell, so common on beaches comes from

but its from a tiny squid, barely 7cm long and acts as a controllable buoyancy chamber to help navigate its deep ocean habitat

cults are a disease

the replacement of your own thought by that of another’s

people don’t really "get" the necessity of back-ups. any hdd or ssd can die just like the flick of fingers for no apparent reason

walking on infinity

endless cannot be measured

but felt

recognition comes but once in many lifetimes

worth waiting around for

walking on infinity, why would the question of loneliness arise ?

everything is interesting

and replete

being

rolling into memory

this procession

we call life

a room where some-one was

and never will be again

the memory doesn’t make up for the absence

there is no creator

god, divine beings

absolute nature

what is there ?

the burden of living

that constant busyness

just to stay afloat

would we

like the flower duet

stay suspended in time

“  the limits of language ”

there are no limits to language, there is nothing that cannot be expressed

the "faux" of course mutter that there are limits, but like everything else they express, its meaningless

until you are revulsed by something

you haven’t really left it

when you have that feeling

you know

the next step

that seems beyond us

if we don’t take it

there’s trouble

if we do take it

there’s yet another step beyond us

that if we don’t take

  .   .   .

when you correct, there has to be something in the correction for you, there is nothing more depressing and "life nullifying" as being involved in "correction" that is ignored or dissed or just takes your time "without fruit"

two interesting videos

not quite the way i think, but there is a truth to their perspectives

the first  is a jordan peterson video, unfortunately for him the monster turned out to be benzodiazepines/pharma and he let it into his life and will never fully recover

the buddha never existed historically, but of course he exists in another sense which is as a didactic source of two and half thousand years of "sermonizing wisdom" ,  not all of which is nonsense  —  indeed i have been pleasantly surprised to find  this

why i think life and our dealings with others are always fraught with an underlying trauma is because there is a/the clash of very rigid "theories of mind" or "theories about how the world and people work" is another way of putting it

theories often work quite well in some contexts and not others and highly gerneralised ones that work smoothly over a number of contexts are difficult to form and require an objectivitity and degree of abstraction we are not accustomed to, or even makes us uncomfortable

what is the world about ?

i don’t know

 can i know ?

no

 who cares ?

i care

what is the world about ?

i don’t know

 can i know ?

no

the trap of "declamation" is that you believe it and act on it

it claims to predict the future, but who can do that ?

wall wrapping, makes unwrapping

to create visibility

sense and the mystery unfold

its interesting to see where the walls are in zen and i notice that its really just one wall, an inability to look at other religions and literature generally for mystical material

that shouldn’t be difficult but no-one does it and r|zen used to be much more open to that sort of OP, but now the mods just delete everything and even to my tolerant eye, the place is just "froth at the mouth" crazy

luminous clarity

in explanation

is a dream

the mists move

what they cover

on the one hand there’s doing something new and sorting out the inevitable problems, even extending to catastrophe

on the other hand there’s sticking with the tried and true and taking its deficits on the nose

uneasy bedfellows

trying to remember the past

the memories are scattered

what really occurred ?

trying to remember the past

the memories scattered

did it really occur ?

names

objects named

don’t get too tangled

you can’t know "infinity"

but there is a road that takes you there

no-one believes me

you go

and come back

intact

the moment doesn’t cohere

its not persistent

writing wraps it up

to make sense

good writing

should conjure a different world

more vivid and real than this one

and you should enter and leave it

what the nature of reality is that this can occur

we should ponder

figure 1B  explains a lot, those few in history who sit on the upper curve, who just seem to grow ntellectually with age

and those who decline drastically on the lower dashed curve

article

october 2020  cardinal pell  in audience with pope francis

what have the fancy dress and religious symbol on the wall to do with anything ?

crazy

google does quite well on contrast questions eg "vitreous vs aqueous humour" and wikipedia is good on  aqueous humour

what glaucoma is seems to be an evolving question and reading the latest research abstracts will take you well past what any course will be teaching

medical school teaching is notorious for being a decade out of date

the rapidity of the passing

we are glazed

nothing has sunk in

one of a hundred gates

we can’t take them all

if its yours

no-one else gives a shit

however

you give a shit

a boy

standing at a railway station

disconnected

standing nowhere

argumentum ad hominem

is the first refuge of a fool

and the not quite fool

 pray to what ?

 there’s nothing

 what is nothing ?

a black and white chequered floor

people moving randomly

a subtle shift

everyone moves onto a colour

a war starts

tell me who you are and i'll tell you

who i am

silence

everyone everywhere

looking for an adequate explanation

what do they find ?

inadequate

still they keep seeking

the world and you are imperfect so one is by necessity constantly engaged in these endless cycles of discovery and correction

i don’t agree with the buddhist stance, but there is some sense to what  he says  and its a basic skill that is not much in evidence these days

“ learning from others you don’t agree with ”

you learn not to get upset after a while and just tackle things factually if it seems of benefit, though of course, "benefit" is difficult to judge, for example, i never thought i would be posting this

"taking time out" to look at what’s happening, also known as "reflection" is more than useful and so costly when its not done when it needed to be

however one needs to be aware that "reflection" can give wrong answers

you repent when you do something different as a consequence

there is no other form

its typical of religion and insanity to estrange it in the verbal

quibi has failed, its interesting because it was "professional" up against volunteer content

i wasn’t familiar with "quibi" but i have looked at a few videos and they have real problem with content, too mired in the public face "fakeness" of the advertising and mass media entertainment worlds

if they had sent me a tiny fraction of the three billion they blew, i’d have set them right

the investors can take comfort in supporting a bizarre collection of the undeserving untalented

bet this isn’t going to go viral

dried flowers in a vase

like old people

some colour is retained

old people

dried flowers

its the natural order of things

dry eyes are due to immune activation and the current generation of eye drops don’t really address the issue, however there is a new generation in the works that target the problem

one of the problems with contact lens is they bias the eye microbiome to that of the skin

selenium is an important nutrient in damping the eye immune response

the  drone pic  simultaneous with "itchy boots" crossing the two bridges in the lofoten islands in norway is "super-impressive"

hot fluids in plastic release  trillions  of nanoparticles

that’s a big number

i’m swapping my polypropylene mug for glass

i feel the story  death and the compass  by jorge borges is not quite right

he’s creating an illusion with two possible constructions, the ending should validate both constructions leaving an ambiguity as to which was true

it could be as simple as the day turning out to be be the next and having the  possibility  of the gun exploding killing scharlach to complete the rhombus, you don’t know who dies or whether its all a construction of lönnrot/borges

the house which is the best part of the story could have been built by an insane man, easy enough to do with the house and story as it stands

he became blind in later years and at the end of  this page  is a poem about it

the problem with talks given after "meditation" is they are too imprinting, the barriers are down and the brain is in a suggestable state, its effectively brain washing

it takes years to get that bullshit out of your hair, let’s be honest ,  decades

i think the view everybody has is that we are actors in a larger sphere of operation that continues in our absence and we must extrapolate and project to maintain a "safe" position in it, we are good at accommodating error within our way of looking at things, but malfunctional when it comes to changing our way of looking at things to be more "error-free"

so i think ultimately, this is what "mystical endeavor" is about, changes in the way we think to improve the accuracy of our ideas about "how things are" and as part of that, we will gravitate to more solipsist views

that improvement of accuracy is fundamental and you don’t get it from religions, you do get it somewhat by extensive quality reading and a lot of solitude/meditative inquiry

the babble of the "pretenders" is unfortunately the norm and everywhere

the weirdness about franz kafka’s "fragment" where a man is trapped by a hunter in a room, to be killed is that his poor sisters ended up in that room

the holocaust must have been in the air decades before it happened

people who "interpret the dead" are in effect claiming "approval" by that person

i don’t actually think dogen would approve you at all, brad, you are not celibate, your philosophizing is getting more and more "vacant", running along the rails of schizophrenia imo which is a consequence of a zazen only approach and too limited reading

this issue of presenting one’s talks, writing and views as implicitly approved by whatever "dead guru" is huge and of course, totally the norm in "spiritual circles" and religion

priests grasp the mantle of a corpse, its what priests do ,  the olfaction of death as a consequence is everywhere

stella vine

interview

huh, the venus de milo was a  real woman  with a "subtle" spinal deformity

you can see her a bit in the face actually

i quite like this  painting  by vincent van gogh of a cast of a woman’s torso

there’s something about  the background

“ the world is made of events and things ”

the world is not made of events and things

the world is not made

it

is

illusory

"42" wasn’t an idle reference on douglas adams’ part, but referred to solutions for the "sum of three cubes" diophantine equation and was actually solved in 2019 on a world wide net of unused computer time as the largest less than 100 being "42", art prefiguring life

the buddha at his "middle class" best

AN 8.54      AN 5.41

sound advice  i am sure, but not how the world works is it ?

there is no adequate explanation for "life, the universe and everything"

inadequacy itself is the only explanation

the endless religious, theological and philosophical treatises claiming an adequate explanation

are

misguided

a day condensed into a drop

it doesn’t seem much

but its all we have

i have just removed a second swallow’s nest from the small shed, no eggs this time, so i am just destroying their labour and presumably it will be a charge of malicious damage and not murder when i am brought before "the swallow court"

i always find the way the post communist russian government brought back the imperial symbolism "lock stock and barrel" quite amusing, like the soviet years and communist ideology never existed

brooks babble

people babble

one is sonorous

one is not

brooks babble

people babble

one is sonorous

the other is not

the pacing days

we run though them,

yet can’t go faster

than they allow

i’m not

i’m not

i’m not

the story of the three "nots"

i’m not

i’m not

i’m not

women are, by biological design, about maternity, just like men are about paternity

each would like the other to fit its definition better

i wonder if the exercises we were taken through at school came out of j.p. müller’s  program , they seem very similar

they combine "flexion" with lymph movement, yet don’t overdo stress on the joints  (a big problem with gym work-outs) ,  a powerful combination

i don’t like any exercise that twists the upper body while keeping the lower body stationary as this is unnatural to the body and is too hard on the lower back

also i found that press-ups caused rotator cuff problems in my right arm

in short, you have to filter exerises to find what doesn’t damage you or play the wrong way into existing damage

the hostility of the world

people

things

rub them the wrong way

they become savage

good and bad are a pair

the bad claim good and the good don’t care

people create stories to themselves that they believe and are not open to testing

however this is not always wrong

a root of dishonesty is people get too caught up in concerns about how they appear to themselves and others

i have never been afraid to waste time and energy and i think if you are honest about some things you have done you will observe a similar lack of fear on your part

you can tell the ungrateful

they are candid about their ingratitude

mole and ratty  meet the god pan

i had read it before, but, like the story episode, had forgotten it 

i think the writing style wants to be your own, there is a transcendent level where the taken meaning doesn’t bear too much resemblance to the individual words

zen doesn’t look so flash in the wider world of literature, so zennists never read the wider world of literature, they read populist trash compared to which, zen’s limited repertoire shines, actually a lot of modern "culture" is like this

a "one trick pony"

has maybe three tricks

and uses them again and again

thinking them sufficient

the beginning and ending

outside and inside

on the edge and on the border

what does this mean ?

“ there are no things, only processes ”

processes are composed of things, what processes show is the ultimate intangibility of things

i don’t think i have ever lived in a climate where an accurate assessment of "the last frost day" is important

the carnage visited on my freshly planted tomatoes is telling me otherwise

there is hope, i see a tiny new leaf at the stem base, i use an aqueous fertiliser mixed with seasol, it makes for greater vigour, i hope its enough

you can devote your life to correcting something

or you can strike out on your own

i wouldn’t say either at their extremes was the right path, but you can get too enmeshed in correcting something

i never looked upon my christian boarding school upbringing as "cultish", but it is and one needs to be "deprogrammed" from it

what i notice as a man is how much i tolerate "bullshit" from women to an extent i wouldn’t in other men

some women seem to trade on this "permission" ,  not a good trait at all and very off putting, once you see it

i think you are being very much less than honest with yourself to the extent i have to ask "what is going on with you ? "

you have been a member of a "cult"  (ed.  thich nhat hanh/plum village) ,  never got "deprogrammed" and all the "bad habits" are still with you

brad warner also suffers from this, so maybe you fit on his vlog

lorena  replied

you don’t know what you are saying

my  reply

cultspeak for "i don’t want to know" huh ?

i was thinking that of all the people on brad’s vlog, you, i and brad are the ones with the serious cult living and exposure experience

thich nhat hanh, soto and kwan um, and also christian in my case

its damaging

you really seem unable to take any view on board that conflicts with the nonsense you have been taught and teach yourself and seek to invalidate my criticism of you

you lack the competence to maintain an open discussion but grasp at what bolsters your self esteem

genuine enlightenment knows the true basis for self-esteem, plainly you don’t have that

when the skin is too thick

take that as a sign

of deep problems

construction and destruction are a pair

wear one

wear both

be-aware

construction and destruction are a pair

wear one

wear both

beware

roger penrose objects to "quantum theory" as not being "quite right" because of "schrödinger’s cat", ie the dead and alive cat co-exist which to his mind doesn’t match our everyday experience

in fact it does match our everyday experience and quantum theory is "quite right"

the brain and our lives traverse this every day

i never fail to be amazed deeply wrong history’s great "intellects" can be

ourselves must have these vast caverns of error we never even have a glimmer of

another way of looking at it is the cat and its absence exists, we are always walking over our absence, that ultimate "ground of being"

oddly, blacks in nazi germany seem to have had relatively normal lives, or perhaps not so oddly as being a lower socio-economic group there is no dispossessed property to be gained

esther fordham  recounts

monika hertwig on watching an absolutely  shocking scene  in schindler’s list about her father, amon göth

he was completely non-negotiable, its the only way you can do something like that and sustain the attitude

why so bossy ?

the half-wits telling everybody

how things are

like we can’t see

half

is

missing

news

what didn’t exist before

now exists

but didn’t it exist before ?

the news

what didn’t exist before

now exists

but didn’t it exist before ?

my life

seems to be a list

of energy put in the wrong places

the need

to go somewhere

far away

hard to find

where

yet

it

turns up

to

my surprise

in the end

after a war

there’s just those who survived

and those who didn’t

humming birds

flashes of turquoise

blue, green, red, maroon, violet

iridescent chain mails of colours

glitter without count

a humming bird

a flash of colour

that moves on

a humming bird

a flash of blue-green

that moves on

we tend to look at things in terms of the "normal distribution"

but there’s plenty of "abnormal" distributions around

know what you are dealing with

the pretenders are endless

none does the work

they only talk

thinking it the same thing

my advice to brad warner who is writing yet another book that won’t sell

brad

do yourself a favour

and read

“ the library of babel ”

oh i forgot

you don’t do yourself any favours

the world has a billion forgettable books

what is one more ?

the world has a million forgettable books

what is one more ?

the idiots

chasing understanding

find

it

eludes them

“ time exists in you ”

time and space don’t exist in you

you don’t exist in time and space

going forward and not behind

is not the way

to

resolve this

the frightening thing about dying is its compulsoriness

non-negotiable

the days burn

we burn the days

the days burn of themselves

what we are

and what we do

shaped by memories

we can no longer remember

i think women more than men make their own world

which they do with themselves and their children

lullaby of takeda

why don’t people read a bit of history ?

the contemporary gives such a limited perspective

chaos

a nonce word

like "order"

why people bother

i

don’t know

“ what happens when cum gets into your eyes ?

in the afternoon, while having sex, i got some cum into my eyes and it hurts like hell, the vision is perfect but the eye has swollen and painful

too ashamed to ask others what might happen. i didn’t feel it back then but now i feel how sore it has become, and washed it, hoping nothing wrong happens ”

the eyevaries get fertilised and you get an eyectopic pregnancy

there will be some "proteases" in the fluid, ie protein cutting enzymes, the effect should wear off soon

pays to wash it out as soon as it happens

or wear goggles

eyelids

open the box

of sight

humans age too quickly and don't live long enough for much sanity in "relationships" to ever occur

zennists

this notion of not attaching to a thought is nothing but a mirage

a writer’s writing

swept by time

into what they never became

a writer’s writing

swept by time

into what they never came

what is "attaching to thoughts" ?

you have to follow your own lines of inquiry and work it out yourself

removing a swallow’s nest

lined with feathers and three very small light brown eggs with darker fawny brown speckles

i felt guilty

no doubt i will see the complaining parents later in the day

a monster i am

mr.  schoolteacher

mrs.  schoolteacher

pedantry does not carry you

through "inquiry"

the world

is far too strange

for us to grasp

keno

you can only play

in the complete absence of any understanding

of

probability theory

the house takes 20%

and interestingly, its origins are chinese

horse racing

trainers

jockeys

svelte young women

overbred monstrosities

what a circus

"meditation" should acquaint you with your own thoughts

so what do people do ?

fill their heads with mental junk from everywhere else

teishos, chants, twisted translations, every type of "feel good" populist nonsense going

thus crippled, they then embark on "missionizing" careers to perpetuate the same nonsense

open cognitive dialogue is utterly beyond them because it undermines their castles

mirror houses

where everything reflects yourself

some can live like this

i can’t

some women have the female "i’m never wrong" to a completely non-functional degree

free or not free

who cares ?

a muddle of constructs

catch

the religious

even god shrinks

from

the crucifixion

the typical devotee or follower

takes on his "master’s" faults and blindnesses as well as his own

there is no escaping this

the typical devotee or follower

takes on his "master’s" faults as well as his own

there is no escaping this

plum blossom

i break off a sprig

and put in a vase to remind me

let others cultivate

it doesn’t last long

if there is a "storehouse of conciousness"

it is an open field

stretching to distant hills and mountains

not the enclosed walls

of an institution

i thought i had finished writing years ago

and now i realise i had only started

i thought i had finished writing years ago

and now i realise i had not even started

there is nothing beyond nothing

nothing is here

and not here

and neither is beyond

not or is

the ways of man

lacerate themselves on this

the weird thing about thérèse of lisieux is that you know she died a difficult death from TB at age 24

most of what she writes doesn’t make sense in terms of that context

phantoms of thought that evaporate

endless talk

without meaning

how can they do it ?

the insane have a talent

for something

about

nothing

enquiring after elderly relatives

is like enquiring after the health conditions

you are going to get

pope leo  X , a larger than life character who hastened the reformation by his need for cash from the sale of indulgences

the catholic church, even then was as "gay as"

i have never liked "the castle" but that may well be cause max brod substantially  altered  it

i do like these  fragments , they "breathe" differently and you can see how heavily influenced by poe he was

the exercise  regimen  kafka followed

2000iu of the blackmores vitamin D3 in the morning with 90mcg of the caruso’s mk7/k2 and possibly another 90mcg of mk7/k2 later, but not too late as it is quite enervating, cured my sciatica and oddly enough, seems to put enamel on teeth, haven’t been to a dentist for many years

play station 5, what the younger generations are being  brought up on frying their brains with the thoughtless

hardware  for those interested, done exceptionally well

must look at liquid metal for my cpu

“ without the blessing of the mother crystal, we cannot defend our lands from the spread of the blight ”

this pearl at 2:56

a painting  of genuis  by caravaggio

“ the inspiration of st. matthew ” 

full of subtle wisdom

unbelievably lacking in his life, like its all there in the paintings and nowhere else

i guess like charles bukowski he only learnt the hard way

endless changing viewpoints

my view

there is a big difference between mouthing the cliché

“ everything is one ”

and living the reality of

“ everything is interleaved ”

i’m just talking on and on

why do i burn out ?

its the hardest thing

to do nothing

language is always slipping from the phonetic to the partially ideogramic

an unfortunate trend abetted by computers

what has come and gone

we can’t conceive

yet we are so sure of our own coming

and less sure of our going

the dreamtime in the outback

solitary travelling

can be a bit scary

not necessarily safe at all

though it looks after you a bit

caution is needed

the dreamtime

in the outback

can be a bit scary

not necessarily safe at all

though it looks after you a bit

care is needed

the dreamtime

in the outback

can be a bit scary

not necessarily safe at all

though it looks after you a bit

caution is needed

walking across to the pump shed at 4.40am

the waning moon was bright enough

that the air was full of magpie warbling

you could locate the different group’s roosts

in the various copses across the landscape

it seems like another country

the angus calves  wells of black

quiet for once

the early hours i think

makes for a pleasant walk

back at the house

my trip to a different realm

over

you can’t shake a person out of dementia

all the gurus, religious teachers, theologians, priests, imams

a million miles of crap

if you walk near, all you do is soil your feet

i go around

in a circle

and come again to what i have gone through before

but this time its quite different

a new perspective

i’m more sympathetic and understand better

what works this magic

i do not know

this one follows a religion

another follows another one

earnestly they missionize

but never ask what it is about

thérèse of lisieux is a gift to the catholic church with her "church serving homiles"

she fits the publicity machine well and it makes the most of it

she was a bit of an idiot, enertering a convent healthy at age 15 to later die of TB at age 24, when convents were notorious for that disease, however the enviroment she was brought up in was  religious crazy

to be fair, some of  the quotes  are quite good

if you take out the religious iconography, they can be quite sensible

its a pity she didn’t live longer, i think quite a different woman would have developed, one much less ameanable to her "kitcshy portrayal"

the net has a disproportionate percentage of the mildly insane who seem to put a huge effort into proselytizing and protecting whatever wrong minded conjecture that has become important to them

all you can do is step over them and not be fooled

they seek validity for the conjecture, not by testing, but by missionizing which is the measure of their insanity

the eye has its own "microbiome" just like the gut and mouth, wearing contacts unbalances the eye microbiome

fungal infections in the eye are not usual

dry eye is usually an overactive immune response in the eye

IQ tests measure our consonance with the tester

nothing else

given the sort of people who write these tests

i would be happy not to do well on them

i have noticed

that wounded wallaby

will often come towards you

its as if they were asking to be finished off

i don’t forget how brutal this world is

and my part in it

the fools chase reason

explanation

not realising

there

is

none

there’s so much

i now ask myself

 why do i have an opinion ?

the fugue of god

the entrance is not noticed

you need to come from the other side to see it

like anything else it takes repetition to become familiar and understand it

no-one goes through

yet some-one comes back

this is not understood

to get what one wants

is to say life has some completion

no wonder it breaks apart under our touch

is aging not our slow breakdown but something else ?

the accumulation of memory making for the increasing density of time

finally we cannot move

it is

called death

not occupied

not even

"doing nothing"

because that would be

some doing of "absence"

but absence is "not there"

so there is nothing to "do nothing on"

not being or being absent

the world quavers

its four corners tie to a bundle

while simultaneously its threads unravel

the "free energy" alarms go off

so people slip back to the existence they know

and little do they realize

they create

in which they appear and disappear

and they have no question about this

prisoners of something

at least

“ just two tiles go all the way out to infinity without ever  repeating ”

is and "is not"

moire patterns

periodic and non-periodic tilings

going to infinity

what i write

they return to the same ground

digging it over

calling it fresh

you can leave something because of circumstances

or time and/or other pressures

but there’s a lot of value in leaving something because you have worked out

you should leave

as one gets older you expect everyone else to go "rack and ruin"

but actually its oneself that goes to rack and ruin

its absolutely the norm for the body to change its response to a medication after use for a while and side effects move from minor to being a problem

some-one i know sent the children’s book he wrote and his wife drew to various agents

it was very good quality so what happened ?

yes, it got plagiarized and was a best seller

its that sort of industry i am afraid

dishonest to the core

i had warned him

i only hallucinate the abstract

“ how do you hallucinate the abstract ? ”

weird huh !

each religion claims

some special truth

only accessible to its adherents

but since religions are cultural

and culture is arbitrary

how can that be ?

3 strikes and you are out

actually its 4 strikes

and 5

and 6

and 7

3 strikes and you are out

actually its 4 strikes

and 5

and 6

something has changed

just because you can’t understand me

doesn’t mean

i

am

talking

nonsense

when you let academics and teachers get hold of poetry

that finishes it

science is not the same as philosophy

great scientists are notoriously bad philosophers

great philosophers are just notoriously bad

philosophy is not the same as science

great scientists are notoriously bad philosophers

great philosophers are just notoriously bad

what is hurt ?

the neurological cost to a theory of mind

billie eilish singing the new james bond  theme ,  semantically excellent

in a world of drivel, there is supercompetence somewhere

one mistake

another mistake

a mistake after

god

a mistake

when you let go of your ideas

harmony shines in

what wouldn’t shine in

 when there’s nothing ?

some people are

a "snarl" of misconceptions

you’re a "snarl" of misconceptions

where people won’t be corrected

you can get in a situation of correcting endlessly

a sucker trap

you can’t make sense of zen in terms of zen

you can only make sense of zen in terms of the mystical branches of other religions

then you can see in depth

r|zennists never make this step though so just go in endless circles

which apparently doesn’t seem to bother them

what to write ?

a woman i knew died in april

she did the full circuit in thirty-nine years

brutally medicated in a psychiatric institution as a young child

the flowering was brief

then the petals shrivelled

an unusual perspicacity

warped

downsized

cruahed in the maw of humanity

for non-conformance

R.I.P.  amanda

what is it about extremes ?

the will-o’-the-wisp of depth that is there and then not ?

the crying penalties of dealing with them ?

your life pouring down the drain as a consequence ?

i don’t know

“ Its this universe thing.  Any direction not up is just going around in circles imv.  And up isn’t done just by calling a taxi. Yet ”

up and down

are also around

what the universe wants to tell you

it will

if you w a i t

“ the density of corneal pain receptors has been estimated to be forty times that of dental pulp ”

if you sculpt the corneal surface with laser to improve refraction then one can see how the regrowth of nerves might give rise to corneal neuralgia like this  unfortunate case

the eye is a very incompletely understood biological, mechanical, immunological, neurological, genetic, biochemical organ

interference is at your peril, any surgery has to be in the context of remedying severe rather than moderate vision problems

even contact lens have the severe side effect of changing the eyes "microbiome" to be more like that of the skin

glasses these days, being so light and not unpleasant to wear have the huge advantage of not interacting with the eyes biology

“ What I carry is outside of memory, but triggered by memorable moments.  Rocker's in t-shirts printed with ' CHOOSE LIFE' opened up a pseudo-memory of a magazine ad campaign using it to hype Laser Initiation Fusion Energy to a planet with mistrust of nuclear energy due to fission related catastophies.  Or God as a defensive satellite orbiting an earthlike planet named Geo (Geo Orbital Defence) being techno-formed by clones that took on project because Earth would allow them to reproduce "naturally" there.  The pseudo-memory of a first born of clones asking a elder, "What is GOD?" being answered with, "GOD sits in his heaven (orbit) and protects us." ”

Too much loopy ?

my reply to the above schizophrenic ramble

“ What I carry is outside of memory, but triggered by memorable moments "

what does that mean ?  its like the writing of a dead man, i can feel the smell of the corpse, its unpleasant

maybe your brain is dying, i don't know, between a "huntington's shadow" and his vegetarian diet brad warner’s certainly is

i went through a stage of having to rewrite my posts two or three times because i wasn’t making sense first time around

i must have learnt something because i no longer have to do that, though i will add to a post

you have to write it to suit yourself, but you also have to write it that it can be read by others and has an interior core of sense, even if they can’t initially grasp what i am saying

you have learnt to write so that its confusing to the reader, as i say a defense mechanism, but its counterproductive

you are not interested in helping yourself, but won't admit this, particularly, you are insensitive to people being offended by you

he  replied

Nope.  but I can respect straight forward.  Those that recognize that my symbols connect in unusual ways see it familiar somehow.  I use it mostly for them.  Others lack the jump point.  It just means they have different base symbols.

my  reply

i'm going to rewrite that

"you may not appreciate me, but there are those who understand my inner meaning"

there you are, simple, to the point and it can be replied to

this is what you don’t like because now the question can be asked

who are those who understand you ?

the reality is nobody

you are being dishonest with yourself

my last comment to him

its like you have built yourself a cage you live in that hangs in the sky above the sea

you see somethings that others don’t see

but the cage holds you there and you can’t go anywhere

what is the difference between "training" and "indoctrination" ?

not much

the central problem of life

construction

requiring deconstruction

requiring

reconstruction

i think one of the things about retreats is becoming comfortable with yourself and your own madness

it also makes you more tolerant of the madness of others

i don’t think writing is really teachable, because once you get into sophisticated writing, you are bending syntax, grammar and semantics in ways people don’t really cope with, let alone the question of "transgressive" content

"i want"

the gap is usually

work

or impossibility

possibility is way down

on

the list

covid is an extreme of an increasing and constant dispersal of infectious diseases in the last decade and  i think will drive an increasing minimization of real life attendance of universities which could even go through to colleges and high/secondary schools, the workplace and god forbid, shopping malls

lorianne disabato on the  horrors of teaching

“ I’ve always said that teaching in a college classroom is like working in a germ-infested Petri dish: by the fifth week of a normal semester, everyone is sick with an infectious malaise that gets passed around and around ‘til Thanksgiving, when students go home, rest up, then return to campus with a fresh set of germs to share ”

beautiful in its strangeness

its hard to be there

and survive

what’s with the words ?

and talk

endless

don’t stop

stop

what really beats me is how people can spend their lives

treating religious gibberish

as though it means something

then i look at the neo-marxism, identity and trans politics coming out of the universities

its the same idiocy

there must always be uncountable infinities of futures

only one of which occurs

something that turns and sees

ezekiel’s "wheels"

honestly

so many things

the only lesson is to leave it

and not go back

out in the cold

the brain freezes

everything is beautifully strange

there’s some limitation to other people’s writing

you can’t get around it

its not yours

these over-confident idiots

who have never had an original thought in their lives

trying to pester you to adopt their belief systems

political, intellectual, religious, cultural – whatever

strip back the cover

and you see a snarling dog

back and forth

conflicting views

somehow

align with each other

you can have  time travel ,  but can’t create paradoxes

study

its no paradox to have information come to the present or future from the past, because it is already known

however for information to go from the present to past must necessarily not be known in the past

that is, it can occur, but can’t be known

if you give enough attention to something

rest assured

you will eventually see through it

if you give enough attention to something

you will eventually see through it

death is a fiction

loss is the truth

what appears disappears

to be lost forever

death is a fiction

loss is the truth

a poem or homily

is the last link in a chain of thought

that forms before your eyes

an empty church has something to it

devoid of confusion

the silence speaks of nothing

housed

and lost

and found

to be

lost

again

to persuade

harangue

convince

reap

the last is suspect

everything just goes in all directions

what do you do ?

the last of the  clipper ships  are an interesting form, they were only viable though the huge amount of volunteer labour ("trainees") and actually a high crew fatality rate, everything was pushed to the edge with a heavy stress on crew competence

they occupied a sort of  "fanasty space" the crown of sailing technology, but not really real

the problem with teaching english is that, just about more than any other subject, you can teach yourself much better on the net than can be done in any classroom

for instance an article on beowulf sparked my interest in the subject and relatively quickly i did some research and now know pretty much as i have time for and are interested in

my experience of people with supposedly a university english "education" is they are appallingly narrow minded, poorly read and insanely politicised

why "the bubble" has never burst, i don’t know

the severity of covid is strongly moderated by vitamin D levels and blood type

type "O" being least affected and those in the type "A" group being   the most affected , the toxic media skip over this information of course

there’s actually a reasonable amount of research on the web and worth spending several hours searching on

“ the highest bidder, by definition is the person prepared to accept the least for his money ”

howard marks offering a sobering thought on winning any auction

my view is the only way you can win at any auction is where the asset value is severely misjudged

he is complaining

 but what is he complaining about ?

hard to say

since

he can’t even say it

the birds unfold the sky

the sky unfolds the birds

you can

call that

origami

if

you

like

"mystical realism" is a "nonce" term

the whole area is too ambiguous for that sort of categorization

reality unfolds before us

as we unfold it

reality unfolds and folds before us

as we unfold and are folded by it

“ what is creation ? ”

that’s a very good question !

if you talk about "creation" then you are also talking about "before creation"

straightaway you hit a recursive block

that ouroboros is not defeatable

you can damage your brain with lucid dreaming

it can really mess people up as evidenced by its promoters

sleep is a highly organised state with all sorts of synchronicities and functional block involvements you don't want to mess with

this picture  of the strahov monastery library in prague really gives a sense of time and unread books, something stored without any regard for its value which is not to say they are all valueless

i wonder if jorge luis borges was thinking of baroque libraries when he wrote "the library of babel", he lived in europe from age fifteen to twenty-five

the use of proxies for your own understanding sucks

and shows you for a bad character

zen priests

studying koans

christian priests

studying the bible

what’s the difference ?

walk away into your own understanding

libraries full of books

a million sermons

what’s the point ?

they tell you nothing

one way or another

we will weep

don’t expect otherwise

one way or another

we weep

don’t expect it to be otherwise

i’m not a professional at what i do

but on the other hand

i’m not an amateur

arum lilies

a red rhododendron

the pride of madeira

a real bouquet

ed.  forth was particularly green and intense with flowers so i stopped and stole some which are now in a vase on a table, red, blue and white

you can spend all your time repairing people and the world

sadly this leaves nothing for you

the world and people's appetite for ingratitude and repair

know

no

bounds

the extra dimension poetry provides

the cretins

ignore

"the way" never appears, its some construct imposed in hindsight, could you say it exists or not ?

i don’t know but so far from saying it exists, i am doubtful

people seek answers in terms of explanations

but both explanations and answers are a moving field that are processes, not fixed positions

the revolving door

we come

we go

others

come

they go too

not a lot of sense in it

but its the way it is

one thing about writing is it helps you think or be aware of what you do really think

we are only ever partially aware of what we do think

you write it out and "my god" that’s what i really think

sometimes you just leave

no feedback

no consequences

no further contact

glorious really

the labyrinth of life

we follow meaning this way and that

tracing a path

that seen from above

looks meaningless

“ it is what it is ”

it is what it isn't

meditation can worsen the failure to examine conjectures which, imo has happened to brad warner

to me meditation has a limited use which is to make you more self-aware particularly the operation of the default circuit in the brain

once that happens you need to transit to contemplative "awareness" which includes the examination of conjectures

sadly, hardly anyone seems to make this transition, but continue everlong in a semi-schizophrenic stupor relentlessly missionizing their lack of transition

the neighbour’s rooster has started crowing again, it being well into spring and he had stopped in winter

it is not exactly "adept"

he’s got a way to go to find his old full voice

i had never though of crowing being a learned dexterous skill, but it obviously is

“  How is a zen practitioner schizophrenic ? ”

the way i use the word "schizophrenia" is in the sense of a failure of testing of conjectures, ie a test of their truth

for example soto zen implicitly conjectures eihei dogen is infallible and that is a false conjecture, since they don’t test they arrive at treating everything he says as true and that makes them schizophrenic in the sense of the word i use

what constitutes "zen practice" itself are notions or conjectures about reality in terms of approach and method to what ?

just a puddle of voynich i am afraid

the tongue-tied

make a virtue of

tongue-tied

poor ewk

he couldna understand

what he wouldna wanna understand

pulling a millstone grinding dirt

he has yet to discover the meaning of

useless

throw the words away

what do you then have

not much

no wonder you ramble so

paper moons have some aesthetic

paper donkeys r|zennists imitate

fake labour

but the stupidities not fake

the half real and real

they achieve

“ Not Long till you’re  70 ! ”

yeah, a week races by like its a day

robert culbertson playing bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor on a  chapman stick

what’s different about  audrey hepburn  ?

there’s something there and i thnk its that her life experience somewhat distanced her, she had seen and been through a lot in the war during formative years

you can see it in  her films ,  more like vapour than a person

now  this  is somewhat in the area of my "visionary" experience with the 6th patriarch, its actually not a "near death" experience at all and in stefan’s case he was not injured, just thought he was going to die

a way of putting it, is there is some other realm we can step into and return from very changed by being in that realm

you can see this "transverse" in religious literature eg jacob’s ladder

however people seem to create a distorted version, for example what happened to sefan was not quite right, the experience was not delivering him to the absolute spot, or perhaps even near, but certainly there’s something near, but he hasn’t worked it through or moved onto the next step

but on the web, they don't do any contemplative work and just spew the most godawful verbose shit endlessly

i think brad warner is in the same boat as stefan, something not quite authentic, like they have held something back of themselves

interestingly both remained in their religions

on the one hand until you have an experience like this you will never believe it, i certainly didn’t, so that's ok, but on the other hand you need to do the real work towards it, but no, they just talk bullshit and get antsy when called on it

women get pregnant

at the drop of a hat

men drop the hat

everywhere the same story

getting involved

followed by

the cost of being uninvolved

beowulf, the male dream of supercompetence

can beat everything

except age

medieval cathedrals

and gargoyles

which speak

of

horror

gored by a calf

not tossed high in the air like a bullfighter caught in inadvertent flamenco

no horn through the chest and left to bleed away slowly in a shameful death 

rather the more benign face of the less than tragic

and an escape from who knows how menacing

the footprint of the absurd

leaves a limp

you can correct something

and you can be damaged by what you correct

its so toxic

so many half-wits

on the web

pretending to an intelligence

they don’t have

"time" is like "god"

useless words

einstein’s office  photographed on the day of his death

mao tse-tung

histories bloodiest hyperlexic

i always think i have nothing more to write then something else turns up

i always think i have nothing more to write

then something else

turns

up

a branch of dried cherry blossom

in a vase

spring’s first flush

passed so quick

a branch of dried plum blossom

in a vase

spring’s first flush

passed so quick

"work" to fill the gap

between inaccurate and accurate prediction

unless of course

you have a natural talent

in an area

the gospel of judas

sethian gnosticism

a bad god to explain the world

a good god to explain the bad god

sounds pretty zoroastrian to me

what is memory ?

memory is memory

memory is not memory

the shards of reality

splinter everywhere

what is "now"

just a word

why do dogen’s translators

use it

to make

 just a turd ?

“ in what way is a dead person more dead than alive ? ”

you can’t know the dead except though memory, they are wholly dead yet through memory, not entirely so

life is life

and death is death

life is not life

and death is not death

dogen’s doublespeak

has

 no heft ?

this area of expression

where you can say what you think

and be understood

is what good writing is about

you are always living on the edge of what the future is

and trying to navigate your way through it

we are always living on the edge of what the future is

and trying to navigate our way through it

death

maybe we can predict when and how

but we cannot predict

what it is

what is a miracle is the extra-supernatural dimension of imagination and its ability to take one into coherent realms far beyond the real

a poem by philip larkin titled  "as bad as a mile"

watching the shied core

striking the basket, skidding across the floor

shows less and less of luck, and more and more

of failure spreading back up the arm

earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm

the apple unbitten in the palm

now when i first read it, i didn’t understand it so i left it off and came back later to try and work it out and it now makes sense to me

now with eihei dogen, if you don’t understand what he writes, then can you assume an underlying sense like in larkin ?

if there is no underlying sense then are you decoyed into some insane trap of endless circles never escaping because there is no underlying sense ?

stalin had a good piece of advice

if they are not for you, they are against you

interestingly, after his wife comitted suicide he took the view this applied to his wife’s family and he had them killed or imprisoned

he can’t have been too abnormal emotionally because his wife’s death deeply affected him, more so than just about anything else i think

poets and artists are a jealous tribe

disinterested advice is hard to get

poets are a jealous tribe

disinterested advice is hard to get

creation

and

destruction

the

tick-tock

of

infinity

tick-tock

creation

and

destruction

the

tick-tock

of

infinity

philip larkin drank himself to death

and his stupid girlfriend shredded, then burnt all his 30 journals

what a waste

you can tell the people who won’t or can’t change

something comes up

an inconsistency

they move on like it never happened

because

according to them

it

didn’t

the man who dies before his parents

there i was

expecting to deliver the oratory at my father’s funeral

i had it all worked out

the right balance of memory and meta

the car came at me side ways, high speed

took me out through the driver’s door

hunting has let me see plenty of blood and guts

my own is just the same

now i’m dead and burning with the irony

a quiet funeral, i at least attending

the speeches stick in my throat

i console myself with the knowledge that its only recent generations where the children outlive the parents

but

all

the

same

ed.  be warned, this is what happens if you read philip larkin

in victorian times and earlier it used to be not unusual that parents outlived all their children

ewk suggested that the 7th patriarch go and see a doctor about his mental health

any recommendations ? asked the 7th patriarch

"dr. tarr" at the place where i work is very good

the 7th patriarch went to see dr. tarr

he never returned

ewk’s ward would go instantly silent when he told them, what happened to the 7th patriarch will happen to you if you don’t shut up

as it happened, just as the 7th patriarch was about to be set upon by cannibals from the r|zen ward, the tardis appeared, a hand stretched out from the door and grabbed him pulling him inside and he was last seen in 11th century byzantium

on dusk

dark

but yellow orange white and blue flowers

can be seen

a dark day

yellow orange white and blue

flowers

one night ewk pointed to the half moon and asked

"where is the other half"

the seventh patriarch replied

"what do you see ?"

ewk had no reply

i see a seal

a seal sees me

such mutual incomprehension

past impossibility

dunno about the way alain de botton categorises ptsd in  this video ,  more like autistic, i thing ptsd has something else to it, though i can't put my finger on it, but of course being autistic or having strong traits is traumatic

this scene  from the desert in northern colombia really conveys a sense of forever

that guy is very resourceful, which you see if you look at the beginning of the video

why know two languages when you can know one ?

english is the clear winner

unburden your brain

and discard

why know two languages when you can know one ?

english is the clear winner

unburden your brain and discard

if you talk to yourself

you can start to believe yourself

the problem is to pare

what’s worthwhile

from what is not

cycles of our life

voids that need filling

they are filled, go empty and are filled again

until we lose the capacity

this is the circus

we call living

cycles of our life

voids that need filling

they are filled, go empty and are filled again

this is the circus

we call living

the "mystery" of the tropics is more in the  clouds and skies  than the islands

apparently you lack the capacity for original thinking and rather than work anything out for yourself, you just parrot the "received wisdom"

well that’s like sailing a ship onto a reef

and you object to it being pointed out to you that you are aground and sinking

monasteries and convents are cults if you haven’t noticed.

the silhouettes of the gums

against a light blue dawn sky

look more like

beech trees

prosperity theology

god intends you to be wealthy

Job laughs

its not worth it he says

the life of buddha

women wealth children, abandonment

its a soap opera script

elevated into scripture

the prophet muhammad

offered clear grapes

not women

a bit of a come down

those ISIS martyrs

must want

their lives

back

ed.  the koran’s offer of 72 virgins in paradise for martrydom is in fact a translation error, it should be "raisins"

take the moment

stand it on its head

the future behind

and the past up front

and you might start

to look at things right

some people will talk rubbish forever

 what can you do ?

nothing

einstein can  bullshit  with the best of them

the starlings on the power lines again

i’ll have to

learn to

read

music

its not just men who get obsessive

woman get obsessive too, it just has a different character

“ how is zen/buddhism a cult ? ”

it was a view i was slow to form, but comes from practical experience of several different zen schools

by way of comparison i do regard christianity or any mainstream religion as a cult as well

i don’t think brad warner personally is a "cultist" because he doesn’t censor, however he is involved in a "cult" in a very inconsistent way, i think its very much to his credit that he doesn’t censor, so his vlog is not actually "cultist"

however real life zen does censor, if you disagree with the party line, you are out

other culty features of zen are embody-ing too much power with "zen masters" and hidden agendas like promiscuous sex and "abuse" of power by leaders

i have a strong interest in cults having spend most of my young life in christian/episcopalian boarding schools, which in reality are cults

also i can compare zen to toni packer’s zen break-away group which definitely was not a cult since criticism is encouraged, rather than prohibited and does not have a belief system

i have never seen real life zen separate from being buddhist and buddhism requires you believe in the existance of an "historical" buddha, which my research indicates clearly is just bunk, like jesus, muhammad and moses, its all just fictional people

so i would say the core of being a cult is "false beliefs" and censorship and exclusion to maintain the "apparent validity" of the false belief

as i have said , this forum  (brad’s vlog)  is an unusual mix of contradictions

out on a limb

a lifetime’s misbelief in whatever

don’t expect me to bail you

these people with their confused replies and total lack of interest in being less confused

disgusting like an open sewer

what the point of fooling yourself about something no-one cares about is, i do not know

the stars steep

stupidity or intelligence

take your choice

what’s the relevance of what you wrote ?

you have just learnt a bag of rhetorical tricks and are not even aware of it

the fakes missionize the dead like they are that person

well the dead can’t call these pretenders out

actually they do, if you read what they wrote

so sad

this toxicity in life

you are just making crazy talk if you ask me and you have

just crazy talk if you ask me and you have

why can’t what you just  read  be complete nonsense brad ?

either the translation is very bad or dogen is just bullshitting

unquestioning acceptance of text is cult behavior

"what is the whole universe" i can’t grasp that, is it even meaningful ?

i don’t feel its a real question at all, but just the usual dead end road that can only be explained as a dead end road

see ?  i can write nonsense as well as dogen or his translator, are we any further from where we started ?

why are we doing this ?

ed.  i put that as a question without an answer because i don't think there is an answer, however, in terms of an answer is it provides me with writing material

"i predict the future"

just sit down and make some predictions

on things and people in your life

it will amaze you

what you know

and what you don’t know

the future

hasn’t occurred yet

how it will occur now

i don’t know

we try to modulate the future to give us what we see as our best gains

this creates difficulty because the results rarely meet with what we need or expect

interestingly there’s a neurological theory of "prediction" called "the free energy principle" which basically says we create our world by carving out areas we can predict successfully in, which of course leaves us vulnerable in counter-intuitive realms like the share market

why people want to travel by air with covid around, i don’t know

there’s too much "shared air" in planes and the jet lag makes you much more susceptible

do plenty of body movement in the plane to move lymph  (basically movements to pump the lymph nodes in the neck, armpits, groin and abdomen)

everybody should be taking vitamin D to reduce complications if they catch covid

the problem with zen is everyone pursues "enlightenment", but they end up deluded calling it enlightenment and get very unfriendly when you point out the problem to them

mystical christianity and isalm/sufi are much better intellectuallly than zen which is pretty moronic, but do they want to discover this truth ?

no

so they just remain running on the rails of "retardation" regurgitating whatever forever

our lives take paths we have learned to create

people perceive any attempt to wrest them off these paths as attempted murder and respond appropriately as they see it

this is why its not possble to encounter people beyond the superficial level, go deeper and footing on the path becomes imperilled and there’s trouble

mars is what a planet looks like  without biology

the irish are a nation of scammers, they do it even when they don’t need to

under the sun

the pine plantation

between the pines

the air

thick with pollen

chasing phantoms

creating phantoms

the "spiritual path"

for

sure

your time, given to whatsoever

is itself

a donation

there’s no certainty outside your own experience

the talkers talking

forever

but not forever

because

they

die

brad warner, until you do the necessary philological research you have no idea what eihei dogen was saying

philological work is basically the intensive analysis of writings contemporary to him to get a bead on meanings and their nuances, its so labour intensive, nobody does it, but stride on in faux certainty like this essential work is done satisfactorily

your whole "modus operandi" is your assumption that there exists some underlying coherent explanation of it all, so that by exclusion, you are left with the correct explanations, but this is just the branches waving in the wind, what can i say ?

talk is avoidant

and the heart of the matter

escapes

never mind

horses for courses

interestingly, there may be something to the  wild west ethos

time’s "relentless march"

it’s a cliché

but its true

time’s "relentless march"

it’s a bit of  cliché

but its true

a violin

a box that squeaks

and squeals

a violin

a box that squeaks

getting involved with people

who are in need of constant correction

and don’t contribute

get out

the so-called "spiritual path"

endless stitchwork

repairing old clothes

a teaspoon of taurine dissolved in warm water every day or second day is great for migraines

if they are going to quote drivel

why shouldn’t i expect them to talk drivel ?

if he’s going to quote drivel

why shouldn’t i expect him to talk drivel

if brad warner is going to quote drivel

why shouldn’t i expect him to talk drivel ?

so many situations

don’t announce you are going

just sneak away

unnoticed is best

the endless night

gum trees

moon shadows

mist

goes on forever

in the distance

the flowing stream

i was sure

were men’s voices

in the distance

the flowing stream

sounds like men’s voices

in a lot of things its just your opinion

which is

well

just your opinion

can you go

 beyond your opinion ?

i was listening to  this choir  and i had the sudden idea of choirs created in the gulag or holocaust concentration camps, because of the sympathy created between performers and audience ,  must have been very disturbing to the people running these places, that the people in the choirs were in a sense more "worthy" than them

i always find this notion of "writing" intriguing, the  hurrian’s  were writing 3500 years ago, yet modern zen is so dismissive of writing, its like the retards have taken over the academy which actually is the case

its actually a bit of a skill to write effectively with limited words, you need to do it so the meaning is stacked into them (the right way)

sometimes i don’t believe what i wrote

then i look at it again

and i believe it

sometimes i don’t believe what i wrote

then i look at it again

and i believe

tik tok

stunning

the normality of it

a race of dancers

and practical jokers

nothing more

modern text paradigms

the trivialization of praise

shovelled out in buckets

like cleaning a septic tank

women are wired to get pregnant

how much freedom is there in that ?

i have travelled extensively between zen and other buddhist centers, though it was a while ago, i tried to figure what was what until i realised it was just bullshit and the teachers didn’t know what they were on about, whereas toni packer at the springwater center, where i stayed for a while, did, that was a revelation

i had a good time travelling and i don’t think any-one didn’t mean well, but really, they were just bunnies

the basic problem with zen is it is part of a larger religious context eg "mystical christianity" if you don’t look and are not comfortable with that, you are wasting your time

they reject these larger contexts

ewk, after crossing an ocean and then with much difficulty found the 7th patriarch and cogitating a bit since according to the old stories one is supposed to ask a question, quickly looked through his books and came up with "what is the fundamental principle" ?

the seventh patriarch replied "don’t meta"

now ewk who knew he wasn’t born yesterday, though sometimes he wondered, replied

"isn’t that meta-ring" ?

the 7th patriarch yawned and asked, "do you live in a consistent universe ?"

ewk was dumbfounded

the koran is written in a combination of  syro-aramaic  and arabic and muhammad is a fiction to counterbalance jesus and moses  (also fictions of the usual cultural soap operas)

what is called the koran is almost an invention of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which actually islam itself is in the same way zen reinvented itself and what we see now doesn’t really bear any relation to the medieval religions

islam is a form of nestorian or non-trintarian christianity and probably bears as close a resemblance to pre-paulian christianity as what we call christianity does itself and of course there’s the the heavy judaic influence

its no co-incidence that modern islam is so hostile to judaism and christianity, its because it needs to separate itself from them, they being the roots from which it developed

of course, if it was generally understood how close judaism, christianity and islam are too each other there would be a lot less friction in the world today, but that is not the nature of religion

there you are, my contribution to world peace, no death threats please !

what you are

your "essence" of being

you cannot convey

weep all you like

it does no good

the opposite genders are somewhat blinded to the problems that a person of the opposite gender may have

there’s some really crazy, dangerous, useless people around who, because of this blinding can pass through your filters

you need to ask around, observe and evaluate carefully to avoid the pitfalls

but basically my experience is what seems good value, is, i do think you get a sense of "good value" ,  if its missing, beware

soto

a celibate tradition

mangled

into "married with kids"

broken from the start

being

being you

being me

being the sky

being the sea

being

where am i ?

where are you

on the way to town

i see

calves

a raven with nest material in its beak

wattles blazing with yellow

it must be spring

calves

a raven with nest material in its beak

wattles blazing with yellow

it must be spring

"the real work" of "contemplation" is you just plug away at what you don’t understand and it will resolve and open up a new vista, and it pretty well applies to anything

it takes solitude and meditation/contemplation to be on the road to self awareness

you never leave the past behind

you drag it everywhere with you

even in dreams

you never leave the past behind

you drag it everywhere with you

the full moon with a thick mist

the magpies are noisy

good

they will be so tired tomorrow morning

they won’t wake me

the world is very constrained

the imaginative world is much less constrained

no wonder we want to escape one for another

the zen koan system is deeply misguided

religions propagate nonsense through the millennia

why ?

well you might ask

there’s a million talentless women out there

preening and pouting on instagram

a good place for them i suppose

how the music world has changed

beatles song on   the gayageum

brad warner, you are trying to make sense of a thousand to two thousand years old nonsense, and are surprised its not working ?

you’re a writer, not a priest

it would be instructive to go back to your old workplace, i did that once and everybody related to me like i hadn’t left and no time had passed, but i had changed and they hadn’t

i think in hindsight they were upset to see me, like i had escaped and they were still stuck there

the world may be all wrong

but that is not your problem

your only concern is working out the other half of the sum

that makes it correct for you

the world may be all wrong

that is not your problem

your only concern is working out the other half of the sum

that makes it correct for you

at the end of the earth

stands a tree

the roots of the tree go into the soul

the branches are lovely with leaves and flowers

it overlooks a bay whose arms embrace the sea

no man lives there yet all pass through

its hard to beat buddhism for its unending amounts of crazy rules

the trouble is everything i do is Trauma

so i just do less

and that’s less trauma

well you can say i’m anti everything

but everything is anti me

the middle aged

chasing sexual shadows

let’s face it, living with a spouse is difficult

women only put up with it because they are overwhelmed by hormones and when those go they are overwhelmed by circumstance

what i write is not rules but discussion or thinking points

there’s something wrong with "rules"

the intellectual junkheap of modern life

brittle people

brittle ideas

the idiot suspension in media pap

making claims for itself

writing a few words in the evening

restores some sanity

after the day’s junkheap

the paucity of my own dreams

infused by the dreams of others

makes a magical synergy

fusion

the paucity of my own dreams

infused a bit by the dreams of others

makes a magical synergy

fusion

god made the world out of nothing

and the nothing shines through

and god was made out of something

which just shows you

that space between coming and going

or anywhere

what is it ?

a woman who had lived in a thich nhat han zen center suggested i stay on the hardcore zen blog to which i replied  (but did not send)

​we have in common some living in a zen center experience which certainly brings social and living skills with it, but hardly anyone here  (ed. brad’s vlog)  has and you can’t guarantee they are not going to get too extreme and i’m getting that vibe from "tristan" whoever he is

the net’s a weird place, over the years i have had someone threaten to kill me, a woman turn up on my doorstep, particularly obsessive people follow me around on various forums and message boards to make a pain in the arse of themselves ,  (that generally lasts about six months) ,  some-one attempting to close down my web site, a band of "chelation mums" attempting to run me off the "autism and diet web" for my anti-chelation stance and the one i like best is getting banned recently from r|poetry for writing poems in my replies

the advantage of brad’s vlog is he doesn’t censor, but if in fact i am going to have people like tristan  (einsof?)  breath down my neck then i don’t feel free to speak my mind and that destroys the writing value of the blog for me

if you’ve lived in a zen center, you know people can be fairly extreme, but the net is a different order of extreme and these people have no real life experience of zen at all that would moderate them and introduce a shadow of doubt into their hubricity

i have a subreddit and i found i had to ban the majority of people wanting to comment because they really didn’t agree with me, but found themselves drawn to my writing, yet not understanding why they were drawn, but doing nothing but argue with me

i have been interested in the question of censorship and was wondering how brad’s approach would turn out, but in the end people or a person within the blog or vlog can step outside the vlog and try make trouble like tristan threatening to have me removed from youtube, that’s actually censorship so brad in fact does not run a truely uncensored blog, even though he doesn’t censor it himself

i’m busy in my own life, its brad’s vlog and looking like his main income source and there’s some people really hostile to me there, so its over

the best advice i ever got while in a zen center was not from the "teachers" but from the african american woman house master with a taste for blue at the cambridge zen center which was "you volunteer too much"

my activity on brad’s vlog is volunteer

writers have the brains actors and actresses don’t have

philosophy occupies the wrong semantic-pragmatic space for the sort of problem it seeks to solve

wittgenstein even told them, do they think he was joking ?

you can say this a hundred million times, but they still don’t get it

there’s overt banning from a message board or even dismissal from a job and what i call "subtle" banning or dismissal where the hostility gets too much to bear and you have to leave because of that

all of the above i have been, well no overt dismissal from a job

interestingly you have a legal basis for leaving a job because of "hostility"

i’m not against censorship, its just it has to be extremely well directed so not as to introduce any distortions to the platform

rarely done well, but some subreddits seem to manage

completely uncensored doesn’t seem to work either, the platform becomes conscripted to the use of whatever group ever organises itself for a takeover

you can look at something one way

for quite a while

years even

then you suddenly see it another way

more helpful to you

you can look at something one way for quite a while, then you suddenly see it another way

more helpful to you

i’m having to give up reading brad warner’s hardcore zen blog and i’m trying to work out why, like its a dead end, but in fact it gives more good writing and experience of an extreme, but i think the real problem is some of the people in the comments section are waking up to who i am and the threat i represent to their ideas ,  so are starting to target me, brad doesn’t censor so i am safe in that respect and these people are quite hostile to him, but all the same, it takes a lot of energy in defense to be constantly under attack, so its become like r|zen, except as well as some curmudgeons targeting me in the comments, the owner really disliked me and was extremely hostile with the mods deleting my best OP’s

i don’t read r|zen now at all except occasionally as an "exit interview" and i feel better for the loss of contact and i suspect with will happen with brad’s vlog as well

these commentators on brad’s vlog are really trying to wrest control from him to make it a public message board with some ownership on their part and they are threatening to report me to youtube, which i really don’t want to have to deal with, so effectively i have been forced out in a subtle way, just like r|zen

“ You could consider calling him out for harassment at YouTube ”

dammed with "faint defense"

“ But let’s not exaggerate.  He is not as bad as to report or block him ”

you raise an important point, i think i’m out because having to deal with being reported to youtube given their reputation for "political correctness" is too much to deal with

those people win and defeated i retreat

good bye all, it has been useful knowing you

people of sense will see what you are talking about

when they don’t

watch out, life doesn’t filter insanity

some women are never wrong

because they are never right

watch out for those ones

some women are never wrong

because they are never right

one of the things about net "contacts" and "associations" is ,  unlike real life you can easily leave them if they are problematic or you don’t like them

this option needs to be used more often

lives

what can be conveyed

very little

what can’t be conveyed

ditto

lives

what can be conveyed

what can’t be conveyed

mostly very little

no-one to love me

no children

just an ephemeral gleam in this life

that’s the truth isn’t it ?

i was thinking of something and an old memory floated up

it wasn’t random, it was very pertinent

indeed, an answer to the situation

a resurfacing of old memories ,  reminders of a life previously lived

dead ends can be a hive of activity creating the illusion of going somewhere

when in fact its going nowhere

wallowing in self-pity and feeling sorry for yourself don’t go anywhere, yet it has a certain validity, that at least in the face of a disinterested or negative world you can feel it for yourself

sometimes very old memories that have no connection to anything i was thinking occur and it amazes me

sometimes very old memories that have no connection to anything i was thinking occur

it amazes me

a way of looking at the net is its just a bunch of bloody liars by omission

its all in what they don’t tell you and makes it a much more fractured medium than it seems

lying by omission

the easiest and worse crime we can make

there comes a time when we need to say something

but don’t

and the catastrophe

accumulates

speaking the nonsense of others

they think they are "authentic'

some definition of "authenticity"

the days pass

like they don’t last

that’s because they don’t

"like" in this case

is

the days pass

like they don’t last

that’s because they don’t

i do a bit of hunting and what i notice is some nights i am on form and don’t miss and other nights it can take three or four misses before i "get my my form" and i think that’s because it does take a while to "get form" and also not passing up too uncertain shots

lacking an adequate understanding

he repeats and repeats

others

two surgery maxims

there is no free lunch

one surgery can buy you another

religion

rules and prescriptions

senseless meta

they just talk

and don’t do

we are all brought up on the fudamentalness of the normal distribution

that is life revolves around a center of likelyhood

but ,  actually life is not like that, its a heavy tailed distribution that can swing side to side of the center and range far out beyond it

how the net differs from the real world is the commonality and immediacy of what in the real world would be extreme, a heavy tailed probability distribution so to speak

some-one posts on r|eyetriage with what looks like worms in his eye ,  loa loa  ?

yes he was in a remote village three days up river from iquitos in the peruvian amazon nine years ago for a month

i didn’t know  caravaggio  /michelangelo merisi from a bar of soap

this  documentary  opened it up for me

madness is where the inconsistencies hurt one personally

brad  (ed. warner)  i don’t think the "little mannerisms" ie the "knowing sage" work on your vlog, john loori used to do them except his were more "exclamatory hero", it can fool initially, but once seen is very off-putting because you know you are just being done over by rhetorical devices and there’s the certainty of insincerity

"gay" is really  another gender

they are attracted to males like females, but the attraction is that of a male to female

they think like men

there is some feminine, but they are not girls in men’s bodies

the socially assigned "genderism" was never correct in the first place

you can attain the truth

but it slips from under you

more words

and more words

one generation starts from another

to go nowhere

you can attain the truth

but it slips from under you

more words

and more words

seeking one

they create two

and still looking

well, that’s a third

seeking one

they create two

and still looking

that’s a third

seeking one

they create two

still looking

that’s a third

i don’t really relate to the state in which i write poetry or homilies ,  it doesn’t seem like me at all, its way more philosophical ,  abstract and has a better command of language and understands what i cannot grasp

there’s a state of energy where you have a breakthrough cognition

when the energy goes, you lose the cognition

that’s the interesting part

i think poetry comes from that state and you better write it down

before

it

goes

in the paddock

so many black cattle

and

their

shadows

in the paddock

any amount of black cattle

with

their

shadows

fancy talk don’t substitute for the cash of donations

you can make universals out of particulars in the same way a papier-mâché bird can’t flap its wings

“ a meta-theory of physics could explain life, the universe, computation, and more ”

it doesn’t explain the explaining

you can’t explain the explaining

another way of looking at "right speech" as per "the eightfold path" is a guide to social skills and converse for autistics, roll on the monotone !

the great secret of hell

is you don’t notice you’re there

paradise

is not

so secretive

camille pissaro’s painting  a plaza in caracas  really takes you into a different world

liang hongyu , a female chinese general and heroine

more than most literary works ,   she stoops to conquer  despite its "indebtedness" to other works, is entirely its author, oliver goldsmith

like jane austen, he’s rewriting his life and died just as stupidly, medical misadventure

if you deal with the mentally ill, you end up partly mentally-ill

do you think she can understand that ?

she’s not a person who needs that

she chose psychology as a subject because she is self-destructive, just like choosing her first boyfriend, she veers to what will traumatise her

she replied that some people are more resistant to becoming crazy

my further comment

she’s more resistant, but it still messes your mind, why piss your life away for very little money ?

she has to identify this self destructiveness in herself

the other problem with psychology is the theory is really off target, she’s just learning crap that she will have to unlearn later

she has a very good brain, she could do very well financially in the right field, neither you nor her focus enough on the money, life is much more fun and safer with enough money

if she can start to identify this self-destructiveness, she’s learning way more of the right material

very intelligent people are often self-destructive

possibility cuts itself out of a plane of possibility and impossibility

keep it short

keep it simple

and for christ’s sake say something meaningful

keep it short

keep it simple

and say something meaningful

day after day

stares you in the eye

what for

why ?

if you deal with the mentally ill, you end up partly mentally ill

fixing the neighbour’s fence

a glint catches my eye

a glass marble in the dirt

50 years since any children were in that house

possibility is a discussion

that ranges

from itself

to

not

to say something is defined by what’s not possible as well as what’s possible is not meaningful imo ,  just saying something is possible also defines what is not possible as a subtext or by exclusion

if there were 100 universes and only this universe had the laws and stability necessary for evolution and life to occur, why is it so surprising that from the view of this universe, that there is life in it ?

it seems unreasonable to suppose that the only universe to be able to support life is the only universe that exists or has or will be able to exist

from the fact of this universe and us existing one can infer that there exist other universes with life and likely an awful lot that exist with varying degrees of persistence but don’t have life

i think we are currently seeing the emergence of an astrophysics able to support such a scenario

discovery

to see the world as it is

but even the world as it is

is cascading different views

discovery

to see the world as it is

but even the world as it is

can be cascading different views

i feel a  children’s story should be  "gripping" and exciting, not some dreary didacticism which seems to be so current now

i can’t make head or tail of what you are saying and i don’t think you can either

"practice" is for wannabe’s, i do things

there is always the next level to climb to, what would that be ?

people make endless claims on the net, but who knows what is really going on

her circles of him

illusory malleability

the distance remains

the last verse of li qingzhao’s  famous poem

the faint fragrance of the plants fills my sleeves

oh, i cannot say it is not enchanting

only, when the west wind stirs the curtain

i see that i am more gracile than the yellow flowers

my reworking

the garden’s scents penetrate me

i cannot say i don’t love it

but more frail than those flowers

am i

early autumn

the first chill affects my sleep

i love to be out under the stars

dreaming of the passing warmth

staying

when you know what’s what

in philosophy and poetry

you have freedom

the frogs croak and the crickets sing

as

usual

evening shadows

late spring

far away mountains

behind my small courtyard

sprout clouds

endless arguing on reddit

made me

a

better

writer

children

not sharing the traits of a parent

not grief to one and grief to another

yesterday

in town

looking at the cherry blossom

the trees in the woolies carpark

the green starting to override

the blossom

i self-publish on the web, i don’t have much interest in conventional publishing at all

education, entertainment and publishing is shifting rapidly in improved directions because of the web

i think new zealand got its response to the coronavirus right, it has a footprint of damage that will affect everyone to some degree, you definitely don’t want to get it, though apparently blood types are significant, with type O least affected and type AB most

also having adequate vitamin D levels ameliorate the effects and paradoxically in sweden their levels are higher because they have to supplement

when i look at my own "art" by which i mean writing which i am doing a lot of now, its taken decades to develop and really i’m only interested in it for myself

she’s a bit "soto zen" really, too minimal, you can question, but you need a palette of answers already available to you which implies a lot of quality reading, solitude and you own "philosophical infrastructure" and the ability to shift context into more productive avenues of thought

i’ve seen it in myself and i’ve seen it in others, people track too deeply in endless re-working of their own thought with "soto minimalism" and what  byron katie  is doing, is she is prescribing a method for others and you can’t do that

i don’t want to come across as too hostile, she’s got some clues

any notion of right thinking or "intention" assumes that such things determine the effect, that is, if i think right and act according to that then the effects necessarily match what i intend

this cannot be thought to be so by even the most naive and inexperienced person

obviously since effects swim in the sea of various possibilities, perhaps more negative than positive, notions of "right thinking" or intention are codswallop

this disparity between intention and effect is the basis of most comedy

“ when you put the body into the eye you have attained ”

this actually is a core teaching and none of the so-called zen teachers today understand it

when eihei dogen says "the eye" he means the eye

when you "see" you know and as a consequence know the waffle for what it is

the pretenders wring their shirts for sweat and drink it thinking it fine wine

why ?

who knows, lazy crazies is my best guess

if infinity stops somewhere

where does it stop ?

how do you know ?

if infinity stops somewhere

where is it ?

across the sea

rainstorm on the horizon

black

then grey

what the distance gives

as present involvements recede

is understanding

male and female

a perpetual motion machine

men and women

a perpetual motion machine

time versus space

is it an enmity ?

you can’t reconcile

the irreconcilable

i can remember

not remembering

i can remember

and not remember

the grief

of having

lost a poem

whaah !

its really hard being a parent

because your children have some of your traits, but not bloody all

just as we at this moment have this sense of what is happening now, so 1000 years ago people are having the same experience or sense of occurrence

as it is to them then its also occurring to us now

all time is simultaneous

different spaces of time

we walk into

like rooms in a house

one we never come out of again

the fish are caught

men, women and children

generation to generation

the fish are caught

unending openings

all needing closure

too old to close

with time

so much falls away

you can’t pick

what shouldn’t

the transition is looked for

but getting there takes attention

grief, a loss

somebody is going

or gone

its ambiguous

grief, a loss

somebody is going

its ambiguous

nothing unalloyed be

i’ve read it before

its right

the confluence of things making for happiness or going right

reciprocation, good humour, tolerance, mutual understanding

never happens

the elements get picked off

individually

prilgrim’s progress, while a great literary work is mistaken, just doing the usual misguided approach of the matter of infinity from an incompatible semantic pragmatic space

i’m not rubbishing it, there is plenty of valuable insight in it and its allegories

the original  cheshire cat

men are so willingly fooled by women, those "napoleons" of various control strategies

the call of the lotus

is heard clearly by the lotus eaters

hard to resist

odysseus did

and lived

“ i'm thinking, should i even tell cat i think she’s using me ?  or is it better to just keep that thought to myself ”

yeah, women are an enemy in some respects, they have agendas hidden to men

work narrows us in the wrong direction

hard to break from

yet, i think

not impossible

the falling snow

in quietude

the landscape beams

for having less life

what i write is just my thought

its not a prescription for life

at least i don’t take it that way

sometimes a bauble

shiner than the rest

rises

that is all

the water in the vase

as it gets to the bottom

leaves the blossom

parched

those silent mouths

so cruel

when they watch

what they should remedy

youth

doomed to repeat the mistakes of the aged

for the aged don’t speak

a language youth understands

you shouldn’t stoop too far to conquer, the rabble are so hubric, they just pull you down further to rob and abuse

i don’t think you are using your art/writing to analyse yourself

art is the repair of damage

joy davidman’s snowfall in madrid

gave no respite

from the madness of life

maybe infinity is a woman and jealously guards her lovers

who knows ?

the effort some people put into being narrow-minded

astounds

how the italians  make pizza

they don’t stint the ingredients

so ligaments connect bone to bone and tendons connect muscle to bone

you need to move joints regularly to move synovial fluid through them and similarly the bursae

nāgārjuna

people seeking meaning

when all he does is step

in and out of recursion

otherwise

he writes  nonsense

eighteen hundred years  of decoying  the idiots

he could not have imagined being so successful

successful or not

nāgārjuna rows one way then another

why i don’t know

direction is meaningful

“ after death, do you continue ? ”

i do not continue

to me the miracle of buddhism is that so much crap without any remedying artistic or literary merit has been passed down through the millenia

i don’t incude the "saundarananda-kavya" by aśvaghoṣa in this of course

jason  writes

“ cat is trying to decide between studying law or psychology, she says she is more interested in psychology because she’s interested in "how the brain works", and she says she took psychology in high school and liked it

she’s also seriously considering law but she says she would do law for the money ”

my  reply

she wants to look at what the degree would mean in terms of work, try and get a real life feel for it, for psychology it would most likely be social work which imo can be a very distressing thing to do, being made a bit crazy by dealing with the crazy for very low pay for what is involved and its risky

i think she is too artistic to make either law or psychology a career, maybe she want to think about writing or similar ?

she really wants to put some effort into asking around and seeing how things work at this stage, save her a lot of grief later

“ the problem is the deadline to sign up for school is coming up, and classes will start by october at the latest

her mother thought she should’ve been an artist ,  for high school there you could either go into art, humanities, or sciences and cat chose humanities

her mother recognizes her writing and art, and yeah in the past her mother thought art was for her

cat’s cousin, her age, is an artist and her mother says she is more talented than her ”

school’s a waste of time for the arts, too behind the times

she’s a young attractive woman, if she asks around the artistic, psychological and legal circles she’s going to be given answers

she has to "do" and get out of "observer mode"

she doesn’t want to end up a social worker

you’re hitting the first consequence of sitting on your arse and not getting her and you more involved in art, a door is closing

“ what should i do about the art, just get her and me to create as much as possible ?

sometimes i’m just lost

i could definitely avoid entertainment with her more

so, what do you think i should do ?  i would appreciate you telling me  ”

what you have is the ability to see beyond surfaces, you will notice that just about all of this web art around is bullshit from a failure to disbelieve in the surface

you are an artist, you are already there but you need to get you production skills up to the point you can sell what you create

cat provides you good material, that’s her use, her use of you is some sort of passing the time/education, there’s another good theme to work on, that dreaming or projection of a life with her

you get too distracted from your central problem and actually you don’t really believe me about you and cat not ending up in a long term relationship, the age gap might not seem very large but at your time of life it is everything and in a sense she is using you, your responsibility to yourself is to get the benefit, which as i say is skill-ing up

when i write i am sort of compelled, i have plenty of other things to do for sure, but its like an addiction, i plough on to see where the writings lead and i think its the same with visual art, once you get into a certain level it takes you forward

you have to do what you find exciting, it takes a toll and that’s work

chewing the lotus leaves you exposed when the tide withdraws

i don’t think you like or have the tolerance for how hard the effects of the creation of anything is, its traumatic, maybe you have ptsd or something, when i look at your family history its quite reasonable to be in that area

the art can process stuff like your pot smoking when your mother was dying, you need to see into that, like i’m putting together a little "homily collage" from this recent thread, i actually find it quite tough, but it propels me forward into a different space, that’s what art and writing really is, that propelling forward, i’m getting more into my own reputation as a writer and away from the "borg" of zen, those bastards

when you are caught up with toxic people

try to leave

all your energies go into making an antidote for the poison

better ways to live i am afraid

not enough sleep

not to wake in the morning refreshed

sucks

the tableaux of our lives

sufficient story for most

but for some

not

positano

the steps up equal the steps down

it can’t be easy living in an escher painting

no room for vertigo

c.s. lewis and christianity did not mix, trying to mix religion and story telling is opening a running wound, it only partially worked for mikhail bulgakov in "the master and margarita"

one of lewis’s worst mistakes was the killing of his main characters in the railway accident, barbarism on the part of the author

both lewis and tolkien trivialise killing in their stories, a likely outcome of their WW1 trench experience

life has a certain reversibility

which is strangely missing

from the storytelling world

the best of "enya" is actually the fusion of the music with the lyrics, without the lyrics the music is empty

roma ryan has a way with words, too bad she got side tracked into her made-up languages when her ability to meld the english poetic with music was a god-given skill

the muse

a woman

how and where the attention rests

is not known

so many young people don’t get this

you pay a price for drinking alcohol

your brain withers

permanently

the west

wannabe culture

so thick

you can cut it

age 50 is a turning point

many don’t take

they decay

prematurely

other worlds

don’t exist in nonexistance

they have to be created

waltz  no. 2  composed by dmitri shostakovich and played on guitar

the young russian woman is interesting if you look at some of her other  videos

black and white talent when the western web is so full of wannabes

if there was one thing that catalysed the murderous demonism of the rule of lenin and stalin, it was the execution of the children of the tsar

there were now no boundaries

innocents killed

russia lost its innocence

bloody diamonds

foreran

these people fond of themselves

that i am less fond of

don’t get sucked into their orbits

theology

some women go to hell

women need to shop

therefore there are shops in hell

there’s a million books with this sort of nonsense

everybody has their own lives

they are not yours

yours are not theirs

what does the boundary of life look like ?

a piece of a paper has a boundary but the writing on it has no boundary

its not death or some-one "going"

i don’t know what it is

any easy trick with pronation/supination of the knee from asymmetrically worn heels is just to cut the unworn side down so it becomes symmetric again

a bit of tilt on the heel seems to be ok

what is the problem with toxic vlogs/blogs and message boards ?

i have always found this difficult because they can really improve your understanding of how the world works being composed of such extreme creeps, stupids and arseholes, literal "résidents des maisons de santé"

so there’s a benefit, the cost has been harder to get a grip on, but i think its that one becomes "normalised" to the level of poisoning that goes on, that is, values flow across into your life and one is prepared to put way too much time and effort into people who are so toxic and misguided  (or guided by their own bad lights)  it blows the mind

brad warner’s vlog ,  because he doesn’t censor has taken me unawares, but really its fitting that category now, he’s gone way backwards since moving in with his girlfriend

you can’t avoid dealing with the people on the vlog and they are the last you want to have as any sort of standard for "normal", especially since they are so  practised  as passing themselves off as an acceptably behaving type of "normal"

well they and brad are not

basically he has problems with narcissism and being intellectually lazy and shallow, well with his brad-nishijima-buddhism evangelizing its time for me to stop reading and keep away

the only discipline you can give to yourself and them is to stop reading like i have done with r|zen

what is the next step ?

there is no next step

it shows when you look back after it is taken

that is all

the real  good life

doesn’t look too bad, especially from the southern hemisphere winter

the competing demands

between straightening out the past

and the energy required for the future

what it takes to come into your own understanding

and be comfortable in it

to decimate the cultural onslaught of mis-information

the battle of towton

I       II

the paucity of decent writers and artists these days

because of alcohol and drugs

is astounding

we are overwhelmed by the incompetent sober

society is bogged in the sub-mediocre

because that’s all that’s left

she won the first battle you won the next

better than two losses

napoleon was a military genius

but his last word was

"josephine"

you can go to sleep

to refresh

to wake

and start all over again

people tell themselves a story

that they repeat to themselves

when you question it

they won’t answer directly

because that would destroy the story

that they repeat to themselves

something to be avoided at all costs

apparently

i’m publishing and writing at a great rate now, but when i was starting i took the trouble and it was quite a bit of trouble to learn the "engine" of web publishing, html, its been a bit of rocky road, but i have something that works and is facile and it gives me a huge freedom, i outlast just about anybody, the only cost is my own labour and time and things are presented the way i want them, uncensored

all conventional publishing censors and you pay for this interference to boot

what if "practice"  (ed. buddhist)  is a form of "social control" that makes you accept dogma unquestioningly ?

i don’t think frozen milk cuts the ice, freezing loses something

i slouch everywhere, not the greatest posture for the back

i think you are expecting things to be too difficult, not relaxed enough, but to find that relaxation you have to go outside buddhism into literature and art

brad, you are always going to be a fish out of water because you are too "artistic" for "buddhism"

religions are actually quite anti the artistic thought mode, though they don’t object when artistic works show them in a good light, usually paid for by them  (michelangelo made a lot of money out of his church commisions and on his death was discovered to have hoarded a huge wealth)

“ some years ago after a four day visit to a noted theravada meditation center in northern california, i wrote a slightly critical piece about my visit on amazon

apparently, the monks there read my essay and were extremely displeased

i know this because when i applied for another visit, one of the head monks brought up my amazon post, and told me i wasn’t welcome to visit for at least a year

i wrote a letter of appeal to the ajahn, who wrote me back that he had actually taken a vote of the entire brave hills sangha, and that they had all voted i was persona non grata

the ajahn added that there was "no possibility" of my ever becoming a monk

i'm not sure what i wrote that so ticked my sangha brothers off so much

as i recall, i’d only given my opinion that i found the place rather glum, and wondered about what living without underwear would be like

if those are the three gems, they can have them ”

"i’m not sure what i wrote that so ticked my sangha brothers off so much"

my  reply

you hit the nail on the head

what i would have to say from experience is that "monastic populations" are "downsized intellectually" and there’s all sorts of hidden agendas floating around, sometimes hidden very effectively, just because they are "mainstream" religions doesn’t mean they are not "cults"

“ the tenth precept  —  don’t slander the buddha, dharma, and sangha ”

buddha is a soap opera character, dharma is toxic bullshit and sangha are stupid not-quite-right-in-the-head morons

now that’s not slander is it ?

when i read how other poets write i am struck that i do it a bit different

no real attempt at construction, its more what turns up on the doorstep, sometimes needing a prod or two to make a better "shape"

but basically its what turns up, i just have to remember to write it down, or it goes, lost forever and i have a few, or more than a few of those

so i can actually write lots in very short periods which can be a bit traumatic, quite mentally and phsyically demanding

of course, one doesn’t have to write at all and i think about that occasionally

maybe those that "just turn up" are a quick unseen birth, there are some that birth with more diffculty and slowly

sometimes

i’m not that happy with what i write

then

the next day

i look again

and see i did better than i thought, little involutions of sense and meaning that worked

i think from a poetic or literary view, you don’t want to get too hung up on national or even planetary borders

the subject matter is truely universal, of interest even to the gods

the charles bukowski  cultists

use him as a frame

to hang their pathetic lives and intellects on

roll roll the thunder

flash flash the lightning

something going on and

wot?

no rain ?

well the rain came eventually

buckets as it happened

seriously disturbed people disturb me

their reasoning processes are alien and not really understood

and can lead in strange and dangerous directions

which need management

one feels threatened basically

the worst of human behavior can come out

never knowing which way the knife can be turned

basically

only you care about yourself enough

to get something right on your own terms

only you care about yourself enough

to get something right

on your own terms

only you care about yourself enough

to get something right

the university liberal arts system has collapsed

at least to sense and sanity

i wonder how much longer it can persist

young lives set on a wrong road that has to be walked back from decades later

wait

that’s education generally

behind a glass wall

you can see but not touch

because if you do touch, you won’t like what you feel

jason  writes

things with cat are going pretty well, the problem is that we’re getting in a vicious circle of entertainment, watching movies and playing uno, and we’re not doing so much art ,  in sort of a lull with the art

my  reply

“ a vicious circle of entertainment ”

its movies that do the damage because they fill the brain full of junk and watching them is only half the problem, you then have to unwind or unclutter the brain from them which takes years

cat has talent, you should be making the most of it otherwise in later years you will look back with regret

just "produce" and messy as that is it will come right

you don’t know how unusual it is to come across some-one like catarina, like stumbling on a diamond in the rubbish, it will go if you’re not careful and you will never find another like it again

lymph node exercises don’t cause the joint and muscle problems weight bearing exercises do

in inverness they talk about the lochness monster

no-one talks about the minnows in the river

which are at least

real

love is not an absolute

hard to understand since

it seems so

i shot two wallabies the other night

i put the skinned carcasses out on the lawn for the cats

its been cold and wet since

a smorgasboard for the cats

since there are no flies

the problem with madness is there is some essential core of mis-information

you cannot touch it

entering something

we leave it later

perhaps wiser

perhaps not

untangled threads sprout at any point in our lives

there is no wisdom to living

the toxic  lead-up  to the meiji era

my great-grandfather died of a wound or wounds from the last day of the evacuation of gallipoli

either a shell or sniper bullet, i wasn’t sure which

he wouldn’t have had the faintest conception of his great grandchild having such a concern

i think elizabeth’s lips being red is part of the symbolism of the poem, but a nice version, makes the poem quite  listenable

more  denis glover

an interesting  biography , too able in a way to be a really good poet

apophenia

pareidolia’s twin

that merciless pair

leading us through reality

web missionaries

of any cause

pumping bullshit

into the vacuity

happy birthday

times fly

on wings that are not quite the same 

getting older

pareidolia

so often we pervice an untrue shape

to reality

what is the dream-time ?

its a type of fugue space

to do with the australian landscape

more than magical realism

getting out can be diffcult

but generally there is a signpost

the aboriginal dream time

not restricted to aborigines

but open to anyone

willing to go there

stupid europeans put up fences

where there are none

after a while

you learn

nothing matches what you want of it

you have to provide the difference

of

competence

ceasing

coming back

unceasing

going away

again

only to return

some-where-else

you have a degree in "self-justification" ?

you have a degree in "rationalization" ?

i’ve never come across "japanese bench" but presume that’s similar to "seiza" which when i sat i used to use

now i just walk round, sit in a chair or lie in bed for maybe two hours a day which is what it really takes imo

to write a book

life and death

love

easy

to make it believable

not so easy

intensity

full lights

half lights

no light

moonlight

sunlight

daylight

any light is welcome

intensity

full lights

half lights

no light

“ The Buddha was already enlightened

He manifested enlightenment again in order to teach others how ”

its all a con, all you are doing is advertising you have been sucked into the "borg" and now, having been taken over you are attempting the "mind control" of others, like any good "memebot"

the parable of the tenants killing the landowner’s son is an echo of the murder of the "rightful" heir to the persian empire by the man who became darius the first and his cronies

teachers and being "taught" is just a con game

the buddhist precept about "sharing the dharma" in christianity is called "missionizing"

precepts

intrusive advice with an ulterior motive

precepts are made to be broken

and they are

and how

and the return

the flux of leaving and returning

just like anything else really

the holy are uncrowned

in the beginning and the end

it might as well be the end as the beginning

they are not well separated

each moment of occupation reverts to what is outside of it

a cascade of words

pouring from my brain

i’m struggling to remember them

like holding an eel really

they slip from your grasp

its just the beginning

it might as well be the end

in the beginning

and end

 who can say ?

its just the beginning

it might as well be the end

in the beginning

and end

 who knows ?

i’m not trying to educate you

or anything

or anything

or anything

normalize mental-illness

it will break you

even if its subtle

women and love

the maelstrom they seek

that spits them out

used

fragility

phasing in and out of existance

dreams are real

or so it seems

what a journey

to a past that never existed

nor could have

the ways had parted

and never joined again

you can be too long on land

you need to fly

occasionally

the past doesn’t re-invent

it wells up like a stream

showing the best part

of what is retained

idylls of dreams

aeon landscapes

where we wander forever

forever

idylls of dreams

aeon landscapes

what we cannot get

forever

dreamscapes

life lacks

compared

the fact of life

the end of memory

a most unsatisfactory state of affairs

no way around it

you can be too conscious of your audience when you write

their attitudes, aspirations, dreams, prohibitions

the circus and conflicts

of

survival

and

not

the crazy world of worlds

more than one

makes you cry

yet it is so

tolkien, lewis, rowling

a triumvirate

of the addled

narnia

middle earth

the wizarding world

inane fantasy lands

tableaux

a damaged woman

the last to admit it

is a damaged woman

a damaged woman

the last to admit it

a damaged woman

some people make a skill of stupidity

soprano anthony way  sings  suo gan

at least genpo (pants down merzel) had a reason for being in zen, its the upright stupids volunteering their lives into vacuity that make one scratch one’s head

man, these buddhist precepts are some "holier than thou" shit

disgusting crazy hubris if you ask me

no wonder you don’t

we think we live in the same world

but we don’t

each world is quite separate and distinct

similarity is a coincidence

once you realise this

life makes a lot more sense

you are prone to projecting where you lack experience and have a poor intuitive "feel" for ?

something that has bitter fruit for sure

you must spend your life going from self-inflicted disaster to self-inflicted disaster, just missing a bit of common sense

we burn the days

the days burn by themselves

burn the days

the days burn themselves

though not in the same way

depending on your age, personal health and family health history, the restricted posture of zazen/seated meditation can be a problem, especially if you spend much of the day at a desk

full lotus is the worst of any world

"don’t talk freely about others"

yeah that’s well put, so much gets back that we don’t anticipate

when you are dealing with the mistakes of others, you are forcibly, though usually unintentionally involved with the repair, which, as the repair is paramount, assistance wants to be as smooth (not quite invisible, but close) as possible

over-visibility is always a hazard and in many areas of life

visibility is very consuming and has an extremely high ongoing maintenance cost

its like talking to the devil

what sense are you going to get from him ?

he only means you harm

if you understood what i said

you’d hang me

so i don’t speak directly anymore

but in allusions

don’t blame me

a million miles of nowhere

the inane stupid

follow the path

they call it "awakening"

or enlightenment

when its just

a big hole

of vacuity

what is life about ?

the fragmented fools

grasp this question as meaningful

its not

ewk

with his scriptural zen

the right zen masters

saying the right thing

he doesn’t even agree or disagree

becuase it was nonsense

in the first place

the stupid religious

tangled in meaning

answers abound

ask them what the question is

silence

the sink holes of inconvenience

they will take whatever you can put into them

better be sure you get

a

return

a step in the wrong direction

is best stopped

before taking the step

you have to be away from something to think straight about it

and it can take quite a time

looking back over the difficult things

disheartening

my life

a little well of meaning

in a nonsense universe

if you open something up

be prepared to close it down

if you open something up

be prepared to close it off

life is a sea of ambiguity, if you take fixed views, you will drown

when those around you want to stab you

in the back

be careful not to shoot yourself in the foot

when you are surrounded by those who want to stab you in the back

be careful not to shoot yourself in the foot

the dream

when you find it

and get there

can be a bit gritty

some psychiatric medications are really toxic, witness jordan peterson almost being killed by benzos, how he didn’t know about the problems with them, i don’t know

the dream world

of somewhere else

where we are

and not

the dream world

somewhere else

of where we are

and are not

escape

our lives

our bodies

our age

our insufficiencies

our sufficiencies

where would we go

and to what ?

an everlasting dream

that can never be

all i can suggest is give some space to what i am saying, it comes from hard earned experience over many years

effectively i publish myself, like i have a subreddit and web pages

the readership is small, but that’s all i need

defeatism is not a good mental space

you can’t win a war with your hands tied behind your back, especially when you enemy gets to do that to you

you can’t win a war with your hands tied behind your back

the problem with r|zen is the way it is "ideologically censored"

it didn’t used to be that way and was way more fun, now its just stupid deadheads masturbating

i stopped posting because the mods delete all my best OP’s which is actually a very subtle way of banning

you can’t win a war with your hands tied behind your back, especially when you enemy gets to do that to you

i used to think the mods were stupid, but they’re not, just malevolent arseholes with some sophistication, r|zen is all about mental health problems "dr. tarr and professor fether"

how can the brain shape itself ?

it can’t

can the eye see what is too fast for it ?

it can

we stand suspended

in the moment of it

my reply to some dofus claiming "zen" has a secret that he of course, is privy to

there is no secret

its as wide as the sky

pretenders abound

 you wouldn’t be one ?

stasis

plum blossom

in a glass jar

english literature teachers and professors

can’t read

can’t

write

can’t think

and teach younger generations to be likewise, while calling this "educated"

pushing incompetence through the shoehorn of stupidity

damaged for life and damaging everyone else around them

the universe does not make its bed in nonsense, but meaning

the universe does not make its bed in nonsense, but meaning

religion breaks the bed and inserts a dunny

philosophy takes it for firewood

and people toss the decorative jewels lining it away every day

a good  explanation  of the global workspace theory of conciousness

its a brain process, but what is the particular characteristic of it ?

maybe "meaning" reaches a certain weight or density ?

when i get tired

i start to imagine

i’ve done things

i haven’t done

with a search engine

and going to work on the results

you can find the needle in the haystack

the brain has only  so much energy

the fools with their wives, children, business affairs

think they can understand infinity in their spare time

substituting the rituals and text of religion

or voynich of any sort for that matter

for real thought and work

thinking they have "got it"

these stupid arseholes will try to grind you down if you say any different

lymph moving exercises are i feel the best approach to exercise, they don’t damage the joints or tear ligaments like just about everything else

writing runs out of steam

and shows

by its absence