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 fascinating thing about philosophy is the ratio of time you can put into studying a philosopher compared to the time he put into it in the first place is 10 or 100 to one

another sobering fact is the lack of a common background against which any one philosophy can be assumed to be a particularization of

also there are intrinsic problems trying to understanding one philosopher versus another because of the intentional conflict of words, let’s not get into the problems of translation

i think its a big mistake to study philosophy in general or academically, the only way it works in my opinion is to be a true philosopher yourself, that is follow your interests in sorting ideas out so you don’t run into the destructive problem of at worst conflicting and at best unsynchronous vocabularies

the redefinition of words away from "common use" is in fact schizophrenic, from that point of view, philosophy is, in part, a mental illness, however this is not entirely negative but a necessity to cross boundaries

trying to encompass the world

in all its particulars

is

a

hopeless

business

the demented run to the defence of the demented

a farce

like

no

other

he’s a poet

or not

doesn’t

fit

any

pigeon hole

“ The research , using a dataset of more than 36,000 adults, revealed that going from one to two drinks a day was linked with changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years.  Heavier drinking was associated with an even greater toll ”

study

moderate and more than moderate social drinking is not benign, post 50 you see the damage emerging

a danger category is heavy drinking perimenopausal women, the hormones go and you see the wreck for what it is

dogen alternates in and out of schizophrenia, no wonder zen is so full of insanity !

heaven is unsatisfactory

too tangible and unbelievable

"nguthuru" is better

a ghost or shadow world

as befits the fleeting resurrection of the dead

in the memories of the living

ed.  “ nguthuru  in kabi, ngul in wakka, was the regular word for the shadow of any object.  it came to be specialised as the name for a ghost or phantom . there was no well-defined idea about future existence, but there was a belief that the dead became nguthuru, or that the nguthuru of the living survived death, and frequented the treetops

they were regarded as being sufficiently substantial to be able to answer a cooey addressed to them ”

whenever i see a tidy desk i  wonder if they are too organised to think clearly

blood type A is a   causal factor  in severe covid

“ nevertheless, it is more likely that A, B, or the combination of A and B is associated with a higher risk for hospitalization

our findings confirm previous reports of the ABO blood group system being an important risk factor for a severe covid-19 infection

for example, the proportion of group A is higher in covid-19 positive individuals than in controls, and group A has been associated with higher mortality

all the evidence taken together suggests that blood group A is the more likely candidate for follow-up studies ”

you won’t see this in the media of course because of its adherence to "everything is enviroment and not genetic" ideology

hallmark

the power of female over male

well

its true

the irrationality of love

humans take these boundary shifts so seriously

however

there is no state outside it

only

malfunction

as for "disciples and the master", take another look at what happened to jesus

we are a tree planted in childhood

continued growth of the branches

is all we can be

obscurantist nonsense

part of the social fabric

today

some leavings

so slow

the years flash by

yet it occurs

huh, i have always been a bit anti-mask, but  reading this  has changed my mind, they would also be useful against the flu and cold viruses, they are in fact effective and we would all benefit with continued use beyond covid

we think there is something

but there is nothing

again and again

two worlds

our own interior

and the external "dealing" world

don’t meet

its not "all one"

at

all

“ choosing the path of the mystic over the path of the martyr ”

the path of "the mystic" is still martyrdom, just not as overt

not content with one vocabulary, you now induct another vocabulary when the first one was worse than useless

2 x useless still equals useless

i am afraid

“ And the use of your comment is  .  .  .   ? ”

let’s take salient as the polar opposite of useless

i think its salient to point out uselessness

trolls call trolls trolls, the inane of wit think they mean something

the following is a bit of a "too long, don’t read", but i have put a huge amount of work into researching so think there is something of value here and basically i have got it right as vindicated by the results and the vivity EDOF with micro/mini monovision in the non-dominant eye is the new optimum taking over from multi-focals

yesterday i had my one month check up after my second cataract operation, i think its another month before the eye settles enough and the cornea has recovered its clarity to see how things really fall, but its looking ok at the moment, the first operated eye’s results  (9 weeks later)  are astounding  (6/5) ,  in part because the eye is now fully "plano" with no astigmatism, i asked the surgeon about this and he said it was because the astigmatism was in the lens and not the cornea, so basically i’m probably seeing better out of this eye for a fair portion of the accommodative range than i have ever seen in my life

i am actually "glasses-less" now through a different mode than the customary multifocal lens, i have a new type of extended depth of vision  (EDOF ) lenses called the vivity in both eyes, with .65? diopters add  (mini/micro-monovision)  in the non-dominant eye which gives a bit of closer vision, i can read a fine printed paperback at 30cm, though i will use reading glasses if i am going to read more than a page or three as more comfortable

the advantage of this EDOF is less "dysphotopsia" being "non-diffractive" and its more robust in terms of its tolerance of the degenerating conditions of aging, most people if they reach 100 are low vision or legally blind, that’s what you are up against

i’m really a fan of one eye being done at a time, i think doing two eyes at once is only possible though the use of steroids, but in fact i dropped steroids early because it disorganises the recovery of the endothelial layer under the cornea, however i am taking quite high amounts of vitamin D which is a natural steroid

i also dropped the antibiotics early, on the second eye, only a day of them finished off with an eyewash of colloidal silver since i have found it very effective on the cats here when they get an eye infection and my eye has been free of infection since

also being male and male eyes tends to have the cornea flatten as they get older i opted for a bit less astigmatism correction than the surgeon wanted to do in the second eye, a step less, so we will have to see how this works out, i have -.5D cylinder "with the rule" ,  i hope that will drop to about -.3 as the eye settles more, but we will see, the surgeon wanted to go what would have ended up a bit into "against the rule"

this is less of an issue with women as the cornea flattens less with aging

one of the reasons i delayed so long getting the operation, to the point the impairment was in hindsight making my driving a bit unsafe, is that the risk of PCO is less as you get older, so its a bit of a waiting game with PCO, though the laser treatment for it is relatively, but not entirely riskless, don’t believe the patter you get from the "ophthalmological establishment" ,  any operation on the eye can have unforeseen complications

risk is the big point of one eye being done at a time, there is no certainty of a lack of complications with the outcome and in my case, i wasn’t one of these 20/20  (6/6) the next day and everything is forever wonderful, basically each eye has been low vision for at least a month where i needed the other eye still being good to do anything, especially drive

the first eye lens was quite dense and the surgeon told me there was a risk of the capsular bag being damaged as part of the removal process which then requires a vitrectomy and since the lens can no longer be placed in the capsular bag, has to be put in the sulcus which limits you to a monofocal replacement

fortunately the bag only took minor damage and could be used to hold the lens, but i did go into the operation realizing it might not go well

as a matter of interest i had almost immediate access to the operations being what they call here "self-funding" ,  so there’s a definite two tier health system, but the operations of course are extraordinarily good value for the cost which in fact was reasonable

the basic metrics are visual acuity and the prescription dimensions of sphere  (magnification) ,  astigmatism  (cylinder and angle) ,  understanding these goes a long long way to getting the most satisfactory result for you

i made clear under no circumstances was i ever going get lasik done after the very unsatisfactory results for a relative, sometimes they want to do lasik to "tweak" the lens replacement results, but its much better to use glasses

the surgeon made clear that i couldn’t necessarily expect to end up not needing to use glasses, but even with the newly operated eye not being fully recovered i am in that "fortunate" state due to the "bonanza-like" like results in the first eye

another thing to realise is that the operations done once are much lower risk than any later operations on the same eye, its not a trivial matter just to have the lens replaced if you don’t like the results

oh well that’s a lot of writing, but i have intensely researched the matter for at least six months and all in all its been an interesting experience, i knew what lens i wanted before going into the surgeon’s office and it has proved to be the right choice, the surgeon also agreed with it, but that’s a tricky area, balancing what you know against the surgeon’s views

the surgery is half art, half science and the choice of surgeon is important, you have to ask around

none of the above is advice, simply a recounting of my experience and the views formed, while i am very happy with the vivity, its performance in very low light conditions is not as good as a monofocal and this may be an issue with some, i have always had good night vision and its not been a problem, though i do notice a full moon is just a touch off in brightness compared to what i am used to and i miss that, the world lit in that in that intense unearthly way

western europeans, particularly the english are descended to a surprising extent from steppe people in the ukraine as per the latest genetic research, there is some sort of identification that that may lead to a surprising degree of western european involvement

a comment i made to brad warner on his "hardcore zen blog"

why do you "volunteer" all your time away for essentially no or very limited financial return ?

a commenter here blew my mind, i offered to make a donation of $80 to you for him making a $20 donation, he talks a lot of flowery nonsense but at the bottom i felt he didn’t want to give you any money on principle, that is, he didn’t want you to get the extra $80 despite his constant "over the top" praise to you  (which he views as his "worthy payment") ,  so over the top its sickening

when i think about it, the nature of this blog is all the commenters don’t really agree with you closely enough to be financially rewarding, myself included, that really you have collected an oddball group of people that finds you closer to the way they think than any other "zen", but still too far away to be significantly "financially supportive"

i’m not unsympathetic, this question of volunteering one’s time away that is "hurtful" to oneself financially is an interesting one

notions of "enlightenment" like mother teresa being "holy" are nonsense, zen is not different from any other religions is being a bunch of crazy half or third truths, i think you have a feeling this is so, but its unexamined

some women

don’t give a shit

about anything

except being a "queen bee"

those ones

are really crazy

some women

really don’t give a shit

about anything

except being a "queen bee"

those ones

are really crazy

the pizer mRNA covid vaccine may induce an  autoimmune response  in the liver, which, imo, may not be a bad thing, especially in the older/elder, it may delete senescent cells

just a far fetched  (or not !)  hypothesis

jesus, muhammad, buddha and moses are soap opera characters in very old long running soap operas

just goes to show solomon was right, there’s nothing new under the sun

buddha is only a story, buddhism is a sitcom

“  May I ask under which  (ed. zen)  master you practiced ? ”

there’s no masters and i never was stupid enough to give any credence to notions of "practice", but in terms of what i think you are asking i spent a while with kwan um zen, john loori’s mt. tremper group, a local zen group and toni packer’s "springwater" group, also namgyal rinpoche’s tibetan buddhist group

i spent my young life in episcopal/anglican boarding schools which is a reality bender, water off a ducks back for most, but not me i think

when people lie by omission

well everyone does and i do it myself

but experience has taught me

its the worst form of lying

and the most destructive

yet the most little

regarded

from distress

comes a glimmer of light

can it work any other way ?

unfortunately not

or at least

it doesn’t seem to

the lesson of napoleon

is no matter how able you are

you will expand into areas of inability

not the least being

the people you delegate to

are

not

you

it still bugs me i could live the remainder of my days without ever knowing whether i have had covid or not

“  We have shown that vitamin D3 appears to stimulate the type I interferon signalling system in the body – a key part of the immune system that provides a first line of defence against bacteria and viruses

Thus, a  healthy vitamin D3  status may help prevent viruses and bacteria from gaining a foothold in the body ”

doctors often prescribe D2 which does not have the same beneficial effect so that would confound any studies on vitamin D and covid

because conventional medicine views "supplements" as "bad" and the only answer was more and more vaccines closely spaced so a disease that could have been simply endemic from when the first mRNA vaccines were available became a public health control nightmare because supplements were excluded

vitamin D, MK7-K2, germanium, zinc, copper, B6, B-12, vitamin A, taurine and selenomethionine if you are in a selenium deficient area

interestingly, the reason why china is such a "viral factory" is because of its large swaths of selenium deficient geology

its obvious that the actors in larry david’s "Curb Your Enthusiasm" are not the usual "pretty", male or female and i wondered why

well they do improv from a broad script outline, in other words they are a cross section of actors with brains

yes, that’s what the real intelligent world looks like

possums

gutting at 2am

stomachs and brains

the next day

aging

when you are proud of yourself

for knowing

what

techno  is

“ Formless identity to blend with nature ”

wow, totally meaningless, how did you come up with that ?

on the peripheries

his actions say

he does not wish the contestants well

the beauty of forbearance

is there is no morality involved

just fatigue

vegetarianism

the wall of limitation

cognition

can’t be maintained

on that diet

tension

is a dimension

that war

tests

expands

and consumes

vegetarianism is a device to reduce the sex drive of monks in monasteries

“ what is the Zen of smoking weed ? ”

zen needs the brain working well, weed damages the brain

if you need help with sleep, try half a level teaspoon of taurine twice a day

oddly enough i have been looking at some "late" nietzsche where he is really getting into having "no pity" as the right way to go and there’s something to it, otherwise you just become a sucker for every bad cause going

“ what’s meant for you will happen for you in a way you could never expect ”

on the facebook page of a semi-local young woman  (18)  now facing murder charges along with three men  (25, 28, 32)  for a murder committed three kilometers from here as the crow flies (very rural) ,  probably after the victims (59) guns, the killing was likely unintentional but they hit him too hard in the head

one of the men had been on a serious charge in court before for breaking a man’s legs but found not guilty by a jury, also had a modus operandi of punching people in the head

there has been a huge problem with burglary locally, it will be good to have these people out of circulation for a while

there’s a definite aggressive edge in the tone of the facebook page, more than the high level of entitlement you often get with young women and some sort of alcohol problem and perhaps more than alcohol, stimulants ?

thanx to the police for doing a thorough job

you have to take each philosopher on his merits

some have more merit than others

they’re a fractious bunch

looking for resolution

they don’t find resolution

because

they

are

looking

for

what

cannot

be

found

brad warner says "I take the vows seriously"

my  reply

as a writer you know "vows" are just "writing" and totally absurd, who are their conformance reported to  ?

some-one else replies

I can say the same about the vows I made when I married my wife, but I still take them seriously.  Just words but they mean something not only for her but for myself as well

my  reply

you can’t say the same about your marriage vows can you ?  there’s an underlying sense to them, they mean something, not just in opinion but fact

religious vows being founded on total fiction must necessarily be fantasy

“ This is one of your poems I told you I enjoyed

"illness can place people in

strangeness

you may not recognize the world

when and if you come back"

parts of me feel forever lost to psychological trauma ”

my  reply

the world is a larger than the trauma, there’s a basic discovery of this "largeness" that permanently alters one’s perspective

“  How did this largeness appear/felt to you ? ”

that’s for you to work out, its a process of a lifetime’s working out, though in essence a lot of my poetry/ homilies/grooks are in the area of this concern

endless the circles of the apologists

yet the same

they return each time

to

justifying nonsense

they have

no control

over

neville chamerlain was  unfairly treated  by history and specifically winston churchill

fatma said  sings  "aatini al naya wa ghanni"

there’s two themes to the covid vaccine i have picked up so far, the first is the benefit to a long spacing between vaccines/boosters and the second comes from the observations that athletically fit young men are disproportionally at risk for myocarditis from the vaccine which i take to relate to them having some degree of hidden heart stress, so it really pays to take it physically easy for a while after the vaccine, certainly in the weeks following

one of the interesting "side effects" of cataract operations is i understand the vulnerability of the eye to puncture wounds better and have brought some wrap around protection glasses for wearing with eye hazardous tool use, i never had a concept of "eye hazard" before

i think why plato’s "world" of forms doesn’t go anywhere is that it is recursive, it is itself a "form"

despite claims to the contrary, nietzsche’s "anti-christ" book is an obvious influence on nazi doctrine, though the doctrine is a distortion, the influence cannot be said not to be there

interestingly the mormons and seventh day adventists owe a lot to milton, since "god" is a story or rather a character in a story, taking milton’s "paradise lost" as literally true and making a religion out of it is simply an extension of the original mistake

theological doctrines are a better fit into the world of appearances than harder underlying truths about reality, people can’t cope with the necessary recursion of a self-inquiry and much prefer a rule based approach to life that leaves one free to move forward on well worn and laid tracks and this is part of the appeal of religions

in the distressed baby’s cries

can be heard our too close approach to death

the dreams of men

supercompetence

abilities spanning the disparate

cynosure of the female eye

that stands above the crowd

aging

erodes

these illusions

mainland china has become a police state dictatorship, no wonder taiwan doesn’t want any part of that

to look at the world

as occurring

beyond your control

is the beginning

of sanity

a bridge of words

A to B to Z

gets there

a bridge of words

A to B to Z

get there

sometimes

the level of self-deceit and stupidity

is too much

leave

weasel words

they are full of deceit

don’t expect any different

they want to pick

your bones

of flesh

so this wine salesman calls me

i tell him i’m a teetotaller

he doesn’t know what a teetotaller is

he keeps trying to sell me wine

i tell him to tell his co-workers

he’s trying to sell wine to a teetotaller

and give them a good laugh

he still doesn’t know what a teetotaller is

then i say, you’re educated but don’t know what a teetotaller is ?

he now hangs up with

“ i’m happy to call you again ”

rarely have i had such good value from wine

pity

nietzsche’s nemesis

he was in need of it

yet gave it

to a horse

for breakfast

slow cooked overnight

possum stomach with its own fat times two

lungs

one heart

not bad

time redeemable

there

shelved next to

irredeemable

post the cataract operations

new lenses

the surprise

of the whiteness

of the moon

“ These hypnagogic exercises that you do, how do they work ? ”

they are not exercises, they occur unpredictably

i’ve not had anything like that for a while

i never force anything, homilies, poems, writing, they turn up when they turn up and the emphasis is to write then down before i can forget which is a real hazard

somethings burn

in threes

and fours

that’s what it takes

to make us leave

subtle and funny, hugh laurie and stephen fry in their  hedge sketch

noam chompsky’s view is our use of words comes before communication, that is language is a cognitive mode and communication was a bonus use, but the reasoning ability that comes with language was its primary origin from the viewpoint of evolutionary advantage

"and there is no trace of the sinister aspect of the original  tale"  (ed.  maxfield parrish’s "pied piper of hamelin")

on the  far left  of the painting they appear to be looking at a cavern in the ground preparatory to going down into it

i think he’s showing the whole story, maybe its even allegorical with himself as the provider of visual fantasies that can be problematic ?

interestingly the historical origin of the story relates to an  emigration event  from the actual town of hamelin

out of a dream

a road appeared

washed in moonlight

the stars as pebbles appeared

and wynken, blynken and nod

disappeared

the absurd word game

clichés of meaning

practice, awareness, awakening

realization

teacher

the sound of ricocheting

error

ed.  what the poem is saying is while you are arguing in terms of say "practice" being conformed to or not and having such and such a result, that the notion "of practice" etc. is flawed

the failure of the gallipoli campaign is a big deal in australia and new zealand, this  documentary  gives good insight into the overall picture

its interesting that a very flawed assumption by the british, that the turks would be a pushover underlay the whole business, the reality was the opposite, competent german leadership, war supplies, dardanelle fortifications and motivated local troops made for a very formidable enemy

if it had been successful, it would have changed the course of the war and history, i think the potential high  gain blinded churchill to its impossibility

basically the turks had "defence in depth" ,  even if the allies had escaped the beach heads, they would have encountered increasing resistance the further they made it inland, the same problem the germans had against the soviets in  WW2

the australian media is trying to make a greta thunberg out of grace tame

the problem is tame doesn’t have the brains of thunberg

its interesting to see them trying the old silk purse out of a sow’s ear trick, how long they will thrash about doing this is anybody’s guess, quite a while from past experience

the weakness of IQ tests is they capture ability only with certain types of reasoning and actually discriminate against other types of cognitive skills that are more meaningful, semantically dense and subtle which is which is why mensa people are often borderline schizophrenic

divergence

its like two banks of a river moving further apart

its always more work to bridge

it can apply to relationships, marriage anything really

there comes a point at which it takes just too much energy to bridge

or the degree of accommodation is too destructive personally

the interesting thing is one bank may stay where it is and the other may move, you may be the one that is moving

in a word

“ outgrow ”

as you get older

you realise

most people

can’t

change

at

all

“ dogen and buddhism in general, claim that love, marriage, and family are futile and ultimately the cause of suffering. so, knowing that, how can buddhist priests choose it ? ”

what does it mean to say love, marriage, and family are futile ?

it certainly doesn’t feel so to those involved and we all owe our existence to it

suffering in its many forms and definitions are an inescapable fact of life

a broader way of looking at celibacy is it is an estrangement from life at a fundamental level and that estrangement opens a window into the infinite that can be seen and stepped through

lacking that estrangement the married with kids are basically happy with their lot and cannot step through, but loiter about pretending in the various soap operas called religions

the dust is starting to settle on the science behind covid vaccination and its interesting and distressing how the public health advice is so out of sync with it

1.  myocarditis is a real risk with vaccines, and the  ratio is adverse  for children getting the vaccine, ie they should not be vaccinated as a part of a public program

2.  the interval between vaccines should be at least 3 months and in my view much longer, which is why i have at this point still only had one dose of pfizer, however i am of the opinion my taking 3000iu a day of blackmores vitamin D and 90 mcg of caruso’s MK7-K2, makes this safe for me, i have had exposure to the virus but never caught it or at least being able to tell i have it

3.  those really at life threatening risk from covid infection have significant co-morbidities

4.  vitamin D/K2 very significantly reduces symptoms

5.  since vaccines are now a poorer fit in the antibodies they produce to current vaccine strains, excessive vaccination  (booster   .   .  booster)  trains the immune systems in maladaptive ways

6.  there are people severely damaged by the vaccines, this may be significantly genetic

what can you say, our drugged blinkered society with its vaccine vaccine bleat is contemptible

i m not anti-vaccine, in fact i rather like my pfizer jab, it may have an anti-senescent effect and i was certainly right to bypass the astra-zeneca as dangerous, but there is a lack of finesse in public health advice and fiats

well, like anything else, you have to look out for yourself, going with the grain is not always the right way to go

soto priests were in effect required to marry as a consequence of the meiji restoration in a successful move to break their power regionally, the meiji restoration was in effect a centralist, nationalist political movement that religions had to "toe the line" to

celibacy is not black and white, even historically when you can find indications of homosexual zen masters in the records and can infer paedophilia in orphanages, however zen doesn’t make sense in any other context, "married with kids" is akin to protestant christianity, bland, lacking energy and understanding

“ kobun chino died in 2002 ”

he drowned in a swimming pool along with his daughter trying to save her when he couldn’t swim himself despite having had opportunities to learn

that’s really fucked up, but its love

incompetent love

koans are basically used to teach an erroneous philosophy/theology, not that all theologies aren’t erroneous, even philip kapleau said koan study is just to pass the time

you can only think there is anything to them if you have almost zero acquaintance with quality literature, napoleon has way better quotes than 90% of what passes for "wisdom" in zen

“ But that’s not why you read koans for.  You read them to break through your rigid mind and rigid assumptions ”

so what good is a broken mind ? ,  its a process of tearing down and rebuilding, koans so far from helping, inhibit it, they are not simply a deflection, but a misdirection

they are an attempt to create a theological system, read the record of joshu, there is just deconstruction and reconstruction, no theology

so much of life

dealing with the obfuscation of relatively simple ideas

well

i’m unobfuscating

“ uncountable ”

is big

so big

its not entirely contained

by the word

uncountable

for most of my life

i have been carrying an unopened book around with me

when i opened it

i discovered

it goes on forever

its called

“ understanding life ”

from when i was a child

i have been carrying an unopened book around with me

when i opened it

i discovered

it goes on forever

its called

“ understanding life ”

i’ve been looking for what seems like forever but i can’t find a correct theology

does that mean there is none or its just i haven’t found it ?

i favour the former

"love is infinity for poodles" quote by louis-ferdinand céline (famous author and notoriously a sometime nazi sympathizer)

you must try

the voice said, to become colder

i understood at once

it is like the bodies of gods  :   cast in bronze

braced in stone.  only something heartless

could bear the full weight

the above poem “the world loved by moonlight” by jane hirshfield  ,  (she has been a zen nun)

her comment on the poem

its source was a sentence written by anton chekhov in a letter to a young writer: "if you want to move your reader, write more dispassionately”

the advice is chilling, true, and rich, i think, and leads in many different directions of thought

this poem follows one of those directions   :   that if one were to imagine a world in which there were mythic, conscious deities, then those beings would have to be very cold, very detached, in order to bear seeing what they must see in the course of any given day

so much suffering, so much foolishness, so much anger

to be able to watch that at all   -   and even more, to play some active role in its continuance   -   would demand total heartlessness

its the same lack of pity that virgil demands of dante as they tour the regions of hell

pity, the ghost-guide tells the poet, is forbidden

it is true for the contemporary writer as well, and for any seeker after truth

a certain detachment is needed to look the fullness of life eye to eye; yet that very detachment is what permits the viewer to feel things fully, to know them without blinking ”

i’m not saying all "koans" are all rubbish, but most are, there’s one or two that actually have something to them but the rest are "misinformation" ,  zen is a quagmire of stupidity

they actually are socratic teaching device for a certain theology, but the theology is wrong, koans are not simply wrong, but "evil" in that sense, so if my reaction seems strong, that’s why

the bottom line with zen is very few of the people involved understand anything about zen at all and a lot of them are running whatever organization

the advantages of being involved in "real life zen" are getting some meditation done and a context in which to develop social and people skills

i always found "interviews" a total waste of time even with a "teacher" i respected, they get too much, from too many people in too many different directions, its just a mess

in the end

explanations are inadequate

in terms of what ?

the need for explanations

in the end

explanations are inadequate

in terms of what ?

explanations

a daddy long legs and its shadow

walking on the wall

would my shadow

stuck as close

god had a bad dream

when he woke up he discovered he had created the creatures

they started pestering him

so he made them blind to him

they could still work out where he was so he made hubris

that solved all problems though he would have bad dreams again

let’s not get into milton and lucifer

worlds circle each star

there are a lot of stars

there are even more worlds

how many are fruitful ?

they take a fundamental truth and distort it

gurus

people listen to a point

then they don’t listen

closing the gate

that would have benefited them

is it not the answer that is at fault, but the question that is at fault ?

“ how does this active inference engine that learns from input data, include its own non-existence ? ”

the model at the highest level includes itself, so naturally the negation exists

“ . . . introducing endless entertainment that causes oversaturation of the DMN with chatter that cannot disengage properly during task-related activity ”

i don’t think "entertainment" targets the default mode network  (DMN)  specifically, though of course it has a huge impact there, and its not a bad guy per se since some entertainment can be illuminating, but as you suggest there is quite a bit of this "toxic" sort around which taken too literally has very negative effect on lives

“  How is energy/matter a complex adaptive system ?

Do you think it is philosophically defensible to claim the process of defiling these complex adaptive systems is evil or bad ”

i think energy/matter meets the criteria of  "the free energy principle" in adapting to continue its existence, it is also in the highest level of abstraction a model which also includes its continued failure to exist, of course we only see the "continuing to exist" mode

if you are going to worry about "defiling" then you are moving down a level of abstraction into only assuming  "the continuing to exist mode"

however its the highest level of abstraction that is most interesting which includes the partial failure of systems as this is the most revealing

wow, you know its a different world when the plaintiffs include a computer generated  re-enactment  as part of their suit for the wrongful death of halyna hutchins accidently shot by alec baldwin

there is an interesting "blur" between real life and the fantasy of the film here

the reality of medical problems

there’s just you

and you

and you

and the problem

and the problem

and the problem

women

make-up

jewellery

clothes

the flower

must

advertise

itself

the rubik cube with words

they don’t like it

when outclassed

freeloaders

pay with words

then complain

when the collection box

is passed around

the talkers talk

dollars clinging tightly to their wallets

even

the change

clings

fine words

apparently

are a

gaudy

substitute

a slight shift

not seeming much

can cross

from

one

side

of

the

universe

to

the

other

religion

clones following an illusion

which

follows

them

two goes to one

and one goes to two

so the monologue goes

the conventional back and forth

the sea sweeping up the beach

says is mistaken

its a good idea to make sure that sort of feeling  (ed. affection , love)  is reciprocated before declaring it, otherwise you are going to make the object of the declaration feel very uncomfortable

anybody can define some solipsist version of a religion for themselves, what they are trying to do is jump on the authority bandwagon the religion has, but have different beliefs, doctrines etc. that suit the taste of the "pretender" more

the utility of the mad

is they are "out of bounds"

this is where the interest lies

normality doesn’t teach you anything

its too constrained

religions are inherently "organizational" ,  if you have your own idea what a particular religion is or should be, that’s just your idea and not what occurs in the real world, highly idiosyncratic re-definitions of a religion are diagnostic of schizophrenia

when some-one defines a word or idea too far away from what is commonly understood by it, you really are looking at a degree of schizophrenia

there is no unitary understanding, only fragments

“ isn’t that a unitary understanding ? ”

the fact of fragments is not unitary, but opposed to it

how we get upset by the nonsense of others

the moon leaves the sky every day

take a leaf out of its book

we come back to where we’ve been before

again and again and again

then we don’t come back

when an evangelical christian tells you  “ you need to accept jesus as your lord to be "saved" ” ,  they are claiming a fictional universe in which being saved is rewarded, is real

tell you what, you get to the afterlife and beria and stalin would be in heaven and st. francis and st. catherine would be in hell

that’s the way bureaucracy works

unless you write "down" for entertainment, a writer’s only audience is other writers or those with that sort of mindset which is why there is normally zero money in it, you are writing for the audience best equipped to steal your ideas

entertainment is actually the great leveller

“ Hey, quick question.  I’ve been doing Meditation for past month where I sit and count my out breaths from 1-10 and then restart.  20 minutes on average.  Is that the legit DOGEN way of zazen ?  Or should I literally just sit and not even count my breaths . The problem with what I am doing is I feel like I am using brain power/energy/effort to do zazen.  How do I do legit zazen dogen style ”

my experience is that "counting the breath" is toxic and it can literally "mess the brain up" though this might seem like an extravagant claim

the other side it is "instructionless", however if there was an instruction ,  its just to sit and observe the flow of thought which over a while you will notice has certain patterns that lead one to behave in "typical ways" which is the beginning of "self-awareness"

i always sat kneeling with the zafu on its edge under the bum or seiza ,  you don't want to mess your hips or knees us with lotus, full or half, and actually now, i just sit in a chair in the evening or walk around

meditation can "ingrain" one into "malfunction", it always needs to be balanced by extensive quality reading across a wide range of approaches and views, that is, you need something to work on, rather like having puzzles to solve

meditation should not be unpleasant and i have noticed, a great help for those with substance addiction

we disagree

“ no we don’t ”

what ?

ed.  i get these people who clearly disagree with me and when i reply that i disagree, then proceed to tell me that we really agree, i guess at least they are being consistent to my call on them disagreeing with me

good poem , helps to have had a cataract operation to appreciate it

i think i agree with this guy, there is a politicization of "state sponsored medical advice" that is not tolerant of rough edges, grey areas or complexity and the "media" are complete toads in their one sided promotion of it

“ This is my personal experience with Ivermectin

I got Delta last year and was put on antibiotics and prednisone but symptoms  (vise-like pressure around my heart and couldn’t breathe)  were so severe I was about to go to the  ER

Thankfully, my doctor prescribed Ivermectin and within 24 hours of the first dose, my symptoms were reduced to a tolerable level

Did Ivermectin magically make symptoms disappear ?

No

But Ivermectin DID help me avoid hospitalization when antibiotics and prednisone were not sufficient

I say follow the money

I hope there are consequences for making medical treatment political

Lives were at stake here ”

there is no unitary source of reality, there are fragments and some shine more than others, its that simple, what’s required is to assign the intrinsic weight rightly due and recognise them when they occur which the bustle of life mitigates against

contrary to religious claims there is very little control as to when they occur

there are semantic correlates that once introduced to, you pursue through life

its a wide world, step outside the box you have constructed for yourself

there is no unitary source of reality, there are fragments and some shine more than others, its that simple, what’s required is to assign the intrinsic weight rightly due and recognise them when they occur which the bustle of life mitigates against

contrary to religious claims there is very little control as to when they occur

there are semantic correlates that once introduced to, you pursue through life

what you write is a mess, its constrained by ideas like dharma and an implicit assumption of the validity of buddhism

its a wide world, step outside the box you have constructed for yourself

zen master baizhang huaihai was asked by huángbò xīyùn

when i want to share the teachings others have given us, how should i teach them ?

master baizhang huaihai made no reply

huángbò xīyùn further asked

how can i teach the sons and grandsons of the laypeople in the future

baizhang huaihai replied "you are a real person"

my comment

baizhang huaihai and huángbò xīyùn were celibate and likely lifelong monks, its a very different perspective, if you are asking what can be taught to "laypeople" its just too difficult, zen makes no sense outside celibacy which lies beyond the flux and paramount interests of family, let them pretend, you can’t do anything about it anyway, they have an almost complete monopoly on "continuity", no wonder baizhang huaihai didn’t reply

a commentary is a "story" about a "story" ,  paper can bear the weight of anything put upon it and it usually has to

interestingly i watched a youtube video where a scholar said that shintoism was originally developed by buddhist monks and was always mixed with buddhism in japan until the meiji restoration where it was separated from buddhism so it could be used for the ultranationalist politics that was emerging in japan, buddhism being too pacifist for that purpose

the signpost goes past

i’ve seen it before

its the same

the road looks straight

but

its

a

circle

“ how long is a kalpa ? ”

if you have to ask, you don’t know

ed.  i think the subtext of the reply is that the questioner doesn’t have enough background or familiarity with the context to make sense of any answer

i prefer zuimonki to the shobogenzo, its more "real", in fact a lot of the shobgenzo is deliberate obfuscation with loops and circles of negation and indirectness to make simple things look complex

what zuimonki is like is more the tsurezuregusa style, episodic observations here and there which is actually a more fundamental truth than theoretical syntheses like the shobogenzo

i find it interesting that zuimonki is avoided in a lot of western zen because you can’t attach a premium to the understandable

4-1

eihei dogen, giving a sermon, advised the monks

men of the way, don’t rest in fixed views

even if you have some understanding, you should continually examine and reflect; there must necessarily be something in error or lacking and the steps to a more profound understanding have no end

see ?  simple enough, but how many escape their investments in "schema" and enter meaning’s fluid stream ?

the talkers talk

that’s their level

most conflicts are best left unresolved imo, its actually when you attempt to resolve them that you run into trouble

not to say you pass up an opportunity to "shoot them between the eyes"

imagine a world in which women wearing make-up was socially unacceptable

then look at a woman with make-up and see how in fact it is a mask

writing is a reorganization of oneself

into the non-linear

categories

its interesting about hans küng, the catholic church in rejecting him also rejected an adaptive modernized future and literally sealed their fate and present decline, each new pope more senile than the last

i cannot for the life of me understand the awe in which james joyce’s "ulysses" is held or the endless commentary by the purblind it seems to inspire

i was thinking "encanto"' is missing something in the script, but actually, disney movies have always been like that, all the sugar chases out any imbuing salient depth, not a particulary hard "add" but excised for whatever reason, most likely the usual inability of entertainment industry executives to handle anything makes them think

some interesting  comments  on stalin by stephen kotkin

peter robinson is a superb interviewer btw, humble, empathetic, not the usual brazen "projectionist" that seems to be the norm these days, could teach the bbc a thing or two with all their "indoctrinated" "full of themselves" interviewers

vicarious existence

the fragments flicker

unsatisfactorily

the shattered glass of ourselves

heals

but the crack lines

remain

the wordy drivel

on the net

in books

in essays

entire institutions devoted to this

nonsense preferred to sense

all the salesmen of themselves

pushing this

this .

species.

brad  (ed. warner), i think you thinking you are a buddhist is an illusion, you don’t censor your vlog comments section whereas my experience of "true" buddhists and zennists, is they would censor, your attitude is much more one of a writer who understands the free expression of ideas is beneficial to himself

religions necessarily involve false beliefs that have to be sustained by censorship, if the belief is open to challenge, then you don’t have a religion, like i can completely destroy christianity and islam by challenging their beliefs jesus and muhammad are historical persons rather than fictional constructs, you can do the same for "buddha" as well

this lack of censorship marks you as a chimera, a non cultist and non religionist, yet caught espousing beliefs that require censorship to be sustained in the long term, in this world every man is a theologian which actually is a correct reflection of "reality" and certainly this comments section but doesn’t go anywhere which i think is your situation, its always puzzled me

brad warner replies

Interesting.  I never thought of religions as having to be sustained by censorship.  But I can see your point

my  reply

that observation comes with staying at various "religious" places as a "non-believer" and always being aware of a line i couldn’t cross in terms of what i said or i would have to leave, the one place i got kicked out of was john loori's monastery at mt. tremper because i was obviously unhappy with the theatrical absurdity of it all having already suffered that nonsense at church schools

now i think about it, i was kicked out of the local zen society which is where i started zen

in fact the only place i could speak relatively freely was the springwater center with toni packer even though being a breakaway from the rochester center you could still see the "heaviness" of that place come through

the degree of censorship is a primary characteristic and your approach on this places you much more in the springwater/krishnamurti camp rather than zen and buddhism per se

there is a contradiction between the "monotheism" of zen and polytheism of buddhism, zen is on the borderlands between christianity/islam and buddhism, and has a distinctly different belief system more aligned with western theology than buddhism

the crossroads are not two

but many

too many

entertainment has a universality

you would think poetry was more universal

but its not

its less

there is no substitute for one’s own creative expression, reading others doesn’t cut it

i think "woke" is doing a lot of damage to humanities educational reputation

economic basements have a way of coming through

queen bees

the "my hive" instinct

overwhelms them

past the point of insanity

central vision has a blind spot

the periphery

doesn’t

time

no imprint of what hasn’t occurred

is an imprint

the press

small minds made smaller

if

its possible

the mirage of beauty

as we step towards it

it steps into the air

to

disappear

not wholly gone however

to linger

like a fragrance

that

then

goes

the problem russia has is between the various terrors and its casualness with lives during WW2 is it destroyed the most productive portion of its population and cretinized the gene pool

stalin and beria, those two demons of murderous competence

my writing is on target, why would i bother if there was something else ?

with astigmatism, there is a gradual shift from "with the rule" to "against the rule " over a lifetime, especially past middle age, much more so for men than women but if you look at the data its quite variable

i had a vivity toric put in last wednesday and am doing a crude check against one of these online star graphs and the astigmatism is shifting all over the place every day or so, i think its going to take at least three weeks to a month for it to settle and i can see where i am at with it

i don’t think astigmatism necessarily gets worse with age, its really this WTR to ATR shift in men and the degree it has to allowed for in the toric, i made my surgeon go slightly underpowered and in theory end up with -.35 WTR, rather than the next step up in toric power to .25 ATR, he did say he would make the incision to hopefully take it to zero as well, but i won't know for several weeks how its going to turn out, could be longer, the other eye which had a low astigmatism never had a toric, but is turning out exceptionally well, lol they are charging me for a toric in this eye, i am going to have to pull them up on this !

the past cannot be changed

the present is a process of change

and the future

is what change can be made into

a flowing from the future to the past

is really the the past to the future

the past cannot be changed

the present is a process of change

and the future

is what change can be made into

this flowing from the past to the future

is really the the future to the past

the multiplicity of things

stretching in all directions

yet encompassed in two words

countless, numberless

the multiplicity of things

endless in all directions

yet encompassed in two words

countless, numberless

writing to make sense

the fools do that

not understanding

the limitations of the term

drudgery

ensues

the flat universe

no curvilinear skulduggery

hiding surprises and mystery

everything laid open before you

exposed

and this is what we aspire to

with all its boredom and lack of reach

little do we know

our intrinsic situation

you can be too far ahead of the play

the turgid heaving mass of moronacy

that one doesn’t believe it

time

the absent imprint

of what

doesn’t occur

an old memory

twists and turns

and me with it

the past

with its immutability

and shifting perception

sickens me

stories on stories

interpretation on interpretation

to the blinkered view

this is meaningful

they write words

and more words

thinking them

an end in themselves

not asking

if the circles return

or move

outwards

so, the four "ig-noble" truths are   .    .    .

some people find life a lot more fun than others for various reasons

suffering is usually visited on you without permission and has nothing to do with unfulfilled desire

desire is a nonsense word anyway  (ed. covers no. 3 and 4)

creativity comes from more  blurred  thinking, rather than segmented

“ pick a good surgeon who can determine the best lens for your eye ”

well, i had done a lot of research and basically decided on vivity in both eyes and the surgeon agreed with the decision, the person most interested in the result is you, on the other hand, lacking surgical experience you will have big holes in your knowledge but i don’t think its a good idea to proxy the entire decision onto some-one else, no matter how experienced they are

the vivity has turned out well

you are getting old when people die on you

its starts on the periphery

and moves

to the center

am i going to go through life never knowing if i have had covid ?

i may have had it twice, the first when it first hit here before the vaccines, i was very tired for a week and second a few days after my first cataract operation at the end of december when about two or three days after the operation i vomited for several hours which can be symptom of omicron, but there were no other symptoms

my secret, 3000 iu a day of vitamin D and 90 mcg of vitamin MK7-K2 and some zinc monomethionine if i feel a virus coming on

plus blood type O which reduces lung involvement

i did have a pfizer jab in october, my reading of the research indicates that 6 or 7 months between the first and second jab is optimal for a memory based immune response to covid which is all that matters since omicron almost fully escapes vaccine antibodies, so i haven’t had a second yet

so what i do is contrary to public health advice, obviously i am wrong since i can’t tell if i have had covid or not, the fully vaccinated and boosted sick and very sick must have it right

well if i get definitively sick i will eat my words, but i’m still waiting

its interesting to see politicians and the media utterly unable to grasp this concept of immune escape from vaccine antibodies and the real benefit of vaccines being a "memory effect" which is really very persistent

“  Strikingly, mortality among patients with  sufficient vitamin D levels was 2.3% , in contrast to 25.6% in the vitamin D deficient group ”

i have long observed in certain sections of the general populace, media and political spectrum that illegal drug use is to be vastly preferred to supplements

if you understand how you work, you will, to a large extent understand how the world works

its not pretty

and never was

if you understand how you work, you will, to a large extent understand how the world works

premature

almost everything

stripped before

maturity

summer

its benign face

turns away

as it eventually

must

lang leav

sophisticated chick lit

female desire

transcends cultures

women and love

i don’t think i could handle

being affixed so tightly

to an object

i had the second eye done two days ago, this eye was "normal" whereas the other lens was "dense" ,  the higher phaco energy needed to break up dense lenses is more destructive of the corneal endothelial layer, but actually both eyes were about the same the next day at 6/9, though the "dense" eye dropped to 6/18 a few days after that, then about two to three weeks later started to recover and now almost 6 weeks later it is very very good, maybe 6/5 and it just seems to consistently get better every day

both eyes are vivity and they really suit me, the newest was toric, but it will take at least three weeks to see how that falls, and this is what i really wanted to say, i read people are 20/20 (6/6) the next day but that’s certainly not the case for me, it took five weeks for me to be convinced the operation was a success and the eye fully functional, and almost six weeks later its still improving, my sister wasn’t able to read fine print with her panoptix until six months and actually i think there are small changes occurring, probably for years

i deliberately waited for the vivity and that’s something that has paid off, i can read small print at arm’s length at not quite plano, maybe -.1D, the contrast is excellent in any sort of reasonable light, you can pick it in dark conditions but its liveable

its not as good as a monofocal set at distance looking at distance ,  (maybe 90% at a guess)  but the midrange bordering on close range is streets ahead and i really like the overall feel of the vision and the filter and really suits computer screens at .9 of a meter

i was hesitant to use the vivity because of its initial bad press when it first came out, but reading all the positive reports on the facebook "cataract surgery suppport group" on the vivity changed my mind and of course the cataracts got so bad i had to do something

a friend of mine went to some trouble to ask around about the different surgeons for me and came up with a recommendation, i do think that surgery is half art and half science and that makes a difference to the result, what i have is slightly different from what i asked for , but actually its better which i put down to his experience

because steroids interfere with the re-formation of the corneal endothelial layer there’s another level of improvement that comes ,  probably several months after the steroid use is stopped

i think the accuracy on the cylinder and sphere is plus or minus .25D and you have to realise you can end up anywhere in that range

getting one eye done at a time has worked well, i would never get both eyes done at once

so the weirdness of this whiter clearer world with the most marvellous contrast and colouration in sunlight

not getting angry when contradicted and using contradiction productively is a basic life skill

the net is so full of "righteous" ,  besides the point anger

some-one on the hardcore zen blog disagreed with the first sentence of the above, writing

I’d take issue with is your assertion that "using contradiction productively is a basic life skill".  That seems to be more of an advanced level skill

my  reply

it took me years to understand what i picked up from my real life zen experience, it wasn’t abstract understanding because i was streets ahead of them, but being able to develop an improvement process with social and life skills which were not good

there is a point at which "abstract understanding" will not develop without improvements in "correlates" like social and life skills because these improvements are founded on a deeper understanding of how life works which you need to know

you have life and culture saying "things are this way" when they are not that way at all and it takes a lot of certainty to go against that, actually and a bit of cunning

in terms of what you are saying, lets assume it was true, but in the context of zen, its not, its a basic skill that even beginners have to start with

in imagination

anything can be created

even imagination

there is josetsu’s famous  painting  "trying to catch a catfish with a gourd", gourds can be made into traps but the man in this painting hasn’t a clue, so the meaning is "clueless"

a monk asked

when the great kalpa fire comes and all three thousand worlds are being destroyed, will this world be destroyed ?

the master replied, yes it will be destroyed

the monk replied, then i will follow things as they occur

my  reply

the great kalpa fire

is here

burning

the idiots

use it

to

cook

marshmellows

liars by omission

undealable by

their commission

1 am a city of streetlamps

quiet, no cars

launceston

you are old fashioned

in the right way

my night in a hotel

traffic sounds

a church bell

tv’s, beeps

talk

no-one’s listening

how does the world work

in bits and pieces that harmonise together ?

in a clockwork mechanism defined and regular ?

a blackjack table with a sharp dealer ?

however it works i won’t be able to tell as i am the working

its a funny thing

returning again

to what was strange before

is now familiar

but not quite

its a funny thing

returning again

to what was strange before

is now familiar

yet not quite

what is now familiar

which wasn’t before

lacking strangeness

it now has a new strangeness

of its own

a woman with a severe cataract in her non-dominant eye and a "slight" cataract in her dominant asks which one she should have done first since the surgeon said he usually does the dominant first

she is also very nearsighted which does carry some small but significant statistical risks from the surgery

my  reply

imo it pays to solve the immediate problem, you are always undertaking "risk" with any operation, so you need a commensurate reward

if you show two faces then those who you show the "bad face" to are going to pull you up on it aren’t they ?

not that that the other face is that great, smarmy to a fault

preschoolers melatonin production was   chronically disrupted  by light exposure an hour before bed

its your own discovery of "infinity" that matters, i don’t mind people asking me questions, i just don’t like my time wasted, i have previously sunk large amounts of time in people and they misuse the understanding i have given them, i’m not making that mistake again

there’s no infinity in one place and actually there’s no infinity at all, my writings are this constant flux of fragments which is what it is

you read, but you also need to write

an exciting real life  hacking  to get a lost password to $ 2 million of a cryptocurrency

what surprised me was how much i knew about the process from the years i worked in electronics, basically they are using the fact that during a chip power up you are in "undefined" states, most of which are no use to you for the purpose of this hack, but with repeated power cycling, eventually like finding a combination of a safe that opens the door, they find one that works

they even had a typical "bench" "glich" in their process, they didn’t ground it properly

the other place the owners of the crypto currency considered in switzerland, i suspect also may have been able to do it, but probably used stuff at the national security level, able to read the chip directly with some sort of imaging beam etc

the problem with "mysticism" is the subject matter is necessarily universal and therefore not constrained to any belief, religion, doctrine, area of study, whatever

the way to handle walls is to climb up on them and look down on both sides

the trope

of

being

everything

and

everywhere

is

a

trope

the trope

of

being

everything

is

a

trope

aa milne has quite a satirical edge  in his poetry  if you look for it

melanie safka singing  alexander beetle

zen has fictional beliefs like any other religion and actually is very influenced by christianity which was around in china when zen was being formed

basically zen is a form of monotheism, interestingly, buddhism is less so which is why zen seems more familiar and acceptable and buddhism not so familiar or acceptable to western religious tastes

the net

the frictionless world of

claimed intention

is deception

i am having my second cataract removed on wednesday, the first eye is looking good five weeks later, its only really at this point i am confident there has been a good result and it just reinforces to me that the eyes should be done one at a time with a substantial recovery period between them

the operation, once done is almost irreversible and no matter how healthy you think your eyes are, problems can be unmasked by the operation

also i think having two eyes done at once requires greater and longer steroid use which interfers with the correct re-establishment of the corneal endothelial layer

interestingly steroid drops in the eyes end up in the blood and so the doses are to some extent systemic

nothing is more attractive to women

than the unvarnished, yet rewarding need of children

splitting, takeovers and "factionalism" happens in all groups, from terrorism to pony club, its called "schism" and is natural as plants growing when they get water, its just people realigning their support in view of what they perceive to be their "true" advantage, in short "groups" are not static entities but dynamic confluences, ask  king john  and his barons

discussions about "free will" are meaningless, that is you would never get to defining "free", "will" and the context in a satisfactory way

its such a weird feeling to see everyone offside with you in a group you were part of, the way they were thinking and talking you couldn’t relate to at all, they wanted you gone and if you were thinking clearly, you wanted to be gone

there’s good videos on youtube of the "viewing" of Thich Nhat Hanh’s dead body and the whole ceremonial rigmarole of the various stages of his funeral, its quite apparent its a cult, a "cultural cult" for sure, but its really no different from christianity and its worship of saints and of course in asian buddhism they used to burn the bodies of people like TNH and look for "śarīra", the more there are, the "holier" the person was, just the usual conventional religious nonsense and craziness

wow, you can see TNH being  cremated

looks like wood is used for the fire

so, a koan

TNH said a person’s "being" continues after death

where is he now ?

what’s set in time

unchangeable

like a motif locked in a glass ball

playing out for the remainder of your life

if you understand how your antagonists work and the world works you are not bait

my advice is to broaden your intellectual horizons, they don’t go there, you have the advantage

there’s plenty of  this sort of stuff  on youtube

these are people who have thought about life, all you have to do is think about what they say

you know the saying, "if you want revenge, dig two graves"

i came across it the other day and sniffed at it a bit, maybe that’s only half right, but today something has shifted and i can see its validity is universal and actually pretty applicable to me

"faith and doubt" is a christian paradigm and really a way of sustaining the psychosis of the fictions of god and jesus as real

zen is the same only the fictions are "buddha nature" and "enlightenment"

given all the crazy mixed up stupidity, doubt should evolve into "rejection"

that said i think the other points brad warner makes are useful, you do need to come into contact with a living person who has a good "understanding" who also "approves" of you, this seems to give some certainty and grounding, for me this was toni packer and actually i had to search to find her given the vast wasteland of idiots in zen

without a sort of trauma and PTSD with "life" i don’t think you will be motivated to put the work in either, people who are happy and moderately successful and "fulfilled" have a different road

of course the world is full of the foolish disaffected who only want to make a pain of themselves to others, basic skills in "dialogue" are almost entirely lacking, force by brutal intrusion are their mode

dealing with the mad

PTSD

in spades

sailing

from the water

you get a different perspective

a staircase

paradigm of life

the necessary steps

a staircase

a paradigm of life

the necessary steps

“ What shall we do with the gilded cage

now that the bird has flown ? ”

put another bird in it

what i have worked out about dogen, is he sometimes says insightful things that can be expressed quite simply in english, but he has various rhetorical techniques  (notably nagarjuna-like inversions)  to confuse what he is saying, which you can also see in elizabethan literature, the commonality is people were always armed to a degree and you had to be very careful what you said to them, too direct could be fatal

people are dishonest with themselves, rather than admit a lack of their own understanding, they fill this gap by using others as their proxies

these others are conveniently inaccessible or dead so the possible embarrassment of that person refuting what is claimed for them doesn’t exist in the person at least, though it can be there in the writings or biography

this is almost entirely the norm with anything to do with the "spiritual" or religions

a dream world

away from this world

partially formed

it cannot be seen clearly

scratch the surface and the weirdness of what is uncovered can be off the wall surprising

time

fast and slow

hold onto the slow

its essential speediness

overwhelms us

in the end

my "vivity" iol was just like the cataracterous lens in terms of vision except clearer and lighter, the amazing thing is cataracterous lenses are also edof from the many different focus points of the cataract, or at least mine was

i think there’s a culture gap with thich nhat hanh  (who has just  died ) ,  the degree of buddhism which is vietmanese rather than japanese doesn’t sit well with western culture, which makes WW2 interesting in that it was between the allies and a very westernized asian culture

the thing which always stops my more critical comments of him like the immensely stupid and unpleasant followers he has and the whole toxic culture of "plum blossom village" is his work during the vietnam war

you want to say something, then that unparalleled work comes up which actually is so mindstopping, it cannot even be talked about

the best evidence that eihei dogen was forgotten soon after his death is he is not mentioned at all in the " Tsurezuregusa", there’s really nothing to indicate he was ever well known at all, unlike say bankei or hakuin who were great missionizers

a lot of people really can’t get to grips with information that is not prepared and "pre-digested" for them

they are expecting some-one to have collated the necessary information and written it up, but original thinking doesn’t exist in that form, you have to research and work things out yourself

original and insightful thinking is a different world, its quite accessible through the necessary work, but most of course prefer the low energy mediocracy of "pre-digested" piffle

ed.  the above was a reply to some-one on the hardcore zen blog, he was offended and wasn’t reluctant to "spell it out" to me, my reply is below

i think you should read and take on board what i am saying, it goes much further than your inquiry about thich nat thanh.  i too am insulted by your attitude, but try to make the best of it, which is of course, this reply

ed.  another miffed reply from him and my reply below

no tantrums now    !    try upgrading your reading age, no wait, you expect everything to be done for you and never ever tell you what you don’t want to hear

6/18

god forbid

no 6/24

15

12

9

7.5

6/6

one month, three days later

recovery

from my cataract operation

a future hanging

on

a

sequence

of

numbers

lost

gone

lost and gone

hard to accept

ed.  damn, can’t find my sunglasses

thich nhat hanh has gone to buddha heaven

well of interest is his disciples wouldn’t let him die after his debilitating stroke in 2014, but kept him on in some sort of hellish "science fiction" half life, so its not so much he has died but finally escaped his "disciples"

its actually not an unusual scenario today, life prolonged where its not wanted

the road of life

accompanied we take others for the road

until they fall away

then there is just us

axel munthe’s  account  of the 1884 cholera epidemic in naples

in medical and health matters, percentage "averages" look very different with "variance", ie individual differences, trends are "emergent" rather than "direct" and can often be difficult to pick

so many cupboards

bare

when the label says

infinity

men’s emotions

they lack the brittle finesse of women’s

but they are there

rough hewn as they are

dream states

the cats

the roses

the evening sun

the light on the lawn

there is

no further to go

a shared dream

this world

or is it ?

your own dream

the dreams of others

your own

 or inaccessible ?

religion is an intellectual sensory deprivation tank

the empty monotony

of the repetition

of stale clichés

religion is an intellectual sensory deprivation tank

the empty monotony

the repetition

of stale clichés

zen is an intellectual sensory deprivation tank

the empty monotony

the repetition

of stale clichés

monaco

a tourist trap

like no other

an entire country

conspired against you

my youtube travels

inform me

tattoos

are a form of surgery

if that doesn’t raise the alarm bells

what does ?

i think you can view both biological and the matter and energy systems of physics as "complex adaptive", its easy to understand how biological systems are this way but difficult for "'energy and matter"

there may be some truth to "god created the universe", something came into existence bootstrapping itself in an adaptive way and god would be the only thing that cover  that, straddling non-existence and existence

one vocabulary to describe

another vocabularly to describe    .    .    .   what ?

uni-object

no

separate worlds

of nonsense

one vocabulary to describe

another vocabularly to describe    .    .    .   what ?

uni-object

no

separate worlds

of nonsense

pot is not  harmless

a riveting account of a volga viking ship  pyre funeral  recorded by  ahmad ibn fadlan

advertising

all that money

put into second rate

bullshit

g y r t u f o b

can you work it out ?

clue   :   its not complimentary

there’s a difference between a copeable challenge and being destroyed by what is not "copeable with"

a high proportion of recovered addicts seem to meditiate, i think one gains insight into "the cravings" and learning to tolerate feeling like shit and perhaps be aware of a larger context

meditation can be as simple as sitting reasonably still in a chair for half an hour, just observing the flow of thought

successful rehabilitation requires a shift in the way the world is viewed, literally a conversion experience of some sort, i think meditation is an entry into a very different world and it helps to read poetry like emily dickinson for another entry into the different perspective

the waking world

full of wonder

we can learn to

see it

in the end

you come into contact with the man with no memory

just going in circles returning to the same place he left before

there’s nothing you can do

just don’t fall into the same trap yourself

i feel there is some fundamental truth here

though exactly what i cannot say

that man could be i

in the end

you come into contact with the man with no memory

just going in circles returning to the same place he left before

there’s nothing you can do

just don’t fall into the same trap yourself

i feel there is some fundamental truth here

though exactly what i cannot say

it could be that man is i

with some exceptions you should only emigrate to a country speaking your first language, the burden of another language is destructive to the brain and life

the exceptions are interesting, i have in mind the russian writers and poets who should have left russia during the stalinist years, but didn’t because their craft was in the russian language and unfortunately paid a horrible price for that love

buddha never could have existed as an historical person because the person and life as described is impossible to have occurred in real life, same holds for muhammad, jesus and moses, supermen belong to the planet krypton

i was involved with the monastery at mt. tremper, actually about when it turned into "a business", i think there was a strong element of fraud in john loori, an impresario of sorts, i don’t like saying that because he was basically kind to me, his strengths were not as a zen teacher but in other areas of his life

you seem only to have learnt deceit by concealment, a very zen "skill" in my judgement

the hardcore zen vlog commenter

when they get asked a question that is too hard

no answer

try that for a koan

the study of "koans" is completely illustrative of the underlying craziness of zen, people wasting their lives projecting nonsense onto nonsense

interestingly its totally ADHD, a few words or paragraphs, stripped of context as a bottomless bucket collecting other words

you could only think such an absurdity had any validity if you were utterly lacking any literary sophistication

“  I don’t necessarily want to be a dharma teacher, but i would like to have the understanding of the Dharma life like a dharma teacher ”

its all just cascades of regressing reflections of illusions

prison ministry is valuable work and i guess eye opening

any "spiritual" group is a seething cauldron of sophisticated infighting seeking a threadbare kitty

with the "political skills" they develop and intensity of schismatic conflict the notion of stalinist russia as a development from the orthodox church is no longer surprising

i upset someone on the hardcore zen blog by saying this, my reply to him is below

i have an extensive background in philosophers and "spiritual teachers" including both krishnamurtis, but my views are really my own and come from experience

what is the fact is my concern and having been involved with about 15 "spiritual groups" over the years what i wrote that you are so critical of is what i have observed, its a generalization, not a 100% truth, but substantially so

you are making "certain" claims about me without actually giving any evidence, i am open to discussing your views, but for instance, you would need to quote some poetry of mine and say what you object to, calling it schizophrenic i don’t take as a criticism since there are "true" aspects to schizophrenia once the condition is understood properly

as to being "wise and smart" or "unwise and stupid" these are judgements for others to make and in this context, not my concern

i am going to ask some questions i would appreciate some answers for, if you don’t answer, you might like to think why ?

what is your experience of "spiritual groups" and does that extend to any involvement in the management however peripheral or observational

there’s a lot of "random shit" on the web, do you notice you are singling me out claiming i am random, yet the action at the same time of singling me out is "non-random"

have you posted here (ed.  the hardcore zen vlog) before under other nicks, you seem every familiar with me, but i don’t know you at all

i’m not expecting you to reply because i get lots of people like you who when addressed with a real requirement like ponying up with some information show a "clean pair of heels"

nothing lasts forever

things change

so we are told

but we stay

borderline personality

is really schizophrenia

a mismatch

between our natural hubris

and the way the world works

god would they address their own non-functionality

but they don’t

the words of those no longer with us

are words

perhaps a depth is missing

by virtue

of them being

no longer with us

"teaching" is an illusion

that there is a teacher

there is something to be taught

and some-one to teach

"teaching" is an illusion

that you are a teacher

there is something to be taught

and some-one to teach

these two young tribal amazonian women have their own  youtube  channel

my idea of amazonian indians is their tribal headdress etc with blow pipes, poison darts and being dangerous to explorers !

but these women are so totally normal and understandable, made me realise how very similar we all are

i get people obsessed with me on the web, can be full on for six months, then when i feel i’ll never get rid of them, bang, they go just like that. i’ve never really felt threatened, but i don’t live in the usa where everyone is only several days drive from everyone else

they seem to hold me responsible for some sort of cognitive dissonance with what i write.

unusually i am now "obsessive-free" as the last "problematic" seems to have been gone for a month

i think in  louis’s  case there are underlying problems with cognitive dissonance, his view on the world can be upsettingly "realistic" for some, they seem unable to take the realism on board and instead you get this intense personal focus and the giveaway is that the "offenders" seem utterly unable to grasp that attention/contact is not wanted

if you listen to what louis is really saying, its "do it yourself", but instead with these people you get this crazy need for contact

completely blind to the trauma an intrusion from an unknown causes

its not hard to figure out, plenty of famous figures around for whom contact by you would be totally out of left field, they don’t know a thing about you or why you would want to contact them, the socially acceptable channels are via family, friends and work, there’s no other basis for contact

below is a post from louis’s vlog that covers the same ground and is well put

well there is a general problem when you have someone really big fan of certain content creators they develop a relationship with that person after watching tons of their content they get to know that person and sometimes their content can say help them a lot with their issues in life like depression like the one he brought up in the video where the kid wrote him and he became empowered to start his own business like he is doing you don't experience something that powerful and feel to some extent a very strong attachment to that person

you run into issues though because the person your attached too doesn’t have any idea who you are, this love connection was only ever delivered one way

I think it is a little less about being on the autistic spectrum  (although i’m sure that matters to some degree)  and more a one way relationship and people in general have to understand you are just a stranger to them although you feel close you really are not

my  comment

well put, its that one way connection that has to be seen through logic and reasoning and not feeling that some find hard to grasp

the media

manic proxies

guardian angels in their own eyes

for

"the people"

giorgio de chirico  I    II

rené  magritte

startlingly theological once you decode them

the maze of story telling

history

and our own

the premise of "the matrix" is that reality is "a simulation" which is supposed to be a "theological meme", but i think it differs from theology in that it what the matrix calls reality and what we call reality are the same, but ultimate "theological reality" is not really what we would call reality at all

a multitude of points

do not define

a single entity

you go to touch the real

and put your hand through

it

you go to touch the real

and put your hand through it

milton’s satan was huge

so large

it doesn’t fit today’s world

unless you downgrade it

to nonsense

being the evil

and it grows

larger

yet

word castles

meeting no code

except the owner’s gratification

well

some good

some bad

its a commonplace about cataract operations that you don’t know how the cataract was affecting you and i think that’s the case

seeing clearly again you have a more optimistic outlook, almost as though the brain has been tracking the cataract and telling itself  "you’re finished"

its actually brought about a major social change, that older people are remaining productive for much longer periods than previously

“ out beyond ideas/ of wrongdoing and rightdoing/ there is a field/ i’ll meet you there ”

  that’s  so far removed from the original text that you would have to credit it as an original poem by coleman barks

the vast majority of supposed "rumi quotes" are modern "feel good" reinterpretations

looking at a more literal translation the poem is a surprising blend of atheism and islamic religious tropes

i did make an attempt to "retranslate it" ,  but like coleman, ended up with something different, even a bit strange

atheism and religion

both partial truths

of the desert plain

in that fata morgana

our blinding passions reign

an NFT is in effect a signed reproduction, so contrary to what you might think, they have value

the art world is a great inflator of undeserving value

search a few artists

look at their paintings in google images

travel a million miles

victor vasarely    jean-pierre vasarely

this is art

that isn’t art

what is art ?

people in the hardcore zen blog comments section don’t do enough meditation/contemplative work to get that introspective cast that zen is really about, its just literal verbal wastelands of mulga and scrub for them, deserts of nothingness they walk in, parched but somehow ignorant of what they are doing

“  I meditate almost daily.  Itake a walk in wild nature almost daily.  Do I qualify ? ”

i prefer to use the word "contemplation" rather than meditate because "meditate" is so associated with some sitting position like lotus or half lotus  ( the old christian meaning of meditate as contemplative prayer has apparently been lost)  which is potentially thrombotic as you get older

as to whether one qualifies, the question has to be asked "for what" ,  i don’t have any sense of that question or really any clear cut question at all

i do notice i think along certain lines occasionally and that would be about it

a lot of times you find you can only take things to a certain point, you can’t go any further and that is an answer in a way that happens again and again, sometimes you go further but even then it stops

you don’t own yourself

you are not even yourself

existence of any sort

unowned or otherwise

is existentially precarious

lightning

so far away you can’t hear the thunder

something is happening

but not here

one of the hazards of getting older is losing your drivers license because you no longer have 6/12 vision, which in my view is utterly unreasonable and doesn’t reflect the real requirements of an adequate driving vision which needs some sort of specially devised test, being able to read fine print has nothing to do with safe driving

anyway i have been testing myself with a  snellen chart at home to monitor my recovery after a cataract operation and it has emerged that with experience of reading the snellen you can gain at least a line which will be a help in the years to come with the eyesight requirement

one of the secrets is there are only 9 letters used so that limits what they can be and another is to focus on each letter at a time, gone are the days when i could read a whole 6/6 line at a glance

the first day after the operation i had 6/9 which then in the days after went down to 6/20 in the mornings and 6/15 in the evenings and now its still 6/18 in the mornings, but i go for a run and that seems to help considerably so i am up to 6/9 uncorrected and probably 6/6 corrected several hours later and i expect that to slowly improve, hopefully i will end up with 6/6 or 6/7.5 corrected which imo will be pretty good

i have stopped the steroid drops because they don’t do anything a run doesn’t do and there’s good  research  saying that steroids interfere with the formation of the corneal endothelial layer, steroids have a role initially in preventing destructive inflammation, but at some point i think the benefit is in stopping to let the corneal epithelial layer develop properly and i take 3000iu of that natural steroid, vitamin D daily (with K2 to balance it)  anyway

the vivity lens is outstanding, i think i’m about -. 5D which works well, contrast is wonderful or even a bit overdone and have good night vision with it and it suits my .9 meter distance from the monitors

what i have learnt is because i think i have a touch of fuchs dystrophy in the operated eye is whatever they say, there can be complications from the surgery and if the other eye has functional vision , then you need the guarantee that having a working, unoperated eye gives for the months after the operation when vision in the operated eye could be problematic

there is a huge cost saving for the clinic in doing two eyes at once and they don’t pass that saving on to you, where i live, having talked to a few ophthalmologists, they will only do one eye at a time as matter of appropriate caution

another benefit of having one eye done at a time is you can "tune" the magnification in respect of having the operated eye settled down to a likely final value after a month or so to provide a base, i think i will opt for .25 or .5D micro/mini monovision in the unoperated eye on top of the already operated eye base value so to give some closer reading ability

i’m not keen on multifocals because of potential dysphotopsias and will go with the vivity edof in both eyes i think

if you get the operation too young, you almost certainly will get PCO and at the other end you should not let the lens get too dense or the extra phaco energy required to break it up can be damaging to the corneal endothelial layer, though there is a new technique called mi-loop now to more harmlessly break up dense cataracts

its not a trivial operation and like any operation there can be complications which may show years later ,  in my view, if its done as a solution for presbyopia only, this is misguided

none of the above is intended as advice and is just a recounting of my experience and views to date, from my reading of personal accounts on the web, there’s a huge span of results from very satisfactory to being almost blind and people vary hugely in what lens they find optimal, monofocal is considered to be the most trouble free, panoptix is a popular multifocal and to me the vivity lens is the edof of choice, though bausch and lomb have a similar one coming out called "luxsmart", but i have no opinion on this yet

chapters  V and VI  from "henry brocken", my favourites from walter de la mare’s corpus

stories about stories

a sophisticated literary technique

but

somehow

empty

my reply to some-one in the hardcore zen vlog comments who cannot answer the points i raise with him objectively, but straight away attacks "the person" ,  me in this case

your continuing to reply must alert even you to there being a problem here in your defensiveness. a non-introspective viewpoint like yours is always going to clash with the introspection of a meditative practice like zen, its like living in a foreign country, you go against the norms of the culture at your peril

my reply to brad warner giving a discursion on "the meaning" of "the red-beared barbarian" versus "the barbarian with a red beard"

close reading of words

they have no context for

yes

the stupidity

of

zen koan study

the context of bodhidharma is he was from a greco-bactrian kingdom and there’s a very heavy influence of greek culture and philosophy in buddhism and zen and even in the burial goods of the first qin emporer and the flowing robe statues of "buddha"

the flaw of zen and any religion is they meander about fruitlessly in a very restricted view looking for answers that are not there but outside their blinkers which seem to be welded to their faces

the deepest truth of mysticsm may seem somewhat scientific

its that if a thing or event is probable then all you need is enough correlated things or events to occur for it to occur

if you want to get to the bottom of what is going on

follow the correlations

i quite like rupi kaur’s poems, some of the more general ones anyway, she has a unique talent and stands above the crowd, its almost like she’s "amplified female" ,  so strange and alien in that respect her viewpoint is often frightening, are women really like that ? god help us !

the door of everything opens and he sits down to sort the contents of the room

clearing his way to a corner he discovers another door which opens   .    .    .

hakuin’s writings and drawings make much more sense  in this context

buddhism for him was actually a buddhist/shinto amalgam

“  Be not afraid of going slowly

Be only afraid of standing still ”

well, i’m not afraid of standing still

i went hunting last night with my "bionic eye", a "vivity" "extended depth of field" lens replacement, its certainly clearer and handles night vision and spotlighting well, bit of a freaky feeling actually because without it i would be going blind, the norm for the aged over anything except the most recent fragment of human history

dogen was never given transmission by rujjing because rujing was opposed to the practice and dogen’s supposed transmission document is a medieval forgery

interestingly "transmission" has killed modern western zen because only stupids hang around waiting for it, all the "competents" migrated out to do their own thing or just pinched the ideas, "buddha at the gas pump" is a good example of this schizophrenic infestation

"i’m getting older and some day i’m going to die"

death, like life is an illusion

what is meant by that ?

the most extraordinary thing about meiji japan was the speed at which they went from a feudal society to being successfully industrialized, it was fortunate for the west the highest levels of government were so strategically incompetent, a problem that persists to this day

fukushima wasn’t an accident, but a product of this centralisation of incompetent direction

the machine of life

as we cycle through

thinking we are doing something useful

2 Timothy 2:13

“ If we are unfaithful, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny who He is ”

and what is he ? a fantasy ? a fairy story ?

faithful to what in terms of what ?

ostracism is intrinsic to judaism because of its basis in "pintel yid", its a racially based religion

christianity and islam by contrast are not racial

we don’t think of japan as christian but it had a christian community since the jesuits arrived there in the 1540’s, unfortunately it was basically destroyed by accident by the atomic bomb dropped near nagasaki when the original target couldn’t be identified and hit the main christian area of japan, so post WW2 we don’t think of japan as having any christian influence, but in actual fact ,  like in china it has been historically influential, soto zen has a particularly catholic flavour

its not really understood at all that western thought has been strongly influenced by buddhism since hume and that buddhism has to some extent, especially in japan been reinvented in the western monotheistic mould

that is why there was such a rapid uptake in zen after world war II, it had already been re-invented in japan in the meiji era to fit western sensibilities, its a testimony to the stupidity of japan’s political system at the time that it made war on what it was so indebted to

to me the difference is clearer if you look at nagarjuna who is not monotheistic

the problem with monotheism, apart from its conceptual non differentiation from polytheism is the "rei-ism" that follows, if you have a tangible progenerative entity like god or "the absolute" then rei-isms like "meditation" "prayer" "practice" "good works" make sense, but what use is sense in a flawed context, the children take on the sins of the father so to speak

“ that’s a common thing to get told in dokusan   .   .   .  "be more normal"  ”

i would say "appear to be more normal" because i am certainly not normal so to a certain extent one has to go through life under that pretence and it is not safe to do otherwise

vacuous.  reply.  not saying.  anything

picking raspberries

turning one

and seeing the beak hole

the indirect are direct

reason approaches

what it doesn’t approach

is anti-reason

signed

the anti-christ

sentimental people can be very brutal

i’d be careful

you will have a more severe case of omicron if you catch it too soon after a booster

the reason is the booster antibodies are an ill fit to omicron, so the immune system just ends up confused

"reification" is a mistake

to convert the abstract to the concrete

loses the truth of the abstract

and gains confusion

within the all

is something that hangs without

and illuminates everything

how could this come to be ?

because it could

within the all

is something that hangs without

and illuminates everything

how could this be ?

because it could

like a mirage

that stays out of reach

ahead of us

what we pursue

cannot be caught

like a mirage

that stays out of range

ahead of us

what we pursue

cannot be caught

fantasy worlds

real life rules are relaxed

be careful

stepping beyond that borne

a witch

brown eyed blackness

she went past all my defences

except the one that mattered

age difference

i wrote it down

half a day later i was thinking the opposite

that’s the point of writing it down

a commonly referenced dogen quote supposedly favouring an "ordinary life is the way" theology

Fences, walls, tiles and pebbles   .   .   .

my  comment

i have seen another translation to the effect you are a wall and you need to be aware of how it is made and tear it down, of course this "deconstructive work" doesn’t fit with most

zen

a jumanji dream

that in the end

if one survives

escapes from

eihei

tangled in reification

spewed verbiage

forever

they quote extracts

finding the meaning

of the larger context

unpalatable

these intellectual cripples

promoting their injury

how unhealthy

applauding monkeys

everywhere on the web

only a monkey

has more intelligence

than get involved with that nonsense

its all the moon

not pointing

or being pointed at

a face of wrath

and beneficence

i don't know why everyone ignores the outstanding feature of eihei dogen and that is he writes and gives talks which is basically "artwork", there’s only one thing that matters which is the production of "artwork", same with hakuin and bankei so the origins of modern zen are in writing, this is a discontinuity from the earlier predominately oral tradition of ch’an in china.

people don’t know how to write or talk in a way that extends their understanding and this notion will actually seem wrong to them, but the reality of zen is writing and a development of mastery with language

half of my comments on the hardcore zen blog are replies to people who can’t even read what i write and are aggrieved at their not understanding it, like its really my problem.  there is no virtue in having a low reading age or being stupid, you want to be stupid, who is going to stop you ?

hitler

in the bunker

the schizophrenic farce is over

reality did not meet expectations

why is the time disappearing like there is no tomorrow ?

a bottomless vortex

sucking everything away

multiplication is a shorthand for repetitive addition

division establishes the amount of repetition

subtraction is addition in the other direction

what is addition ?

i’m 2 weeks out  (6/jan/22)  from my first op on one eye and still have a problem with the cornea being inflamed in the morning, but excellent (6/9 likely 6/6 corrected so the vivity lense is placed well and works fine) ,  but i could have a "fuchs dystropia - like" condition or problem.  other members of my family say its months before things come right

it takes at least a month for the eye to settle with the huge advantage of having a stable refraction in the operated eye as a base for a micro-monovision add of .25 D in the non-dominant eye which you get for "free" since without it you lose .25 in the error of having no stable base ie random

i would really question both eyes being done at once both from the point of view of the loss of being able to implement a hidden micro-monovision without "cost" and the possible loss of functional sight if complications from the operations develop, at least if you still had a functional eye in addition to the most severely cataracterous one

explanations

run out

leaving a need

for more explanations

how to escape this

is not known

time in prison

makes everyone

a philosopher

irish  duelling rules ,  search " 1775" from the "personal sketches of his own times" by sir jonah barrington

and just on from the rules is an account of his duel

i was just watching  this video  of gangs in prison, all that aggression and the system still beats you, the prisoners focused on hurting each other

100 miles of rubbish

they piffle on

these talkers

of religious nonsense

what you have with zen is basically stories and half baked philosophical ideas translated into really crazy guides for living, christianity is the same, all these stories about the saints and this is what you should do, which sometimes appears to be to die as a martyr for the greater glory of god and the church, well you can see where that is going

at best a story or "wisdom literature" gives insight and you take something on board, but its not your experience and to take this sort of thing too literally/slavishly will create trouble for you

schopenhauer makes this point, that wisdom literature is necessarily inadequate for a number of reasons including our own lack of experience, that is, even if the wisdom literature is substantially true, we have an inability to pick up on it since most things about life we are required to learn the hard way

in terms of eihei dogen, "abiding in the mountains" is not literal, but metaphorical, what is meant by this is utterly beyond the fakes, the translators have no clues, i would put it as "there is no abiding in the mountains, yet there is"

“  You have much to critique, what is it that you teach ? ”

it might look like a critique, but really its a new synthesis of ideas.  its just going the extra mile to open something new up.  if you don’t go the extra mile you will go in a circle which is something i am sure we can all recognise

so what i wrote was new to me and its an open different space, sorta like travelling i guess

“ "It’s not really a critique, but an extension" is an interesting approach, and arguably what Zen supposedly did with regards to Buddhism.  To paraphrase by quoting the Bible, you claim to "sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." Fair enough, but then  *What is it that you teach* ?  Can you formulate some principles, some insights, some directions, a Way ? ”

you have to know "the precious jewel" that’s all there is to it, its something you have to experience yourself, i cannot convey it.  in terms of your quote, the "refining of sliver" just seems to come along with it, i don’t know why, but its secondary to the experiential aspect.  so you can see that "meditation" which is the contemplative side is secondary, but seems to play a role.  my primary criticism of zen is that supposedly what it is about is universal and so must be there in other religious traditions, philosophy, art, literature and these are ignored or denied in zen which has become some crazy facsimile of anything real

our species is cannibalistic

the sexes

feed on each other

the world is so wide

and large

the wonder is

we only see such a harrow portion

for so long

everybody’s heart gets shattered

by one thing or another

and the pieces coalesce about us

for the rest of our lives

everybody’s heart gets shattered

by one thing or another

and the pieces coalesce about us

for the rest of our life

stealing time ahead

into now

the density

is overwhelming

carinthia in the eastern austrian alps, i find it relaxing to just look  at the video  without music

you can lower the playback speed for the more scenic bits

educating the children has taken away the next generation, they won’t pick up enough of the skills necessary to keep the traditional lifestyle going and they already are of an age to be significantly helpful, their loss away at school is felt and i think shows in stress and a sense of emptiness  in the herders

who created god ?

god created god

the circles of existence

defined by non-existence

surgically plumped lips

botox

tattoos

today’s schizophrenic female

advertises herself

the sere-ities of age

unmask youthful invincibilities

yet

the light

doesn’t

fade

if i had to construct some paradise

green leaved trees by a silvered lake

the quiet of serenity

where would it be ?

not in my head for sure

that turmoil of choppy seas

yet that better land seems somewhere

ideal

there’s a bit of an art to putting in eye drops

I      II

the sky above

and earth below

we sow what we reap

and reap what we sow

actors

meaningless façades

puppets of the script

the problem with philosophy which attempts to represent the unknown in terms of the known, you actually have to move from the known into the unknown which destroys the points of reference previously established

there’s more truth in the modulation of specifics than the wash of any amount of generalities

little gidding church

those black doors

all who enter here

never return

did they even make it as far as the doors ?

st. john really existed

little gidding church

those black doors

all who enter here

never return

did they even make it as far as the doors ?

st. john never existed

an eihei dogen quote

a great precious jewel is not the true treasure, but cherish each moment

my  reworking

a great precious jewel is the true treasure, only where it is, occurs and value is hardly ever understood

eihei dogen gives a lot of depressingly bad advice, how people can build there lives around it is beyond me

single positive is not the same as "double negative" since there is a different and longer transit involved that visits a different space

sylvia plath’s black

the bourn where we are not

the spike of the yew tree

that dissonance throws us onto

we dissolve

its probably not much more than that

ideas of the afterlife

are futile

the weirdness of our little worlds

family

community

friends

work

that seem so complete to us

yet when looked at closely

swim before our eyes

with dissonance and subterfuge

was joshu enlightened ?

yes

why do you say that

because he wasn’t conscious of any such thing

one mind   =   god, usual christian nonsense, huang po was not enlightened, even to negate something is a mistake

ed.  one of the difficulties of huang po is he never wrote anything himself, we only see him through the filters and reconstructions of transcriptions and translations, some of the stuff he says really makes sense, other things don’t so maybe his "interpreters" were grappling to understand him and just "reimaged" him in ways they understood

“ if you only ever tear down   .   .   . ”

then you are a zen patriarch

clone voice

clone people

the newsmedia

cloned views

repressive regimes know what they are doing in terms of repression/oppression

generally they are not accidental in what they do

a monotheistic quote by deepak chopra

meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet, but a way of entering the quiet that is already there

my  reply

he’s not right, meditation is an illusion of contact with infinity, a mimic decoy, a toxic meta on the perverse tableaux of religion

over the years i have seen  these bells  around as items of interest, but i never knew what they were for !

its a great video   lac du brevant

when i look at the rubbish i dream

everynight

that tiny portion i remember into waking

i give up

if you know anything about the  history of   ancient athens, its surprisingly a rum’un

i thought of a rule

considered how well it would work

it broke down before i had got very far

brad  (ed.  warner), i have this image of you as a street performer doing an act for a crowd of beggars who applaud you, but toss street rubbish and defecations at you as your reward

brad  replies

That’s about right

my  reply

there you are, enlightenment is being able to see the absurd side of what we do, the "masterclass" non-one wants to attend

the number of women who deliberately eat  iron poor  diets is unbelievable, liver, kidneys and other offal are a pariah in their eyes, you can’t reason with them

self-awareness and awareness of the world

neither is sufficient

they have a complementary necessity

i’m five days out from my cataract operation, feeling more robust, the eye is a small area but any injury traumatises, its not a surprise surgery makes one feel vulnerable

my eyesight is not as good as i expected and maybe worse than a day after the operation, but on discussion with relatives who have had the operations they are saying three to six months before things really come right, you have factors like surgically induced astigmatism and corneal opacity from damage to the endotheial cells and some adaptation by the retina to deal with and all take time and one may need glasses at the end anyway

all in all things are progressing much as one would expect, the eye is healing well, and one just has to wait and see, functionally i have good vision in combination with the other eye providing .75 D  (mini-monovision)

i do think its better to get one eye done at a time, there’s some definite uncertainties to the operation

talking with me you must be aware that some people find what i say quite contentious, it mightn’t seem that way to you because you are somewhat of a similar mindset, but over the years and in different contexts i have had quite a bit of trouble and try to anticipate minefields

family is not necessarily a chummy club, this is the real world, all you can do is observe

there’s some things to keep to yourself though they tend to break cover at some point anyway

my comment to sepehr on an article he is working on

very well written, quite professional

you were quoting some buddhist texts, but then went on to validate "buddhism" which most know as a rather flawed contemporary religion, there’s big difference between quoting and validating an entire, but very fractured religion

its like your sending your manuscript to that publisher who plagiarised it, collectives like religions or the publishing industry are just a bunch of ratbags, don’t gift them your work

an important trick is to let people form their own conclusions from what you write, its better to leave some things unsaid and not force conclusions on people

the tectonic plates

seen to be pulling apart

in iceland

where else ?

a good explanation of what the van eyck painting  arnolfini portrait  is about

“  Still going eh ?  (ed.  a comment to me on the hardcore zen blog)

I wonder, what have you achieved doing this so far and what do you hope to achieve here in the future ? ”

my  reply

well, for some reason brad thinks on a similar wavelength as me, though not identical the difference is instructive and that enables me to develop ideas in writing, just as this reply to you is a development, i think a bit differently and perhaps understand something a bit better just by this reply to you

what is growing on me is that zen is a work of fiction. it is the "reification" of a story or stories and as such a monumental stupidity, not without its saving graces though like all religions

two  quotes  by the very recently deceased joan didion

“ I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language ”

“ I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear ”

i find joshu particularly illuminating in this respect, there is a real mastery of thought and language there

the brain has more unconscious than conscious activity so questions about what consciousness is are really deflective, what you are really concerned about is the Heideggerian notions of "being" and if that doesn’t tell you something, then i don’t know what will

an aggressive comment to me on the hardcore zen blog

Pure ego showing yourself through trite continued comments  .  .  .

my  reply

i presume you are an academic, yet you have no idea of how to rationally discourse

you are making a claim but give no justifying information, your only concern is to try and put me down, a borderline personality trait and clearly you have not understood what i wrote

karl friston  

andy clark

sir henry neville  was the real author of shakespeare’s plays 

neville’s   connection  to contemporaries mentioned or involved in the first folio

no fixed understanding means you are continuing to explore what is infinite, closed boxes of understanding always have infinitely more outside the box

the elixir of youth, showing yourself in old videos

ed.  brad warner is showing old videos of talks he gave

kobun chino wasn’t enlightened

ed.  he is held up as some holy saint in zen, but aspects of his life are completely stupid in any context

there is no underlying semantic referent/tableaux

ed gepixel volunteered that he upvoted my comments on the hardcore zen blog, almost against his will, he upvoted the above conmment

my  reply

i did wonder a bit, you must be well above the average grade of intelligence here. you don't have to disagree or agree, but give consideration over time if you feel there is something to it and it will click into place

i feel that all those three items listed are completely true, the most important being the last, that is, no fixed understanding

no fixed understanding means you are continuing to explore what is infinite, closed boxes of understanding always have infinitely more outside the box.  zen is a very closed box

religion

the illusion of an underlying semantic referent/tableaux

there is none

the feeling of being sick

vomiting

not keeping any water down

nausea

seeming

never to end

i wander around the house looking for respite

there is none

ed.  i had cataract surgery two days ago and am having a reaction/withdrawal now

one gets loaded up with various chemicals including an opiate laced partial anaesthetic

alternatively i have covid in a very mild form since the medical area of launceston is full of it, some symptoms match like heavier breathing than normal, feeling warmer than usual  (but still having a normal temperature)  severe fatigue, still have my sense of smell and though tired the next day, am recovering

i have been taking 3000iu of vitamin D and 90mcg of K2 for years with the odd extra zinc, if it was covid i think they considerably helped keep the symptoms mild and by a fortunate co-incidence its pretty much eight weeks since my first covid shot which is the time of maximum antibody production, there’s quite a bit of research saying a 9 to twelve week spacing between the first and second pfizer shot is optimal

an interesting  study  on why the pfizer Mrna vaccine is so effective, i also suspect it has some anti-senescent action

the strangeness of old churches

not quite abandoned

consecrated to something

futility ?

lying by omission

subtle

but deadly

things exist

what if they don’t exist ?

they don’t exist

yahweh equals jehovah

bitter fruit

even for the nameless

wow, i never realised the "garden of earthly delights"   triptych  was so big

william blake’s "muscular stereotypes" i think are heavily indebted to  michelangelo

yeats’ destroyed ladders

going back to square one

he discovers

there was nothing but square one

sometimes in our lives

time goes backwards

not much

but enough for us to take

another branch

amazing whale underwater  sequence with sounds

more

i have never seen anyone so casual about such a remarkable experience, but of course they have done this many, many times

the whole sky moves

yet it doesn’t

rigid rotations

that slowly vary

the whole sky moves

yet it doesn’t

rigid rotations

that very slowly vary

when you leave you leave

you don’t go back

beware the fate of lot’s wife (edith?)

looking back

revisiting

the pillar of salt

doesn’t

move

ed.  interestingly that story has some factual basis with the ancient bronze age city of tall el-hamman, in modern-day jordan, being destroyed by a  meteor airburst  about four kilometers above the city

one word

grew to two

four

and

many more

so poetry was invented and

prose

followed

but

poems

were first

nothing more bruising

than being right

anti  —  phase

nothing more bruising

than being right

out of phase

god is not "unitary"

but multiple

monotheism is dishonest

reification covers

art, religion and life

you can argue "god"

is just a bunch of abstractions

art

a reified

reality

art

a reified reality

"missionizing" is dunning-kruger for sure

interestingly st. francis was a great fan of islam, worth reading up on his travels, gives a different perspective to the usual catholic "animal funster" hagiography

so many interactions in life and religion

they just want to beat you up

rob you

and leave your body by the side of the road

so many interactions in life

they just want to beat you up

and leave your body by the side of the road

so many interactions in religion

they just want to beat you up

and leave your body by the side of the road

trying to grasp infinity

within all the nonsense of recursion

and infinite regress

there exist repackaged states

that make sense

its that simple

reification

is

for

the

birds

trying to grasp infinity

within all the nonsense of recursion

and infinite regress

exist repackaged states

that make sense

its that simple

trying to grasp infinity

within all the nonsense of recursion

and infinite regress

there exist repackaged states

that make sense

its that simple

trying to grasp infinity

within all the nonsense of recursion

and infinite regress

exist repackaged states

that make sense

its that simple

reification

is

for

the

birds

“ Shrooms taught me that time is an illusion.  I had always heard it but never understood ”

"recursive construction" is a better way of puting it since you can’t look at the question "out of time"

the problem is always how do you circumvent the recursion, "shrooms" do this to some extent, not by eliminating time, but by distorting or "repackaging it"

god, buddha fictions of holy

the world is raving insane

 how could it be otherwise ?

religion is the reification of literature

some of the more fringe christian sects like the mormons and 7th day adventists are reifications of milton’s poems

zen is a reification of a poetic administrative dynastic chinese culture

scientology of science fiction

christian science of mary baker eddy’s corpus

islam has a vast disparate textual tradition as has christianity of which we only see a selected portion

buddhism is not selective and has literal libraries of textual source material

“ in the beginning was a textual fantasy ”

religion’s "novels" require you to take their "stories" as real, then against that backdrop of fixed understanding, whatever "holy" or so called spiritual attributes seem to exist

however in reality there is no fixed understanding so those "attributes" don’t exist outside the stories

for instance mother teresa, supposedly a holy saint, is ,  on investigation a very mixed bag, that is, her life and the way she lived has all the vicissitudes or more of a real person, so much so that you could actually take religion/catholicism right out of the equation

one of the most subtle problems i have seen

is "fixing" another’s error

this goes on endlessly

one see’s parents and especially mothers caught in it

but it applies everywhere and to everything

it kills us precisely in its ability to absorb all our capacity and leave nothing to spare

good footage  of the monastery of  san jerónimos  in lisbon

this is as you would see it, not some hyped touristy thing

its interesting what in past times seems crazy now, but obviously wasn’t then

the new zealand affectation

using two words where one would do

stray syllables

why   -   he aha ?

well

i can be fancy too

what history teaches

the oppressed become the oppressors

the world works in ways that stymie explanation

and discards our projections

power has its own dynamic

and crushes those who ignore it

if they are not listening to you

they might be planning to kill you

watch out !

if they are not listening to you

they are to kill you

watch out !

where the mad congregate

they will use their strength against you

the teeming world

we would have it so unfortunately

absence

frightens us

i like to pretend to myself

i’m going to last forever

but i’m not

the failings of aging

only point in one direction

i like to pretend to myself

i’m going to last forever

but i’m not

a cataract operation

with potential complications

wakes me up

why am i having to explain ?

well i’m not

it only matters to me

and i’m not explaining

the intrinsic problem with translation is you can’t reproduce an identical work in the new language because the expression of the language and use by the original author can’t be deconstructed

the best the translator can do is write a new work which to a large extent is interpretive

a good   article  on eating potato skins, basically you want to watch alkaloid content which is indicated by chlorophyll  (the green, which is not in itself toxic)  which the article claims peeling to a depth of 2 to 3mm reduces by 90%

i sometimes eat the skins of new potatoes that show no sign of green and maybe ones a bit older

in my view hot baked new potatoes are the most digestible and i don’t eat potato that has been stored in the fridge as this, imo changes the starch structure negatively

one language is not more authentic than another

there’s just "utility"

and the language with the most utility is that you were brought up with

there is a heavy neurological cost to being fluent in more than one language

if you don’t study history

you will never understand the human condition

and current politics

the intrinsic nature of reality

to lurch through farces

and how competence is succeeded by incompetence, one breeds the other

don’t expect people to change

life is simpler

and truer

the burden of each new thing

wanting its portion of time you don’t have

yet if you don’t give it    .    .    .   ?

as you get older

there is a cost to strangeness

you never really adjust

birds of a feather

don’t simply flock together

they become  “ of a feather ”

be warned !

caught in a loop ?

recognition

eventually

facilitates

escape

show me the pure land !

bit difficult ?

like heaven or hell, nothing but a fiction ?

the usual religious pule ?

the sickening pretenders ?

ed.  pure land buddhism is a   particularly   crazy japanese religion, however it has  its redemptions

“do not worship the emperor, parents, and kami when you have real faith in the tathāgata and in amida buddha.”

so ethei dogen can’t die of something as unglamorous as tuberculosis ?

it was endemic in medieval japan and it is known that his disease was a chronic pulmonary one

if you have a "tin god" he has to be always right and not have anything unpretty in his life huh ?

did he pick up the latent disease in china with all that meditation and lack of sleep reducing the effectiveness of his immune system ?

monasteries were known to be "hotbeds" of infections of any sort with horrific illness and death rates, the most recent well known example being the catholic saint   thérèse of lisieux , we have a benign view today of monastic living because of population health advances, but it did not used to be the case

it need not be a rapidly progressing disease by any means and has a high degree  of latency

the reality is for one who preached "meditation" he did nothing but write and what meditation he actually did was not the right thing for his health since meditation stagnates lymph movement

what is the granularity of existence ?

well it "is" and "is not"

and in between

what is the granularity of existence ?

well its "is" and "is not"

and in between

what is the granularity of existence ?

well its is and is not

and in between

what is the granularity of existence ?

well it is and is not

and in between

the world is granular

not some smooth declension

going on forever

sort the grain out

and you have solved everything

but people rarely do

rhetoric

twisted language

doomed from the start

to distort

the gap between ourselves and others

we are not them

nor they us

writing is memory

a way of discarding the past

and keeping it

is religion a cosplay ?

if so, eastern orthodox would be the winner

awakening and enlightenment are illusions, like "holiness", its just one stupid fess

the dreamers dream

of what ?

lost in a maze

they think that arrival

insanity creeps up

the chorus of confusion grows louder

this is how it happens

the spirit of doom

stalks you

meaning and meaningless

thus and such

the coils of poison

so eagerly imbibed

we are both in time

and out of time

its an odd thing

helen of troy

women are that sort of trouble

even though cities not be taken

huh, koan study would be "lectio divina", very christian, but not surprising as christianity was a growing religion in china when zen was forming, the more one looks at it the more the christian influences on zen are apparent which is why it slotted in so well into contemporary western culture

nothing wrong with posturing    .     .     .     .    i guess

other people’s understanding is not your own, lacking experience you proxy with their words

what does the buddhist term "emptiness" mean ? ,  i can’t wrap my head around it

its essentially a theological term meaning "god" or "ultimate reality" in that sense of "everything" necessarily being its own "negation", you know "silence" and inactivity might be more than noise and activity

personally i am a bit dubious about it, it does premise "monotheism" in my view, the real "emptiness" is its own non experience/ nonexistence non-reality reality

so don’t try to wrap your head around it, it won’t manage it

no nothing

nothing

something

nothing

no nothing

something

nothing

no nothing

something is an object

some men fall into the intellectual orbits of their "significant others" to an astounding degree, john lennon and yoko ono would have to be a good example of this

there’s a continuum from men who don’t connect at all to those who overconnect with the middle ground being the case for most

no wonder marriage is fraught, the mixings of identity is a fundamental trauma and to be fair to women ,  as the hormones wear off, they come to their senses and put up with less

people who write unconsciously

full of sophistical tricks

that don’t hold water

you pull them up on it

and they can’t see what you are on about

version one

in a painting

snowing

an old man in a straw hat

fishing from his boat

suspended in time

did he ever exist or not exist ?

version two

an old man in a straw hat

in his boat fishing the snow cold river

swallowing the flakes as they alight

on the water

existence is too much for him

yet he seems to survive

ed.  this is a reworking or development from some lines of a famous old chinese poem '"old straw hat man/ fishing the cold river snow"

i wouldn’t call it unreal

the walter mitty-esque

what would i call it ?

those preferred worlds

that swim in and out of view

you know you’re a great poet when a child of yours commits suicide

sylvia plath

lauris edmonds

robert frost

surgeons have a saying

“ one operation begets another ”

the only way to avoid this is to have the necessity for the next one outside of your likely lifespan which interestingly holds for breast cancer, "remission" has a time stamp

romantic love

gonads seeking gonads

original composition and played by alyona vargasova

journey through the milky way

the day’s amusement

i had a phone call from a wine salesman pretending i had placed a previously supplied order and was i interested in more ?

that’s a ruse just to take the edge off a cold call, anyway i told him i am a teetotaller

he asked me to say that again

then he couldn’t get away quick enough, like it was contagious

the power of language

just because you can change

doesn’t mean others can

a trap of competence

projected

onto

incompetence

are religions "walter mitty" worlds where everyone is their own hero ?

is religion a "walter mitty" world where everyone is their own hero ?

images of alienation

and poverty

the numb fingered hurdy gurdy man

fronting to his recompenseless plate

tunes of another world

fall on no ear

except his own

ed.  the hurdy-gurdy man is a reference to wilhelm müller’s poem “der leiermann”

beyond the village borders

stands a hurdy-gurdy man

with his numb fingers

he plays as good as he can

standing barefoot on the ice

he teeters back and forth

and his little plate

remains forever empty

what they know

people speak in terms of

can’t they listen

to what they don’t know ?

taken in by everything

because

everything takes us in

walter mitty

blurring fantasy and reality

they don’t

the disjunction of solipsist being

in a world of many

the exploration of summer

white light

flowers

their explosion

of colour

strawberries

the one thing about reddit and indeed a lot of the web is they are infested with the mildly and not so mildly insane and the very stupid, you have to watch out not to be influenced malappropriately by these people

the other side is that there are also some very informed people, but its a small minority so you have to filter

adverse circumstances

the rage passes

just roll with it

america

obsessed with the ghislaine maxwell trial

another school shooting 4 killed and seven injured

ho hum

the story of "noah’s ark" is  babylonian mythology  picked up by jewish scribes in the captivity and stems from the many disastrous floods of the euphrates

judaism , like christianity is a patchwork of "the borrowed" fashioned into the supposedly "incontrovertible"

belief   =   an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof

this inevitably must be confused information since everything is partial, belief is a necessarily failed and often badly failed attempt at a philosophically impossible completeness

another way of looking at belief is it a projection about a future state and once we step away from the grandiose we can see how it is constantly used in everyday life to great practical effect, it is the preservation of continuities necessary to survival

of course, until the discontinuous happens, one morning we may not wake up like every other

the epidemic of "total relativism"

“ all opinions are equally valid ”

which of course is an opinion, so internally inconsistent it is easily destroyed by another opinion

"hardly any opinions are equally valid "

try the paper bag koan

“ look at a paperbag for an hour

then ask yourself

how come i can’t think my way out of that ”

how far do i need to look ?

further than my nose or toes ?

my life

the world

others

other’s lives ?

how far ?

further than you can look

the echoes of nothing

that’s how far

being solitary

even in the presence of people

one is alienated

hence solitary

eihei dogen is no mystery, he says things that sound quite sensible and simple if translated effectively, but between the usual agended translator obfuscation and his own nagarjuna like turnings and involutions, you just get a voynichy mess

what mental track are you on that is not obvious ?

explore, the world is not what you think it is

brad  (ed. warner) ,  do you think your obsession with "nostalgia" is a consequence of zazen ?

where zazen can go wrong is it just deepens existing "mental tracks" forming ruts that meditators continually turn in, never escaping ?

well nostalgia is a construct to a large extent, often not well founded in reality, like some other things, the manufacture of a fantasy world to escape to

the problem is the way it detracts from other necessary activity

opening the door

memory

what is seen is surprisingly bare

but loaded

the middle class "underbelly"

exposed to

but oblivious of

drugs

female news readers

one voice

half a brain

shared

amongst many

ed.  soon after i wrote this, sick of these stupid cloned voices, blond hair, pale white faces and insipid intellects one sees incessantly on australian TV, i watched yet another on some news site and blow me down she asked some very intelligent questions of the person being interviewed who was a bit startled actually, just goes to show not to judge by appearances because she looked just like the usual "barbie" clone

you can’t lose serious weight without intermittent fasting, all these people who get gastric bypass operations rather than do this discipline want their heads examined

an interesting study on  ketosis ,  basically it takes 17 to 24 hours to enter it depending

i don’t fast to lose weight because i am on the light side, but will fast as i find it helpful for mitigating bad migraine, at the most for two or three days

i have found it necessary to say have a teaspoon of jam a day mixed in hot water to keep a bit of sugar in the stomach to help maintain the stomach biofilm and maybe a touch of a vitamin C supplement

some things are not train wrecks but more like all the trains have left the station with no more coming, not unpleasant wandering around a deserted station but becomes tiring

paul mcartney composed  yesterday  hypnagogically, both the music and lyrics

i have written the odd poem or "grook" from hypnagogic states, though i can’t remember which, but they had a startlingly different perspective

the horror story of the world

fiction doesn’t replicate it

the world so vast

infinite lifetimes

will not limn

the edges

you can tell if its the end

because you keep coming back to it and its still the end

if its not the end when you come back to it

its not the end

tiresome as that is

the heavy burden of being female

men have no idea

and to be honest

i’m not sure women do either

mind numbing

this world

with its complexity

manipulation

interaction

yet we

don’t want to to be

left alone

mind numbing

this world

with its complexity

interaction

manipulation

yet we

don’t want to to be

left

alone

stupidity is more dangerous than malice, because at least  malice can go awry, but stupidity never does, it is statistical

a prostitute talks  about her life

another  interview

writing speaks

in a way

talk can’t

history and archaeology teach a wideness to human existence and experience that is unfathomable and ungraspable

one of the feral cats died yesterday afternoon, stretched out by the back door, so lifelike that i didn’t pick up that it was dead until the next morning

a young adult with no obvious course of death, might have been a snake bite

he came back here to die

i was touched

is morning sun a boon for retinal health ?

this study  is promoting red led lights to improve retinal health in the post 40, however they also say "the energy delivered by 670nm long wave light is not that much greater than that found in natural environmental light"

so it seem to me that five or ten minutes of morning light  (summer anyway)  between eight and nine could give this 17 to 20% boost in colour contrast

an earlier  study

the applauding morons

that’s what they can do

applaud

trash or quality

they are not indifferent

and boo out

quality

the applauding morons

that’s what they can do

applaud

trash or quality

they are not indifferent

and boo out

the best

“ what is it all about ? ”

 what is right in front of you ?

“ what’s behind it ”

patterns

foxgloves

in a glass vase

white, pink and pink-purple

bells

hanging there

in

nothing

foxgloves

in a glass vase

white, pink and pink-purple

bells

hanging there

forever

age discards the baubles of thought

their shininess no longer attracts

the slow grinding of the mill wheel

spits everything out

until finally

everything

loses identity

well learning can be a closed box, you have to interact with what its about to gain the next level which is often disconcerting in that you then question the learning

“ My dad taught me that all humanity was the same.  He served in the British Army 1939 to 1945 and in the jungles of Burma.  Many of my  (now)  fellow American citizens managed to dehumanize the Japanese in  WW2

My dad related how a young Japanese soldier jumped out of the jungle and into the back of a British staff car where he held a grenade to the chest of a British Officer.  It killed the officer and blew the boy’s hand off.  The British soldiers put a rope around the boy’s neck and dragged him  (untreated)  behind the car for three days until he died ”

there’s two paradigms for existence

one is solipsism which is you are the entire universe

the other is collective, you know what that is, cyphers on a meaningless plain

solipsism becomes schizophrenia if not enough accommodation is made with the collective and the collective becomes too enmeshed in the various psychotic delusions of cultures and crowds without the sanity of solipsism

jean de carrouges  had much more battle/combat experience than jacques le gris and that was what won out despite jacques being the larger man

their duel to the death  is gripping ,  that scene in the film pretty much matches what actually happened as far as can be told

interestingly chaucer also raped a woman of status, it took some manoeuvring and no doubt compensation for him to escape serious consequences

if you write a good "grook" it goes straight past all the filters to the core of the reader’s brain

that’s a lot of power and perhaps not so paradoxically can excite hate from what is in fact perceived as  "trauma"

the basic problem of zen is the extremely poor quality of the so-called "teachers", a bunch of stupids if there ever was and the 60’s and 70’s audience and later has moved away into the similarly pure schizophrenia of the "buddha at the gas pump" milieu

one of the most useful books about zen to read is hakuin’s autobiography

its extremely disillusioning as is anything about his life

wipes the rose tints from the spectacles

people seek power, the formation of cliques in any context is inevitable which actually was an insight of mao tse tung

people seek power, the formation of cliques is inevitable which actually was an insight of mao tse tung

you have to take "enemies" in whatever form they come

in one sound

lies other sounds

hypnotic

in one sound

lies other sounds

hypnotic

our bodies and minds

designed over billions of years

by a simple idea

“ some processes are more fit for purpose than others ”

a blind point of the justice system is it assumes the hammer of the charge of perjury or perverting the course of justice keeps complainants basically honest, but in many cases the complainants escape the hammer, mental illness for instance or just plain reluctance by the police and prosecution to pursue them

years ago on a web chat i remember a young woman saying she laid a false accusation of rape against her stepfather, he was still in jail and she didn’t seem the least perturbed by it

the early days of the web were much more interesting and people were very unguarded, one certainly saw some way out stuff

suburban hell

the same

the same

different

the same

the same

the same

the suburban hell

the same

the same

different

the same

the same

the same

when you have to explain or argue a point, you have already lost

you think a bit and come to such and such a conclusion

you think a bit more and come to the opposite conclusion

then you blend them

what parentage can humility claim ?

sanity and insanity

the similars but polar opposites

give birth

to a chimera

ideal being

universals

something

born of nothing

trying to explain itself

the world looks different as you get older, more complex, shades, ambiguities and trade-offs in everything

unless you meet both parents of some-one

you can never fully understand them

there is always something hidden from you

this is a significant disadvantage if one of them is dead

the dead sea scrolls

gibberish

lauded by some

not a patch on the nag hammadi manuscripts

last words

rattling through the centuries

persistent illusions

last words

rattling through the centuries

persistent illusions

“ death is mysterious for none reporteth back ”

charmion, servant of cleopatra answering a query from one augustus’ men about whether cleopatra died well

why doesn’t the film "the hours"  (2002)  work ?

well actually it can’t work, it tries to imitate woolf’s interior monologue without the talent or time for introspection on the part of the script writers, the film is too specific, the actresses and actors are separate existences whereas virginia woolf’s book is in fact only her

its like an art fake, even the good ones on closer examination betray themselves, the film hasn’t captured that receding depth that distinguishes woolf’s writing

banal, pretentious and jarring

what parentage can humility claim ?

sanity and calamity

peace and trauma

the tides of deep waters

throw up

a chimera

“ the book of events is always open half way through ”

the last line of wislawa szymborska’s poem  love at first sight

she has a dry rational edge that means she can think and observe

work something out for yourself and you understand the limitations of other people

work something out yourself and you understand the limitations of other people

what we cannot grasp

the discontinuity of death

thich nhat yoda

and his diseased disciples

selling the force

which turns out to be

intellectual leprosy

fictions made real

by more fictions

more turtles below

disguising the fact

there is no

bottom turtle

one thousand eyes

stand on one thousand eyes

you don’t have to see

what will be visited

"something is so" "ought to be"

is and ought

ain’t so

clear cut

hume

chopped

by his own guillotine

a thousand eyes

no eye

one eye sees

not

right

wrong

the song

of ignorance

existence cannot come into existence

without going out of existence

there’s patterns there in the thoughts while meditating, you will start to see them, don’t get bogged down in what you think, but abstract the patterns, because in the end that’s you, those patterns

also its necessary to be reading a bit of philosophy and poetry, you need something to work on, some recurring thoughst will just gets "engraved deeper" and are actually quite toxic

I have a question that has been on my mind  :  I have been doing zazen for several months now but I still find myself "narrating" my zazen and having these inner monologues.  What do you do to stop this or learn to work with it ?

there’s patterns to the monologues and you will recognise these as your "modus operandi", mine is "fixing situations and things" lol pretty empty as it happens

there’ a limit to how much you can work with it and the next step is "relevant quality reading" otherwise you will just join the rest of the meditators who get stuck in the mire and can be as clueless after twenty years as they were at the beginning

in the all

there is something outside the all and contains the all

why ?

because its all

reality stems from a recursive flip

in

meaning

go figure

genesis go to the rubbish bin

where you ,  god, jesus, muhammad, buddha and moses belong

why we should all be taking  vitamin  D and K , especially in these "covid times"

for reference i am taking 3000 iu of the blackmores vitamin D a  day with 90 micrograms of the caruso’s vitamin MK7-K2, i do think you have to experiment as to what works best for you

the brain is a "prediction machine" and it is always running through predictions, some of which may be on the psychotic side and distasteful, usually we are not even aware of them

but in the end the brain is surprisingly neutral as to what is psychosis and not and might as well be a poker machine, constantly flipping up the numbers

however we have a filter as to what we do or don’t, an extra layer of "processing" to avoid adverse consequences of actions, its interesting to consider "mental illness" in this context, malfunction at the deeper level and the "filter"

this is also an intrinsic problem with meditation and why most seem to get somewhat crippled by it, both levels are reshaped and unless you have an idea of the right direction to go in  (which can only be got by reading widely of great minds)  then you are thrown into the maw of malfunction, which as i say is the usual result simply because the normal context of meditation is reading trash and being in a religion which blinkers the view

"red notice", where is there real art theft occurring ?

the prices for modernist abstract paintings

and the rest

theft so subtle

its victims think they have something of value

blood letting reduces the iron available to bacterial infections and is a remedy for hemochromatosis and can help in old age with lowering brain iron levels, high levels of iron in the brain are a factor in dementia, so blood letting not as stupid as we have been told and of course done on a previously unimagined scale with blood donations

brad  (ed. warner), you don’t think vegetarianism is "being too excellent" ?

imo you are not keeping up "cognitively", maybe the adequate supply of amino acids a nonvegetarian diet gives  is important  ?

historically vegetarian diets were in the context of celibacy, make what you will of that comment !  (ed.  he recently married)

now i think about it "excellence" is a moral judgement, moral perfection if you will, but if you take away the idea of moral benefit, everything looks unfinished and far from perfect, though somethings may be better than others

spiritus mundi

yeats’ source

of the  isle of innisfree

and the  slouching sphinx

one source for both

or are the lapping waters

something

different ?

read this  and you will see any notion of a "zen master" is a toxic illusion

the warning signs where everywhere, especially otsubo torturing the dog, suzuki was totally at fault

the notion of "zen master" is as toxic as you can get

malcom gladwell has an interesting thesis that you have to be careful in judging strangers because you approach the problem like you do with people you know well, but a stranger can be very different and you won’t pick this up

when i think of relatives and marriages that have lasted and those that haven’t, in the ones that have lasted, the spouses are "familiar", one feels one knows them and are predictable and basically they are not too strange in terms of my family background and what that milieu is used in terms of outlook and behavior

the marriages that haven’t lasted, the spouses have been "strange" and have quite a different mindset from what my relatives are used to, we tend to project what is not there, and what is there is surprising, sometimes devastatingly so and it can take years to emerge

the thing is there’s only an ocean between china, the usa and australia

if you ignore the ocean, they are all next door neighbours

it will take an powerful military alliance to contain china and that’s what’s happening

in its hey day the  yuan dynasty  got as far as java

it was only stopped by losing in battle and i think that also applies now, only the battles are different, cyberwarfare and control of strategic islands, interestingly i think new zealand can be included as an easy island target except for the strong cultural bond with australia

i don't think the chinese are in any position militarily to launch an invasion of taiwan yet, but in five years ?

there is an achilles heels with china’s need to build nuclear powerstations, they are very vulnerable targets to missile attack

fame with its infrastructure of insanity

the polluted circle

the infected inhabit

toy’s acquiescence was so unreasonable and predjudicial to redbubble’s interest i don’t think his collusion with hummel can be ruled out, europe is so full of scamming its unbelievable.

to play the  legal game  let them continue to incur costs and you incur none

you don’t seek a solution and don’t concede anything, for instance i would have never conceded their copyright claim as its visually absurd and actually is the opportunity for a long correspondence with them that costs them every reply they make

its only your trying to resolve the matter that makes you vulnerable, its an out and out scam, there's a lot more going behind the scenes, you are just one victim in a well established racket, new zealanders living in such a well ordered society can be naive about what goes on outside the country

extreme competence in some areas implies extreme incompetence in others

justice is blind

the scales hang in balance

looking for that different perspective

to straighten out your thinking

the hoops of the world invert

and you escape some closed loop

revenge is best served not cold, but invisibly otherwise you set yourself up as a target for retaliation

"invisible revenge" is often quite easily achieved by removing yourself from a situation and letting them continue with what you were complaining about

there is nothing but there is something

i looked more closely and it turned out to be nothing

but giving up and turning away

i may have glimpsed something

there is nothing but there is something

i looked more closely and it turned out to be nothing

but giving up and turning away

there may have been something

a sensible person is concerned about  being stupid

you, however are only concerned to defend yourself against the charge

the dream that has no end

we don’t know when we are in it

and can only leave it for another dream

if we could end tidily

pack up to go away

a sane world of departing and leaving

so everything makes sense

and that devil solipsism banished

the amazing thing

is this is imagined to be the case

the mystery of life

is why it is unaddressable

words abound

to fall

a

w

a

y

if satan would look at his workload

he would disappear

he disappeared

the present

a trail of

transience

that we place faith in

what is the nature of a process ?

the past is erased by what comes after

the future

words

life’s emoticons

so transient

the storm of life

ends in a storm

how unfair

awakened they flounder about

unawakened they flounder about

ah, the root matter is "flounder"

why ?