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

揭翻古剡岸雲開。 峻發清機劈箭來。 裂轉面皮乾剝剝。 萬山奔浪笑咍咍。

tiantong rujing   :   jingxi weng  translated by surupamaerl2

opening clouds, rising, turning, over the banks of the old shan river

austere, with undiluted potential revealed, come to split the arrow

a split that transforms the face, now all dried up

countless mountains, rushing waves, smile and laugh   —   haha !

my  reply

an arrow splitting an arrow

this is the secret

afloat on the shan river

clouds in the distance

this is serenity

mountains, rivers, waves all rushing

fixed for a moment by serenity which smiles and laughs

saying

don’t take yourself too seriously

you don’t hold the moment

the moment holds you

its not confusing

is it ?

“ Who holds this moment ? ”

this moment

“ But the last moment will be greedy ”

who holds the last moment ?

they say they don’t know

then spew their knowing

such

as

they are

"not knowing"

is not nearest

what is

nearest

is

knowing

correctly

which

is

not

necessarily

a

moving

target

we tend to view mistakes as unnecessary and to be avoided, but some mistakes are necessary, we need to do them to learn

my suggestions for "remedying"   this script

there needs to be more "horror" like the husband gets scared /confused/indignant as he starts to infer what has happened and the attendant needs to get scared/confused as well and maybe a momentary flash of the wife back in the seat, then both see her in that flash and realisation dawns on them

“ that’s what i am talking about ”

there is no "about"

beyond the noise

通身是口掛虛空。 不管東西南北風。 一等與渠談般若。 滴丁東了滴丁東。

surupamaerl2’s translation of taintong rujing’s famous wind bells/chimes stanza

the pith is a mouth, in the void, suspended

regardless of winds; easterly, westerly, north or south

prajna discussed for the allowance of others, wholly impartial  —

ding dong-a-ling ding dong !

my  reply

the pith is in the mouth

the void a noise

not beyond the mouth

bells ring or chime

take the chime

without substantial meditation/contemplative experience and wide ranging reading you won’t have the insight into yourself and how life works to pursue this line of inquiry in a productive way

what i have found is the same problem as people have on r|zen and the approach totally rejected by the effective owner of that sub, if you don't read outside zen then you are wasting your time, doesn't matter how much meditation you do

the strength of zen is its emphasis on meditation/contemplation, zen literature with some exceptions is not very good

to me the best way to describe meditation or contemplation is as "do nothing time"

lenin was a theoretician for mass murder, stalin wasn’t something new, he was lenin’s faithful pupil

i have only read lenin recently, he’s really interesting, not at all like i thought, he’s very intelligent but absolutely brutal in what you have to do to get to the "final goal", a literal "we had to destroy them to save them" and actually he’s not a particular fan of the "working class"

socialism runs the span from the mass murder of the population to today’s "social democracies"

the problem in its more extreme form is the state cannot competently control the economy so everyone ends up very poor except the ruling clique and total repression is need to stop the population rebelling

the brain dead

and their verbal dribbles

you try to tell them

and they just dribble some more

zombies at least

have decent food

but these

just solidify

air

the positive feature of mental illness is it takes you outside the boundaries of "normative reality"

those who are within "normal" never see how large the universe truly is and are actively in denial of it and this is just the way things are

so at a certain level of art or philosophy or literature you are getting a lot of "blur" with "mental illness"

the ukrainians are really like first cousins to the russians, what beats me is the alacrity with which russians kill their own

when christianity was first starting in ireland, there were two monasteries in the same area

one day a monk from one monastery copied a nice hymn from the other monastery for his group’s use

this lead to a pitched battle where monks were killed and the leaders of the fracas sent on a dangerous missionary expedition to scotland  (an interesting story in itself, it really was the pagan wilds)  as punishment by the church authorities

this is a true story

“ Is Zen sectarian ? ”

the problem is that the word zen is "multivalent", it has different meanings so that in the end you can’t really say what it is beyond what the context defines it as

and contexts vary, so you can’t say, it is this, or that or one person is necessarily incorrect or correct

so any discussion goes on in infinite regress and forever which is observable

you could argue philosophy is like this, a field of mutating definitions and meanings just creating piles of words to no point

beware of people pushing nonsense proxies as a cover for their total lack of investigation and understanding

i think a lot of people lack intellectual reasoning skills, indeed are disdainful of them so with disputes things revert to force of one sort or another

that is in essence what the reddit "down/up voting system" is, empowering the intellectual feeble

religions

bad fairy tales

of

meaningless words

so much of what is called "zen" is a western re-interpretation, even the japanese don’t have a word for zen master, rather the equivalent is "respected teacher", but the west gets hold of it to make it something like yoda

the great void

auden’s land of the dead

anything is possible

and is

ed.  the first line refers to taintong rujing’s  [0127b12]  (translated by surupamaerl2)

忽然掃破太虛空。 萬別千差盡豁通。

“ suddenly, the sweeping bursts through into the great void of space, where categories and distinctions beyond count are, without anything held back, open and spacious throughout ”

auden of the second line is a famous english poet and "the land of the dead" is a reference to

“ the glacier knocks in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the tea-cup opens a lane to the land of the dead

where the beggars raffle the banknotes and the giant is enchanting to jack, and the lily-white boy is a roarer, and jill goes down on her back

o look, look in the mirror, o look in your distress   :   life remains a blessing although you cannot bless ”

which is part of  a larger poem 

so i guess what my poem is saying is rujing and auden’s words are equivalent which is hard to see but there is no "absolute reality" apart from what they say, its not something behind the scenes, it is "the scenes"

repeated patterns

encountered anew

like they have never occurred before

what is the point of being involved in zen if it just makes you a grizzly curmudgeon and significantly lowers your reading age ?

that’s r|zen

i think real life zen makes you more passive aggressive and an intellectual cripple

stories in the religious context are uncritically accepted as a foundation point to move forward from, rather than examining the story itself for veracity

what you have is mostly fictional characters in a soap opera

the quality of soap operas is not great

those guided only by their feelings are unable to rationally discourse

lenin really wrote the  textbook  on how an unpopular minority group takes and holds power

some of it highly intelligent, but you can see he was aware of the necessity to kill people on an industrial scale

he also comes across as schizophrenic and as it turned out, criminally insane

the benign world of youth

where health floats along behind you like a dream

the best years ahead

the clock issues warning signs

which chime the louder for being ignored

and the floating

dream

collapses

more "simultaneous notation"

pachelbel’s canon in D   performed  by hiromi uehara and transcribed by tony williams

the notation does something for me, i don’t have any ear for the different notes, they are just sounds to me and i think the notation helps me place and give them a "relativity"

peter greenham’s  portrait  of queen elizabeth, its her best i think, touching on the surreal, no wonder it didn’t go down well with the commissioners

i think if you are going to make a criticism, you have to be prepared to help remedy it

tiantong rujing says "side business"

he means openness, inquiry and sorting out

what is the main business ?

like goes to like, but there is unlikeness

the monotheistic view is that there is something "beyond" of which reality is facets

to me this is not correct, rather than say there is anything "beyond", its more like a number of poems or/and homilies each illustrating something different and that’s as far as you can go

What do you swear on your life to be 100% true ?

The world exists

my  comment

30% in my view, maybe even down to 14

with most "pop" songs one tends to remember the tune rather than the words and there’s been one around recently in dance videos that i know the "sound" of, but the words were a blank, so i looked up the lyrics and its actually isiZulu in a gospel christian format, but disco

its  sung  by the sister of the composer who apparently wasn’t happy with the royalty distribution

when i look at these  quotes  by vladimir lenin, much more than marx he provided the axioms for stalinism and dictatorship within soviet russia and the union, they are not unintelligent ,  but no holds barred "brutal" ,  its power without any moral compass which of course is what happened

“ One man with a gun can control 100 without one ”

“ There are no morals in politics;  there is only expedience.  A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel ”

another instructive "simultaneous notation"

veronica smith singing  cherokee

you can see there’s no finality with notation, its simply an abstraction, a representation and actually an oversimplification

when i travel i make the effort to get out and about and see things that interest me and what’s more it reinvigorates against the stress of travel

writing eats oral discourse

the reason is

you can compress thought into it

the problem the young have is incomplete knowledge, yet they act like they have complete knowledge

and not so young actually

“ There was a sense of that timelessness again as the scattered light through the canopy was dancing against the leafy floor ”

that’s all it is about, that sense of timelessness is your union with infinity

simple huh ?

not according to the theologians and philosophers

these moments and intervals steal upon us unannounced and leave their imprint

there has always been a lot of mental illness in religions, these days you don’t even have to scratch the surface to see it

dealing with aggressive hostile people is very draining and they are always looking for socially acceptable outlets for it which border on the not socially acceptable

below is one of the better known zen koans : no work, no food

hyakujo, the chinese zen master, used to labor with his students even at the age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the trees

the student felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools

that day the master did not eat.  the next day he did not eat, nor the next.  "he may be angry because we have hidden his tools," they surmised.  "we had better put them back"

the day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. in the evening he instructed them: "no work, no food."

my  comment

freeloading and thieving monks were a big problem, just like in europe except you can add womanizing to the european context since ch’an was more based in remote hermitages and cultural access to the opposite gender was restricted

the story i love is at a big ch’an monastery a certain group of monks from an area left in the early morning after a retreat and when everyone else got up, they discovered they had taken all the furniture with them

another huge and surprising issue that relates to the story is the problem monasteries had retaining skilled monks placing an unwanted burden on the older more experienced monks so they were never able to retire

philosophers; burning your life away on this sort of nonsense ?

willow flowers and plum blossom

one needs the beauty of water

the other stands alone

phantoms pass in front of us

a sort of intensity of what was

gather what we may

we are still confronted with what we can’t hold

stalin and beria

the georgian twins

it never bothered them killing russians

the thing about hypocrites that is hard to get, is that the hypocrisy doesn’t change when its pointed out to them

if you eat badly, you are going to get health problems and "healthy eating" is often not what the conventional thinking is

what i find interesting reading old records and histories is what i never expected when starting zen, that nobody has clue what it is about and people just don’t seem to get that ceremonies etc are meaningless and what one sees on r|zen, that scholastic or "academic" zen with its endless analysis is also a waste of time, or at least the way most approach it which is a very christian-like "interpreting" of the scriptures

the old records show exactly the same problems occurring

i see all this "highfalutin" waffle-nonsense in comments on youtube and reddit coupled with a lot of socially atrocious behaviour, like they don’t think its rude to missionize some-one else who is not the vlog/ message board owner

my comment on a mod OP on r|zen asking for suggestions of improvements to moderation policy

"zen" has a lot of meanings now, particularly certain meanings in art and i think there should be more tolerance of what might be regarded as "off topic" in this regard, it would make for a much more interesting subreddit rather than just being composed of the endless regurgitation of what is regarded as the "right texts" with the usual "larping" commentary by faux zen masters

the other thing which is just as applicable to real life zen is too narrow a focus of what zen is compared to what might be approaching zen in other religions, if you think about it, if what zen is about is truly "universal" its going to be there in other religions and literature in general

in particular eastern orthodox christianity has a much more "zen " approach compared to protestantism and catholicism

also the "desert fathers" and some sufi notables

i do think the sub moderation has improved, its intelligent moderation that makes a sub, i just feel at this point there is a larger sense of zen of what it is about that could be addressed

as a side note a certain person  (ed. ewk)  has blocked me and the new blocking system reddit has implemented is an amazing improvement since it works both ways and not being bothered by the usual predatory personal attacks from nowhere is a great feeling

its a basic skill that everyone needs to grasp, arguing on the content of the post and not the person, like an academic discussion so to speak, though arguing on the person has its place, it should be rare rather than common

my sixty cents

____________________

my actual preference is for r|zen to be exactly the way it is, i’ve no complaints in that respect, however i do think there is a hidden moderation agenda that biases the subreddit in a certain way that is harmful to the participants including yourself and the other moderaters

as i imply, fortunately the moderation is so rigid and sectarian there's no prospect of change and the sub gives me benefit and others harm, i’m old enough not to get bothered by others taking harm, i watch out for myself

so as they say "you are welcome"

“error runs down an inclined plane, while truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill”

madame blatvatsky, who of course, would know

“ buddha said when you own nothing, everything is yours ”

he worked in a pawn shop ?

for a while

it looks like a maze

nothing familiar

then

surprise

the familiar

other people are not you

they are going to express things differently

because they think differently

beware

fake social consensus

seething snakes lie below the surface

if you study history which is generally a concatenation of disastrous vicissitudes you get the benefit of a very deep scepticism about current politics and political ideas

“ shut the mouth

plug the ears

kill all five

 where’s the sixth ? ”

ed.  he is referring to the buddhist "six senses" with "mind" being the sixth

my reply

i count

to

seven

throw out the book

and begin

at

nought

todays "poets"

jamming words together to make sense

well, it does of a sort

the wrong sort

the vacuity exposed

by opening his mouth

much better to keep it shut

and listen

faint hope

though

mouthing more platitudes

the truth that truth is not fixed

escapes him

a stone

worn by the river

is all he is

gottfried kallstenius  (sweden 1861 to 1943) ,  travel today can take you there, but  these paintings  take you back in time

tiantong rujing   :    going up to the abbots quarters at jingci, translated by surupamaerl2

located in a bullpen, ten-foot squared

the ancestors spurred us, on through the gate

using just eyebrows now, reach the scaffold

the sky, blotted out, flooded in darkness, covering the earth

a  reply

ten by ten

past the gate

the bullpen forgotten

eyebrows grow unimpeded

my  reply

twenty by twenty

gates

cattle yards

eyebrows

the usual nonsense

from

the idiots

who have no idea

what they are talking about

the sky

was never blotted out

but can you tell them ?

other people are not ourselves

and what’s more

we can’t make them similar to ourselves

they have to be so

when you look at something  like this ,  you realise your genes are a culmination of so many accidents of history that one’s own existence is random, something that came into to being without any particular reason, just like the universe

the poverty of self

is the wealth

maori i think is unfortunately a dying language

i can remember fluent maori speakers who i knew and you don’t really have that at all now

so we have the mortifying spectacle of english doing its usual thing, picking over the dying body for trinkets for itself to keep

self-publishing

panned by the caretakers

of the mottled corpse

of the publishing industry

normality

we cruise through

keeping to its strictures

even

if

it breaks us

a poem  by wendy cope

another poem,   read by her  in this case

her  proverbial ballade from her book "making cocoa with kingsley amis"

her advice on how to deal with the press

she’ll urge you to confide.  resist

be careful, courteous, and cool

never trust a journalist

"we’re off the record"  she’ll insist

if you believe her, you’re a fool

she’ll urge you to confide.  resist

should you tell her who you’ve kissed

you’ll see it all in print, and you’ll

never trust a journalist

again.  the words are hers to twist

and yours the risk of ridicule

she’ll urge you to confide.  resist

my comment   :   the problem with fame of any sort, even very minor is people who really can’t stand what you say or even you personally who would never have known about you now know about you and feel obliged to cause you problems in real life and being some sort of fringe mental illness or worse are beyond reasonable dealing

上堂。霖霪大雨。 豁遠大晴。 蝦蟆啼蚯蚓鳴。 古佛不曾過去。 發揮金剛眼睛。 咄。 葛藤葛藤。

surupamaerl2’s translation  (immediately below)  of the above tiantong rujing quote  [0124a05]

going up to the dharma hall, tiantong rujing said

persistent, steady, heavy rain

clears, a promising cloudless sky  —

the chirp of small frogs and writhing of earthworms

the ancient buddhas have never passed by

expressing their diamond eye  —   bah !

my re-translation

the day turns

variable weather

what can you say about it ?

nobody says anything

the eye of wisdom

is quiet

a woman "leaving stability"

is like a fish escaping back

to water

she needs to travel

the emotional depths

to feel alive

刀兩段沒商量。 透出無明大火坑。 再入死灰烹得活。 歲寒聲價轉崢嶸。

surupamaerl2’s translation  (immediately below)  of the above tiantong rujing quote

two pieces, in a single cut  —  this is non-negotiable

leaping out the great, fiery pit of ignorance

re-entry into the cold ashes requires you to boil alive   —

when the year is cold, reputation becomes   precipitous   lofty and steep

my  (below  —  and what turned out to be)  a line for line reworking

semantic-pragmatic disorder is the norm

abstract objectivity is not easy

equanimity is the result but roiling is the process

no wonder so few come this way

an existential exposition of  a bar at the folies-bergère by édouard manet

quite well done imo

there’s definitely something solipsist going on

locked into this cycling body

when we would live forever

the dream of immortality

never fulfilled

an opaque translation

something missed

nothing to fill the gap

i can’t find it

the result out there

neither meaning

nor not meaning

some of these  short youtubes  are very good, certainly giving conventional entertainment a run for its money

stuff that is actually funny without being forced

buster scruggs

one of the best film short stories i have ever come across

we take knowledge

as safety

which to a certain extent

it

is

which is why

we can’t let it go

we take safety

as knowledge

which to a certain extent

it

is

which is why

we can’t let it go

painters

painting

writer’s writing

composers

composing

what is left

after they die

continues

i’ve never understood musical notation, but looking at this video i sorta got a feel for it

bagpipe swing  with gunhild carling in central park new york city

the "unannotated"   original video

the trouble with insanity is it is incoherent

the trouble with "normality" is it is too limited

cross the bridge between

and you will get there

a lot of words don’t make for sense, tangles going nowhere, obvious to the outsider whereas the perpetrator is blind to it

"scientific perspective" is just a perspective, its consonant with a certain sort of reality, but that’s all it is, it doesn't have anything to say in terms of more ultimate "realities of being"

teachers are an illusion

the spiritual path is an illusion

what is not an illusion ?

go for a walk by yourself and find out

the spiritual path is an illusion

teachers are an illusion

what is not an illusion ?

go for a walk by yourself and find out

“ Yeah, sounds legit enough :)) ”

"legit" is what you make it

legit is what you fake it

legit is what you take it

as

sepehr writes complaining about his present situation

my  reply

you are actually a talented writer and have a strong mystical bent, i really liked some of your "dreams"

the problem with the world is it is almost impossible to earn a living in art or writing, some do but its almost an accident of fate, that children’s book illustrated by your wife was pretty good i thought, but this is where you go wrong, i warned you against "publishers" and to do it online yourself and you threw the whole thing away by falling into the usual publishing trap, which is they pinch your ideas for their own authors

i have learnt to be more open to the fact that most of what i do usually doesn’t work, so try to be less impulsive and step back rather than go forward which is to ask, "should i be doing this" and "what is needed to bring this matter to success/fruition ?"

you have a software degree, but no practical experience so its not surprising you you are having difficulty in getting employment, but it strikes me from what you say is you don’t like writing software, maybe specialising in documentation might suit you more ? or something else entirely ?

re the bad interstate car accident and you losing confidence driving, you want to go over why it occurred and how you can avoid that sort of scenario in the future, i find the "defensive driving" approach of high utility, anticipating how things can go wrong and never rushing, better late for an appointment that an increased chance of an accident

maybe you are too artistically inclined to ever do well at non-artistic work and opening or working at an art gallery or similar might be a goer, i think you will find you get along better with artistic people and they will understand more where you are at

i’m getting a feeling you are going down the wrong road with software, you can be too unhappy in a job

not inquiring

he stops in the house of emulation

its comfortable

to the purblind mind

people disrespectful of those they are communicating with

its not harmless

its hard to see the point of  paradise lost

except

it does paint a picture of people

he has a lot of insight about politics, which well he may, given the times he lived in

“ though strange to us it seemed

at first, that angel should with angel war

and in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet

so oft in festivals of joy and love ”

“ what is an ignorant man ? ”

you ask ?

strange spaces

of interaction

none of us

can know the other

a stupid war

is like

paying to lose money

the non-thinkers

the attitude takers

the self-assured

because

assured

but

oh

so

wrong

gaming landscapes

the dominant horizon

of several generations now

god help us !

fate follows some with a razor

or sword

others a bat

to beat them

i think i’m in the latter category

the sadness

remedied by the return

to devolve

into sadness again

so many roads i have walked down

but its the supposedly blind alleys turning off to the side that have been fruitful

opening up into new, different and interesting landscapes

escaping the burdens of repetition and containment

a window out of the press of normality

so to speak

never force your writing

when its there its there

and quickly write it down

the work has been done prior

the pieces polished and finished

fitted together

and flushed out

people make all sorts of claims with their heads in the sand

you realise its an active process

by their efforts to keep it there

surprisingly the charge and discharge levels of mobile phones with their lithium batteries are far from optimal for the usual 100 to 40% usage pattern

optimal is 75 to 65%, i might bend that to say 80 to 55%, obviously they don’t like being fully charged

figure six ,  very different from lead-acid for sure

even curiosity

wears

妙用靈通變化多

“ fecund mutations, and subtle function, spirit’s open passage ”

magical expression and subtle function, spirit’s open passage ?

magical expression and operating unseen within the limits

is the road

taintong rujing was celibate

and asks

why

well

celibacy was why

wide is the world

the parts don’t add

we live for a while

an unbalanced sum

their hairdo’s

earrings

make-up

necklaces

fashionably clothed

the appalling

limited

imagination

of women

the first stanza of a poem by Dina El-Mogazi

The animals live in the stream

The stream is a flow of water

The stream is a flow of air

And also a flow of energy

And also a flow of sound

And even a flow of earth

And even a flow of thinking

my  reply

flow

also even

not flow

within the stasis

shines what ?

yet stasis

and

flow

force

when things degenerate

the hidden reality

the russians seem to be very slow in understanding they are a country at war and mobilization is necessarily the next step if they want to have any hope of keeping their present gains

its like seeing something in slow motion

western europe and russia coming to the realization

they are at war with each other

how bad does it have to get ?

we will see

edie sedgwick

charisma beyond her ordinary mind

the usual result

life failure

“ the world as it really is ”

what is the world as it really is

disappointing ?

subtle in the way it works, but simple ?

not quite the intense dream it might be ?

a bog to get stuck in with no release ?

six words

create a conundrum

roads with signs saying

"don’t go there"

i ignore

only to eventually retrace

because i discover

why not to go there

the crazy world of the media

the assumption of a phantom jury

sitting in service on everything everywhere

pontificating cultural values

and handing out

summary judgment

to

unseen applause

the crazy world of the media

the assumption of a phantom jury

sitting in duty on everything everywhere

pontificating cultural values

and handing out

summary judgment

to

unseen applause

for the life of me, i can’t see why you would climb mount everest

its like "so what"

all that discomfort, oxygen deprivation and risk

drone shot

“ Don’t you gotta die to get real enlightenment ? ”

nup, its a process anyway, how can a process occur after death ?

i had pretty much forgotten about being the seventh patriarch which follows from my "dia kensho" experience involving a vision with the sixth patriarch, which in zen terms makes me his "dharma heir" and the only one as it happens since he had no others

prior to the experience i would have thought the whole idea insane and therefore i can see how others might see it

the visionary experience is not drug induced and as or more real than anything else regarded as real

some/most will disquieted by it, doesn’t fit into their scheme of things and i could see 99% of zen teachers hadn’t the slighest idea what it was about

some people want to learn to dialogue in a more open way, aggression is off putting

what dante

never mentioned on his discursions

heaven and hell

is their most depressing aspect

their sheer endlessness and multitudes

rather than crammed

give me oblivion

instead

the days flash by

when i look at the dates on my emails

i can’t tell whether i am in the past or future

or the present

“ Can I ask, are you critical about Brad Warner ? I ask this because I watch his channel and  your video  about Brad seems to be not very complimentary, this video couldn’t be made without a reason, so I decided to ask you about that ”

the basic issue with zen and buddhism and any religion is that the subject matter must necessarily be universal, that being the case, how can one be right and the others wrong ?

so if you take any teacher in any religion, its intrinsically flawed

brad thinks about some of the same problems as me so i find him useful in that respect

i’m not going to say "zen" is about something because its a multivalent word with a hundred different meanings, however there is something to sort out and all experience is grist to the mill, you should not be in a position of relying on some-one else’s opinion but sort out yourself how things are

i do think nishijima has lead brad "up the garden path" in certain respects and brad has yet to sort that out and may never

i’m sympathetic to his situation, its a difficult area to make a living in and requires "perfomance" to a large extent, people just want to bolster their self-esteem by "larping" as "zen masters", what can you do ?

yet another pope  has become senile ,  the catholic church doesn’t shoot itself in the foot so much as in the head in its constant discrediting of itself

well he’s the first one for a while who isn’t gay

“ what’s the best answer to being called ugly ? ”

tell them there’s nothing you can do about it and it hurts

librarians

to the library of babel

they never learn

answers are outside the library

there is only obscuration

within

clichés hold up against clichés

discards

in another world

writing

ahead of ability

or understanding

 what can you do ?

billions of hours

wasted

is the norm

a reply

there’s a tumbleweed

circling through a red waste

next to a muddy puddle

disembark

my reply

you can’t disembark from random and expect to hit the jackpot

the pretenders decoyed

to a deserving fate

words

without

that inner coherence

fail

beyond buddha

the monotheists putrid claims

god or buddha

dancing in a cesspit

tiantong rujing’s case collection   :   "king prasenajit asks a question", translated by surupamaerl2

king prasenajit asked the venerable pindola   :   i have heard, venerable one, that you have been close with, and met with, the buddha, have you not ?

the venerable one used his hands to raise his eyebrows

tiantong rujing comments

by means of using his hands, to answer the question’s key point,

showing, without anything hidden, his familiarity, his meeting the buddha  —

up to this day, for this, he is worshipped, in all four quarters  —

a plum sprig in spring, wrapped in cold, and snow

ed. (translator)  king prasenajit was an indian king in the 6th c. BCE, and a lay follower of the buddha

pindola bharadvaja was an arhat the buddha asked to stay in the world to proliferate the dharma

my  reply

meeting with an object

the object fails

we fail

what is this ?

surupamaerl2 replies   :   what is what ?

my reply   :   not meeting with an object

the blind self-centered that so seem to hang onto some toxic image they have of themselves and the world

there’s a million billion languages

don’t get tangled in the supremacy of your own

one day it will neither be spoken or heard

dealing with the misguided

is it your business ?

walk away

brad warner "on tour" in finland was saying the place a weird vibe compared to when he had been there before

my  comment

you are in a country that shares a very long border with a country that nato  (finland will be a nato member in a month)  is in a very real proxy war with, its gotta have a weird vibe, its actually a very big change for finland, basically the country is about to become a protagonist in a war compared to its previous policy of appeasement

declaiming

he whines

the world doesn’t

fit

me

blood type has an effect on  your probability  for a stroke, higher risk for types A and B and lower for type O

guess i got lucky, i've never felt in any danger of having a stroke despite being prone to migraine

shitou xiqian’s poem "complement of arrangement and coincidence" translated by surupamaerl2

to every domain, there is a gate of access

some orbit each other, while others do not

when they revolve, they also involve one another

if not, their condition is to abide their place

the root of expression is distinct from the ground of representation

"harsh" and "pleasant" are fundamentally exceptional to sound

though there is a subtle unity, between ascendant and accurate words

it’s in verse, that muddled and lucid are made apparent

my reply/re-expression

recursion

involution

each swallowing the other

how to escape this ?

words used differently

that jump the barrier

how

nobody knows

but it happens

what zen is about, or might be about can only be expressed in poetry, prose doesn’t cut the ice

you can’t explain what can’t be explained, so poetry at its best, doesn’t explain, it is

there’s no question

there’s no

answer

only expression

what life is about, or might be about can only be expressed in poetry, prose doesn’t cut the ice

you can’t explain what can’t be explained, so poetry at its best, doesn’t explain, it is

there’s no question

there’s no

answer

only expression

what if its all nonsense ?

why does nobody ask themselves that

before embarking on more nonsense ?

pretending works on reddit, but how far does it go in real life ?

 what ?

what if its all nonsense ?

why does nobody ask themselves that

before embarking on more nonsense ?

pretending works in dreams, but how far does it go in real life ?

 what ?

a rather fascinating account of being robbed and possibly escaping worse by a french  recumbent trike  rider in a lawless part of lebanon (beqaa)

read the comments as well, you will get an inside picture of that area of the middle east

tiantong rujing is totally "dai kensho" basically a life changing experience about "the nature of reality"

that’s what he’s describing

"Breaking the chains, of clouds and mist, of uncountable weight  —

Sudden, the sound of a thunderclap  —  BOOM !

Colours of spring, the home of the heavenly gods; apricot blossom red"

those three lines are really what zen is, kudos to surupamaerl2 for a good translation

he so extreme in terms of this and dissing everyone wasting their time with various conceptual nonsense  (like r|zen_larp does for instance)  that he’s disliked in contemporary zen, but it is the basic thing about zen, before and after so to speak and it can’t be approached through the usual theological nonsense

however there is another stage beyond this covered in the last line of the quote that hardly anyone ever seems to get to, though its not so difficult imo

i’m not sure how good an idea fasting in general is, if you are trying to lose weight its better just to cut down on the amount eaten in a balanced way  (not calorie counting)

fasting is not a remedy for what its usually taken as, a poor quality diet

the seasons of life

old women, old men

is it all decay ?

the grey men

talk and talk

building castles

where there are none required

even within

crazed babbling

an ounce of sense

the sanctimonious

reek

of attempting to be

something they are not

as i get older if i have a philosophy of life its to look to the advantage in everything because there’s nothing without disadvantage

there’s this bridge of a bit of work to cross over the gap from disadvantage to advantage that is usually required, or even just thinking about it differently

the problem is always giving adequate attention to necessary matters

flat time

everything continues as it is now

a dream

not come true

it is looking increasingly like the assassination of darya dugina was the work of a ukrainian undercover group

from a pragmatic viewpoint it will be startlingly successful as a propaganda weapon in bring home to the russians there is a war going on and russia will have to mobilize to win it

this means russia will become a very different and uncomfortable country to live in, and actually putin mightn’t be in power in that, more like some sort of military junta

it was even more successful in missing its possibly primary target alexander dugin, discrediting him as man who sacrificed his daughter for some ill thought-out and dated ideas

drug dealers effectively run robbery and burglary operations because that is how they are funded

i suppose drugs are in effect, a currency

my mother complained about my writing being a bit "dark"  (or negative as she put it)

there is perhaps an underlying pessimism, but really you have to be in the mood to read some of it, what’s said will click, yet if you look at it other times it seems like nothing, that is even the case for me who wrote it

i have only ever had one rule about my participation in net message boards, does it provide material for my writing  and just about always, it does

russian casualties are more in the area of WW2 than the usual modern warfare, nobody  (at least on the russian youtube  videos )  seems to mention this or have any concern about it

probably its too dangerous for them

putin is the leader most like stalin since him, but a watered down version without the social control that stalin had, so lacking that and the "war" dragging on i would say his days are numbered

russia has never recovered from stalin and beria; the gulags and WW2

its best men lost and taken out of the genetic pool

the effects of war are never controllable

 too much real world for you ?

they build

insane castles in the air

a breeze

brings

down

message boards

empty words

going into

a bottomless bucket

off topic

or on topic

you

the arbiter

of

nothing

as a child i was superimpressed by henry winterfeld’s story "trouble at timpetill" ,  i was looking at this  scene  from the film "the city without jews" and suddenly twigged that timpetill reflected the film, that timpetill was written by a german jew on a background of nazi ascendency

interestingly the author of "the city without jews" was assassinated soon after the film version appeared by a nazi and  the woman  who wrote the script for the film died in a nazi concentration camp

“ people are better able to believe in a claim once thought to be false, as opposed to  unbelieving  something once believed to be true ”

one thing i hate is an article that first states the belief assumed to be true without telling you that they then go on to disprove it, ie its not true, so you have reinforced the wrong belief as true, bastards

the song of r|zen

fakes

spewing words

a dunning kruger devil

sitting on each shoulder

not seeking answers

just wandering along

the world they already know

what does rujing say ?

“ Pines are straight, brambles are crooked; cranes are tall, ducks are short ”

Pines are crooked, brambles are straight, cranes are short, ducks are tall

this is where the truth is

enlightenment

seeing something you hadn’t seen before

the ignorant rabble

miss this

zen is just a story

they mumble to themselves

thinking it meaningful

they worship the scriptures

why ?

because they lack creativity

an empty meme

“ consciousness ”

theorised about

endlessly

even stupidity has its validity

which is just as well

for me

incremental improvement

the years pass while we can

ed.  anton brucker’s 4th, 8th and  9th  symphonies show this pattern imo

voces8 singing  locus iste  by anton bruckner at at les dominicains de haute-alsace, i think the brown cloth covered objects are to improve the acoustics

the past accessible to us ?

hardly

but when it does

it hits with a weight

people object

if i say

“ my life is grief ”

and there is a lot

of

silent weeping

a sterile husk

tossed in the refuse

reality forgets

because it must

to work

life fragments

beyond our ability to fuse

into coherence

their lives blink in and out

that were once part of yours

you are remaining

for how long

 who knows ?

if you look for approval from other poets

don’t

you don’t like their work

why should they like yours ?

the land of our past

seen patchily

we can’t grasp it

the intensity

does

and doesn’t

fade

the land of the past

seen patchily

we can’t grasp it

it disappears

the "woke" argument is that "gender" is "performative", well it has a performative element but fundamentally its genetic at the DNA level and i can’t see how you can get away from that

"trans" must necessarily be a mixed bag, i think a lot of the fuss about it is a sort of schizophrenia looking for a black and white resolution of what is not black and white

huh, i had wondered why  peanut butter  was still sold in glass jars and i guess the same holds for other stiff  (at room temperature)  "condiments" that need to be heated to flow

the circuses were an integral part of the roman empire and i wonder what purpose they served ?

for one ,  they were a constant reminder of what happens in war, its a gristly business and people get killed and it could be you, i think the experience of what war is gets lost in a generation

i think the word "zen" is now "multivalent" with different meanings dependent on context, historically it was defined by monasticism but now it also means "spiritual-like serenity" or similar

a modern problem with monasteries is the lack of information access that the net gives, so if you are stuck in a monastery then you are going to look stupid and uniformed compared to anyone able to spend several hours a day on the net

the notion of "practice" is a modern western fiction, i can’t find any evidence of it in the old chan masters

meditation does something that you can’t see

good and bad

the only universes where god exists are ontological

these are not real worlds, but abstracted limited worlds defined by axioms

however within these worlds god definitely exists and like maths that has no physics to match, usually sheds light of a sort on the real world, but has profound inadequacies

god is after all an answer to a limited question

before us

lives

empires

universes

after us

lives

empires

universes

no answers there

life’s stages

the next one can only be approached through the previous

rujing is surprisingly "anti-formalist" which is why he is not popular in soto circles, just about everything he says is a criticism of monks and "the system"

what is there to say or do ?

observing opens a world

free of the chains of thought

what emerges

blazes like a million suns

“ Smash the black lacquer bucket  — ”

black lacquer buckets

a waste of paint

remove the colour

and what do you have ?

i wouldn’t say hania rani’s music is intellectually demanding, its more  relaxation  when you don’t want to think at all really

film footage  of marcel proust

you can tell there’s something very different about him, he’s not like the others there, a degree of removal and refinement

cai thomas  (aged 12)  singing  laudate dominum  by mozart

evidence multilingualism  harms the expression  in any one language, they tend to blur and use is non-optimal, and, i think impose neurological and cognitive opportunity costs in other areas

the attempt to retain dying languages is harmful to the cultures that are attempting to be preserved having an isolating effect on new speakers and burdening them with useless complexity and reducing accessibility of the culture to english monolinguals to no purpose

yuja wang playing  the cadenza  in the first movement of prokofiev’s  piano concerto no. 2

its an odd thing to have grown to like prokofiev in my old age, but so few play him well

no angels

no heaven

no afterlife

william blake would

be at his wit’s end

ed.  i am reading his "the marriage of heaven and hell" a rather  extraordinary  work and a precursor in some ways to modern science fiction

going back in time

you can’t recover

what you lost

the problem with war is its compulsion

if some-one goes to war with you, you have to go to war back

its goes to the basement of fear, that is your death, it really can’t go further

i think therefore, it will always exist

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction" from william blake’s "proverbs of hell" in "the marriage of heaven and hell"

shingles has become more of a problem in those who had chickenpox naturally because the vaccine has stopped the virus circulating endemically so resistance from constant exposure to the virus is lost

i find being angry motivates me and from that point of view is useful, but it rarely pays to be overtly angry with others because there is a process of "unwrapping" the problem to go through, a dialogue in effect is required which requires a degree of "equanimity" by both sides

its actually something to practice when you get an "angry" response to a comment on the net, but what usually happens is they flake off and don’t engage, a bad sign of their not getting to grips with a problem

i was reading that the  root cause  of glaucoma is vascular problems an example of which is  flammer syndrome

sleeping with two pillows or similar may help reduce nighttime  pressure spikes

i get these waffle replies sometimes on the net where clearly they can’t understand what i have posted or even their own thoughts on the matter

the reply is just a projective meta that doesn’t go anywhere and diagnostic for semantic-pragmatic impairment, what can you do about it ?

nothing

“ the teaching beyond words ”

when infinity gathers

and coils around you

is

that

beyond

words ?

a monk asked joshu   :   what is the way ?

joshu replied

it shows in retrospect, but can hardly be seen ahead and eventually disappears

the monk was nonplussed into silence

joshu left

the trail of infinity

we all tread

forever

not even forever

we stop

and it goes on

sometimes it coils

so we see it

you can look back at something, but you can’t really say anything, reality doesn’t work in that way, the continuity is an illusion

this study opened my eyes a bit, we really only have a couple of hours a day of good decision making and often wasted on an   ungrateful employer

“ cola-based soft drinks induces memory impairment at different ages ”

“ long-term administration of soft drink causes memory impairment and oxidative damage in adult and middle-aged rats ”

let’s see  if this  makes the media, because um   .   .   .

advertising you know

the history of the middle east, eastern europe and northern africa is one of constant war and armies and enslavement shifting populations around and some of it pretty extreme like scandinavian mercenaries serving as bodyguards for the byzantium emperors so the populations are going to be exceptionally  racially mixed

i always find it the most amazing thing about war, once a victor is sorted out the dead and injured are written off and everything settles back to normal, just with a new controlling hierarchy class if the defender lost

my observation of the american foreign service is its inability to understand different cultures, the middle east, iraq/syria and afgahnistan being prime examples and getting overinvolved in cot-case situations and being behind the eight ball in situations that are more productive of involvement

the usa’s major issue currently is the need for japan, taiwan and australia to have nuclear weapons because "the cold war" doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" is the only thing that’s going to work to keep the peace in tomorrow's world, politically unpalatable as it is in some quarters

circles

seen from a distance

are cycles

turning around

to begin again

“ When intense cognitive work is prolonged for several hours, it causes potentially toxic byproducts to build up in the part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex.  This in turn alters your control over decisions, so you shift toward low-cost actions requiring no effort or waiting as  cognitive fatigue  sets in

cognitive work results in a true functional alteration/ accumulation of noxious substances  —  so fatigue would indeed be a signal that makes us stop working but for a different purpose  —  to preserve the integrity of brain functioning ”

one wonders what the effect of playing a game like the  cult of the lamb  is ?

this may be a more general problem of the sophistication and intensity of modern entertainment eating quality attention to the detriment of our lives

“ what’s going on ? ”

you have to ask ?

“ well, yes ”

what’s going on is your asking "what’s going on"

“ oh, i see ”

we outlive cats and dogs

our personal history with them dies too when they go

one god

spawns two

spawns three

ad infinitum

infinity with an explanation of itself is just like it is with everything else

endless

why is it something predicted never happens, then happens

what i notice with things you have been thinking about for years, is you have the conclusion, but you don’t have the certainty

then one day, the conclusion literally snaps into place and you have the certainty, despite what everyone else says

what’s the point of being honest in a game there’s no honesty in ?

you also are dishonest

our points of resistance

to reality

taking us to perdition

and the next generation

its not true there is no adequate theory for consciousness, its been around for years and basically it states that consciousness is an artefact of a superhighway of information flow in the brain, effectively a broadcast system no doubt necessary for real time navigation in this world

most recent work on consciousness is some variant of this, the media seems to ignore or be in denial of it

its like sir henry neville being the true author of shakespeare's works, takes 20 years to be accepted after proven, the old guard have to die off, says a lot about humanity doesn't it

for there to be "aliens" as per popular "folklore" ,  there has to be faster than light travel

you can’t get around that and the laws of physics don’t permit it

not a lot different from being resurrected from the dead or flying on the back of a buraq from mecca to jerusalem

nonsense without redeeming merit made literal

best advertisement  for drug use

its quite disturbing how intelligent some of these people are, or at least, you can see they were, an unstable upbringing seems to be a common factor, but not necessarily

actually he’s a bit lacklustre ,  this woman  is more interesting

is "postmodernism" a populist "re-rendering" of old philosophical saws with the usual consequences ?

i think so/ yes

the internet is the defacto medical research publishing medium, ignore at your peril

medical professionals are people, not gods and like everyone and everything else, get some things right and others wrong, patients can empower themselves with intensive intelligent research and at a minimum have a more informed appreciation of the options

________________

reading the research is very different from taking random advice on the internet from a message board or forum, though these may be helpful in forming an opinion, you have to be careful, i find some people who have had bad results want to decoy others into having the same problems as themselves so they feel better, others can be much more straightforward and honest about difficulties

even the research can be flawed, seen that a few times, some elephant in the room totally missed

the practical experience of a medical specialist though not aligning 100% with the research can be right on

there is not an answer in terms of an ideal proxy that will predict the future with gratuitous certainty, its not a problem that can ever be resolvable so it has to be worked through, the motivation to do this is that just taking advice from one source is usually going to lead to far from optimal outcomes, like anything else in life

rushdie, the assassin’s target

for some relatively non-controversial references to islam

i say muhammad is a fictional character with a plot function in an incoherent novel

the ways of the world are wonderous

my long life assured

the old look at the young

now i am old

i look at the young

their concerns and world

are different

the old look at the young

now i am old

i look at the young

their concerns and world

is different

i don’t object to being dead

its the process of dying i object to

being compelled to go where one does not want to go

oddly now i think about it

we were compelled into existence to

“ Why are you here ? ”

why are why ?

if you think about it

what’s universal should not be really hidden anywhere

but reflect through everything

agreeing

disagreeing

the circularity of which

never strikes us

superstitious behaviour

a mask

for lack of knowledge

plagiarism

the cheapskate’s

cheat sheet

your brain understands you better than you do

you can’t understand you

but the brain can

your brain understands you better than you do

you can’t understand you

but your brain can

it must be frightening to be a woman, so obviously designed to be a breeding machine and so easily conscripted into that life changing event

explanations

a reflection of the way we look at things

and need them to be

the warbling of the magpies

under the bright light of a supermoon

are they complaining or what ?

magpies

you warblers

disturbed by the supermoon

are you complaining

or what ?

“ What interested me was how many people brought up lion’s mane mushroom, as a supplement.  And ashwaganda which I keep hearing about.  Maybe black seed oil which Iheard from people personally helped them

And many, many people take magnesium apparently ”

well i'm taking 3000iu daily of vitamin D, 90mcg of K2/MK7, 200 mcg of chromium gtf, 100 mcg of selenomethionine, 3/4 of a teaspoon of taurine and occasional zinc , germanium and B vits

the above is somewhat tailored to me for migraine, the usual joint problems with aging and immune resistance, i have had covid once for sure, pretty mild, sick for a day

magnesium feeds bad gut flora, i suspect there are problems with lion’s mane as well, what i notice with these people and their half-arsed supplementation and dietary changes is they are constrained to a very low ceiling of improvement, but of course, you can’t tell them

the dietary side is quite hard to work out, however eliminating grains is an effective simple rule, i do have very substantial write ups on the subject with the  biofilm carbohydrate diet  and compendium

as i get older i really appreciate chromium keeping blood sugar problems at bay

anthologies

a compilation of mediocrity

the real stars

burn those close to them

sometimes the light

which crosses boundaries

without warning

appears

hang on to it

but it slips

through your grasp

our brains are evolutionarily configured to see things in terms of agency because its lions that chase us across the velt and not plato’s theory of forms

on the other hand "you" and "lion" are forms

the translations are in effect a "reinterpretation", the one or two occasions where i have done/attempted a literal interpretation of dogen, i have come up with something very different to the usual, its a generic problem with religious translations, the translators always seem to have some reinterpretation to fit their own ideas axe to grind

what i have found is eihei dogen is quite understandable from a more literary perspective when he is not "sect building"

there’s no mystery, he’s a writer and philosopher and you can pick up the ideas in other writers at the literary and philosophical level

the moon last night

was no moon

but a full moon

arcing through the sky

the clouds deleting it

and not

ed.  the poem is actually observations from a couple of nights, close to and including a full "supermoon", the first when i was out hunting in what was very bright moonlight, a rather surreal experience tramping over the paddocks and the next nights which were cloudy

the talkers

thinking they are doing something

yet they can’t communicate

or be communicated to

disconnected people

the farce of pretending

connection

that gap

silence speaks

its bewilderment

suspended time

seen for a moment

what we really are

translation

what flows in one language

may be jangled in the next

we have "free will"

what does that mean ?

that we are free to make choices the reasons for which are hidden from us

remnants

what remains

can be seen through

that’s why

they’re remnants

picking up the gauntlet

stitching together the parts to make an illusory sense

oh

it wasn’t illusory

i don’t understand what this means  

picking up the gauntlet

stitching together the parts to make an illusory sense

oh

it wasn’t illusory

i don’t understand what it means

the rivers of time

what do we know of the rivers of time ?

waters gathered

are sent outward

never to return

a land of the dead

the stupid, idiots, dishonest, malign, perverse

one way or another

their only expertise is to eat you alive

suddenly you realise where you are

jehovah’s witnesses are having trouble competing with google

unsurprisingly

when you look at this young woman who is a really  fluent japanese  and english speaker, exposed intensively to both languages in childhood, you understand that there’s nothing special about one language compared to another, that basically they are equivalent, that the sense of what the language is conveying is paramount and to prioritize one language over another except for plain practicality is stupid

hans-georg gadamer giving thoughtful insight on  the separation of being

needs to be muted unless you understand german

i have to say i think  "the other"  is a form of monotheism, which, while it has a certain ontological correctness is not the final word by any means

ed.  "the other" is a modernish philosophical concept with jacques derrida amongst its promoters

years ago some-one brad warner was familiar with  (they did not get along)  called adam tebbe did a crowd funded documentary on current zen teachers, one day he had a revelation stacking pallets in a store ,  that he felt better with the exercise and zazen was just making him depressed, he dropped the zen documentary  (funding had run out anyway)  and converted to an evangelical christianity that believes strongly in the demonic, a prudent move considering the state he now lives in

strange but true

our expectations

are socially imprinted

to be giant leaps

but reality

only

permits

stepping

stones

MMA, male or  female   :   the brain damage is not worth the money

the vicarious enjoyment of the destruction of some-one else’s personality seems to be genetically imprinted in us

even the rotating beam

of  a

lighthouse

misses a lot

a nun counting her beads

the days slipped by

so

ed.  i was reading georges simenon’s account of his mother dying and a nun sitting in the corner of the hospital room counting the beads of her rosary

i even got as far as using it as a seed for a short story and actually i think a novel could be made from it but my brain absolutely rebels at the effort required, i find this divide between the way i write and say something more conventional like stories quite interesting, i need the punch of a homily to be interested, longer prose is flatter and i find it hard to be bothered with, though i can see you can apply the same concepts homilies deal with and work them them into prose, its just that prose works in a different way, however i think homilies are better suited to the increasingly ADHD world and have the intensity needed for me to be interested and actually are much more time efficient

i notice that successful prose writers have been writing as children, so that in fact by the time they are thirty they can have about 23 years under their belts and i feel that is what you actually need to write prose well, which is why the field so abounds in failure

anyway nuns depressively wasting their lives in the male dominated organisation of the catholic church and the personal side of that is a theme worth investigating

the start of my story, not exactly alice munroe lol

cecila was counting the beads of her rosary

it was an unsatisfactory business, this continual parsing of each bead but it created an acceptable busi-ness in the eyes of the other nuns with their antennas constantly tuned to interfering to suit their busy-body ways

as the beads slid by, she felt a certain featurelessness rather like the months that slipped by in the convent

   .     .     .     .    not to be continued

when i have fasted  (usually only a day or two with a bad migraine or flu)  i have taken a teaspoon of jam a day in hot water to line the stomach with a small amount of sugar

the reason for this is to keep the sugar eating bacteria alive and not let the protein eating bacteria take over

coming off fasting too requires a bit of skill, easing out with small amounts of easily digested food like say hard boiled egg

“ Suddenly he sees his own body becoming ethereal (身如氣), expanding until it passes beyond the limits of the triple world.  He sees water entering through the crown of his head and his body solidifying until it is equal to the water and pervades it completely  He then sees his navel as a lotus flower, from which a live spring bubbles forth, the water overflowing from his body and encircling it like a pond with multiple lotus flowers, each shining with a seven-coloured light ”

and to think there’s a million miles of this sort of rot out there in buddhist writings

the how and why baffles me

looking at what you dislike

opens

a door

looking at what you dislike

opens the door

“ when attempts to eradicate a problem fail, people might dismiss smaller but  critical steps  that were and can still be made ”

the whole zen scene and dogen has dramatically changed over the last decade, wherever you go he's now shoved "in your face" overexposure for sure, and its bedevilled by the usual bad and projective translations

i find rujing far more interesting and actually this guy on reddit (surupamaerl2) has been doing some good quality translations of him

one thing i get from rujing that dogen is not is his "anti-formalism" which i far prefer

zen though ostensibly "buddhist" does differ and "dia kensho" is its basis, "practice" is really just nonsense

a way of describing "dia kensho" is if you subscribe to the spiritual "two world " hypothesis is stepping into that other world, that you know its something real and existent and effects a profound change in outlook, too great for most people to handle actually so they just sit around "pretending" as safer and actually it is

you can pick if its happened to some-one through this change and 99% of the claimants have never had it

as per the "records" there are the "sudden" and gradual aspects, the gradual in fact is a process over the rest of your life and you need to live along time to get the full benefit of that, joshu is a good example of a great long lived zen master

reddit’s suicide note

a young man on a cruise ship

soon to jump overboard

asking readers to look for him in the news

reddit removed his account and OP

if he jumped he would be dead by now

its pretty rare so would make the news especially with the reddit connection

edit:  nothing in the news so i’d say he didn’t jump, i think there is a bit of a contradiction between publicising something and carrying it out successfully, i’ve been through one on-line suicide attempt with another young man years ago, it wasn’t successful, police and an ambulance was called, never again, those people who man the suicide help lines must get traumatised

the edge of madness

the carelessness of being

not caring whether we drive towards

or away from it

a poem by taigu ryokan

my legacy  —

what will it be?

flowers in spring

the cuckoo in summer

and the crimson maples

of autumn  –

my  reply

i have no legacy

summer spring autumn winter

cycle through

without me

after i had my "enlightenment experience" i slowly realised all the zen teachers were pretenders and none knew what they were talking about, a bunch of fakes

it seems absurd but true, zen is just a bunch of manufactured nonsense, idiots passing the time until they die

something rujing was very critical of btw

translations of historically old writings are full of philological hurdles which the reader has to jump so you have to come in part from the other way, what they could have said

“ where would you make the philological connections ? ”

its something the reader does from their own experience, i’m not saying its correct

its very apparent in eihei dogen and why the translations are such poor quality is the translators project into the philology and so you get in effect, their version/intepretation rather than an accurate translation

your  (ed. user/surupamaerl2)  strength as a translator is to leave a certain vacancy over unresearched philology which of necessity given remoteness of the culture is a fair portion of it, that what we see from you is an actual translation and not a "reworking" creating some alien image of the source text

its easy to see why tiantong rujing gets so little press in zen and buddhism since he is so strongly critical of zen formalism, way more than dogen who essentially "scammed" his transmission certificate from rujing because to rujing, transmission was just more formalistic nonsense

“ What is the most beautiful thing you have learned ? ”

that ugliness can also be truth

your error is not just being on the wrong road

but your failure to go where roads are not

for all roads

are wrong

the poets

and philosophers claim

dreamers we are

within a dream

but moreso i think

all we are

is what is real

within the dream

"ultraman" seems some sort of japanese angst not worked through about the war

the earth is at rest, the cloth gold threaded, bled over by the colours of the sky

another mile to travel gets there

solitary suffices

the moon absent or present

its light illuminating or not illuminating

if we mimic its phases

how far will we get ?

kleptocracy is the worst of all political worlds, it lacks the adaptability of democracy and the competence of a so shall we say bonapartian dictatorship

russia and north korea are today’s outstanding kelptocracies and in fact china has also become one, a consequence of which is it is internally facing the same expansionist pressures as russia

the invasion of the ukraine was really the consequence of a political dialogue in previous years in which russia opted for kleptocracy rather than democracy and was clearly lacking the economic mass to sustain itself militarily and economically with the inefficiencies of the kleptocratic system

the basic point i am making about a cult is this requirement for "infallibility" somewhere, if you start to say the teacher or whatever guru is wrong or buddha, jesus and muhammad are fictions and not historical people the purpose of the group collapses, so they eject you rather than open up to rational development

in a lot of milder cases its not a black and white thing and i’m not saying there’s no utility in these groups, like my time in zen greatly improved my social skills and i would never have gone on retreats without the group opportunity, but all the same the utility wears off and you start to hit the cult aspects and their unreasonableness that comes from investment in closed fixed ideas

what i am saying is core ideas are wrong in fact and the only way you can sustain a group in that context is cult control, for instance zen is heavily dependent on the notion of "enlightenment" but that is a fiction and all the usual scandals prove it

religious teachers of any sort are ordinary people with well crafted masks, pull the masks off and see for yourself how things really are

what a strange land

all these consciousnesses we know not

about which only limited inferences can be made

but not how they see

colourama

cats’ eyes in a spotlight

orange   blue   white

i was reading georges simenon’s "letter to my mother" in a good translation by ralph manheim and i did some   background research  on georges not really being familiar with him, even watching  an episode  of maigret

essentially it brings the writing to life to know the author, there seems to be some crazy belief in university english departments that the text stands alone, but it never does, its part of a life, jane austen and sir henry neville are outstanding examples of this

childhood

the pot is formed

then set

the glaze’s intensity

fuels us

for the rest of our life

yet what it is

we only dimly glimpse

there’s no such thing as something that is always right, you have to explore the way things are wrong

so even if the entire world is wrong, you will still make progress though you do need to come across something that is right to keep your sanity

if you search enough, what is right will find you

for a cult to work you need a notion of infallibility, it can be there in the doctrine and a fictitious or historical person or some sort of living "guru" or even something apparently harmless as education where essentially teachers and their authority can’t be questioned

so the moment you have this notion of teacher which is a subversion of solipsism and saying that people are essentially not equal in terms of existing you are into "cultism"

why not connect the dots ?

sylvie and bruno

alive under this pen

yet they cannot walk or talk

because it doesn’t want them to

ed.   sylvie and bruno  was lewis carroll’s last novel, its too adult in themes i think so misses the magic of alice, or maybe he was getting old

plagiarism

the unforgivable sin

of idiots

real talent

permutes

modifies

distorts

condenses

no mere make-over

but stolen goods

beautified

origins a dream

long past

the problem of intellectual property

easy theft

cuts both ways

stolen from

is also stolen to

a blur of uncertainties

a kaleidoscope twisting

some patterns

are more meaningful than others

love is not essential

borderlines of existence

can be crossed in other ways

her eyes

hardedged

a ruthless depression

life’s roundabout

no left turn, straight ahead or right

just going around and around

the

roundabout

a supposed bankei quote

Everything is perfectly resolved in the Unborn

my "denouement"

the "unborn" is famous for

its lack

of resolution

what can be said about "birth and death" ?

words that go on forever

meaninglessly

self-promotion

the world’s

an unending

gaslight

i was in the supermarket this cold 2nd of august wintery evening and a woman of about 35 ? with a young child of about four or five was being served and what she was buying was unusually limited, a couple of bananas and small quantities of other items

i think it came to $60 which is not much these days, she was dressed plainly and functionally, a sort of black padded overcoat against the cold

it was obvious there was no money and she was limited by the $60 when much more would have been bought if she was able to afford it

in my time in supermarket queues i have only seen evidence of very limited budgets once or twice and that in old people having to get some items returned to the shelf, so to see this where there was obvious need was a bit distressing

far versus near

their different perspectives

jar

its been said before

but we should take time

to stop and stare

life is short

and when we go

everything goes

the rules of war

are no rules

except winning

ask

the dead

minecraft

build a world

n  +  1

forever

in fact

what we see

is limited to what we understand

as our understanding opens up

so does what we see

when i say something

should be this way or that

its only should

what if

 it shouldn’t ?

statues

empty images

making something

ungraspable

concrete

or

stone

satan

an agency

a cause of something

we don’t quite know

evil and good

rotate in confusion

god and jesus swap heads

horrifying

the innocent

ed. the above poem night seem a little "unusual" but it references several literary and theological tropes and themes

the deep flaw intwining in "harry potter" is the over-ascription of agency, which condemns it to a bit above "the run of the mill"

i dream of a world

where nothing changes

so i can catch up

and stay ahead

instead of it outpacing me

an interesting way to think about the ukraine conflict is to personify russia and ask how it looks at things

it wouldn’t know anything of putin but might say it was too small to support itself adequately and needed to be larger

the idea that the facility of language is a learned rather than genetically designed attribute is nonsense

to clarify, a language itself may be learned, but that ability is a genetically designed developmental process

sunday afternoon ,  greenwich avenue, george ault’s 1925 painting  is heavily "influential" on edward hopper’s later  (1942)  and more famous  nighthawks  (his wife modelled for the woman in it)

more george ault

the make-up team has created a  model in looks  who sounds like helen clark, dissonant

its that highly skilled "evasion" helen was such a master of

well, arden is a protege of clark and this is what makes her such a formidably successful politician, clark’s mentoring accelerated arden’s political development by thirty years so what you see is an illusory make-over, a younger woman of 42 years who is in fact a very seasoned and experienced politician of about sixty in terms of political skill, supercompetent in that respect and almost impossible to defeat give the rest of new zealand’s very run of the mill "political talent"

i’m not really political, what is interesting is the profound impact quality mentoring can have, parallels in history are aristotle’s tutoring of alexander the great and socrates of critias, i think its the association of socrates with critias  (a leader of the thirty tyrants)  that was the underlying reason for his execution

history and these people would be different if not for the power of what you might call "supernormal" mentoring

of course the flip side can be seen in some aspects of the education system with what in effect amounts to "malign mentoring"

direction

in a pathless void

well,

its whatever

you take

fractals round

not quite

the right way

self-defeating

they

are

no explanation

 indeed !

modern life

the vicarious assumption of skills

leaves a gap

the breeze of sleep

righting the worn day

to wear out

in another

tired themes

recycled

the faux reality

of today’s

films

the discontinuity of people

one moment

to the next

they change

infinitesimally

but infinitesimals add

the discontinuity of people

one moment

to the next

they change

infinitesimally

but infinitesimals add

infinitesimally

tin ears, the sadness of the musically untalented suffering hallucinatory delusions about the quality of their playing

when religions are cultural "hegemons" they conscript art to be their "propaganda departments" which is the state of affairs for most historical art and sculpture

the artists themselves had to work within the system to give a message "outside the system" which of course is what great religious art is about, leonardo da vinci’s "last supper" is a subtle example of this

in terms of a "zen art aesthetic" i think that’s a modern western construct, historically there have been a number of poets and artists/sculptures with a loose association to zen for some quite practical reasons like a publicity vehicle for their products and/or some mendicant’s fit to the culture

my own practical experience of zen is like all religions its deeply anti-artistic and anti-intellectual at core because of course these are its competitors

the vast sea of infinity

has a certain sameness

walk on the colour

not the waves

what i have noticed

is hardly anything turns out like i expect

yet the expecting is constant

why is that ?

the obvious jumps out at us

too big not to miss

yet somehow

we slide around it

the ontological god

is not all

but not not himself

interestingly, goethe and napoleon  met  a couple of times, napoleon had read "the sorrows of young werther" closely

if not for the disaster of the russian campaign, the problems of which he was warned about, we would have quite a different map of europe and a more benign opinion of him

paradoxically the base for the invasion of russia was the partial integration of most of europe into the french empire

the problem with drugs is they just wreck the room called the brain

“ What confuses me a little is people whose lives have obviously been influenced/directed by the chemicals they previously took, advise other people not to do what they did, sounds a little like : ignore that key i used to open the door, stay safe and secure in the room you’re in ”

the problem with drugs is they just wreck the room and this altered landscape is taken as "opening the door" which is not the case at all

the door has to be opened by picking the lock, that’s not drugs, but takes sustained cognitive effort

the level of missionizing their stupid nonsense by drug users always amazes me

there’s a good wikipedia entry on  john lilly ,  he was a man of outstanding abilities and born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but all the drug taking later in life made him a bit  (or worse)  schizophrenic which is how his writings come across

points of light

grasped

we rise towards them

and sink away

the universe begins and ends

or cycles forever

what does it matter ?

i begin and end

and don’t cycle forever

the media

editors

journalists

presenters

even

gossip column writers

mad men

and women

who can’t write or think

a hubbub of babble

that disappears

not male

nor female

what am i ?

the world splits

and thinks it normal

not male

or female

what am i ?

the world splits

and thinks it normal

its a bit of an old trick to claim something we made up ourselves was said by some historical famous figure

i don’t form a good opinion of some-one who does that to me

search "We were, meantime," for  an account  of goethe and johann eckermann in a scenic coach road trip to the hottelstedt ecke

life has another dimension if we take the trouble to enter it

sums that never added

now add

you can see a certain sort of conceptual thinking in andy warhol that separates him from the crowd

google is a wonder, its all there with a bit of searching, worth it if you want to untangle your thinking on  a subject

the lack of half an hours research leads you into off target speculation

what "amma" the "hugging guru" does is a disease risk and not mild, of course her publicity machine kills any discussion of that

yet another sophisticated indian guru "con"

they have millennia of experience in this area

i think i got something in the way of "spiritual energy transfer" from toni packer, but of course she died like the rest of us will

the way leonard cohen got conned by sasaki was astounding

“ How so ? ”

are you aware of sasaki’s history in japan ?

leonard cohen should have been paying attention to his finances rather than mucking around in sasaki’s bullshit

the really weird thing is cohen’s insight was in a different realm as evidenced by his lyrics and yet he got taken in by  that

napoleon was highly intellectual, google quotes by him, he was a literary genius which i think partly explains the allies leniency with him, twice after he was in their custody

rather than doing a full blown retreat, you just want to get several hours a day of "do nothing" time or walks etc and the right sort of reading is an important background

the only time i ever fasted beyond a day or two when ill with a virus is when i was about 20 for two weeks in bed with a bad flu which seemed to work

if you fast you need to take say a teaspoon of jam a day to keep a bit of sugar in the stomach so the stomach biofilm/microbiome doesn’t get starved of sugar and start to get biased to going for protein

if you are trying to lose weight, i was reading a study that says just consistently cutting down the amount you eat works

also  chromium  helps imo and attention to what you actually eat, a way to view being overweight is it is a type of malnutrition and micro-nutrient deficiency syndrome

some people go through extremes when they do anything, this happens to me too ,  so now i am wary with what i do

the problem with afghanistan and all the billions of wasted military money is it was surrounded by countries unfriendly to the usa, that includes pakistan which is crazy ambiguous at best

interestingly this is why russia has such a problem with the ukraine which is able to be resupplied through poland, that should have been a big alarm bell for the russians but their leadership is too old and has lost the plot, its just a question of time before putin is removed from power as the russian casualties mount

intervention in afghanistan should have only ever been at the level of intelligence and foreign services

down here in the pacific there’s no question that china is becoming a "hegemon" and the only thing that will stop it is australia, taiwan and japan getting nuclear weapons, australia is on the road to getting them, but could be 10 or fifteen years away

history shows empires always feel the need to expand so russia and china as a problem are here to stay

the real reason russia invaded the ukraine is they needed the larger economic mass an annexation of the ukraine would give them, but of course they are so stupid they are destroying all the infrastructure

when there is a lack of rational consideration by one of the parties in international politics, things can get very brutal for the populations involved and actually NATO and the USA’s involvement at a military level in afghanistan was not rational and its not like history wasn’t shouting, "don’t go there"

the problem some couples have is not how they feel about each other, but that their added weaknesses and strengths don’t mutually compensate, in the real world they are dysfunctional as a couple, they just continually get burnt

the problem with some couples is not how they feel about each other, but that their added weaknesses and strengths don’t mutually compensate, in the real world they are dysfunctional as a couple, they just continually get burnt

death is not the body, its the absence

ed.  one of the feral kittens had disappeared, i assumed it had died as it was sickly, never really expecting to see the body, but i  have just came across the body and thought the body was immaterial to its death, it had died when i noticed it was no longer around

buried it under some loose dirt close to where it lay

more than anything else, patience sorts reality out for us

job and satan

beelzebub

complainers of god

never asked what they were complaining to

nothing

the world

its strangeness

hassle

and dullness

need a remedy

let me read

a good poem

or homily

taking me across the universe

and millennia

other spaces

than this

for a medium of writing, the web is ruled to a surprising extent by the low reading aged

its not passive, these idiots will inveigle themselves into positions of control

thereby to impose "dumbness"

“ i don’t understand what you write ”

well its somewhat between the raving of a mad man and being understandable

“ oh, i see ”

a heavy metal song by necorphagous ported  through  MIDI to a full sized organ

the equator

equanimity

where south becomes north

and north

south

palladas advises

the partition of sleep

throws the veil of amnesia

over all that has passed before

god made the devil

then he thought

i have not gone far enough

so he made language

the point i’m making is the difference between ideas about what might happen and how things actually happen

we really can’t tell how things actually happen so need to "feel" our way cautiously as things often don’t turn out how we hoped or even contrary to our expectations

muhammad

emergent from the koran

and not the other way around

ed.  interestingly the "life" of muhammad is a fictional construct to weave together the very disparate elements in the koran

what is dementia like ?

an inertia

intelligence is there

its like being stuck

things not remembered

flash by

no longer harnessed

they fall uselessly away

this slow moving existence

holds us in stasis

stupefying

the guillotine

not even a second and its all over

yet the head still lives

but the body is just meat

ed.  there’s a good french "docudrama" series on the french revolution with some very realistic guillotining  footage , the "before" and "after" is shocking, for all its ease and "humaneness" its a very intimidating form of execution

projections aplenty

what actually happens

nothing

well that’s actually safer

than the disaster

of the projections

today’s events

so fragile

they pass like the wind

to me, any claim to be an "ist", "ian", "an" or "ean" of whatever religion is so meaningless as to make me wonder if they are sane

how can they say they are something like that ?

that they are "measured" like that

a bunch of incoherent twaddle

the essence of the existence of god is a story, how corporeal is a story ?

"getting there before you get there" is not embarking on new enterprises cold, but already having made some inroads in terms of experience, doing things in a small way and this can be done for quite a while, it accesses the larger world of your own experience so you don’t fall victim so much to naive projections and keeps you on the road of your natural aptitudes with feedback

now i am "glasses-free" after getting my EDOF cataract replacement lens, i am noticing others wearing glasses

also there’s a little feeling of superiority that goes with it

i suppose in fact glasses are an aid to a disability that a lot of people are in denial of

when you look at the egregious sums the most awful stuff sells for, you realise that to some extent the art world is a con game

you can argue whether those this hurts the most, the tasteless rich, are a deserving target

you  (ed. jason)  don’t seem to understand the huge skill gap between what you would like to be employed at and your actual skill level, your inability to grasp this is almost schizophrenic

of course to give the amount of attention required for many years for a skilled high paying job is of course a huge price to pay and it may be that simply, you don’t want to pay it which is quite understandable

you have bailed from art which i thought you had some talent at, got yourself electrocuted doing electrical work and totalled your very nice BMW as a pizza delivery man

what you are looking for is something that pays well and doesn’t demand the type of attention from you that you are reluctant to give

being a pilot or working in cybersecurity is outside your ken, government work is closed to you because you don’t have a degree

i’m not knocking being unemployed if you can get the benefit, its actually better not to work, a discovery that covid lockdowns have opened many people’s eyes to, but you want to be pragmatic and look at the way things lie ahead

please try to understand the concept of "getting there before you get there"

something you already have an interest in and experience of, perhaps real estate, electrical work certainly, cyber security, being a pilot, certainly not

commercial driving would be on, but its not healthy

to me the electrical work route offers reasonable money and would seem to be the best bet at the moment and maybe later you could work more with computer system cabling etc

its interesting how language is so well preserved in what you might call "mild schizophrenia" but the  sense of reality  is so off the tracks

another

the fundamental flaw at the root of christianity and any theistic religion is an overstated "effability" of "god"

if its diseased in the root, its going to be diseased in the branches

on monasteries and convents   :

why would you be locked up with a bunch of marginally or otherwise schizophrenic men or women with crazy ceremonies and beliefs except you were gay or seeking institutional care ?

when you get something wrong, its the end of a train of misdirection and unravelling the error requires tracing each carriage in the train back

some times its only a few, but others its so long its beyond us

this is why, by the time we are adults we are so fixed in our ways and keep structural errors for the remainder of our lives and in general, people can only accommodate change in very narrow windows

the satyricon  is a satire  of christianity ?

when you enter something

you cannot exit randomly

without damage

exits need to be appropriate and timed

i just realised, i was brought up in a cult in christian boarding schools, no wonder i react against it

most of my peers it didn’t affect, there were one or two but the majority had no or were minimally questioning about it

but basically the doctrine is so fucked up it messes your perception of reality, especially since we are such social thinkers and go along with group opinions regardless of their veracity

buddha and einstein are not comparable, religious opinions are not physics, basically you have something in the area of solipsism versus total objectivity and in fact when you read the supposed words of "buddha" who is fictional you are effectively looking a sort of historical wiki of various opinions, how can there be any meaning there ?

look at this poem by ferdinand pessoa, its the "real deal" not the vapid bullshit of buddhism and zen

i broke with the sun and stars.  i let the world go

i went far and deep with the knapsack of things i know

i made the journey, bought the useless, found the indefinite

and my heart is the same as it was   :    a sky and a desert

i failed in what i was, in what i wanted, in what i discovered

i’ve no soul left for light to arouse or darkness to smother

i’m nothing but nausea, nothing but reverie, nothing but longing

i’m something very far removed, and i keep going

just because my i feels cozy and profoundly real

stuck like a wad of spit to one of the world’s wheels

pessoa was basically, though not entirely celibate, you cannot get this sort of insight from "married" with its contradictory claims and demands on time

you can get to the point of cross-over

then you have crossed over

try as you might

you can’t escape your own existence

it doesn’t last forever

small frogs chirp

the sound has no owner

the small frogs chirp

not to anyone in particular

gert van hoef  playing  bach’s toccata and fugue in d-minor on the 1802 knol organ in the stephanuskerk, hasselt, the netherlands

air  from handel’s water music

a good  explanation  of what organ stops do

now i think about it, several of the commenters on brad warner’s vlog have a clear agenda of wresting "social control" of the comments section from him, not so much recently, but once they were out in force

some agendered doctrinally, but others with a degree of borderline personality disorder

everyone trying to create their own little world of meaning and censoring rather than disturb its flaws

“ just avoid picking and choosing ”

but no, they already know it all and do nothing but "pick and choose"

“ the buddha ”

a soap opera character

“ the wise one ”

sententious pontification

a senile fart

foul air

for two millennia

apologists

cannot disguise it

grief

has only one size

our own

grief and sorrow

don’t have many sizes

just one

our own

the library of babel

a million floors

a billion alleys

all blind

not

one

seeing

as the world looks at it

something is small

not large

but to us

its everything

delayed precocity

we suffer

the world suffers

its enough

to make one a buddhist

“ trading on jargon ”

a crowded marketplace

still

the buyers and sellers never cease

sometimes

i go so far from myself

and drink the sanity there

for my return

what people say

shows what is within

often not much

nevertheless

its not the whole story

by any means

what people say

shows what is within

often not much

mythic worlds

built on dreams

infused with what

ourselves ?

and more ?

weep for lives we never lived

what good does it do ?

i can’t see how "shooter games"   like this  don’t have a profound impact on school shootings, they provide a "normative" tableaux and rationale for the shooters who are socially isolated and alienated from conventional cultural values

hagiographic statues and pictures/portraits or stories are a defining marker of cults

i think what is missing in this discussion of "cult", both in brad warner’s vlog and the comments section is the notion of cult according to the dictionary definition "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed towards a particular figure or object"

clearly soto zen with its veneration and ascription of "infallibility" to eihei dogen is, by that definition a cult

people tend to just look at the "social control" side in evaluating the degree of "cultishness" and it certainly is a part of it, but not the whole story

i have seen academic research saying the communist party in soviet russia was a christian-like doomsday cult, it had both the primary elements of being a cult, social control  (extreme)  and infallilible figures/doctrines marx/lenin/stalin, and interestingly stalin was a die hard "believer" in marxism who unfortunately for everyone held the reins of extreme social control

the social control is a secondary aspect that springs from the need for protection of some base doctrinal/personal infallibility from criticism

in religion this translates to not being able to criticise jesus, muhammad, buddha, dogen, various saints, supernatural figures theologies, hierarchies etc, but there’s plenty of political and organisational correlates that might seem surprising fits, schools for instance

i think brad is caught in a major inconsistency/incoherence pushing what is inherently a cult but him not being cult minded at all, unlike some other commenters who would like him to exercise social control and get rid of me

brad, your "eviction" from the angel city zen center is a good exemplar of what will tear this inconsistency apart, that is people prepared to exercise social control will step in and take whatever enterprise you are building from you

netflix’s adpatation of jane austen’s "persuasion", from what little i could see via the  trailers looked quite reasonable for what is, after all, a mills and boon story

I        II        III

there’s an outcry against it, but adaptations are not the original work and they need to be judged on their own merits, not the dissonances felt with the original

i think a lot of negativity comes from the reimagining of georgian england as being somewhat "mixed race", but that’s just catering to netflix’s audience and is to be commended

these talkers

quoters

cliché stitchers

not a single original thought in their brains

spreading their disease

like it was a balm

battles endless

birth and death

endless

fabricated meaning

unstoppable

even what stops

is moving

battles endless

birth and death

endless

fabricated meaning

unstoppable

even what stops

moves

the vast number of hours

wasted on computer games

nothing compared to religion though

with its historical advantage

marie-denise viller’s  portrait  of marie joséphine charlotte du val d’ognes, 1801

there’s something very modernist about it, a sense of solipsistic isolation about the artist for whom that all is about to change with marriage

only one other painting of hers has survived ,  that same look

you can’t go back to an earlier stage of life

it would be like you demoted yourself and "regressed"

lacune

i looked up the meaning

.

.

i write like this

and this

and this

then i don’t write

finished

things don’t add

a tidy separation of parts

instead a blurring confusion and mists

before becomes after and after before

the neat sums waltz

spinning different numbers and different tunes

confused i retire

wittgenstein was right

a philosophy of life

is nonsensical

we coalesced

by a miracle

a jigsaw

in part

complete

the rest

to

be

fitted

irreversibly

bars

strobing

one thing then another

back and forth

is the only way

for clarity

nostalgia

yearning backwards

for a world that has gone

or never existed

a fata morgana

of comfort

you can see the face

you can’t see the brain

fictions

masquerading as real truths

buddhism

is not different

from nazism

in this respect

child caught in the cross fire

mortally wounded

well it will feel like it

women

instagram

poets

more

angst

than atoms in the universe

the female psyche

traumatized by the necessity of evolutionary design for childrearing

the trauma doesn’t stop

with the female psyche

van gogh

his paintings

change time

van gogh did not commit suicide

gaugin chopped his ear off

shakespeare did not write shakespeare

falsities

entrained

by idiots

“ wut bro ”

two words

he’s stretched

can we hope

for three words

these "geniuses" on the web

a kindergarten child

would put to shame

lions versus hyenas

a species war

with casualties

how human !

what we define as normal

our culture

yet other cultures

normalities abound

our culture

what we define as normal

yet other cultures

normalities abound

men who are sure they know how women think are wrong

nature has blinded them to what they could not bear

women however are under no illusions

2 x 2   =   4

an idiot one side

is an idiot another side

the problem is that monastic and center  (these days)  life doesn’t exist independent of whatever "theology" ,  you have to take the "theology" with the life

as the theology is a total load of nonsense, then your brain is going to get sharded and having been in religious boarding schools i can tell you they have the same effect

historically of course monasteries were famous for contagious diseases and even these days, the diet and messed up sleeping hours have a significant negative effect on health and in the usa you have issues with health insurance

the other modern problem is lack of any decent amount of time on the internet, to me this is another killer, the internet is so transforming of views through the vast panoply of high quality research material available without which you are just going to remain an ignorant schmuck

at the end of the beginning

the beginning ended

makes sense doesn’t it ?

at the beginning of the end

the ending began

but where is from the end of the end to the beginning of the beginning ?

there are always potential problems with cataract surgery and long term eye health, imo its an operation for cataracts where the reward risk ratio is right, but NOT for presbyopia

the most impressive thing about eihei-ji is how unhealthy the climate is, especially for TB

the sort of training described in the book "eat sleep sit" is in fact military designed to render soldiers obedient where there’s a high probability of being killed or injured, which, given zen’s historical involvement with samurai, its hardly surprising

zen and more generally buddhism are in fact cults and being in a cult does extreme mental violence to the brain

some people can get things right without going the extra mile or ten, i’m not one

i find i have to really investigate  (which google and the net greatly facilitates)  anything to walk myself past my uninformed opinions into operating in an area of practical utility

what i have noticed with some people on the net is that when you get down to it, their reading age is too low, they simply cannot understand thought of any complexity, a few words are picked out from what you write and are projected onto, which is actually schizophrenic, distorted views of reality untempered by any real dealing

it basic not to argue on the person, but to the points raised

its an idiot world

time

is a jumble

before and after a foolish trick

not some neat tapestry where all is laid out

but a churning chaos of illusions

with no fixed point of reference

macdonalds

a subtle malnutrition

computer games

the new existential

dystopian

backdrop

computer games

the new existential

backdrop

this world

its exigencies thrust in your face

give me another world

timeless

where the slow beat of nothingness

bears me along

this world

its exigencies thrust in your face

give me another world

timeless

the slow beat of nothingness

bears me along

modelling

existence

now

reality

modelling

modelling

now

existence

reality

modelling

devout

the suggestible

enter

non-criticality

slavs killing slavs, stalin and beria at least were georgian, but putin ?

francine van hove paints  bookworm nudes

the theme is a bit monotomous, but there is one and it clicked when i saw a woman reading colette’s "bella-vista"

to argue with those with power over you

risks

annihilation

the web

where the righteous talk

about being righteous

today’s poetry

pale

sexualised

nonsense

the idiot

hordes

run

amoke

i’m quite interested in whether you can tell a fake painting or not, but  this one  you can tell, its just not chagall

however sotheby’s clearly knew it was a fake with its super low revaluation of $100,000 in 2008, only 10% more on the 1994 sales price and i would say there is a good possibility they always knew it was fake, its so glaringly not chagall

the owner was naive

“ in late 2020, the panel released its findings regarding her work.  in a letter to ms. clegg, meret meyer, one of chagall’s granddaughters and a member of the panel, reported that it had unanimously found the work to be inauthentic, adding that it is an amalgam of several other works including “le couple au bouquet,” from about 1952, and “les amoureux au cheval” from 1961

ms. clegg’s painting included “recurrent iconographic elements of chagall’s work,” including a bouquet, lovers, a horse profile, a rooster profile, a village silhouette and a crescent moon, the committee wrote, but those lacked “real presence” –  according to a translation provided by ms. clegg’s lawyer.  the letter went on to say that chagall’s heirs were requesting the “judicial seizure” of the painting “so that the work may be destroyed” ”

destruction , i think is mistaken as the only way to be 100% certain is have the paints and canvas analysed and compared and the committee is just going on its thematic and stylistic judgement

there’s been a multi-generational shift in attitude towards entitlement and low trust

a "postamble" on some advice i gave

i hope you will take this in the spirit its intended, disinterested advice from one who has been through a few of the circuses and is older than you and more sceptical in today’s world of constant theft and blind entitlement of one sort or another, times have changed !

“ where are you going ? ”

i don’t know

i just move on, one day following another

“ me too ! ”

“ an inspirational person that I admired very much died recently and now that he’s gone I realize there will never be another moment with him again.  I suppose what I’m asking is how does one cope with the loss of someone close to them and how do they move on ? ”

my  reply

my observation is we never know if some-one has died, we simply notice we never see them again and that’s about it, that noticing is always dynamic, situational and never solidifies or changes

the new zealand ACT MP david seymour has a good point about using the tax department to investigate "gangs", al capone was eventually imprisoned for failing to file tax returns, it was the only way they could get him

seymour is showing labour’s "gang friendly" biases up which actually has deep leftish ideological roots going back to the early soviet era with its persecution of the "kulaks" and glorification of criminality

he really has them over a barrel on this, i hope he’s not put off by the response as the media tries to freeze him out

"gangs" are a new government "in waiting"

when constellations fall

a gravity they didn’t expect

that is the end times

a face

a head

a body

animated with being

its something

but i cannot fathom

it not being me

some chasm

leaving us looking at each other

and wondering

does that person really exist ?

why are you here ?

i am here

because i’m here

the irrefutable argument

if i wasn’t here then you wouldn’t be able to ask me not to be here, therefore in terms of ontological necessity, i am here, you have called me to be here so to speak

when you are not here, neither am i

hypocrisy times stupidity is such a great multiplier, a square effect rather than simple addition

the notion of teaching is not right, its not wrong, its just meaningless, learning is essentially "agentless"

teaching is an illusion

people are themselves

and always revert to type

i liked kwan um zen, it had an underlying democratic spirit that japanese zen didn’t, in fact my experience of japanese zen was it was dictatorial and oppressive

to "respect" some-one or a decision is to isolate them or it from criticism

i have yet to meet anyone or associates who benefited from that isolation

i would distinguish valid criticism from sniping and takedown of which unfortunately there can be a lot in some contexts

a memory

she was there

then she was gone

what does that mean

i don’t know

change brings pain

that i do know

the world is ordered around emotional pole stars

whose axes are too traumatic

to have any lasting contact with

yet if we move too far away

the vacuum whistles around us

frightening

to see yourself too well

is a type of insanity

its tedious and far from comfortable

yet without some insight into the way we and others work

life can be too bruising

prose

is a skill

writing

sinking in depth

from a point like an astigmatism test

no wonder i never set  

from the center

a central idea

theology

mono-theistic deity

always has something outside

the sparkling ripples reveal

both the inside

and outside

just wait and the world will come to you

well, that works somewhere

my dreams perhaps ?

you will be stuck in a place

until you outgrow it

outgrowing however

is a luxury

life rarely

gives

words are not the everything

or anything

or something at all

w. h. auden’s famous poem "as i walked out one evening" is heavily indebted to t.s. eliot’s "the boston evening transcript"

i was shocked, its not plagiarism by any means but rather eliot’s poem was a seed for auden’s poem

night shifts should be done to minimise large transitions in sleeping hours

obviously you can’t get away from it, but some of the shift regimes like FIFO 4 days on, 3 days off are maximally disruptive to the circadian rhythm

the research shows an increased cancer risk with shift work, its a real effect, if you are doing a nightshift, whatever you are being paid, you are underpaid

we are ourselves

in the various spinning circles

we take to be ourselves

ezekiel’s spinning wheels

with eyes

are other circles

not our own

but of a majesty we only dimly perceive

the rush of angels wings passes us by

dragging us in their turbulent wake

but still we spin

until we stop

the trap of correction

is that its endless

and away from you

absence

means

don’t go there

laura ranger

the poet

who disappeared

moscow  in summer

you’d hardly believe

it is a country at war

only the death

of friends and relatives

can break the façade

the backward view

which time gives

shows

what is

and is not

our lives

passing a window

is it the outside looking in

or the inside looking out ?

when we wonder

miraculous things

happen

lauris edmond

swept down the river of time

drowned by her memories

the sadness of old age

with its attempt to recapture

what has gone

views shifting

changing

rendering the usual landscape

alien

people foreign

where do i exist

i don’t know where

a stranger in this life

and where i am not a stranger

only occasionally visited

remembered

by

necessity

"neuro-fluid" implies a switchability at the hardware level which cannot be the case

sim-neurotypical would be more accurate

imo real estate is never going to be phased out, also i would say its part of the match to you that it is a bit feminine or requires skills across both genders

you have a fundamental problem with a failure to understand reality gaps

i wasn’t joking when i said you have a degree of schizophrenia

you have to be very testing of your hypotheses about yourself

it might be easier to show if you look at some of the poker game videos on youtube

the hypothesis is that "i could be a professional poker player"

well from the videos its obvious it requires a super high skill level of many years playing and because you have to bet so much of your net worth, its hugely traumatic

so the conclusion would be "i am many years away from being even a mediocre player and even if i was a good player it would be too traumatic for me"

the issue with cybersecurity consulting is you can’t even program, so ten years to become proficient in programming and another ten to get to a consulting level of skill in cybersecurity

you seem totally incognizant of the requirement for many years work to get to a sufficient skill level in any decently paying job, why that is, i don’t know

reality always is different from projections, more correct views have to be explored practically

anomie  is an interesting word

easy to see in some social groupings these days

the wikipedia  entry

highly precise long range rockets have changed the nature of warfare as profoundly as aircraft did

if you don’t have a "mincer" ,  a blender with the meat cut fairly small and adequate water added works well, though it comes out pink and smooth, it cooks the same as mince and the water separates out

adding enough water is essential to getting the blending to work

the interesting thing about emergent properties is they are not resolvable into anything definite

for example

gender identity

consciousness

ontological questions

some aspects of physics and astrophysics

and so on

and so on

and so on

the story of the three "so ons’"

i’ve been looking at some japanese "driving" or road youtubes as they give an unbaised view of what the scenery is like and really, i don’t feel i am missing out on anything not having been to japan

norway looks way more interesting

one of the reasons we dream is so there’s some activity in the brain so it doesn’t cool too much during sleep

very dense "memory type foam" pillows can be too conductive of heat away from the head, leading to the brain getting colder than is healthy for it

something to watch out for, though the need to avoid is going to vary person to person

leonard cohen was an interesting study in insight and gullibility with the semantics of his songs versus getting robbed by his accountant and sucked in by joshu sasaki

seeing a sword being evaluated for sale at a pawn shop on youtube

remembering as a young child sitting on the gate with my brother at my grandparent’s place in remuera waving a sword at passers by

a possum stomach

for breakfast

and that evening

the brain starts to work again

composites fool

until the parts

are teased out

chess

refracts to patterns

a computer can work out

how disappointing

epileptics

dice with death

too overt for me

after a migraine

is like after a storm

the wreckage is everywhere

the relief is palpable

emotional worlds

in turmoil

the way women like it

the travellers pass and occasionally stop

at the cross roads

they don’t ask the whys or wherefores

how sensible

words

the trailing remanence

of something organic

now lost

it can only be like this

an effect can produce itself

how can this be ?

no effect can produce itself

god is beyond knowing

therefore we cannot know if god exists

we can know god

therefore god exists

eat your heart out quantum physics

god is beyond knowing

therefore we cannot know if god exists

we can know god

therefore god exists

eat my dust quantum physics !

olamic

as short

as

thinking

about it

the roads i have made

mostly empty

one or two

something more

religious hagiographical concepts such as enlightenment and holiness are "fake" ,  there’s no such thing, life and people are too uneven

actually, ontologically speaking, its to jump from "god-like" to god, a tall claim, even for ontological logic

john loori had charisma which i have learnt to be very suspicious of in anybody

its not strictly sane

i think you should be realistic about your inclinations and abilities

ed.  my reply to a "career" question

some doors are shut, no good pretending they are open

what is open may surprise you, but you need to go through

“ Well what do you see me doing at this point ?  Because I’m not really too sure what my doors are and I feel like you can see it better than I can ”

well, this sort of thing is a process of "discovery" since the way ahead is not clear at all

i think basically you don’t want to work which i am highly sympathetic to, only you need some income

the electrician job seemed to go ok before you got shocked, maybe real estate as suiting your skill set ?

you have other interests, all you want is something that pays reasonably well, is not too complex in terms of skills and does not have any health hazards, hidden or otherwise

you don’t need a job to provide "meaning" in your life, just income

parents often are clueless about what is best for their children

successful employment needs to give a good match with natural skills and interest

is existence a self bootstrapping emergence from non-existence ?

drugs are not "kensho" experiences

its the absence of genuine experiences that make people think psychedelics give insight

so they become the usual fakes, you can’t tell ’em and they scavenge zen and other forms of mysticism to wallpaper their lives with the nonsense they think is valid

the only instance i have ever come across of anyone ever getting an insight was the one-time abbott of the mt. tremper monastery who started to do ayahuasca and figured out that monastery life was just bullshit about twenty three years too late

insight has to be cognitive which means being open and intelligently investigate and not walling off everything you don’t like

psychedelics are not harmless either, you can’t throw spanners into a working machine without causing permanent damage, though there is this  study  on psilocybin microdoses and niacin being helpful

françois barraud

portrait  de jeune fille  (1932)

video

“ what happens when i am dead ? ”

you have already come to death but have not known it

"ego" is a conceptualization that i don’t feel is useful

“ why is there something rather than nothing ? ”

"nothing" actually in common use is always in the context of something so i think to make sense of this question is you have to have the complete universal absence of anything which would include the question

so basically this complete universal absence can only be seen from outside of it which would imply a contradiction to it being a complete universal absence

so you can say the question is not meaningful or self-contradictory, but what does that mean ?

it can’t quite be quite meaningless since that implies an opposite of meaning, it breaks up the ontological world

so i think what it is saying is the "ontological world" is itself a reification of something, there are deeper levels of abstraction and what does this mean ?

well there’s an abstraction deeper than "meaning", like is lewis carroll tapping into that with his "hunting of the snark"

what does that work mean or is there no fixed meaning, but one that changes with the looking ?

the asking of the question thwarts the answer ?

"is christ a god, is he a man", this is the whole trinitarian thing, at an extreme god, the holy ghost and jesus are each all separately god in their own right and this was an actual sect  (tritheism)  that you can see a strong condemnation of in the koran, islam itself is a form of "nestorian" christianity which tries to solve the trinitarian problem by demoting jesus and having a human intermediary between god and the human world in the form of a prophet being dictated to by an angel, none of the christian ambiguity about the realization of god in the form of jesus and the holy ghost

hard to believe wars were fought over this stuff and there are vast "libraries of babel" arguing the pros and cons of whatever, all not worth the space in a wastepaper basket

interestingly nestorian christianity was strong in china before it was supressed and heavily influenced chan and its basic absolute/relative doctrine is just a more abstract take on christian doctrine, its also why zen slotted so well into western culture, that fundamentally its the same doctrine

“ Anyway, a real question I’ve been meaning to ask   :    I was re-reading Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners’ Mind where he literally said, when you are new, if you meditate for 15 minutes a week, that’s good enough  (he was basically saying don’t get overzealous)

It made me think of Bodhidharma who went in the opposite direction and “allegedly” cut out his eyelids so he could "wall-stare" in mediation ”

my  reply

religion is basically a substitution of absurd nonsense for your own working out of how reality is

you are looking for "correct information" from a sphere incapable of giving it

i’ve looked at this question of meditation for decades, to me its basically "do nothing time" yet it creates a creative and decompression space and probably i do several hours a day, nothing to do with posture as i haven’t sat zazen for thirty years

in terms of your question i would try to get some time in daily, even five minutes, walk around the house, neighbourhood, sit in a chair, whatever, writing a comment itself is a form of meditation, you are seeing what you think

nothing is nothing

they chase something

looking for nothing

and nothing

looking for something

what a sad way

to waste

the

dream

of life

the highly intelligent insane

stalin, hitler, mao, genghis khan

a scourge like no other

the mad

will wrap you up in their own nonsense

if you let them

airline movies damage the brain, even if you are not listening

the mad

just suck your time

to further

their madness

winter

that awful feeling

of summer’s loss

empty

there’s no-one

except myself

the absurdity

homesick for what i never had

past midnight

a frost

and the stars glow

blue

ed.  i was outside and the stars were glowing ,  no moon and it seemed the sky itself had a luminous blue tint, later i looked again and the blue was gone, just black so i wondered if i imagined it, but i didn’t

pushkin

as good as murdered in that fatal duel

his second the guilty one

the range was exceptionally close

and pushkin, a good shot always fired second

so, cuckholded by the czar

his wife a brainless twit

killed by his sister-in-law’s homosexual husband

a crazy mess

fiction could not create

ed.  even weirder, his  passage  in  eugene onegin  about a duel, but unlike eugene, pushkin in life was on the wrong end of the bullet

not on a peak in darien

but a church on top of a hill

back dropped by mt. kazbek

pushkin and i both saw

ed.  i was reading a poem by pushkin and figured he was referring to a real church and place  (ed.  the gergeti trinity church) ,  so looked it up and the church is still there and could see what he was on about

my reworking of pushkin’s poem

kazbek

supreme beauty of the mountains

lit by more than the sun’s rays

yet there

above the clouds

in the wisps of mists

like a hovering boat

a cloister

floating in a different world

to disappear

into the infinite

tim maudlin on the  fine-tuning problem

the world

every direction will absorb you

leaving nothing

large states always require more territory and resources, this  study  fits well with russia’s attempt to annex the whole of the ukraine to bolster its food supply, population, technology and industry so as provide the strength to resist NATO and china

though the invasion was born in hubris, it was also a sign of the desperation of russia’s current position as no longer a superpower yet hemmed on two sides by more formidable opponents

big gods , one of the discounted models, hypothesis 14, 3/5 down the page

michael shermer on essentialism  and agency  and how we are genetically designed to see the world in this way

untempered ascription to agency is a feature of some mental illnesses

life’s direction

forwards and not backwards

we can’t escape

or can we ?

explanations of jacques derrida’s "deconstruction"

are

not

explanations

but

constructions

each as meaningless as the other

its a process

don’t bother about it

the queen bee

control of the hive

before reason

the queen bee

control of her hive

before reason

as one gets old and has been around the snakes and ladder board so many times

we are on first name terms with the snakes

the idiosyncrasies of each ladder are familiar

only the board is fading and tattered like ourselves

the ladders more prone to break

hard then to explain

the increased virulence

of

the snakes

the core problem of marxism is that the disenfranchisement of the self-organization of economic life cannot be adequately replaced

that economic activity "self-organises" if not interfered with is in effect what adam smith calls "the invisible hand"

i prefer "self-organising" as the way to express this because it fits with modern ideas of adaptive complex systems and is biological rather than the laws of physics, it just doesn’t happen "to be", but has internal feedback loops to keep things on track

as it turns out ,  in practice the replacement is always some form of state control that is so perverse and woefully inadequate that the most brutal suppression of a rebelling populace suffering from scarcities is necessary

i think what he was attempting to remedy were the working and social conditions of the working class in victorian england, problems that to large extent new technologies and improved education and health knowledge eventually solved

one can compare marxism as a sort off the shelf tool for making apocalyptic dystopias compared to the more organic idiosyncratic nationalist tailored nazism, different roads to the same end

if shakespeare really wrote those works, he wouldn’t be simply a genius, but rather an imaginative paragon we have not seen before or since because he was creating worlds of high verisimilitude than in fact were outside his personal experience

sir henry neville would simply be a genius because these worlds were his personal and family experience

the schadenfreude of those we know dying before us

the schadenfreude of others dying before us

the schadenfreude of others dying

there’s a lot of wisdom in outliving people

writing is a form of "outliving"

walking backwards to ourselves in the past

if it were possible

it is !

nonsense about nonsense

is not nonsense doubled

but squared

there is no poetry of philosophy

and no philosophy of poetry

a natural cleaving keeps them apart

thank-goodness

there is no poetry of philosophy

and no philosophy of poetry

a natural cleavage keeps them apart

thank-goodness

tattoos

the bars of a prison

for whatever bad art

like a picture frame

doomed to a lifetime display

of idiocy

declamations don’t make a thing so, the modern disease is the pretence it does

the insane dreams

christians are holy or saints

buddhists "enlightened" compassionate or bodisattvas

islam with its imans, mecca, haji, hadiths

projections of meaninglessness

onto meaninglessness

how appropriate

these sucker

traps

there must be truth

what if that isn’t true ?

there must be falsity

what if that isn’t false ?

that’s a pair

that doesn’t go anywhere

itchy boots rides through the spectacular  sierra gorda  to  san miguel de allende  which historically was quite in the thick of the spanish colonisation

philosophy

one system subsumes another

forever

the mass of words grows

to what point ?

the emptiness of human endeavour

says it all

what does history teach ?

amorality ?

futility ?

cycles ?

all three of the above ?

agency vs non-agency ?

the generations dance, but the tunes so apparently dissimilar are the same

no master piper

but the bare philosophy of loss and gain

“ researchers report that proteins in a model plant-based substitute were  not as accessible  to cells as those from meat ”

“ the amino acid composition showed  fewer  essential and non-essential amino acids in the meat analogue permeate than in the chicken breast permeate ”

love

a human fire

a heat

that goes and stays

addiction is different from "obsession".  the problem with substance abuse as, say compared to some collecting mania are the irreversible effects of whatever systemic "poison" on organ and brain health, if you don’t have the intelligence and self-respect to want to escape from this vicious circle of self-harm, what can be done ?

meditation may be a useful tool in breaking an addiction, i say this because the meditation subreddit is full of ex-addicts and ex-alcoholics, perhaps it makes the cycle of need and withdrawal more psychologically transparent ?

a good review  of leo damrosch’s new book on giacomo casanova, they had a complete set of volumes of his memoirs in the auckland library and i read a fair portion of them

where art and life cross over ,  resting girl  a painting of marie-louise o’murphy by françois boucher with a minature of her commissioned by giacomo as his source

listening to the rain

it goes on forever

and so i go on forever

parked in my brain

a lyric poem, with

landscapes of light

happenstances

the easement of living

with the magic of what is not

life’s wolves

the terror beguiled

momentary illumination

that is then gone

to hold two contradictions in your heart

and wonder why it splits

“ so and so says ”

no

you are saying 'so and so' says

its your claim about what so and so would have said

“ so and so says ”

no

you are saying 'so and so' says

its a claim about what so and so would have said

classical physics may be surprised by "quantum"

as if the incompleteness of knowledge is something new

almost pantheism in the way it has panned out

god are the rolling dies

not-einstein

there’s definitely something weird going on

there is no agency

there is agency

somethings are hard to explain except in terms of agency

but how can there be ?

the new world

shopping online

$10 special for a $60 modem

$8 for postage/shipping

still undelivered

time separates us

one phase from another

i might say "thank god"

since unseparated

even god does not go there

the problem  with modern war is you kill the able-bodied young on who the future rests, while the alcoholics, drug addicts, criminal element and otherwise problematic all survive ,  russia lost entire generations of the young in world war two, has nobody learnt anything ?

i guess you can view russia’s current government as "the criminal element" being thieves and murderers, interestingly stalin had no trouble with that view of himself

what is secondary

turned out to be primary

the eye of existence

through which we shoot

my reply to a comment by brad warner on his reply  (vaguely dissapproving)  to a commenter seeking to enhance his "practice" by taking part in other sects of buddhism

in actual fact he is just doing what you do, which is "omni-syncretic", that is, "picking and choosing" to create his own religion and completely ignoring the theological primacy of the 'teachers' in any a particular religion or its sects or their opinions and strictures on the validity of other sects which is apparently, a very japanese cultural thing, a form of "spiritual materialism"

there seems to be a lot of this occurring now and is probably a natural feature of the way religions develop in the absence of external coercive forces like for medieval christianity

they  do have a basic point, that social attitudes to gender have a normative reproductive basis, which is just one possible attitude amongst many from an existential point of view, and even the notion of gender itself is constructed, of course reifying into its various existential forms amongst which we have normative and trans.

the problem is its elevation into the overriding ethical concern when especially in the context of social work there is so much extreme harm in other areas already occurring that are not being remedied

basically it seems like the elevation of a relatively trivial matter and a denial of much more substantive issues.

the other point is that if society loses its reproductive focus on gender identity that at an extreme it will depopulate and in the human evolutionary context any "tribe" that this happened to was likely to be decimated by more numerous neighbours

i think the central issue is not the imposition of a different definition of sexual identity, though that definition is, in my view no less flawed than what it replaces, but the avoidant nature of the implicit denial of hugely larger harm constantly occurring in the arena that social work attempts to remedy

what i would predict is such attitudes will go nowhere because they are so directly in conflict with a societies need for continued reproductive success, which of necessity must triumph, this is not say this view has more philosophical validity, rather its an existential necessity

i have to say that the declamatory redefinition of "gender" espoused by these people is a miracle of sanity compared to some of the society-wide historical religious attitudes that have occurred

the oddness of a "spell checker"

every misspelling

is an existence

you either confirm or deny

the oddness of a "spell checker"

every spelling

is an existence

you either confirm or deny

if what they say is "brainless"

then they are "brainless"

its that simple

it obviously breeds better

than "brains"

which are entirely an artifact

of incorrect judgment

having bad consequences

from

an evolutionary point of view

if what they say is "brainless"

then they are "brainless"

its that simple

literal and non-literal

truth

needs to cross both

the boundaried and boundaryless

this is not well understood

“ low levels of vitamin D were associated with lower brain volumes and  an increased risk  of dementia and stroke ”

  study

one world or two

a better world

somewhere

nowhere

so li po dreams

ed.  my reply to the poem below by  li po

questioning me you ask

why live alone far from men ?

to reply fatigues me

alone my soul grows quiet

and one with the wild peach tree blossom

along the banks of the flowing river

the world before this

where all things are

ive had two bad accidents in my life, nearly three or four, fortunately no-one was killed, its taken me years and years to realise the problem is the way my attention works, its all over the place, oddly in my later years my driving is much better with all those driving decades behind me

being a real estate agent has bad rep because most of the people who do it, suck at it like this woman  in the video  and fail, however a small percentage do it very well, who knows, you could be one of those, but like everything else its a skill that has to be developed, instant competence without experience is today’s infantile dream

a momentary vision

a large sun on the horizon

of a smooth black reflective sea

there were reflections in it, but i can’t remember what they were

we had a big storm and the winds which had already been blowing hard for days blew for 24 hours stronger than ever remembered in local memory, knocking down huge gums and strewing branches, twigs, leaves everywhere and damaging the power network with the consequence the area was without power for four days at the coldest time of year

it opened my eyes to how big a social change electrification was, it was really quite a different world that i grew to like despite the difficulties

my bed was too cold and damp to sleep in so i had to sleep in front of the woodheater and get up several times during the night to put more wood on

constantly having to boil water for any dish washing was a nuisance

my favourite memory is refreezing the freezer contents by putting them outside in a four degree frost late in the evening under an almost full moon and then getting up at 6 am when the frost reached its peak to take them inside again for storage in a polystyrene insulating box

it was a quieter simpler world with a lot more physical activity that required constant attention to the basic necessities of life

so actually when the power came back on, i was disappointed, it really had a "retreat vibe" that i was reluctant to leave

the more i look at the "spiritual circuit" and the people in it, the more i am put off by all the bullshit

i think religion has become decoupled from culture which acted as a brake of a type of sanity, there was always some everyday common sense which is lacking now

one insane system is replaced by another, systems and beliefs differ and evolve, the common factor unfortunately is "insanity"

no job is worth health problems, you are trading your younger years for a bit of money and health problems in your older years

the trauma of dreams

what we remember

and what we don’t

is no accident

buzzing cartwheels of thoughts

in my head

one tires of it

familiar circles

familiar faces

there is some illusion going on here

what comes into existence

goes out of existence

some things you can’t defeat

you can only let them run to their own defeat

"the end times"

within time is the end

but time itself, how does that end ?

"the end times"

within time is the end

but what is the end of time ?

loss and gain are a pair

when either gets too big

beware

the idea of living in the moment is nonsensical

what is the moment but the churn of past and present into the future ?

this idea of living in the moment is ridiculous

what is the moment but the churn of past and present into the future ?

as sophisticated a politically themed  animation  as you get

from an ontological point of view, god is not not god

and therefore ontology arises

make sense of that !

the noise of people

living

give me their opposite

no people

quiet

the noise of people

living

give me their opposite

the absence of people

quiet

you can see the intellectual power of jean rhys with a recollection from her unfinished autobiography, "smile please" ,  of a memory of having her photo taken as a young girl and watching the photographer dodge out from behind a dark cloth

she then recalls looking at the same photo three years later, realising “with dismay” that she was no longer the same girl 

“ the eyes were a stranger’s eyes.  it was the first time i was aware of time, change, and the longing for the past.  i was nine years of age ”

unbelievable perspicacity, from a different planet, no wonder her living on this one was so messy

another anecdote is her asking an actor friend to paint her face with the stage make-up she had worn as a young actress.  he rouged her lips and cheeks, with her silently sipping a martini; once the job was done, she asked him to leave, so he left her alone, staring at the made-up face in the mirror

a review  of  "i used to live here once : the haunted life of jean rhys" by miranda seymour

a  synopsis  of "smile please"

chickens/ chooks are  domesticated  "red jungle fowl" and look very similar, rather like cats being descended from the african wild cat

dogs of course are all over the place