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

things unfound

do not fit

the mould

of forming

things unformed

do not fit

the mould

of forming

creation myths

try to address

before creation

and fail

so of creation

and after

of necessity

also fail

creation myths

try to address

before creation

and fail

so of creation

and after

of necessity

also must fail

william blake

a search for sense

tangents explored

saliences

occasioned on

 is this fair to him ?

the most extreme tv show for unintentional existential incongruities and irony has to be "hogan’s heroes"

robert clary   (louis lebeau)  went though the worst of the holocaust as a camp inmate and along with several other actors lost family

werner klemperer  (colonel clink)  was german jew, son of the famous conductor otto klemperer and first cousin once removed of the diarist  victor klemperer

bob crane  (hogan)  had a crazy life and was mysteriously murdered

john banner was austrian jewish  (shultz), emigrated to the US in 1938 after the germans annexed austria, but lost a lot of family in the holocaust

inadvertent metaphysical depth to infantile entertainment

“ the kicker is I’ve been working out every day the last three weeks and on my rest days, I do guided meditation ”

that’s not low stress, exercise itself is stressful and should be done in moderation, this applies to both men and women, but especially women who are not metabolically designed for intense workouts

meditation combined with doing a lot of sitting in a day is also problematic if it significantly increases the sitting time

matt has a dilemma, there’s a possibility the twelve cylinder engine of  this bentley  has water in the cylinders or some other significant problem, what, if anything should he bid on it ?

my  thoughts

when bidding at a used car auction, take the FOMO  (fear of missing out)  and bury it, let the offer reflect the risk discount of unknown problems with the vehicles condition and if you "win" it or if another person with a different risk assessment gets it, at the end of the day its his judgment against yours and one of you will be righter than the other, but hopefully he will take a loss you have avoided

actually "risk" is a bit of a dissemble to cover not actually sorting things out to the right level of detail, and ignorance, like for most things makes you vulnerable, however, bentleys like rolls-royces are, imo significantly under-engineered

the bottom line with auctions is you are in competition with people who may be paying too much and you have to let that happen and for them to take the consequences

what’s more they have used their "powder" reducing their ability to bid against you on later offerings, of course that works the same way if the mistake is yours

what history shows

is there is no point to anything

strife and striving go together

so much so

their shared emptiness

is no surprise

the gates of absence

empty out on the stars

those pinpricks of futility

so full of themselves

winking obliquely

hinting

at

something else

going on

there’s something existential about this chinese classical style  dance

fyi i think what is portrayed in a not a pure "kalavinka" (human head, bird body) but some sort of synthesis with the bodisattva/goddess of compassion kuan yin, in short, very eclectic

slavs killing slavs, how can there be any winners, just the dead on both sides and a destroyed slav country

crazy

gnosticism looks like it could make sense, but ultimately, its just voynich

perhaps more sophisticated than the usual

when the sums don’t add

make sure

they don’t add worse

its a wide world in time and place, you are too wrapped up in ancestry

where i see merit i am interested

that is all

the disease

of overweighting explanation

their lives must be nonsense

is the only explanation

being overweight is not a benign condition, its a life shortening disease promoting cancer and a host of other metabolic problems

this stupid species is in denial about this because "food quality" is complex and needs thinking about and working through

tim spector’s   take

these women

with overfull lips

from plastic surgery

must have some body image

disorder

not being able to perceive

how ghastly it has made them look

its funny what images stick with us, a minute’s thought and it is with us for the rest of our lives

years ago i read a science fiction story, or perhaps it was a comic, a train was going through a snow covered landscape, the situation on the train was desperate for the small number of people on it and giant white wolves/creatures were pacing the train and this just went on and on, the wolves never tiring

i must have felt this was my life

those wolves/creatures, they are there for all of us, i used to wonder why they never tired, now i don’t

julius evola

“ The legionary spirit is that fire of one who will choose the hardest road, who will fight to the death even when all is already lost ”

pass

yes, there are people who thought like this, or at least, others should be like this

mostly "the hardest road" we always only inadvertently find ourselves on

beauty has many forms

none of which

can be called beauty

“ Hope you stick around and learn something ! ”

ed.  a reddit comment to me

my  reply

same lesson again and again, the net is full of intransigent idiots

i can’t give you brains you weren’t born with

"zen" is just repackaged philosophy strung together in a fictional narrative

i can’t give you brains you weren’t born with

one of the fascinating things about being old is the way the past seems richer and simpler, because it was

i went to write something

thinking such and such

but somehow

it came out different

i went to write something

thinking such and such

but it came out

different

i went to write something

thinking such and such

but

it

came

out

different

when is a poem a homily ?

and a homily a poem ?

sense gets blurred into nonsense

the film director’s lament

script writers lack imagination

actors are narcissists

the cameraman half blind

the crew  —  thieves

the wardrobe over the top

the producer scrooge incarnate

that just leaves

an insufficient god

me

gangs are in effect territorial militias, if your legislation is pandering to their legality, you are making a rod for your own back

queensland is leading the way in making proactive legislation to defeat this threat to social order

militias are in effect, governments in waiting

putin’s big mistake was to allow the separatists in the donbas in 2014 to hijack the russian agenda and create a festering sore of conflict that poisoned relations with the ukraine as well as taking a significant russian population out of the ukraine hence increasing nationalist influence there

his other big mistake was not to annex belarus so its economy and military could be strengthened and provide a much more material support to russia and increase russia’s protrusion into europe

anybody can see this, the lesson is autocracies with incompetent leaders may give an illusory stability for a while, but egregiously bad decisions lie around the corner making populaces suffer

i’m just viewing things from what would have worked for russia and putin, not condoning it, what they actually did is a blind probing by idiots !

an ex-pope has died

and perhaps the present one is not so far away

this is god on earth

senile mediocrity

pass

just when you think the accelerating expansion of the universe is a settled thing, along comes  new data  and a possible reversion to a static universe

the muscle of celibacy is the writing and stories of the celibate zen greats

zen doesn’t make sense unless there is celibacy

historically religion has been notoriously transmissible, bits and pieces of each ending up in others

interestingly, "zen" is to a large extent "repackaged" philosophy

"bodhidharma" can be seen as a metaphor for the transmission of greek philosophy into chinese buddhism from the greco-bactrian kingdoms ie "the blue-eyed barbarian"

attention to diet and exercise goes along way in helping with mental illness

not a popular message apparently

and some quality reading  (ed.  viewing with the addition of some of what is available on youtube)  to lift above the usual cultural morass of clichés and stupidity

aerobic exercise is surprisingly helpful for depression

buddha

bodhidharma

stories

god

jesus

muhammad

more

stories

how many stories are there ?

the british are  descended  from an emigration of the northern european "bell beakers", themselves a continuation of yamanay/corded ware culture and the usual modus operandi was to kill all males of different ethnic groups which resulted in the destruction of the matriarchal neolithic culture in britain and the success of these patriarchal groups is why western society is ,  or at least was patriarchal up to recent times

i think basically it was improved weaponry that changed societies from matriarchal to patriarchal, a man armed with a metal sword became a disproportionate physical threat

interestingly the beaker people are from the steppes, the curious western resonance with the ukraine might have something to do with that old genetic tie shown in how similar they look to us, the russians with a stronger mongol influence look a bit different

i never realised  ronald searle  was captured at the fall of singapore, imprisoned in changi prison and then sent to work on the siam-burma death railway

i did meet some-one who had been imprisoned in changi and the only comment he made was about the common experience breaking down the barriers between people, i think he may have even included the guards in that

a  youtube  on him

where the surface is troubled, the depths are stirring

medications have side effects, it is not sensible to take a medication and not do some research on what they might be !

anabasis  by "dead can dance" with lisa gerard doing the solo

i think this  youtube  has better sound quality, but its missing the visual impact of the band performing

judging by the surrounds and clothes, they were certainly not in it for the money, and i think drug use has created a musical ceiling of sorts

theology

nonsense for simpletons

the upanishads are just as much malign nonsense as anything else and as such the nature of explanations must be

the unbelievableness of the petty minds flogging themselves to death on this stuff

the nature of twitter is attention deficit, its never going to be anything except empty craziness

for all its ignorance, sleaziness and mendacity reddit with its longer attention span is much more productive

autocrats, the secret police

the pitiless

in power

you can live within it

but it warps the brain

just when you think you have left no stone unturned, a whole new boulder field comes into view

on "eyetriage" on reddit, there is a constant flow of young men coming through who suffer high and unreasonable anxiety that they have some unusual health problem with their eyes, below is my attempt to explain illness and population dynamics to them

just follow the logic through

if its rare you are unlikely to have it and given you have no symptoms, unlikely goes to almost impossible

if you want to know what "almost impossible" is, take a coin and keep flipping it until you get 6 heads in a row

i find the concept of  plot armour  useful in thinking about what happens on the net, its a high plot armour environment, so you can’t really touch them which is why the bullshit can reach such egregious extremes

i find the concept of plot armour useful in thinking about what happens on the net, its a high plot armour environment, so you can’t really touch them which is why bullshit can reach egregious extremes

god is not one

but two, three, four

in infinite regress

this is so little understood

i would not even make a heretic

there’s a lot of very good 19th century painters i like who are not top of the "fame list".  they convey something of the era they lived in, often a certain halycon-ness before the destructiveness of world war I or, in the case of russia, the revolution

henri gervex  une soirée au pré catelan ,  quite proustian really

a venetian scene  by fritz thaulow circa 1895, i wonder how the water levels compare with today ?

issac levitan’s   last painting  and his  most famous

interestingly, levitan was a friend of anton chekhov

you make a series of claims for what zen is and unchallenged i think they constitute a "definition"

that is, one can make any definition of a word one likes but if the sphere of the claim is enlarged to the communicative and social where you have to deal with challenges which ensure some sort of commonality and utility to the definition, does it hold up ?

so the question is, is your definition sufficiently consonant with common perceptions of the meaning of the word so that any communication has sufficient utility to be worthwhile ?

or is it characteristic of much of the content of r|zen being self-aggrandising nonsense on the edge of schizophrenia utterly untempered by any real life involvement ?

plot amour  is a good metaphor for our limited ability to influence each other

ten years

twenty years

thirty years

forty years

fifty years

to see something clearly

and maybe i knew

what i was doing all along

books

writing

memory

compounded

squared

loss

hurt

but what of the gain that led to the loss

did that hurt too ?

or did we not see it ?

the universe is

flat

round

saddle shaped

with or without a boundary

we

the dots within

have no cognizance

of these matters

i think samuel barber’s  angus dei  needs a full choir to really tap into it

a different sort of "who dunnit", tracking down  the provenance  of three possible l.s. lowry paintings

i’ve watched a few of these "fake or fortune" programs, they do open your eyes as to how the art world works and the way it sets value

the young look on the old with disgust, not connecting that one day they too will be old and all the youthful beauty gone

“ all sorts of processes at the macroscopic level involve causation ”

i wonder if "causation" is in effect, something emergent ?

“if you do not get enough exposure to light during the day when the sun is out, that ‘delays’ your clock and  pushes back  the onset of sleep at night ”

i have always been suspicious of the night owl concept, that in reality it has more to do with exposure to daylight and the time of day such exposure occurs

taoism is monistic, chrisitianity is a blend of monism and metaphysical dualism

i don’t think buddhism or zen are monistic, they don’t categorise easily, in part i think because of their overt philosophical emphasis

"monism" is of course a generalisation, religions at the bottom are not that coherent so you are never going to get a 100% fit

"once upon a time in luoyang"  performed  by the chinese national theater principal dancer tang shiyi

i like the lyrics pinned at the top of the comments

there is an historical princess  anle , not the romantic figure pictured in the dance, but a young woman deeply enmeshed in the usual turmoil and murderous greed of chinese power politics

florid

death with jewels

is there another way ?

yes

death without jewels

philosophy

the fundamental problems

solution

no solution

just endlessness

that

sometimes

ends

no

road

is

an

answer

goebbel’s one-time mistress and  soviet spy ,  marika rökk led a "charmed" life for sure

you can see  the performance  is a bit thin and formulaic, no doubt because of the emigration of german jewish and other talent to hollywood

the calm before the storm

“ Actually, persona plot armor is not a bad Zen metaphor for getting stuck ”

i think this is why some meditation is important, it teaches the skill of seeing the plot armour

i am blocked by at least three people  (ed. on r|zen)  because they can’t converse with me and not start to have some "plot armour" exposed to their seeing and it freaks them out

the action of "seeing" itself, somewhat unsticks

they can talk until the cows come home, but in the absence of this personal/phenomenological work, they are wasting their time

sometimes you see too much

and wonder if only seeing a little

would make for more content

unfortunately

life does not work that way

i was talking to a brick wall and was surprised when the brick wall spoke back, admitting and not admitting its nature

malevolent

resting in the arms of "profound meaning"

it has a bite

they ignore

the self consumption

buddhism, two and a half thousand years of nonsense by the not too bright

islam, 1300 years of social control by the murderous varying to the humane

christianity, two thousand years of confusion by the confused

ed.  my comment on islam may not be understood, but the islamic empires at their height were a real achievement in personal safety, internal lawfulness especially travel, and its succorance of intellectual life and aesthetic public works

i feel modern islam has got divorced from its history as a mechanism of social control for empires and today is an narrow reinvention made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century looking much more like a conventional religion

“ You are being uselessly repetitive ”

what is right ,  i’m going to repeat in the face of what is wrong !

things exist in different ways

real

unreal

abstract

imaginary

non-existence

you just can’t get past it

"that without constancy" is quite different from "impermanent" and from a philosophical point of view more correct because you have categories of "constancy" eg the platonic whereas "impermanence" implies constant changefulness without context

why be a pompous ass ? you people preach on and on, knowing nothing and never pick up your mistakes, and can’t be told

what was unusual about the mongol invasions was the extent to which they massacred their about to be subjects, the usual course of military success is to have the subject populations keep intact and subservient as giving you the maximum benefit

if you watch any of these videos like the youtube channel 1420, its hilarious with its usual story of those who can’t be drafted in favour of others being drafted, the level of personal hypocrisy is egregious

huh, there is  a solution  to the "mystery of the mary celeste"

“ long-term consumption of  allura red  food dye can be a potential trigger of inflammatory bowel diseases  (IBDs), crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis ”

the new zealand government (food standards australia new zealand ?) has  a different view

“ research has shown that synthetic colours are safe to consume.  they don’t cause adverse effects even when consumed in large amounts

colours such as tartrazine have sometimes been linked to adverse reactions like asthma, rashes, and headaches. but these cases are rare.  they usually occur only in people who have other allergies ”

humans originally had two heads and four arms and legs, so zeus, fearing the strength of this, divided them into two so they would be always searching for each other and he hasn’t looked back since

what is not generally understood is the eye ages worse than any other organ, even more than the heart and brain

without memory how can you even ask the question of having any concept of yourself or its absence ?

time is the flower

"zen masters", like "saints" are a fictitious construct in a narrative

what more can i say ?

"zen masters" are a fictitious construct in a narrative

what more can i say ?

one has to be careful on the net that any time you put in gets used effectively, like you might look more challengingly at the way and what you express, but of course you don't

“ You seem to see a lot of red flags. I wonder why ? ”

deflection, declamation, argumentum ad hominem, skipping salient points, hubris beyond belief, semantic pragmatic insufficiency, self-esteem chasing

thought i’d make a list that actually requires quite a bit of phenomenological work to move past

your problem is you can’t extricate the narrative from the philosophical !

the most useful part of zen you ignore, which is phenomenological inquiry while buying into the whole fiction of zen masters

when they can’t distinguish a narrative from reality

trouble !

memories

accidently picking up a sewing kit

purloined from a hotel

when people get defensive and slip into argumentum ad hominem

you know

they are in denial

like skaters on ice

they glide over the points you make

the echo chamber of the net

many find

not echoey enough

magical thinking is a super big red flag

because you asked

ed.  a r|zen OP asking about the meaning of some passages in dahui’s "treasury eye of the true teaching #19" supposedly quoting shishuang chuyuan (986–1039)

“ Boundless emotionally afflicted intellectual interpretations are all purified.  This is the pure reality body ”

ie being objective

“ If you reach this state, then you can emerge in one place and disappear in another, discard one embodiment and take on another.  Free at will in all ways in hell or heaven, this world or another, floating and sinking, shedding light in response to people, setting down teachings according to potentials ”

ie adapting to situations and people

all this stuff can be put simply in english, but you know, obfuscated nonsense seems more attractive to the usual benighted

i can write this, but it won't make any difference, the vectors of the human mind won’t be shifted off their cultural, evolutionary and energetic rails

i am god

a claim

which if you insist on

will get you sectioned

i’m not sectioned

but

sectionable

a succession of senile popes, what do you expect ?  who does their incapacity suit ?  the looters ?

is and isn’t

also means

is and isn’t

which is and isn’t

old roads

worn with our travelling

attractive to slough into

but not necessarily the right way to go

i must type a lot because i am always wearing away the letters on my keyboard, nail polish in block-like letters painted over the old seems to work well and greatly extends the life of the keyboard, lol half my letters are in pink !

R is best in lower case, otherwise upper case seems ok

all my life i have had problems with people not liking what i say and i have wondered why as its often simply a rational view !

well there is a reason, interestingly we never take in the whole world, but rather only variances from what we expect since they need to be dealt with as there may be unanticipated consequences, this is a huge saving on cognitive processing, but it also means that these variances go straight to the center of our attention and what fits doesn’t

so there am i constantly not fitting and therefore going to the center of other people’s attention as "unwelcome news"

the problem is the extent to which i look at things rationally and update any "theories of mind" i have to fit better the facts, this is not normal for human adults, though of course children are still forming views of how the world works, with adults these views are frozen and people get hugely traumatised with convincing evidence those views have errors because of the neurological impossibility of changing them

human history is a graveyard of adult preferences to fight and kill to preserve untouched the views of the world imbibed as a child, you can see it in russia at the moment, the world has changed, yet attitudes in russia are still stuck back with the romanovs and territorial expansionism

in my view, this is also an all encompassing explanation of mental illness which in the terms i have discussed is simply a total inability to accommodate the "variances" and having socially malformed "theories of mind" that brings constant conflict in any dealings, so since this happens to a degree to all of us, you can see its not black and white at all and the craziness of the world is not so unexpected

there is only one explanation for all the very different languages across the globe

a deeply conserved, evolutionarily designed facility in the brain laid out in the genes

“ what is your passion ? ”

fighting on reddit

“ hmmmm ”

 what is everything ?

everything is fuss

and noise and bustle

life’s preoccupations that prevent us

looking

outside

knowledge is a way of looking at things and as such is a projection, culturally you see it all the time, but its just as applicable to science as paradigms change, what was previously thought of as immutable turns out to be mutable

“ the buddha ”

a dream lapped up

by the mentally non-discriminating

the most damming indictment of human asininity is the way half-arsed nonsense gets religiously carried down for 2000 years and so much of the real mcCoy is lost forever

how fake can you get, maria  (ed. zakharova), i know work is hard to come by for a PHD in history, but surely there are limits to how far you are prepared  to debase  yourself ?

a poem by vladimir vysotsky that you surely won’t be reading

they don’t put up crosses on communal graves

and widows don’t come to shed tears

but flowers are laid and eternal flames

will never be quenched, it appears

interestingly, vladimir, for some  of his work  wasn’t writing from direct experience

there’s no prizes for being stupid

well maybe there are

its life’s most common commodity

god said "i am not"

“and god said unto moses, i am that i am   :   and he said, thus shalt thou say unto the children of israel, "i am" hath sent me unto you”

and also sent the holocaust apparently "which was"

amazing how a few words have sent so many to their deaths

how experience and culture curates us

an unwritten book

just as the body is

so the brain will be

jerusalem, historically and today, has been and is notorious for theft, scams and in previous times, bloody violence

on first glance there seems to be  a contradiction between so many "holy places" and the general larceny that occurs

but on second thoughts, the "holy places" are revealed as infinitely more sophisticated in their scams and robbery than the relative amateurs who ply their trade in the streets

right path

wrong path

he judges ahead

how can i tell him

“ picking and choosing ”

is wrong ?

well i got a reply "Not the way"

my  reply

he picks and chooses

the way

not the way

spinning between choices

he

is lost

cassandra

astride madness and sanity

favoured by neither

yet imbued

with the power

of foretelling

cassandra

astride sanity and madness

favoured by neither

yet imbued

with the power

of foretelling

mass graves

memory stopped at a certain point

and the dirt took over

“ The only two categories are those who see and those who don’t ”

ed.  those who are enlightened or holy and those who aren’t

see what ?

fictional landscapes ?

stand on the boundary of the fictional and real

then you will see

surupamaerl2’s translation of rujing’s sermon at jingci

additionally, he brought up this record

the monks asked the ancient worthy   :   what is buddha ?

in response, the ancient worthy replied   :   the great assembly arrives within the palace

still, did you know ?

the great ocean is boundless

mt. sumeru towers

now, the dharma i expound is beyond thoughts and beyond words

open-hearted obeisance is the most peculiar thing of all

復舉記得。僧問古德。如何是佛。答云。殿裡底大眾。還知麼。大海汪洋。須彌突兀。現在說法不思議。稽首光明最奇特。

my observation

tiantong rujing

a genuine sage

one amongst millions

the clarity of understanding

that comes with experience

neither monotheist

or polytheist

yet both

he hits the mark

being young

a bubble of

health

hubris

and a natural stupidity that arises from inexperience

the key lesson napoleon took from the  battle of zunta   (which if had been lost would completely have changed european history making it much more ottoman)  was that you should force a split or wait until the enemy forces are split themselves for whatever reason and cannot help each other and then attack their reduced forces

basically the battle was won by the superior tactical skills of  prince eugene  of savoy

interestingly, this is why the duke of wellington said the result of the battle of waterloo was a close call since it was the arrival of von blücher’s army that changed the battle in the seventh coalition’s favour and was napoleon’s greatest fear

from this you can see that putin’s strategy in the ukraine was fundamentally flawed, he cannot stop the resupply of the ukraine through poland, and belarus, while a client state of russia refuses to join the war, putin years ago needed to have annexed belarus so its army operated under russian command and this would have made the russian attack more fully on two fronts which would have put the ukraine is a very difficult situation despite russia being a generation behind in its weaponry

lukashenko has a reputation for being wily as a fox and NATO has a lot to thank him for

instead, russia is having to deal with the ukraine on a single front and cannot stop resupply through poland

being attacked on two or more fronts being a certain signal of eventual defeat is a lesson that germany only seems to have learnt after two world wars

russia’s recent escalation of drone attacks on ukrainian infrastructure can be looked at as the successful opening up of a new front against the urkaine, interestingly the drones had to come from a country outside russia’s own military infrastructure which says a lot about the state of russian weaponry

this is one of the problems of russia going on nuclear alert, the "governance" of the top echelons of command over the lower are so poor that an unintended initiation of a first strike attempt by russia would be on the cards which was why, even at the height of the cuban missile crisis russia never went on the alert level for its missiles, but had them all stood down

this is one of the hard facts about MAD, bluffs have to be called and so the risk of a weapons exchange happening is not zero, but the prize is a nuclear peace, so preferable to our human history of constant warfare

the reality of lamborghinis, under-designed, under-built, way way overpriced, a sham of faux and a testimony to human stupidity and gullibility

receive the body of christ

russian orthodox  hymn 

a what looks like an abandoned  (pre-revolution)  church as seen  from the trans-siberian railway in eastern siberia

some good scenery in the video but you have to browse

artificial sweeteners are really suss imo, i used some "equal" to feed some ants fifteen years ago and they have never come back

aspartame  causes anxiety  in mice for two generations

its quite possible fyodor dostoyevsky married his first wife  here

interestingly he was the sickly one, but she died first

when you read about his life your realize russia was a militarized society back then, the recent events are a return to form

"enlightenment"

like holiness

is an illusion

once source looked for

turns out to be many

people are fractured and uneven

that is the truth

alan guth  explains  how infinitely ascending numbers of universes are created as part of cosmic "inflation"

its actually quite important because it solves the problem of having enough universes that the anthropic principle can come into play, ordinary infinities are too small

so you have mechanisms in physics that explain our existence, the other half of the problem, "why is there something rather than nothing" is a category error or voynich but not entirely without a bit of sense that drives at the core of the problem which is nothing always has a context

so the problem/answer is not why is there something rather than nothing, but within the somethings there is a mysterious inclusive condition that transcends "agency", it is and isn’t an agent which is extraordinary and as agents ,  we can’t get our heads around it

twitter

ADHD

embedded

in

digital culture

two verses by foyan translated by surupamaerl2

body in the sky, body in a dream

do not seek your life in chimera

a pitiable vein of water, before the face of the cliff

drifting into our world, from past to now

self-knowledge is a dream, of flowers in the sky

thoughts below the surface, for twenty nine years, not

the place where we once walked; sweet smelling grass, sunset

who would have thought the red lotus followed every step ?

感興二首。空裏形骸夢裏身。夢中身世莫追尋。可憐一脉嵓前水。流入人間古到今。夢幻空花祇自知。潛思二十九年非。夕陽芳草曾行處。誰料紅蓮步步隨。

my  reply

the red lotus

inversion of the white

who is to say what is what

purity and sexuality are false dreams

we are chimeras that emerge

astounded at the joining of parts

our future

looks back at us

creating

our present

if only

it wasn’t so bloody well informed

the brain does funny things as it closes down and wakes up from sleep

in the sleep state we literally become a different person, all a bit weird if you think about it

the world’s woes

your woes

work on your own first

the world’s woes

my woes

work on your own first

if you’re worrying about rules, you are not going to write well

content should fuse with its expression

if you question conventional assumptions about "reality" and explore and develop a more sophisticated understanding of how it works the world turns out to be not particularly sane nor humans "nice"

if you look at the ftx  company structure  chart, its quite apparent it was a sophisticated ponzi scheme with a few key players and probably heavy staff involvement and could have lasted a lot longer if not for some bad trades and the collapse of the crypto bubble from the federal reserve bank putting the liquidity brakes on

its not easy to make $10 billion disappear, but a significant potion has to ended up with the key players and bankman-fried is acting as the public scapegoat, no doubt by arrangement with the other shareholders

because he spent so much money on the media  (his true talent was as a promoter)  you can see them playing into his game presenting himself as a naïve innocent

its through the net and youtube you get a truer picture of the situation

his parents are very interesting, both standford professors, his mother a leftist law reform advocate who wrote a paper denying personal responsibility for crimes and his father is an expert on tax shelters

all the books

translators

translation

different universes upon

different universes

anybody who can claim clarity in this

is dreaming

"awakening"

"enlightenment"

they meditate for a reason

to find

life is just

one dream

amongst

many

“ what do you think ? ”

i don’t know what i think

“ how can you not know what you think ? ”

how can i know what i think ?

“ what do you mean ? how is that ? ”

how isn’t that ?

how is knowing not thinking ?

if you don’t find an answer and you have never found an answer and all you can do is reformulate the question, what is that telling you ?

a religion is obliged to take some half-truths or untruths as true or it becomes meaningless

don’t be fooled

it will fight and destroy to preserve its errors

rujing i prefer to dogen as more direct and honest, there’s a vein of dishonesty that runs through dogen that is a little difficult to stomach which he probably felt was necessary to build a religion

i quite like  this drawing  of what a greenland ecoscene two million years ago looked like

the article  explaining  how they were able to figure it out with recovered DNA

gatekeeping

the gatekeepers

studiously enforce

their poor judgement

laymen

have a better understanding than monks

a bitter pill

to swallow

putin is suffering a form of subtle dementia or late onset schizophrenia and the russian federation has no mechanism for his replacement

its really like science fiction, the appearance of democracy ie some matrix like simulation decoying the population from the fact of autocracy

even the usual mutineers aiming to replace the autocrat with another autocrat are decoyed

putin is very like stalin, in fact there’s been no leader so like stalin and i guess his fate will be the same

one day it will be announced that putin has died from a health condition but in fact executed like stalin and after a bit of infighting a new autocrat will emerge

there are some words that carry too much freight for sanity

zen, god, love, hate

bit of an odd bunch actually

"one cause of everything"

demystifies the world

except

what demystifies

the one cause of everything ?

the anthropic principle takes care of any questions of probability, an existing, time stable universe that can support life doesn’t have to be probable, it can be an extreme of improbable, the only requirement is that of it being observed by life that has risen in it

i think personally it is at an extreme of improbable since this universe, while apparently stable to us may not be so stable at all and there are other hints

the "improbable"   mass constant  of the higgs boson should also be looked at in this light

my 50 cents on the deep meaning of probability is it is a reflection of imperfect knowledge and the relativity of points of view, the incarnation of which in physics, is of course, quantum theory

i guess you could say that knowledge horizons are always a function of the beholder

to me, the resistance to the anthropic principle is strange, its like evolution, a simple idea that explains a lot, apparently too simple for some

people think they are right

and remove evidence they are wrong

is that right

or

 wrong ?

“ People can change.  If they remove wrong content, is that bad ? ”

i take you mean their own "wrong" content ?

lol, i used to do that, but now i don’t make any mistakes so "problem solved"

actually i still remove posts where i have large areas of uncertainty and i don’t want to engage in a long debate, or i’m certain but can’t be bothered with the stir my  (usually)  dissonant views cause

however i am open to the uncertainty of being wrong, in writing the poem i was thinking more of trying to alter the world to fit the facts

downvotes mean  :

they were compelled to read you

they were too scared to actually reply

one’s proper assessment of downvotes is counter-intuitive, its an absolute value, just the same as an upvote, don’t be intimidated by the bottomless pit of idle, low reading age idiots on the web

i find that they often simply don’t understand what was written and get traumatised by this

“ you should go with whatever the ophthamologist recommends ”

i don’t think you can proxy everything onto another like that, people are uneven, they have good days, bad days and imperfect knowledge

“ What should a patient do instead ? ”

well, its the problem of  " drink deep  or taste not the pierian spring", with the net there is the possibility of reading a lot of top quality research and getting the opinions of other with experience from various forums, but the professional you are dealing with has had a lot of practical experience that may be missing in the information you have picked up from your own investigations

there’s no final answer because getting something right is only shown by the eventual results

i know in my own case some of my own suggestions for the final refraction, the surgeon ignored, but the one instance where i insisted on an under correction of the cylinder to allow for a rule shift he did agree with and the final result now 8 months later is -.25 all around which is as perfect a result as you can get

“ Respectfully, that’s not how this works, we don’t get to practice medicine retrospectively.  For a doctor, there has to be a 'final answer' beforehand ”

its not saying medicine is practiced retrospectively, but really that future outcomes are to varying degrees "uncertain" ie at some point things becomes probabilistic because of uncertainty of knowledge

no. 105 from james green’s translation of, and titled "the recorded sayings of zen master joshu"

a monk asked : "the true way is without difficulty, just refrain from picking and choosing".  to talk about it even a little is "picking and choosing"

how, then, do you instruct people ?

the master replied   :   why do you not finish quoting the words of the ancient ?

the monk responded   :   i only can say until that point

the master replied   :   only that "the true way is without difficulty, just refrain from picking and choosing [is my instruction] "

my  comment

the monk is taking an "ontological position" and joshu both validates and invalidates it

people do not understand this truth

its the brick wall at which everything stops though philosophy delineates the bricks, ultimately its not helpful, though not without a certain validity

spiralling in

meets spiralling out

why

is

this

not

 understood ?

in silence

and solitude

the brain unfolds

the art is to see what is revealed

and not to impose

one’s own ideas

form sits on infinity

the common view

what does infinity sit on ?

infinity sits on itself

the real meaning of life

the golden ball holds itself up in the air

why is this so ?

it just is

animated  portrait photo  of a woman living in 1870’s japan

i thought the world was all that lay before me

then i turned around and could see that it was all that was behind me as well

talking worlds

so normal for us

yet

vacant

phenomenology is inquiry based, there are no limits to that enquiry as per the claim it is purely intellectual and on the other hand the claim for some special validity of zen having a physical embodied practice is nonsense

if you think about it, what zen is supposedly about must necessarily be universal and therefore will also be there in other religions and lines of inquiry

blinkers restrict the field of view, its tautological

i think "practice" is a modern western notion, its not there in the old texts !

zen is a sort of philosophical inquiry that today we would call  phenomenological

however very few do this and so what is perceived as "zen" is just some endless bog of people who never got on the right path to start with

president xi jinping has completely changed the game for russia by saying in effect that if russia uses the nuclear bomb on the ukraine, it may move on some of their disputed boundary

larry david’s ftx commercial is the most  prophetic  i have ever seen , he’s a clever man, the ad could have been written the way it was so he never directly endorses the product, in fact he disclaims it

it all looks very expensive, must have cost FTX a bomb, very effective marketing, of course behind the scenes was a malfunctioning/ fraudulent company

its happened

newspaper journalists can’t resist their inner cringiness

and are now promoting

their erstwhile archenemies

the "influencers"

tiantong rujing at jingci   :   summertime session translated by surupamaerl2

in a summertime sermon, rujing said

the end of the summer retreat has passed us by, yet, the dismissal is still yet to come  —

in amongst the seeds of the first statement

the blooming lotus reflects in the water  —

for what reason do the grasses settle ?

to stop crying, really, is only for the babies

中夏上堂。結夏已過了。解夏猶未來。中間一句子。蓮花照水開。因甚落草。止啼元只為嬰孩。

my  reply

the dismissal comes

slowly or quickly as it may

the beauty of flowers doesn’t come with us

there is cause to weep

caught within the narration

believing it

yet disbelieving it

is so freeing

churn churn

the churn of old ideas

smothering new ones

you can argue as to responsibility for the background to the russo-ukraine war, but its all water under the bridge, russia is now too exposed to potential chinese aggression and other border issues because of over-investment in the ukraine war, putin must be demented to have got into this situation, that’s the trouble with autocracy, things are only as good as sanity at the top

it took me a full man month to research the question of sir henry neville writing the works of shakespeare, without putting in that sort of time you are not going to come to the conclusions i did, there’s so much material to go through

however there is a broad consensus that shakespeare never wrote the plays, he was likely writing illiterate and in fact an underworld figure so basically you are looking at about three possible authors and neville is the best fit by a long way

the fundamental problem with shakespeare as an author is he is writing convincingly of worlds totally outside his experience and sir henry neville is writing of worlds within his experience with matching details in the plays

further, the tempest could only be written by a man born once every several hundred years it is so unusual and the man that matches is not shakespeare but neville

just keep an open mind and start a bit of research, investigating his life totally opened up his works to me

so twitter, trying to fill an absence of literary skills with aggressive bluster !

reading twitter does something bad to the brain

too aggressive

too hostile

too insane

too stupid

to think this is part of the world that exists is depressing

everyone else’s nonsense

your own nonsense

what remains

is nonsense

reading sir henry neville’s life is the biggest "breakthrough" on understanding shakespeare

everything slots into place

religion is not evolution

it schisms

not develops

everyone gives you their own nonsense

which remains

nonsense

“ So provide an answer then ? ”

you need to "unpack" then rebuild more coherently

you really have to question everything whereas people just accept what is given without question

evidence is not in some sutra or scripture, but what you have worked out and that’s actually what makes zen a bit different from buddhism

"tiantong rujing arrived at dangu" translated by surupamaerl

a single, unseeing eye on the forehead

great people have great sight

tip over the sky in an earthen jar

great wisdom has great potential

take up the great and enter the small

and countless transformations are carried out, throughout

it is also said, "what use is it to make verification ?"

the warbler that moves tree to tree tunes a new tongue

the plum that emits a delicate scent grows out of the same old branch

大石鼓至。上堂。獨瞎頂門眼。大人具大見。掀翻瓮裡天。大智具大機。以大入小。萬化普施。且道。以何為驗。鶯遷喬木調新舌。梅吐清香發舊枝。

___________________

my  replies

eyes see

they must

its their nature

and there is nothing

that cannot be seen

that is the use

of verification

________________

eyes on the forehead

thought carries you far

when the sky inverts

wisdom floods out

gather a little

and you are free

to move

when the narrative dominates

you can’t argue with them

they pull the blinds down

over their thoughts

when memory goes

our going

not even a wave

gone

its not enough just to live

you need beauty as well

disney’s animated childrens’s film "strange world"  (ed.  november 2022)  is devoid of something, lacks energy, like it is too fragmented and has just been sort of put together and never fuses

on the positive side its the leader in its class for film memes, plagiarism and cinematic clichés

lol, so sue me, disney, you obviously have problems with your creative management !

i’d look at "me" time as decompression, a walk or whatever, i’d be careful that you actually got that and not say reading what i call "low quality" or watching a soap etc

also i’d be careful with sitting meditation, research is consistently showing that the amount of time we sit today in a lot of occupations creates health problems

buddhism is a celibate religion and not family friendly if you look at the original stories so don’t get too tangled up in trying to bridge the gap

i think the thing the execution of the tsar’s family showed was the bolsheviks had no limits with what they would do to maintain power and that’s how it turned out to be

in contrast the revolutionaries spared louis the XVI’s children, so there was a limit, though bloody

zen has always been very much part of japanese politics and what we call zen today is a "politically expedient" construct formed in the meiji era to promote extreme japanese nationalism (hence the "zen at war" problems) and reduce the influence of zen buddhism on the public by forcing priests to marry

“ the emptiness of emptiness ”

nagarjuna’s criticism of the view that "everything is mind"

  well put  by carlo rovelli

there’s a lot of faux buddhism out there which is just rehashed western cultural memes that have been around many centuries

talent

beats no-talent

beats talent

i was looking at this carlo rovelli video

“ reality is not things, but connections ”

and thinking it sounded very buddhist/nagarjuna

  and lo and behold

the penny dropped

once

twice

ten thousand times

do you think i will get it on the ten thousandth time ?

one would hope so

exculpatory

inculpatory

i am convicted

or exonerated

from what ?

time shows

guilt

and

innocence

the jury

died with me

writing should never be a degree course, good writing requires some brain abnormality that is inimical to communal learning

bitcoin hasn’t collapsed, its still over double its 2020 value !

the real problem is today’s chips and networks are not up to handling the computational burden for its use as a currency, that might be ten or fifteen years away, weird as it seems, its something ahead of its time

woven threads

reformed

an impossible task

the answer is already there

when it occurs

dusk in autumn

a certain melancholy

what is gone is gone

there is nothing worse than dealing with a group of people

that know that they are right

and you are wrong

heraclitus

that wise man

wiser than all who followed him

how weird !

the snark

no phantom of delight

our opposite sum

cannot equal

our annihilation

abstract ideas

and the real

and concrete

and imaginary

all exist

so what ?

nothing itself

is its own failure

into some-things

no-thing is nothing

compared

to other things

amongst which

are all things

you can call it god

the absolute

or nothing

there is no real mystery

except our constitutional blindness

there’s always a treachery and natural insolence with journalists

they are like sheep with the jaws of wolves

the problem with tsar nicholas the second was you couldn’t find a person less competent to lead russia and there was no system for getting rid of him

the same with putin, no person less competent to run russian foreign policy with his mid twentieth century KGB ideas and no system to get rid of him

russia seems to bounce through extremes and its break up is not in the interests of the west

when the days bleed into night

and the night reciprocates

that is understanding

strained couples

in your face

fake smiles

the advertising

staple

inane babble

by the inane babbler

proud

of it

blind to be so insensitive to such a shameful

public display

religion is anti-intellectual, anti-literary and anti-artistic in the main because they show the stupids up

break your back

break my back

going back

once done

cannot be undone

giovanni croce’s "buccinate in neomenia tuba"  sung  by voces8 in the cathedral of brixen, south tyrol

in context

out of context

text is a con

with medicine, there is no universally safe procedure because there are always morbid conditions that make them "unsafe"

these are often discovered after the event so to speak

however, statistically speaking they are unlikely

what follows is a brief discussion of the zen and buddhist concept of  emptiness

“ form is emptiness, emptiness is form

emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness

whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form ”

so its a theological position "the identity of relative and absolute" which like most theological positions that doesn’t mean much, a blind alley rather

the basic issue with zen is it doesn’t make sense outside celibacy, you need that level of disinterest in life

today’s married with or without kids is just the usual human paradigm of conflict and self-interest

out of the swirling noise of chaos

meaning emerges

chaos’s necessity

and here we are

the beneficiaries

who scatter

it fruitlessly away

a tiantong rujing quote  (0130b03) translated by surupamaerl2

speaking informally to a congregation member zuqing, rujing said

when this old monk was a youth, i would lie on the back of the bull, blowing on its black salt horns.  then, these plum blossoms guided me in, and suddenly, it all turned to a cry, stuck in my throat  —  i don't know why its like that.  in that instant, the horns shattered  —  breathing stopped, heaven and earth was spacious, open and insubstantial

my mind was forgotten

it was a long time before i returned, my heart having become the great ancestor of this world

alas! these floral cliffs blossom in the sigh of the wind in pines

as for the countless forms that have no cause; this is all my mind’s activity, and yet  —  this beginning  —  i had not yet experienced what its functioning is like, so i mounted the bull and returned home

still, i remember how it seemed, so, elder zuqing, you are trying to find some words or instruction on zen, but zen doesnt know in the first place  —  so i’m writing you to stop you from coming

法語

示祖清禪人

老僧少年。臥牛背上吹烏鹽角。調入梅花引。忽然轉嗚噎。不知所以。乃其角破而氣絕。天地豁空吾心忘矣。久而返。吾心即天地之太祖。嗚呼岩花開松風鳴。至於萬像無作而作。皆吾心之用。而初未甞用也。於是騎牛還家。尚記其彷彿。祖清上座求語參禪。禪固不知。因筆聊塞來意。

in essence this is the core of zen, the "enlightenment experience" and what follows

people take the enlightenment experience as the end, but its only the beginning

lacking this experience, people waste their time with scriptures, "practices" and endless failing what is in effect theological philosophy

when the wide world opens

in its wideness

the gift of infinity pours in

revealing

the triviality of religion

we

are

free

the internal politics of any religious group are always surprisingly vicious and ruthless

the internal politics of zen and any religious group actually are always surprisingly vicious and ruthless

fugue states of being open a door

nightshift is a killer, the worst is when the hours switch around on a regular basis massively disrupting the circadian rhythm, it literally damages the brain

the point of "shikanatza" is to see the way your brain works

the patterns turn out to be surprisingly simple, but its never ending and never lacks interest because its content is your life and the way you react and behave

general philosophical, theological and literary reading is important as well to give the brain something to work on

“ How is a city not nature ? ”

its crawling with the ants called humans

the trap of old age

spavined wheels spinning

when new ones are needed

theories of life fail

because life has too much complexity

to be contained

homilies are guesses at simplicity

and thus tainted

if you want to know what goes on in the head

listen to what comes out of the mouth

i can relate to haruki murakami’s  automatic dwarfs ,  there’s some unconscious process that creates the writing and in my case delivers it usually complete and actually gabriel garcía márquez, the writer of the "one hundred years of solitude" says this is how he wrote his book, interrupting a holiday trip to start

i don’t know where what is written comes from or even how these sometimes elegant and well worked ideas can be from me given my usual chaotic, failure prone and messy manner of thinking and working

i do think in the end it has to be a gift and you can clearly see it in murakami’s case, there is something extra to his parental literary background, access to a creative forge

the university system is turning out thousands of writers without this, presupposing it is only a matter of training and education, but the result is the world is now awash in meaningless burble from these people and i notice on the web that the notion of reading age almost seems a lost concept with strong negative reactions to anything that stretches the brain a bit

dreamers, they dream

benign unflawed realities

the painstaking building of coherences

is beyond them

russia’s problem is the same as in the afghanistan war, they are a generation behind in their weapons technology compared to what their opponents have and this makes the russian fatalities too high and the russian system of government is incapable of delivering the latest generation of reliably functioning weapons, this also applies to nuclear except MAD makes confrontation ill-advised

one of the most unusual features of the current situation is the "stalinist" degree of social control putin has achieved which must be due to modern media technology because basically its without the brute force power stalin and his regime exerted, this also is what has happened in china

the initial scenario of the invasion of the ukraine was only viable if they quickly took the whole country because then ,  if successful, they would not face being shut out of most of the international economic community due to reparations being sought, putin actually had the opportunity to get out of his mess when it was obvious after the first days things weren’t going to plan, by withdrawing back to the dontesk and crimea and using his show of willingness to invade to force a better negotiated settlement for the then current situation, but putin failed at the pass

authoritarian regimes depend very much on competence at the top and in this case its not there, whereas lukashenko, now in hindsight shows himself as more competent

well its an ill wind that blows no good and the prime beneficiaries are those countries threatened by chinese expansionism being shown how a modern war is fought and the consequences of a lack of nuclear deterrent

an entirely new form of warfare has emerged, highly complex with a sort of "rules based" structure, nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver in the background, conventional forces with empowered infantry having advanced weapons to even up the balance against tanks, helicopters and aircraft, and the dominance of missiles and their ability to strike crippling blows against infrastructure and enemy positions

there are surprising parallels with the peloponnesian war where the economic "weight" and efficiency of the countries involved determined successful outcomes in a long and grinding campaign of attrition

hopefully such a form of warfare today will be more "muted", but there will be an underlying "fragility" for the foreseeable future with a high vulnerability by all parties to various threats

models

are models

they cannot be

the

real world

yet

so often

 we are persuaded they are

words about kafka

bowdlerized of tragedy

his ability to create different shaped realties

so compelling

more real than life

yet cannot exist

perspectives shift

sometimes so far

our looking itself

shifts

these people who seem totally unable to construct any sort of rebuttal and just drop back to the usual refuge of "the not too bright" which is a generalist personal attack or worse

the truth is they can’t understand what is said to them isn’t it ?

what’s the point of being a know-all when you know nothing

you just look an idiot

the flaw with the advaita vedanta obsession with consciousness is the vast majority of brain function is unconscious, so by that most significant measure consciousness is only a part of the picture

the paradox of life

is not that, as we are taught

something must be built from nothing

but from all things some-things must fall

brad warner asks what insight gensha got in the zen story of him hurting his toe on a rock

i'll let you into the secret brad, gensha is just a character in a story and the story is nonsense and you personally are in an echo chamber

you are looking for answers in explanation, but there never was a valid question to start with

rupert spira is on the wrong track as well

from a pragmatic point of view, there is no bottom turtle, its that simple, this is not an explanation but an observation

no buddha, no dogen, no dogen translations, no joshu, no jesus

the fools prattle their empty nonsense forever

sorry to be a bit harsh, but the way you are going is doing you no good at all !

hard times

have to be borne

why ?

because there is no-one else to bear them

if you have ever wondered how islamic geometric motifs  were designed

atarashii gakko doing the  chopping dance

alma deutscher  transits  to orchestral

the music comes from the beginning of  the magic bomb ,  a 2021 track by vietnamese musician/producer hoàng read

god

existence

entirely a false problem

others don’t worry

and neither should you

god

existence

entirely a false problem

others don’t worry

and neither should i

opinions

so peripheral to our existence

yet we are inadvertently

steered by

when the gates open and the dead pour forth

this world doesn’t exist

fragments coalesce

to make a world

when the gates open and the dead pour forth

this world doesn’t exist

fragments coalesce

to make a gate

not knowing

and knowing

the flux

bemuses us

the arrow of meaning

aimed at the heart

deflected by the shield

of obfuscations

the power of language

cuts both ways

the arrow of meaning

aimed at the heart

deflected by the shield

of obscurations

the power of language

cuts both ways

the impenetrable

the indecipherable

paraded as

penetrable

decipherable

by those who hold the key

the frauds !

the performing monkey

rattles a chain he cannot see

the audience

insanity has a normative edge

insanity without a normative edge

now that’s real insanity

and so rare

closed minds

closed for a reason

because open

causes breakage

its a skill sadly missing

to get past that

dreamscape , artwork by maurice sendak from the children’s book "mr. rabbit and the lovely present" written by charlotte zolotow

article  on the work of maurice sendak

everything spread in all directions

that’s how it is

we

take our one small track for all

but obviously

its not

"itchy boots" has finally arrived at prudhoe bay, alaska and recaps some of the most  stunning footage  of her travels though south america and the andes

that the baskets  were worn  to be anonymous indicates to me that joining the order may have been a socially acceptable way for the usual samurai murderers and thieves to lead a reformed or not so reformed life

the rōnins were basically brigands, the wikipedia entry is biased by the usual toxic idiots

i think the trouble with the word "zen" is it is unusually plastic in what it might mean to people since they constantly seem to redefine it to mean whatever theological slant suits them

you can’t get around this, like the word "god" it now has so much baggage its useless

in a more general sense religion is repackaged and inappropriately reified philosophy and "zen" is no exception to this

mermaids , now i think about it, its hard to get any chimera more incongruous to biological reality

well, as it turns out, the title of that painting is  “ the daughters of  rán ” ,  so they are mermaids of a sort but missing fish parts

it makes a difference to see the subtle interactions amongst the choir members i think

voces8 singing gregorio allegri’s  miserere mei

translation, especially of historical texts is a guessing game, at best a reasonable approximation to what was said and at worse no relation and most are somewhere between these two extremes

one of the limitations of contacts is they make the eye "microbiome" more skin-like, this will be an issue for some

buddha looked at his own existence

it was fictitious

he disappeared

so phoney !

no shame at all

these purveyors of nonsense

cherry blossom

why look further

already the other side

ed.  i was in town the day before yesterday and was surprised  (it now being almost summer)  to see the cherry trees in between the bottle store and woolies in full bloom and the ground carpeted with the small pink petals, a wonderful feeling of mystery and seclusion where none was to be expected

when douglas harding is talking about being headless, he’s just talking about our body image which modern brain science bears out, its a constructed image/model, that there’s really nothing there, just constructions and in that sense ,  unreal, that what we call reality is not the "bottom turtle" we think it is

so basically rupert spira is a cosmo/panpsychist, very sanskrit !

its still, imo a form of monotheism, there’s a very overt underlying reality pulling the strings so to speak, my own view is more than unpalatable to these people, that there is no answer because there is no meaningful question and you can’t go any further which i think is also dogen’s view, his "roundaboutness" is not co-incidental, but part of the message

explanation is a continually failing process, of course you may have to do that process and you might as well try to get it as correct as possible, but theologies and schema etc trying to rest in the cradle of fixation are retrograde

brad warner’s vlog has changed a lot, my haters have gone, those wannabe brads trying to take over the vlog have gone, the missionaries of other "teachers" have gone  (especially the thich nhat hanhists   .   .   .   .  )

what has happened ?

maybe after a couple of years it did dawn on them that it is brad’s vlog, and on the worst offenders, that the mirror said they were different

of course thich nhat hanh dying and being cremated like that may have also caused them to enter the trauma of thinking about what they were doing ?

i think they always expected brad to step in and save them and their supposedly orthodox if insane views and its to his great credit he didn’t, though why he would support those toxic intellectual freeloaders is anyone’s guess

what is zen about ?

well i can answer

it is anything you make it

i share dogen’s opinion of huangpo and da hui, they weren’t fully enlightened

huang po comes across as not quite right, it could be pei xiu not understanding what he said or  (more likely imo)  huang po had further to go and never got there

the problem with r|zen is lacking their own experience they proxy in the usual idiots to stand in for their own lack of understanding

its just a made up story, you might as well look at grimm’s fairy tales/ rumpelstiltskin

there’s something wrong with you when you take soap operas as real occurrences

total fake, even your reddit nick is fake

can’t put up the goods is all there is to you

so fake that even if you are called on it, you are in total denial

basically "what is a platonic object" and how does it differ from other, more real objects ?

you could be years if ever  away from understanding what i wrote, i can’t cross that gap for you

the sort of things i think about are across decades and a lifetime to sort out, an endless process terminated by death or senility

a way of looking at the russo-ukraine war is the absurdity of two russian speaking nations fighting each other, like there are too many russian speakers in the world

they don’t really argue is the problem on net message boards with certain aggressive stupids

what they do is attack the person because they lack the reading age to understand what is said in the first place

they are not at the first step of being able to read and write, that is being able to understand what is being said, just amazing, but true

seriously, ghosts only exist in the imagination,

don’t confuse your life by adding the unnecessary

the eye of infinity twists

endless recursion

don’t look for meaning

because there is none

the eye of infinity twists

then straightens

the recursion unwinds

looking down the aeons

only a fool takes meaning

feeding the homeless

well the homeless turns out to be me

homeless

having favourites can be fatal for the "favourite"

dunno why life works that way, but it does

"the existence of a historical buddha was never at center stage for zen"

that is the claim, but its like the new testament without jesus, what is regarded as the foundation of christianity is validated because its supposedly historical, but if its just a bunch of stories by some upper class roman "fanficton" literary types, why should it have more validity than a tv soap ?

same for zen and buddhism

its not all bullshit, but by god there’s an awful lot of it and you have to sort it out

paradoxically what i think western zen has most to offer is some beginning experience of meditation which in terms of philosophy is practical phenomenology

those people who who posture here quoting some supposedly super secretly true text then do long nonsensical comments are literally deranged !

what can you do about it ?

nothing

some people sitting meditation sends mentally ill, i’m not joking, its not for everyone

get some exercise and for meditation go for walks by yourself

“ Do you prepare yourself for potential future conversations when you’re alone ? ”

its a form of thinking ahead and can be valuable, often you see there’s a lot of stuff you don’t want to bring up or do, so can walk around what would bring unnecessary trouble

quality small choirs are hard to beat and throw in edvard grieg and some stupifyingly good rococo church architecture and you have voces8 singing  ave maris stella

this  makes me think about the story of the sixth patriarch in the verse competition, that it was the type of mirror referred to because its an image, its really quite a negative reference, but highly ambiguous as there is also something to it

there is an insanity of age

of ennui

the absurdity of waiting to pass

watching a total eclipse of a full moon

well, not quite total

a fuzzy dark smudge

creeping slowly  —  then the entire disk extinguished except for a telltale murky orange light

and the release

taking a different form

a reversing re-illumination

ed.  8th november 2022, i didn’t write this my usual way, but slowly put it together over the several hours of the eclipse, going outside every now and then to see the progress, i didn’t feel intellectually up to writing it, but something came together, maybe the words still not quite a good fit

the malevolent

capturing the stupid

 what is the moral point ?

she doesn’t hear criticism

 why ?

only she knows

“ What would you have me do with criticism ? ”

criticism

doors that open

to a wider world

the clarity of judgment

over time

shows

i killed a litter of maybe several days old feral kittens last night, six in all, i agonized a bit over "killing" but did the deed anyway

later that night i heard some growling outside the front door

it was a cat eating one of the kittens and keeping the others away

all the kittens are gone this morning

eaten no doubt

not knowing the authentic

they praise the inauthentic

its just the way it is

the eye grows and sees all

why didn’t it always see all ?

it did

the "general problem with truth" is it places an upper bound on "being"

there is no upper bound !

is that a truth ?

koans, cases, scriptural quotes

nonsense crafted

into flypaper

for the stupid

a different world

the western  norwegian fjords  in the second half of the 19th century as painted by anders askevold

the validity of being a monk or nun rests on some purposeful assumptions and is not more valid than validity of the assumptions themselves, the principle one being that the doctrine is true and not some man-made nightmare of inconsistency and contradiction

“ The  results  showed a significant association between blood group A and the severity of covid-19, whereas patients with blood group O showed a low risk of developing severe covid-19 infection

No significant association was found between Rh and susceptibility/severity of the disease ”

too long

too short

too iffy

too haught

a good video of hasui kawase  prints

tiantong rujing   :   seeing off the monks translated by surupamaerl2

living compels the monkey to sit on the anvil  —

heaven and earth crumbles and sinks at the blow of a hammer

comes to be horizontal, while the vertical goes on with a smile, haha !

proceeding through past and present, slurping up the gruel and sleeping

my restatement

whatever happens

there is a space

beyond it all

what is "nothing" without a context

is it a state or is there no such state ?

therefore there is no such thing ?

in the quantum world you in effect get  backward causation  of the future on the past through the mediation of uncertainty

inanity is in the eye of the beholder

what is simple parses deeper

if you look

i have done quite a bit of real life zen and the contradiction of its oral emphasis and reliance on written texts for validation always struck me as anomalous

i think what fits zen best is its a repackaging of pre-socratic philosophy with a heavily phenomological emphasis which has a certain validity

textually, zen is the usual religious mixture of small stones of authenticity and boulder banks of self-serving nonsense

your child

somewhat a clone

of you

a

surprise

no parent

ever gets over

how every woman  feels

remedios varo

error is the nature of reality and has to be sorted out

constantly

“ Sounds like weaving a story of personal preference then ”

you really have a messed up way of looking at things, the point of sorting out mistakes is to create objective truth

frozen associations

we can’t undo them

redo them

or anything

hasui kawase’s 1931  print   “ spring moon at ninomiya beach ”

1/4 down the above linked page  (3rd print down from the top)

zōjō-ji in shiba , 1925

political violence is interesting because it is often the result of insanity, yet the action and outcomes are entirely coherent in terms of the political result, that is they are the actions of a sane man in terms of intention and result, yet the man is insane and the violence is a vehicle for his insanity

an alphabet

falling from the sky

janet

you are remembered

ed.  janet frame and her book "the carpathians"

there’s lot of "out of body" and near death experiences floating about on the net, it is observable how they are dressed in the most appalling conceptual apparatus

if they had really died of course we would have been spared the nonsense

the issue is that they are physiological events and any conclusions derived are by necessity, derived from physiology

reading the words of others

carried on the words of others

danger

janet frame’s

memory flowers

plural

did she make a mistake ?

the pretenders

keep

pretending

unaware

their duplicity is exposed

for all to see

abstract

you can travel a million miles very quickly

why get bogged down in the particular ?

because that’s where you live

politics is always a mixed bag of decaying ideologies

i never realised lev gumilev was such  a pest  !

a good video, worth watching in its entirety

he was of course the son of one of russia’s most famous and suffering poets, anna akhmatova, he certainly looks like her

its interesting to compare her ultra sanity against his what is really schizophrenic  insanity

when you look at this sort of stuff, you realise nabakov’s dream of a halcyon russia could only ever be that

rujing translated by surupamaerl2

while setting the flames to elder yi’s funeral pyre, rujing said  :

all things return to the one  —  since life is just like wearing a shirt, to where is "to the one" returning ?

since dying, in like, is taking off one’s pants, when life and death are shed, in one’s so doing, there is little relevancy  —  the light shares one path; constant, inimitable, revealing

oh ?  how rapid the flames rise in the passing wind, into the great potential  —  world’s innumerable, as every dust, without reciprocation

my  reply

world’s innumerable

the buddhists and philosophers have that right

but what does it mean ?

the depth of a scratch

exposes what is not deeper

and illuminates

with its own light

what is unlikely

versus what is not possible

think about it

the rabble of the rabble

don’t be fooled

its rabble

and they

are

rabble

its interesting the way virtuoso performers remain insulated from composition

i can’t see how you can play a lot and not come up with your own, some of course do, but they are not many

a receding dream

it was all fiction

made up in my head

words going around

more words going around

philosophy, various theologies

whatever

your own words

tiring

its no good being 50/50 right/wrong, you need to get a better percentage than that

there seems to be a cultural denial of psychiatric drugs having severe long term side effects, but while side effects are a major concern for "normal" medicine, the bar is lower for anything psychiatric since the base is not good health but a legal requirement to to prevent an individual being a danger to themselves or others

caution   :   graphic  war video

no wonder military age russian men are fleeing their country !

if you have done any hunting you know what a writhing animal means !

what i don’t understand is the way the general population tolerates these losses,   stalin’s days  are long gone

actors, singers, songwriters can have a deep skill

but are usually very ordinary people

mentally

their banality

is disturbing

pulling back

as apposite as going forward

if we don’t pull back

the future becomes too crowded

the imbeciles

the "not too bright"

to take fiction as reality

and then

reality as fiction

all wrong

god knowing everything

is too complicated

even for god

the media industry of "A-list"

and B and C

even D, E and F

the churn

of inanity

of other peoples’ lives

there is an argument that the roman empire was brought down by its own success, that the population density and agricultural intensity provided the breeding ground for the pandemic diseases and plagues that caused the depopulation that effectively meant the empire became too weak to defend its borders and the tribes on the other side of the borders not being so "civilized" didn’t have the pandemic problems to the same extent

so covid is in the same vein, and there would be others more fatal except for medical technology

a white flash or loud sound on falling asleep is quite normal and it surprises me it is not better known

also some weird blending of the dreaming state and reality on waking

i think i have had covid for the second or third time

the first was before the vaccines and a longer illness, more flu-like or even the flu, i can’t say except covid was going around at the time

the most recent illness is very similar to the second and with an incubation period of about eight days

then a bad migraine for about two or three days during which i stop eating

then the last day with the migraine gone, but still not feeling like i could hold anything down, vomiting once and then pretty much ok except a bit weak, which is a very rapid recovery from being sick

one thing i have learnt is i think its healthy to stop eating for several days, so the not eating is not an issue with me, on fasting days i eat/drink a teaspoon of jam in hot water once to give the stomach microbiome a bit of sugar so it doesn’t morph into protein eating

lying down and resting helps you build the necessary T-cells

two pfizer vaccines separated by six months has given me the immunity i need, i’m waiting for a next generation vaccine which will cover variants, currently omicron is mutating too quickly for effective antibody immunity to be given, the current vaccines are only giving a long term general immunity which is why its important not to have them too close together

not eating  (but being careful to keep hydrated ) improves the immune targeting because you don’t have any "labelled" food particles in the blood thus improving the signal to noise ratio

i can’t say for sure i have had covid because i have never been tested, but it seems to fit

solitude

let’s what’s in

out

and what’s out

in

the transaction

is

worthwhile

oddly, cataracts can act like EDOF lens giving you vision over a range of focal lengths so going to monofocal in a sense can be a step down even though the lens is clearer

when i had the vivity edof put in my eye, from a focal point of view it was no different from the cataract, but of course clearer and the surgeon agreed that this could be so, that cataracts create multiple points of focus similar to an EDOF

in my email program

today

always follows

yesterday

i wait for the day

yesterday is first

behind tomorrow

twitter is the cackle of idiots

good luck elon !

the publishing industry is a bunch of robbers

as you will discover

or should have

in fact

already

egregious error

splashes everywhere

don’t waste your time

mopping up after it

rujing at jingci   :   a sermon thanking the overseer translated by surupamaerl2

cleansing the dharmakāya, vairocana  —  there’s a dried radish in this bunch of patch-robed monks

daily, the call of the beaten gavel comes; countless images  —  everything turns, like the sound of rumbling wheels

it can also be said, that the place to where the merit returns, is realizing grace, and repaying this profound grace with this; everyone wins some porridge to slurp

bah !

my comments/replies

you have some experience

you tell them

they don’t

listen

you talk some more

and realise

they cannot listen

everything turns

and the sound of rumbling wheels

can be taken for necessity

and are necessary

ed.  what i get with rujing is he is very sceptical about the monks so anything he says in relation to them is ambiguous

you have some experience

you tell them

they don’t

listen

you talk some more

and realise

they cannot listen

when philosophy goes into the way the world should work, rather than the way it works, it runs into trouble, in effect it becomes a form of politics which is why they don’t mix well or if they do mix, its a disaster of which there are plenty of examples going back to the farce of plato’s involvement with the sicilian tyrants

cy twombly

emergent complexity

its not trivial

but its trivial

an art critics dream

worthless without them

the problem with fame is a lot of people know about you, but you don’t know about them

statistically some are not going to like you and a very small percentage of those may be quite prepared to harm you if they can

publicity is a business with its downsides and if you look you can see its quite manufactured, those who don’t want to be known are generally not known

to be well known is not a default condition

“  Our results  support previous findings suggesting that vitamin D-deficient individuals have accelerated brain aging

In addition, associations between vitamin D levels and total brain/ gray matter volumes suggest neuroprotective effects of vitamin D on the brain ”

the mediocre in the arts

they won’t go

where they need to go

the pretentious

wear

the

same

pantaloons

yuja wang  playing  mendelssohn’s piano concerto no. 1 in G minor, op. 25

sanity

insanity

everything fades

or

one

turns

into

another

tiatong rujing’s talk on the anniversary of emperor huizong’s death  translated  by surupamaerl2

the soughing and rustle of the wind, the rain, steady, continuous

the wise man has never escaped the passage of suffering in nirvana

coming out to expound the peace and quiet of wondrous sound  —

if you use your ears to listen, in the end, it will be hard to meet

the first statement; before the intention to pierce past and present

my reply/reworking

tranquillity and quiet

doesn’t reside anywhere

hard to meet

the future informs the past

what’s interesting  about this  is without a video recording is its not worthwhile, all that effort and its gone for ever 35 seconds later

but with a digital video recording it can last as long as human civilization survives

a lot of music is in this category too, its mind blowing to think how without recording a good musical performance was consistently lost forever and this was the normal state of affairs

a poem by Mary Oliver

In the deep  fall

don’t you imagine the leaves think how

comfortable it will be to touch

the earth instead of the

nothingness of air and the endless

freshets of wind ?

my  reply

fall

a road

not so deep

colours surprise

and impose

perspective

dark

compared to half light

is not so beautiful

compared to full light

is more beautiful

taylor swift’s  snow on the beach  distressingly good, lyrics and music at their best are unbeatable, sappho’s territory i guess, plain writing can’t compete

its quite a bit better than her usual, obviously the collaboration with lana del ray worked

ed. sappho was a "pop" star with an unusual poetic density of lyrics matched to lyre music

“ gender is written into every cell genetically, how can it be performative ? ”

i posted this as a reply on a youtube channel and constantly i have people replying to my statement over the last seven months contending with that

seemed innocuous to me but there’s people who really believe that gender is socially  (ie  learned)  and not biologically determined

zen is full of absolute mice i can tell you

never seen such a bunch of big talkers and runaways when accosted

“ I love truth.  I sought truth.  I found truth ”

lol, well i hate truth

ed.  the "quotee" was high/manic on dextromethorphan from cough syrup, obviously powerful stuff !

religion to some degree is repackaged philosophy, with any sort of a philosophical background i would expect scepticism about what goes on there

“ why is meditation important ?

I’m currently practicing with mu, and do sit daily ”

that you can ask the question i think shows you are on the wrong track !

this nonsense about mu is obstructing what "sitting" should do which is make you acquainted with yourself

its just actually some "do nothing time" and you see the way the brain works and it never changes

emily

an exploration

more life than death

no mariner bound

to tell his tale

she kept to herself

her tale

the problem of the ukrainian war is the same problem since WW1, you selectively kill your best people, alcoholics and drug addicts have more sense than to enlist or be conscripted

war for most of human history was quite different, death was much more uniform across the entire population and young men could get fortunes to settle down with

the selective killing of modern war was the driver for the various euthanasia of "defectives" movements after world war 1

one of the weird things as you get older and i am talking post-60 is the way people your age start to fall away through health problems and losing their grip on things mentally which is what i think has happened in russia, putin doesn’t have dementia but there is some significant cognitive impairment, what he has already worked out he still has some competence at but with something new like invading a country he is completely at sea while retaining his ability to keep "social control", a bad combination for everybody as it turns out

china appears to be on the same road

compassion, sanctity

the big drums thunder

however,

they are not our size

read

but don’t write

you are only doing half

both are necessary

if you look at what we say

you can open it in different ways

we rebel against this

of course

ourselves

small burning candles

chasing down

to

the

end

the game of being

male and female

what is behind it ?

categories that inhere

life’s function overwhelms

independence is twisted to non-existence

a story

goes one way

or another

better to vacate the ground ?

an interesting   anecdote  recounted by phoebe waller-bridge

interiors

decorated

bare

fantastical

the absorption of labour of the ages

yet roofless

when we die

if god had created the universe, he would have been so overwhelmed by the complexity nothing would have ever happened

be warned, its a deceiving world that leaves a lot of wreckage from missteps

buddhism in the west is a hybrid that never existed in the east where it was primarily monastic

it doesn’t make sense outside of monasticism within a culture that it is intertwined with

what is godlike ?

a perception

of our roiling

inadequacy

out there

the mass

conformity

suffocating

all who fall under its power

rujing at jingci   :   a poem upon returning from out in the countryside translated by  surupamaerl2

holding up the fish-hook, returning with bright, multifaceted scales  —

the full sky saturates the earth in laughter; joyful, exhilarating  —

although this is but merely, the usual way of things

my experience has been storms and trials; thoroughly, repeatedly

that’s a good translation, really the essence of zen

he caught the fish hook

and the fish hook caught him

there is really nothing else

to explain

if you want to make notes just before falling asleep or on waking up in the night don’t use a cell phone, the white/blue light is too "waking" and can make it difficult to get back to sleep

a red led headlamp with pencil and paper works for me, red looks like dark to the circadian rhythm

there’s a whole class of ideas that will only come to you on the verge of falling asleep

more strange and beautiful than from waking hours

angels, being of likeness to god

are evidence for god

for god cannot be seen

“ just avoid picking and choosing ”

so simple

yet so ignored

when you look at a film like alita, there is a huge disconnect between a supposed futuristic scfi society and no projectile weaponry, all weapon use is anchored to bodies

so i had a question about this, why ?

well the answer is it is a plot device to ensure lots of conversational interaction between the protagonists and spectacular   interpersonal violence

weapons fired from a distance which is how real world conflict works are too thin in interest to capture the viewers attention, russians being killed by drone dropped grenades is  strangely flat

there are a number of genres this applies to, for example westerns with their emphasis on fist fights and duels

archaeology

artefacts

imprints in time

of what is mostly lost

the most "classic"  images  of don quixote are by gustave doré, but we don’t recognise them as such

this one  i really like

the writings of the  brontë sisters

with an underlying theme of the melancholy of senseless early death

the family’s fate

the light only shone

for a short while

the only safe help to offer

is to people who reject it

“ To be clear, your advice to "go read some Bukowski" is not a helpful response ”

unless of course you read some bukowski !

he has a very "jaundiced" view of humanity, here's a good  reading  of one of his poems i like

any notion of "helping others" is deluded and that’s actually a "zen truth" if you scratch below the surface

something not understood about e. m. escher is he was the inheritor of a lost world and the skillsets of the mosque artisans of various medieval arab/islamic empires

he literally brought the designs from then into the twentieth century

a couple i know of adopted a child and gave him a very good upbringing and as a young man he murdered a woman in a park

the brain has its own logic sometimes and won’t swerve from the course it wants

often it doesn’t take much drug use to create a damaged personality, especially in adolescents

my opinion about lasik is interfering with such a nerve dense organ as the cornea is always problematic, it is, after all, the eye’s "other lens"

your view of the world and people is too soft, you strike me as "deluded"

fakes

called

fakes

complain

of being

called

fakes

their

indignation

shows how little they understand themselves

the hardness of getting old

all the change that is needed

happens slowly

too slowly

a denial of the validity of criticism

unhealthy as

the "dream of red mansions" is one of the great chinese classics, though not overtly about ch’an, its there in the background, the social class it is about had some of their daughters go into convents which is really all the ch’an that was at this late stage of the game

he who sells others

recognizes

he has no value himself

caught in the world

seeing beyond the world

some wisdom in what we are doing

some remnant

of what is beyond

my downvoters ?

inarticulate as per the usual glorification of a low reading age

reading they stumble

writing they tumble

inarticulate idiots

the product

of today’s education

ed.  a huge number of people on message boards don’t get that writing and reading skill is important and are traumatised when they realise that writing can carry them further than their blinkered minds want to go

“ prayers  .   .   .

it’s all i got

but still given generously ”

giving nothing

as she says "generously"

her worth

is ?

let’s pretend there’s substance

where there is

vacuity

a taintong rujing quote

Open your eyes and tip over the sky in a jar  —

he’s basically describing the enlightenment experience

"the sky tips like a jar flooding the inner vision"

that meshes quite well with the idea  (ed. chinese)  of fairy folk tales  (other worlds)  being kept in a jar in the sky which in terms of philosophy is nativistic/ innatism/ a priori and also very recently, the brain as a   quantum computer

“ Because these brain functions were also correlated to short-term memory performance and conscious awareness, it is likely that those quantum processes are an important part of our cognitive and conscious brain functions ”

tiantong is about the only zen teacher to talk authentically about enlightenment experiences, some like joshu you can infer he has had by his approach, but a lot of the others like dai hui and huang po are ignorant and are the usual unenlightened "teachers"

the idea that the brain uses quantum computing is as old as philosophy and known as innatism, its more modern form is nativism

the tie up with quantum computing is the mechanism of picking from an array of pre-existent answers

paradoxically some of the modern teaching philosophy is based on "tabula rasa" and actually some academic language ideas as well

the whole "performative gender" thing is based on tabula rasa, there is something to tabular rasa but practically nativism is where its at, DNA itself is nativistic

one rather amusing side effect of the russian mobilization and war is it makes it hard to argue that gender is social performance rather than biological

a poem by basho followed by my reply

sitting quietly, doing nothing

spring comes

and the grass grows by itself

quiet sitting is a dream

the voicebox of the brain

resounds

“ "How are you" is one of the most pointless questions ”

not at all, its designed to search out or indicate the state of the person you are talking to

e.g.  how hostile or friendly they will be to you

words asleep

well i wake them

but they slip back

unready yet

to face the world

ed.  below is my reply to some schizophrenic nonsense posted on my subreddit, my writings are like a magnet to the mad who read me then throw back my writings at me all garbled

its not a poem, its voynich

just a bunch of unworked ideas lacking any sort of "philosophical" rigour and uninformed by your own experience

vacuity in mud

and mud in vacuity

can’t disguise itself

sepehr  writes

Recently, I had an interesting dream

A woman sang about seeing a god near a tree, so I decided to take a look

There was that experience of timelessness again, which can be likened to a circumference that appears wavy and a center that is indivisible, but this time I screamed internally as my sense of self dissolved into the center

A blue and luminescent angelic being then appeared near the center, whose form was not entirely discernible

It was like an angel or the soul of the tree, perhaps the Amesha Spenta Ameretat

When I saw its form, I knew the tree possessed a soul

my  reply

"blue and luminescent angelic being"

blue is not a propitious colour in that context

red is

your dreams are "literary quality", unusually visionary by any standards, rather "blake-like"

a medieval  soap opera  carved on an ivory casket

how bronze age scandinavians  explained  the sun’s cycle

zen is full of "manufactured" enlightenment experiences including just about all supposed zen masters.  the whole thing is so fake its ridiculous

a genuine enlightenment experience will put you immediately at odds with the zen "establishment" so is traumatic in that sense, when you have had it, you know what it is  —  accept no substitutes and you will get nothing but confused idiocy from those who have never had it

they are a sort of answer, but can have subtle aspects that take decades to pick up on, in my own case its a movement away from zen’s ,  what is effectively a form of monotheism into a more loose aggregation "of truths", there’s really nothing, or no agency behind these truths, that’s very hard for us humans to get, yet its not quite a flat surface so to speak

ceasing to do something

not because you make a choice to desist

but because you have better things to do

is the way to go

the burden of deconstruction what is continually constructing

itself

mad in its mania

don’t be defeated

before you start

don’t tell people what they might understand

they invariably resent it

don’t tell people what they can understand

they invariably resent it

don’t tell people what they understand

they invariably resent it

if you ever come to the attention of national or international media

remember

it will all be edited to your disadvantage

by

the

treacherous

swine

religion

the crazy world of treating fairy tales as real

that’s only half pejorative

a riveting  account  by a recently mobilized russian soldier from sakhalin of how he was put on the front line without adequate training and is now wounded

what amazes me is how its not perceived as civil war which is what it really is, similar culture and races focused on nothing but killing each other

the only beneficiary is us in the pacific being forewarned against china

basically one man is bringing two countries to ruin, how can he stay in power ?

there must be others who think as mistakenly as him

buddhism is noticeably less christian and more greek than zen/ch'an, which is what what you would expect from the history of their development which most people are unfamiliar with

you can find

what is there to find

but you can’t find

what is not there to find

unsettling

the eye of insight opening

changing the reality of what appears

a moving field of uncertainty

is what it is

the chinese can be as crazy or crazier than anyone else if you look at their current political system and history

if you are suffering from "ennui", take an interest in quality literature, philosophy and art, there’s an awful lot on youtube

the normative world is crucifyingly dull

western translations of buddhist and zen religious works are very "monotheistic" in tone, the non-monotheistic view is too strange for westerners

"the other shore" is an interesting idea  (ed. buddhism)  because it implies an alternate or alternate realities which imo is the core of zen with its emphasis on enlightenment stepping into those realities

you can read bodhidharma’s "6 paramitas" as a prescription for celibate practice and to be sure i don’t think zen or buddhism has much meaning outside celibacy, though of course "alternate realities" abound outside celibacy, its just the attention to see them is difficult to come by outside celibacy

strung between

is and is not

faraway places

strange spaces

anything can be

because its not

ed.  "faraway places" seemed to be a line from a song i remembered and on a search ,  lo and behold

causation

different spaces of being

how do they connect ?

i don’t know

a way of looking at causation is it is an effect of changes above a level of complexity that can be reversed

so its intimately linked with time

we all have opinions

why is that we are surprised others have theirs

as different as we are from them

the mishy mashy of what we are

beliefs, incorrect ideas, correct ideas

a ragtag of motivations

ideals

spinning fields colliding

generating sparks

we go forward going backward

and backward going forward

life’s trajectory can hardly be certain

can it ?

another reworking of a taintong rujing quote, the context is a lecture by him to monks

handling the gourd

they think its impenetrability has no opening

arrogant and ignorant

they want to stay that way

flowers in spring

the petals light up your life

this is disbelieved

ed.  a gourd has a number of significances in japanese and chinese literature and art that a search will reveal

its an unusual thing to be born sane in an insane world

the constant trauma of the dissonance

why it is like this i do not know

tattoo inks are unregulated and contain nano-particles, carcinogens and toxins

heavily tattooed people always have mental and physical health issues, its a form of self injury

also i count the usually extraordinarily bad art as toxic

why be a billboard for an idiot forever ?

demons and spirits

phantasmagorical

but true

good writers blend imagination with their own experience

everything fits with neville, the problem with shakespeare is he would have to be writing from imagination, but sir henry neville is writing from his and his families life

the historical facts we know about shakespeare is he likely illiterate and an underworld "heavy"

his connection with sir henry neville beyond being a 2nd cousin is the globe theater where a lot of different elizabethan worlds intersected

the true author being sir henry neville is being increasingly accepted amongst the younger generation of university scholars

why the acceptance is delayed is there is a political dimension, shakespeare being middle class and sir henry neville being almost aristocracy

none of the other claimants match stylistically or thematically

unlike shakespeare his life in interesting and fun to research

that we can be mistaken

does not

necessarily imply

we are mistaken

those for whom a google search is a step too far

disgraceful !

in jail

he claims no jailer

as evidence

he quotes a story

that doesn’t

mean

anything

philosophy is really the development of theories of minds for autistics

how does the world actually work ?

find out and the confusion will lift

result defeats intention

when you live long

you know this

the young chase what they want

and get something else

it takes aging

to see the confusion

the criminal confesses

as well he might

when praised by the jailers

for his criminality

string theory generates vast numbers  (10 to the power of 500!)  of universes as solutions to its equations

steven weinburg  explaining  why the "anthropic principle" is valid

he is one of the great minds of physics, you can see the difference in the clarity and simplicity of the way he presents his ideas

all things can be

therefore there are the laws of physics

all things can’t be

therefore only some of the laws of physics can work

the problem megan markle and prince harry have, is neither are remarkable intellectually, they are too "normative" for public life basically

"nothing" has a context, that is a frame or tableau in which there is nothing in contradistinction to something or things

you can’t have nothing without something, you might better ask, why can’t you have "meaning" without antithesis so you start to end up with asking "what is meaning" and i think its some sort of coherence arising from an associative flux, without a certain level of coherence being reached it falls away into nothing, with more coherence it becomes something

you can play circular word games forever and i feel that the circular word game is the foundation of everything, there’s no base, just various fluxes that necessarily occur in absence

a common flaw in writing poetry is being too overtly conceptual, you want to let the words do the work of thinking for you

this would be more a male failing than female one, women tend to be bound by feelings which gives a certain intensity but lacks emergent thematics

the use of "why" as a direct response is a bit bald and antagonistic and doesn’t give an entry into a more informed discussion, though it has its place

gaining the opposite

you also gain what is not opposite

word spells

spilling

tumbling

dreaming

beyond

ourselves

w.b. yeats

for all his madness

ireland, maud gonne, fairies, séances

he had a lyric gift

unmatched

yet the madness

was tangled in

causes

seem right

and probably are

but eat

their adherents

alive

“ Huating used to have a duck that could speak   —

Now, in the state of Yue, there are no geese that can write ”

talking ducks

geese that write

how can these things be ?

find out if you are amongst them

was rujing complimentary or not ?

damien, there is an "intellectual stupidity" about you, selling  hackneyed tropes  and making good money from that, not stupid in that respect at least

transmigration of "real physical identity" into nfts won’t work any more than it did for the "heaven’s gate" cult, ideas can transfer into each other, but objects can’t

interesting video, entirely theatre

you can compare it with the  monotype  printing technique where the master is destroyed in the printing process, the print is necessarily unique

against this, ntf’s seem fakes, in part because, as in damien hirst’s case, the ntf is a degraded image of the original, whereas the destructive printing process of monotype generates the original

sarcasm is the last refuge of the already defeated, the cynicism of knowing you can’t win

seem to spend most of my time there

i’m old enough to have seen "vegetarianism" having gone through various phases, it used to be more intelligent rather than the obscenely high grain loading  (especially wheat)  now current

my observation in general about the vegetarian diet is this, it fries the brain because it lacks the nutritional profile of a  more balanced diet

if you have studied any history, you will know that war is the normal state of human affairs and that the historical "shakyamuni", a persian emperor was assassinated, betrayed by one of his wives as it happened

the buddha legend is a composite, "shakyamuni" is a persian emperor who is the only historical figure known by that name, so that’s where you get the name and royal background, other parts of the legend come from other places eg the tree shrines of nepal for that part of the legend

i replied to you because i have the same problem with pissing my time away on mental junk food like that stupid netflix series you watched, it has a huge cost of being more than a waste of time, rather its a very unproductive concentration of attention much better spent on what is essential

there is no "bottom", because the belief system you have as the "base" is illusory which is the same for any belief system

you are effectively writing a story about the netflix series, which you seemed at home in, that its a story is obvious, what is also "obvious" is the buddha legends are also stories, of no more weight than the netflix series

buddhism and zen are really "repackaged philosophy" which you would expect from their origins in the greco-bactrian empires, well, kingdoms

being ignorant as legal systems say, is no defense

“ our study  suggests that abnormal leg alignment, a risk factor for future injury and osteoarthritis, develops in early adolescence due to  high activity levels ”

philosophy

tin cans banging

i listen for an organ tone

i can listen for a long time

occasionally one catches a drift

that means something more

only to disappear

meditation, while offering benefit, also can create victims in my observation, too much vacuity that gets filled in with nonsense

more reworkings of tiantong rujing

at the end of a long road

others have fallen by the wayside

there is only you

-------------------

without work

you will make no progress

.

without study

you will make no progress

.

yet if you follow the road, without study or work, you will arrive

a gift of difficulty

for children

---------------------------

the talkers are poisonous

wasting your time with their malevolence

on the boundaries of being

is an answer

he cuts people’s heads off

in his imagination

the sword slices through air

removing air

and is air

and he is

hot air

to 100 inconsistencies

he adds another hundred

and thinks

butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth

you are reacting confrontationally because i have disturbed your echo chamber is what it amounts to

how pathetic to be some sort of idiot posting/ talking nonsense and being unable to conduct any sort of dialogue about what they don’t understand, because in their own eyes they know everything already, so just get defensive

a low reading age is only admirable in some quarters, but they certainly exist

zero real life experience

dunning-kruger

breeds here

"the buddha"

god

infinity

bad dreams

to wake from

into

nothing

infinity will write upon you

if you let it

its heavy footsteps tread

forming the ground

its unmistakable shape will trip you

be careful of making an echo chamber, hubris eats even the able

i was looking at the haka performed in the australia versus black ferns rugby match at eden park and thinking that while men need a war dance, women don’t because they are always on a war dance

totalism

a prescription or counting

of infinity

that can never work

but is rarely seen through

i don’t think we know ourselves particularly well

why don’t we know ourselves ?

why do we never wonder about this ?

as if anyone understands what emmanuel levinas was writing

including himself

as if anyone understands what levinas was writing

including levinas

hypnagogic visual phenomena

waking is a strange state for the brain if you think about it

the precepts  (ed. buddhist)  are nonsense, lying has its place, but its often better just to not say anything and let the other/s make assumptions

surviving and making things more benign for yourself and others is a work in progress

you have some bad cognitive habits, you need to take an interest in philosophy and not zen to learn to straighten them out, zen just plays into fancifulness if you are not careful

there are plenty of good philosophy  youtubes

the king understands

formalism is a formality

and discards it

for his peers

likewise

the king

is joshu’s peer

there is

no

higher

honour

ed.  my comment on the incident in the record of joshu where joshu skips the formalities when the king visits, but doesn’t when a lower ranking dignitary does

surupamaerl2’s translation of tiantong rujing’s "presented to the monks"

shouts sound like thunderclaps, shaking the clear skies

a clear strike, and flying stars transform into living dragons  —

do not join a troupe of children such as this

a riot of blossoms flutter their sleeves, dancing on the spring breeze

贈僧

喝聲霹靂震晴空。 白棒飛星化活龍。 不入這般兒女隊。 亂花翻袖舞春風。

my  re-translation

the ambitious

shake the earth

don’t join them

its beside the point

"reality" is an idea about "reality"

the turtles in the stack

look

for a bottom

“ what is the golden fish ? ”

chasing an answer

the gullible flounder

(please forgive the pun)

ed.  the golden fish refers to case 33 of  "the book of serenity"

this poem  of Edward Estlin Cummings i liked

north korea with a very limited nuclear strike capability has kept china from invading

the gullible

perform for the gullible

its nothing great

i can assure you

that  infection  on the nose might be more significant than you think, there can be complex involvements between skin cancer development and infections

I find 40% hydrogen peroxide works well with skin infections/ pre cancers, you can get it in the form of spa pool sanitizers like king neptune

went through that way 25 years ago, must have had my eyes closed, didn’t see half of it

quadratic equations

the unsolved stories of our lives

that go on forever

after which we forever lurch

unsatisfied

layman pang

dumping all his money in the river

that is when

you know the story

is

total

bullshit

two wrongs make a right

how does it happen ?

two rights make a wrong !

its not generally known that stalin had a fair portion of his wife’s family  killed  after her suicide

he is still glorified in some quarters including putin’s russia, its just amazing, i suppose its no accident

this stuff is stranger than fiction

what are abstractions ?

why is there no answer to this ?

because any answer impinges upon abstractions

the way we order the world

ideas about ideas

yet some will kill for them

the booker prize shortlistee noviolet bulawayo  ("glory")  talks  about her childhood and learning how to tell stories

its like this

our enemy thinks he’s the good, i’m the bad, and you are umm   .   .   .   .

only the good and bad matter, but call me ugly, i don’t mind

the russo-ukrainian war is giving a superb example of how it works with an invading power that has nuclear weapons against a country that does not

basically the threat of using nuclear weapons keeps any allies of the country being invaded out and restricted to indirect help

taiwan needs its own nuclear weapons as matter of urgency, there’s no getting around it, and longer term so does australia

interestingly milton’s view of "god" is not as an ultimate cause, but a very powerful participant in reality, not ultimately powerful, that question is a bit on edge since satan rebelled and thought he was in with "a better than even chance"

i criticize "zen" and buddhism as monotheist, by which i mean they have a view of one entity behind everything

a lot of the more sophisticated writing is a refutation of that view, so the problem has always been understood

“ Why is Zen in scare quotes ? ”

because i think it is a bit of a construct as a religion, it appears to me it wasn’t very differentiated from buddhism in chinese  dynasty times

so the "scare quotes" identify a difference from buddhism in terms of buddhism being a more real and actual religion by itself

zen also has substantial daoist and christian influences

“ Christian is a surprising claim ”

yeah, that’s what i initially thought, but  nestorian christianity was going strong in china around the period zen was forming

it would be a dominant religion in china today if it hadn’t been so successful it was perceived as a threat by the state and suppressed

a lot of zen doctrine if you look is surprisingly christian-like and the reason it was so rapidly uptaken in the west to an extent buddhism wasn’t, there was no cognitive dissonance

interestingly, christianity was very much part of the boxer rebellion

its just like greek philosophy being a formative influence on buddhism, how could such a thing be ?  well when alexander the great’s empire collapsed, it split into various kingdoms and the one’s contiguous to india and central asia formed what is known as the greco-bactrian kingdoms which were ruled by greeks, there’s plenty of info on the web about this, the flowing robe buddha statues are in fact developed from greek ideas about statuary

real life zen is quite strongly enmeshed with other christian faiths in some cases, there’s a doctrinal fit that needs to be explained and historically you can see it in the muted "trinitarian", ie more strongly monotheistic flavour that nestorian christianity is

time and reality don’t work the way we think it does

appearances are deceptive

necessarily so

i think we have a rose-tinted picture of historical monastical life but the reality was different, theft, sexual scandals, pregnancy, local politics extending to open warfare, depleting the countryside of resources, illness and disease, freeloading monks, incompetent administration, convents being high class brothels etc

all the wasted avenues of my life

the problem is they are mine

the futility and emptiness

are mine

  the wikipedia entry  for francisco goya’s "los caprichos" has the full eighty prints, he had to withdraw them soon after they went on sale, the ones ridiculing priests, the church and the inquisition were going dangerously too far

a good youtube on goya’s  black art  though beware of the narration being too "interpretative"

zen is a "multivalent" word, you go to grasp it and it slips into another meaning

good luck finding some fixed definition !

my  reworkings  of three tiantong rujing quotes translated by surupamaerl2

ed.  i passed on no. 2 in the sequence, so its 1,3, and 4

released from oneself

it happens

the music of infinity

not distant

but close

Guanyin

is misunderstood

not seen at close quarters

or even the large

a savage beast

that needs taming

stealing from the conventional

the unconventional lasts

well beyond its use by date

the birds sing and flowers bloom

in the late autumn garden

"ordinary"

a trope

the "extraordinary"

unrecognized

by the unenlightened

stages of life

pass quickly

an observation

that increasingly grows on you

Louise Bourgeois

“ In order to liberate myself from the past, i have to reconstruct it, ponder about it, make a statue out of it and get rid of it through making sculpture, i’m able to forget it afterwards. I have paid my debt to the past and am liberated ”

my thinking  (such as it is)  is that you have a situation somewhat akin to plato’s forms that "stability" inclines to future stability and in fact the development of biology is simply a progression of stability

so when you add probability  (improbability in smolin’s terms)  then any universe that is stable enough to exist, it will necessarily develop life and biology

so i agree with  lee smolin , you don’t need a profusion of "almost universes" the continued existence of this one is enough and if you look at the time scales of biological development in relation to the development of the universe, that fits

“ evolution through time changed causality ”

“ natural selection will generate things that are true but improbable, that’s how we recognise its action ”

its funny how the main lesson of the cold war has been lost, that the russian high command doesn’t have complete control of launching, that lower levels of command or in the case of cuba, that fidel castro could hijack the command makes any escalation by russia very fraught, the politburo appreciated this because over the whole of the cuba crisis russia never went onto nuclear standby

it was so disturbing to russia that nikita khrushchev was eventually sacked because of it

what is unusual about putin is he is really the leader with the most power/control since stalin and i would say at this point he doesn’t seem in sound mind, maybe a degree of dementia, who knows

the russians got it all wrong from the start, they should have never permitted the separatists to rebel against ukraine in the donetsk and the real low hanging fruit was belarus which they could have annexed without complaint and from a strategic point of view would have greatly strenghtened their hand against the ukraine forcing a much better possible deal for them over the crimea

i think putin is if he is able to will drop a nuclear bomb on the ukraine, he’s pretty much a dead man if he doesn’t, the question is whether he will be able to stay in power long enough to do this and just russia going on nuclear standby means things get very scary

the nuclear drill he has ordered is the first step to that, can we look forward to more strontium-90 in the atmosphere ?

there is an irrationality to the russian foreign policy and war aims that is disturbing

my reply to some-one with mental health problems on r|zen

prior to your belief you are "enlightened" is a belief that its some sort of valid concept and imo "enlightenment" without a context the way you use it, is not valid

so we don’t have to argue whether or not you are "enlightened", but we can argue what is meant by it or if it is semantically valid at all

journalists

their hubric certainty

of the way things are

and the way they should be

some new corner of the universe you drive into

already occupied

"ghostly action at a distance" can work  backwards  in time

nabakov’s novel, "ada" is an alternative historical pathway and when you look at battles and wars and their usually very uncertain outcomes there's obviously many infinitudes of alternative pathways around but when you look at archaeology and factual history there is only one occurrence

however when that information is not there, there are any number of speculative/creative hypotheses

t.s. eliot at age 59 writing to emily hale to excuse himself from marrying her after his wife vivien died in a mental asylum

“ I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself  (which means not merely one moment, but a perpetual adaptation for the rest of life)  to any other person ”

its quite an interesting perspective, that constant tax on one’s being of adaption and attention, if you take its meaning relationships later in life should not be rushed into

dunning-kruger

shoes to hair

what can you do ?

faux poets

cobble words together

their coinage

is bankrupt

not content with being bound

they handcuff their hands to their feet

appearing and disappearing

our thoughts

where do they go ?

yet they return

from nowhere we can see

a reply to me was made by way of a poem with the lines

turning again/ as our thoughts do/ as on a wheel

my  reply

that’s "seeing" and theoretical/theological , i really take a much more "phenomenological" approach and don’t make unwarranted inferences

i think this is the basic problem, people don’t have enough meditative/contemplative experience and fill in the gaps with theology or theory and so never penetrate the true understanding actual phenomenology gives

my observation is that reddit posters are not on a normal distribution but tend much more to the extreme ends so caution is needed

when i was young

everybody was older than me

but i felt older than them

now i am old

and everybody is younger than me

i feel younger than them

steroids are a double edged sword, they inhibit the correct recovery of the eye’s corneal endothelial layer, i stopped taking the steroids the day after my cataract operation hoping to simulate a sort of DWEK and imo its worked

i had been taking 3000iu a day of vitamin D a day for years, so there was the steroidal effect of that

the scary part is that for a couple of weeks i had quite impaired vision through the eye  (i had one eye done at a time)  which i wouldn’t have had if i had been on the steroid, but when it cleared up the final result was very very good and actually my eyes are less dry as well, but this was never a severe condition with me

the above is not a recommendation or even saying that i have interpreted what i did correctly

slavs killing slavs, histories old old story

there’s nothing worse than people who disagree but pretend to agree, only all their actions speak disagreement

a fascinating development in new testament scholarship is that as you know, the authors of the gospels were always unknown, but now it appears likely they were concocted by well educated upper/ leisured class romans as what was essentially "fan fiction"

you can see how that might also fit zen buddhism, being as it was a religion/ interest of the administrative class

once you weed out the pseudo-biographical aspect you are stuck with zen being a lot of "repackaged" philosophical memes and tropes, a tar pit for the stupid

zen splits in a very uneven way into "logocentricsm" and meditative work, a way of looking at "shikantaza" is its an attempt to break away from the usual waste of time meditative practices into something genuine

"formal english study" in the usa is a disaster of "cretinism", the stupidity of those who go through it is unbelievable, narrow-minded, no creative spirit whatsoever etc

recursion inducts a measure of meaninglessness

interpretations are "unlimited", that is their "nature"

recursion is fundamental to zen because explanations of reality have to escape recursion

you can argue that in the zen records, the fundamental criticism the "master" makes of the monks is they don’t escape recursion, they just parrot overt semantic-pragmatic religious nonsense

"correct" and "incorrect" in terms of case 31 in the blue cliff record

jesus descended from the clouds

and got crucified for his pains

the post-mortem ascent

is far less certain

the voices of confusion

then you figure

voice itself

is wrong

being right can get you into as much trouble as being wrong

scripture is in a sense literature ie creative writing, you can make it anything you think fits, so you are looking for the most "illuminating" interpretation

a monk asked joshu   :    it is said "the true teaching has no meta", neither of us are here

joshu replied   :   "i beg to differ"

the monk was dumbfounded

to think the fools

parade the nonsense of others

when

their own nonsense

would be sufficient

“ What do you mean by "fool" ? ”

a person asking a question ,  the answer to which is incriminating of them

old men on carousel horses

they go up and down

and the carousel

goes around and around

as familiar as we are to ourselves

others remain a mystery

be cautious with approval

surprises abound

edvard munch

a northern emptiness

of light

so much

uninteresting

the interesting

is rare

art versus writing

logocentrism versus the visual image

try as i might

i can’t compare them

any basis

eludes me

i looked up and saw the pleiades

they were doing a shuffle dance

w - hat ? ?

a stitch too far

binding tightly

what doesn’t belong

ed.  i was thinking a problem the philosophical and theological systems of thought have is they overextend themselves, for some reason their various authors assume they have to be able to explain everything but the very completeness of an explanation is its own demise through an increasing level of recursive feedback

how weird modern communications have made the world, i’m watching  a livestream  of putin’s "speech" with simultaneous translation by a draft evader who fled to georgia

putin is seriously deranged, a worry since russia is a nuclear power, what this lecture by putin is about is he is saying in effect that russia will use nuclear weapons in the last resort to ensure its control of the occupied ukrainian territories

everything is super accelerated, what would take months or years now transpires in days or weeks

when you quote something and fail to credit the translator you are committing the crime of dishonesty since you are trying to make it appear that the quote is what the quotee originally said whereas it just the translator’s opinion

of course its not always known who the quotee is but most quotes should be assigned a translator credit as a courtesy to both the reader and translator

failing to credit the translators is so dishonest, with google you can do some quite easily and a bit of work will open to you why this is so

you need to do some translation yourself to understand the problem

turning in circles

each

time

the

same

waypoint is passed

he

salutes

he reads what he wants

and filters out what he doesn’t want

which

is

most

of

it

full and empty

the witless

prattle on

god and godless

they talk forever

the language changes

but the nonsense doesn’t

the witless

is offended

by wit

he has some insufficiency

he never had

the wit to imagine

he ate the pizza under a crescent moon

they were both round once

equanimity

bottoms out

in the face of adversity

why should i explain anything to you ?

the whole point of my assessment of you responding to me in bad faith is any help i give you will be used against me

religions

endless sinks

of intellectual

need

the modern disease

satan is angsted

over being satan

who

apparently

has never read

milton

the everyday use of english, that is communication so many people can understand each other is so important in talking and writing, i equate any movement away from that a shift into mental illness

as i said earlier you write in "bad faith", resort to naïve sophistical tricks and maybe are not even conscious of it

"zen masters" are a fictional literary construct

enlightenment requires a context, it doesn’t exist as a standalone abstraction, ie one is enlightened about something, to say "one is enlightened" is meaningless

“ It is clear that the Zen Masters were "enlightened" ”

so you have taken an ontological position with axioms, but the axioms break down on examination and in fact i think the more interesting question is whether there are ever any axioms prior to an ontology that don’t break down on examination

fortunately there is a good example of the problem in the "proof of the existence of god" and interestingly you can get a reasonably coherent proof, but you still have trouble with the axioms, like you have god existing, but this is conditional on there also being not god, but that being the case, how can god be limited by his own boundaries ?

joshu i thinks shines in this respect, he is constantly refuting the axioms of what is said to him, often quite subtly and dogen i think understands the problem, his sort of flowing or tidal affirmation and refutation, this establishing and deconstruction of axioms

i don’t know why people find it so hard to get this, their theological castle building with the main activity being to defend it whereas building castles necessarily enforces their destruction

so i would take the position there are better and worse axioms but there’s no resolution or finality on their ability to hold up to examination

the whole game on r|zen is making axioms and developing some decrepit ontology from them, but the axioms are not coherent and lack quality

the  battle of hastings  was quite "touch and go" but the english army was significantly less professional  (and not really under adequate control)  than the normans, what worked against the norse melee style wouldn’t work against disciplined knights in heavy armour on horses

basically harold godwinson made several strategic mistakes, not letting his army have more time to recover from their earlier pitched battle, not enough training of new troops and not gathering more troops, all of which he had the time and home base advantage for and had he done would have likely won

i think it was a transition from the rough and tumble of viking style warfare to a more professional army not seen since roman times

putin’s billion dollar "palace" is what the english call a "folly", interestingly when a top ranking general built one after world war two, stalin made him convert it into an orphanage

cathedral ceilings

ornate

modified cones

speaking the labour that went into them

yet

disconnected

from the sky

some of the most unpleasant people i have met are ex-alcoholics

the benign mist of feeling they had has lifted to reveal the damage

when the writing dries up

i’m out

henry the viii had an alternative career as a  pop song writer

the claim for unlimited

is

limited

the endless

nonsense spun

without meaning

claiming

meaning

intellects scraping the barrel

of no barrel

come up with the slime

of their wholly inadequate

minds

“ I don’t think so ”

"i think so"

two sides to an ambiguity

it falls one way

then another

you reach for either

and it disappears

"bad faith" is not simply my issue with your behaviour, but your issue with yourself, its more deep seated than anything i can attempt in the nature of a repair

that’s the nature of bad faith, to claim "good faith" despite the evidence to the contrary

most of the translations of nagarjuna are really bad, they add so much stuff its ridiculous, his "sparseness" and recursion is obviously "unpalatable"

thus far you have continued to evade my salient points , so i have to conclude you are replying in bad faith so i am ceasing to reply

zen is looking more and more to me like repackaged philosophy, its not actually that difficult to pick

i have been a bit negative on hegel taking schopenhauer’s lead on him, but he has his moments

a lot of philosophy is deliberately obscure and obfuscated

not saying all, one of the reasons nietzsche is so popular is he doesn’t go down this path

“ If you call a guitar a "burger," and ask me to get you a burger, I won't be able to get you a guitar.  But if I spend a couple hours a day with you, and you keep talking about playing your burger, and how Kirk Hammett is such a great burger player, eventually it will dawn on me to grab the guitar when you ask for "burger" ”

"sick" is a good example of a word with a changed meaning, when i was younger, it never meant anything except illness

the trouble with "burger" is that is a special idiosyncratic meaning, you have to be restricted to common public understandings

its a very common feature of mental illness when definitions get moved away from what the general public acceptance is and actually a lot of philosophy suffers from that flaw

“ You can get it all from half a sentence ”

get what ?

how intellectually lazy you are ?

the glorification of a low reading age ?

its a cheap rhetorical trick, to strip a pronoun of context and pretend it means something

the younger generations are big on this sort of intellectual dishonesty i notice

  colourized film  of the 1902 great yorkshire show at leeds

notice the women’s fashion with trailing skirts so the ankles are well covered and there’s really no old people there

and the hats

also mono-racial

some of the younger men there would be killed in world war one

that’s a literal translation  (ed. of some medieval chinese that makes no sense at all)  which shows you how much more "comprehensible" translations are in fact the translator’s opinion

all this nonsense of quotes and the stupid claiming "so and so said" when really its just a translator’s opinion

i’m getting on a bit and even in my lifetime i have seen the meanings of words shift or change, same word, different meaning, if you look at medieval china with the time spans since and geographical and cultural differences the philology must be very difficult to establish, especially for poetry which is so dependent on an in depth facility with any particular language and dialect

camille monet

i had no idea who this woman in his paintings was, she died unfortunately young, but that’s how it was in those days

without some "contemplative/meditative" work to give those involved in whatever religion some introspective skill, they are just wasting their time

a question materialises an answer

both are lost

but the gate remains

shut

a concatenation of fictions

if the first wasn’t

the latter can’t be

“ Natural immunity worked just fine for me  —  never got vaxxed, wore a mask or took any precautions, and never got covid.  And there are tens of millions of people like me, so you are talking nonsense ”

i think there’s a lot of genetic variation in the effective immune response to covid, your "tens of millions" doesn't cover the billions affected, plenty of people have died or got "long covid"

i was careful to get a minimum of six months between my two shots which is what the research suggests is most effective and i was only sick for a day when i caught it

can i suggest you brush up on your "social skills", your reply was unnecessarily aggressive and self-righteous, why put people’s backs-up over matters that can be "dialogued"

theological exegesis

pompous waffle

about nothing

the point of aporia of all religions is the same

that what must be necessarily universal is denied in favour of particulars arbitrarily assigned as "true"

“ I find it really hard to "get" zen.  Its really confusing to me.  Could someone explain the philosophy to me ? ”

its interesting you use the word "philosophy", my view is increasingly that zen is just a bunch of "repackaged" philosophical tropes and memes like "solipsism", phenomenology and logocentrism

when you poke it there’s nothing there like christianity and surprisingly, zen is a form of modified christianity, monotheist basically which is a philosophical trope

interestingly buddhism is noticeably less monotheist than zen

so the problem is to explain why zen is in fact so christian

well as it turns out nestorian christianity was growing strongly in china during zen’s formative years, it wasn’t just buddhism that came along the silk road, but nestorian christianity as well and actually bodidharma  (the blue eyed barbarian)  is the description of a man from christian persia

there are heaps of other parallels between zen and christianity and this similarity is why zen has been picked up more readily by western culture and the churches than buddhism which is really a more alien animal

zen has parentage as a religion and other historical sources is what it all boils down to

i hardly ever read fiction now, it only rarely "grabs" me,   the hunter gracchus  by franz kafka grabs me, highly imaginative to a point

went to a funeral

might as well have been my own

too many people

the eulogies tedious and long

the only bright point

i sneaked out early

to beat the rush out of the car park

the hearse doing a lap of honour

around the football ground

the strangeness

of the body in the box

not seeming to have occurred

to any mourner

what’s totally absurd about putin and the russians is they could have annexed belarus and nobody would have complained and this would have given them a better geopolitical footprint in europe than annexing the ukraine

the rot started for russia in its failure to hand the donbas back to the ukraine because the russian population in the area also kept the ukraine more friendly to moscow and some sort of compromise was possible over the crimea

instead you just had this warzone nightmare festering on the mutual boundaries

putin is the usual dictator with extreme social control utterly at sea on long term geopolitical strategy

beyond logocentrism

the cut of the winter sword

and being beaten by the swirling melee

opens

into a pearl’s lustre

gardens and the sea

illuminate

in their own way

words

the logocentric

trip over them

putin is a godsend to australasia, telling them what they are up against with china

in the final analysis its all about your ability to deliver nuclear warheads

unless putin is removed from power which seems unlikely in the short and even medium term it seems certain that at least one or two tactical nuclear warheads will be dropped

against that, the russians are very wary of any stepping up of the nuclear threat, in part because their systems are so unreliable, just going on nuclear launch standby runs the risk of accidental launching, this was one of the reasons stalin was executed by beria and khrushchev eventually fired, they got too close

however launching a tactical weapon doesn’t engage the same risk

a "tactical" nuclear warhead is about two thirds the size of hiroshima

imo the fundamental lesson of the cuba crisis was that the political leadership can lose control of the launching, that escalation can run away into disaster

the problem i have with philosophy is that understanding what is said is so dependent on learning what really is a new language, the complexities of the nuances and redefinitions of the way any particular philosopher uses his mother tongue

this is almost schizophrenic because the philosopher redefines the use of a language away from how it is normally used, and actually its necessary it does this since normal language outside poetry won't manage the semantic burden imposed on it

i think there’s this battle between the assumption of an underlying, consistent "philosophical theory of everything" and that every "philosopher" produces something unique and a lot less than 100% relatable to other philosophers, derrida would a good example of this

does the brain think in language, or is there something before language ?

or does language have a deep structure that the specific elements of grammar, syntax, phonemes etc are only the very latter stages of ?

you could argue that philosophy is just ideas presented in an obtuse way, idiosyncracy rather than the broad road of common usage

those that won’t be told

won’t be told

one thing i had never thought about being the eldest child

you are nearer your parents age than your siblings

to some extent you were brought up by different people

my brain

burnt out

by 12pm

damn the internet

meanings

one or many

in a poem

i am not concerned

it should read

as

a whole

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

poverty of mind

shows

just words

kludged together

no life

yeah, john of the cross had a very interesting life, reading about and the works of these "superior" people lifts you out of the problem of having your reality defined by one’s everyday acquaintances and their conventional stupidity, normally an insurmountable brick wall in terms of limited views of life

as matter of interest, i came across this really good poem by sappho  (translated by  mary barnard ) ,  simple and beautiful and written about  2592  years ago

tonight i’ve watched

the moon and then the pleiades

go down

the night is now

half-gone; youth

goes; i am

in bed alone

she was the mega  rock star  of her day as it happens and her family was on the losing side of a power struggle in lesbos , so she got exiled and went to sicily where she found a statue erected to her so i guess she had gone to the right place

one of her brothers married a famous egyptian prostitute which she was not happy about

we only know a few fragments of her life and poetry and none of the music, one of the great literary losses

best  shuffle  yet

a total  waste of time ,  well not quite, it can build social skills but so much accumulated mental junk to be unlearnt

really when you look at it, its an exercise in brainwashing

searching for meaning

they baulk

when they come to the land of no-meaning

where meaning lies

joshu asked nansen, “what is the spiritual path ?”

“that’s a load of rubbish” nansen replied

“that’s being honest” joshu replied

that’s the spiritual path replied nansen

a medieval chinese proverb followed by my comment

“ a wise host does not admit either the goddess of fortune or the girl of darkness ”

great wealth and great poverty

are both to be avoided

one seems obvious and one not

something to think about

poverty may not be what it seems

so neither is wealth

i don’t know who these people think they are fooling, but of course its themselves