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

huh, i knew  clem  well having stayed at her  hermitage  in the hokianga for a while (along with a greek orthodox monk, marcus)

a remarkable woman and missed, a uniquely generous spirit

finalists  for the young archie painting competition 2025

why regurgitate the usual nonsense ?

why not do some in depth research rather than concatenate miles of "empty" assumptions ?

“ In my reading of Bankei, he basically says  .   .   . ” 

in your projection of your reading of a translation of a transcription of who knows what provenance

i gather this is  a lament  about what women have to suffer in war, the recording was made before the ukraine "special operation", i doubt if it would have been allowed after it started

i have combined two translations so they read easier, as per below

i loved sokol  —  handsome, tall...  beautiful, like a falcon in flight

i loved him with all my soul, but he was taken by the army

what a life soldiers have, just hold on to your coat and rifle, your boots will hurt, you will groan

before we were happy, but now, grief begins

to the enlistment office my darling is called

oh, my beloved, how could they do this, and where will you be sent, so young and naïve ?

i didn’t think pine needles grew on the fir trees

i didn’t think that they would give my dear a rifle

i’m walking in the garden, the current bushes need picking

oh that my dear one has gone to defend the motherland

oh, war, war, what has it done ? 

it took my dear one to the front, that fatal hell

oh, war, war, what has it done ?

taken his life and left me grieving alone

girls ,  pray the war ends or you will have no husbands

i have the strangeness of only knowing he is dead

not knowing how and where he is buried

he became sundered from me

there’s 8 billion people and there’s not one you can say is "enlightened"

its just a notion like holy, you can say mother teresa is holy, but you scratch the surface and it turns out she's not holy

real people are a mixed bag and the perspective on them can shift radically in unanticipated ways

some perfect being who doesn’t make mistakes and is able to give celestial guidance so to speak is only found in fiction

you will go through life being wrong i am afraid, endlessly trying to enforce your viewpoint without understanding the meaning of the terms you use

double rainbow

just a sign

the world is not as we think it is

you are storytelling to yourself, creating heroes and villains, but life doesn’t work that way

why does the effective study of history and philosophy have no morality or underlying belief systems ?

its because you can’t make sense of their subject matter with these constraints

the abstract ideas of these fields are driven by the factual reality of what happens, not ideas about how things should be

since politics is about how things should be, then, in this you have an explanation as to the blindness of political decisions

both hakuin and bankei were in effect the progeny of ch'an lineages, hakuin of  xutang zhiyu  and bankei, silent illumination and interestingly the pair were artistic

Hakuin’s Naikan & Zen Sickness

that’s an interesting pair, as far as i can see "naikan" would correspond today to what we call introspection or contemplation say compared to a very busy, externalised lifestyle

zen sickness is literal, interestingly recent science is showing that "sitting" in itself is a health hazard and some people become mentally disturbed by meditation

i like hakuin, he’s a realist and humourist, he does see the fun side of things, and of course there is his art

mondo

question and answer

but question the questions

and answer the answer

and it doesn’t go well

i think the future lies with  thorium  liquid metal cooled nuclear reactors because if blown up by a missile or bomb, they won’t melt down and have a comparatively limited distribution of radioactive material

this is not the case for conventional reactors and in fact they represent such a hazard to military or terrorist targeting that i feel they should be phased out and certainly, no new ones built

diana ankudinova, magnificent  voice and range

there’s a touch of "throat singing" in her voice, she was born near vladisvoslok, i wonder if there’s a mongol/ nomad musical influence ?

she had speech problems as a child and i think her singing ability is a paradoxial development from that

she was found abandoned at a bus stop in winter with a broken collarbone at age 3

this song by "moondog" is about a man who falls to his death to be besides  the edelweiss flower  he has fallen in love with

i think "academic philosophy" has destroyed what used to be regarded as philosophy, ie aphorisms about life and we only see it with people like  scott adams  (unfortunately now diagnosed with a fatal cancer)  and oddly  carrie fisher ,  total outliers in terms of university philosophy

post tsarist russia is hard to make sense of with its brutal and insane destruction of its own population, but elivra barry  gives insight here

worryingly i think we in western cultures are seeing a big increase in the sort of empowerment of organised crime  (in part from asian, eastern european and middle eastern cultures where such attitudes are embedded)  that elivera talks about

the iliad coming  from the hittites  and other anatolian and near eastern cultures makes a lot more sense than the notion of "homer" as its author

our innermost thoughts

written large

on our outermost being

why

does

the

banality

surprise

us ?

that which crosses boundaries

equi-presence everywhere

trauma is hidden

illusion smothers

and equanimity prevails

infatuation

those blinkers

blinders of the eyes

and sense

an artefact

of mechanisms

ensuring

the survival

of

the

species

a true polygot ,  but, i think it messes the brain

modern  chinese dance  is its own niche between high and low brow, perhpas a little sophisticated for the western mass market, which is a pity

the ability and flexibility  of these dancers can only come through a state system of early selection and training imo

we are

not

in a labyrinth, maze, mirror or dream

because

its that

these things

are within

us

hybrid technology, while it makes sense for trains  (diesel-electric)  doesn’t make sense for cars, the whole power to weight to scale ratio is different and there is insufficient gain to justify the nightmare-ish increase in complexity and its very significant associated costs

i think battery technology has to jump three or four generations into the future to make hybrids viable

better to write

three words that make sense

than pages that don’t

suicide

those who want to die

not so surprising

an inversion of

wanting to live

it

happens

loss

that going backward

in life and thought

if we think we can live forever

we see our dying

day by day

some interesting  quotes  from scott adams, the creator of the famous comic strip "dilbert"

this used to be called "wisdom literature" or aphorisms, its not produced by academic establishments for sure

women donating blood should get their ferritin checked annually imo, Hb is not a reliable estimate of body iron levels, you don’t want to be at the lower end of the range

the obvious constituency for blood donation is men, but that was never the ratio i saw when donating blood, they need to target that group, especially young men more

fresh liver is the best source of iron and other haematological factors, maybe the spleen as well

NAC is one of the more problematic supplements, it mobilises heavy metals in bad way, ie its a semi-chelator

by "bad" i mean it can lift heavy metals and then drop them again doing more damage

unfortunately if you lift something dangerous like mercury and move it around you just cause more injury

i think taurine is the safest "sulphur based mobiliser"

ALA is very unsafe, i’m not in favour of "chelation"

the smaller world the larger world contains

our attention

the bridge

between

philosophy

and

life

is

called

experience

so many real life "zen masters", priests etc repeat the same bilge of proclaiming their own authenticity, projections of fancy nonsense without examining the underlying ideas, like what is the real fakery ?

their talks for instance ?

these not too bright drudges who can’t grasp philosophy ?

buddhism has its origins as an agrarian cult that also functioned as a rural bank, socially essential, the idea of "buddha" as an historical person evolved from a nepalese tree god and was really part of a middle eastern movement of religions into state vehicles of control which seemed to work much better if the founders or primary figures were supposed to be real historically; jesus, muhammad, zarathustra, moses

you can’t change reality with explanations

you can’t change reality

with

explanations

“ The Way does not need cultivation   —   just don’t defile it ”

the "way" and zen are not the same, daoism is its own distinct religion and actually "the way" is a belief system whereas zen is an abrogation of belief systems

i see a lot of synthesizing zen and daoism as people endlessly make up their own little religions

what i like about stoicism is it addresses too much trying to make the world to be the way you want it

years ago i thought as a policy i’d just put up anything i found interesting on this "blog" regardless of how "off-topic" it seemed ( is there an on-topic in fact ? )

so here’s pewdiepie at a  friend’s wedding ,  he was the most prominent early influencer, married an italian influencer who seems to be a very good mother, and is now settled somewhat quietly in japan

an unusual beacon of sanity in today’s personally dysfunctional world

sitting by myself

there is no-one

this

is

how

it

always

was

and

is

if the world is ruled by reptilians/greys then it can’t be ruled by angels, this is some sort of natural law that two conspiracy theories can’t be simultaneously true

so much of the conflict in human history can be worked around this, capitalism vs marxism, any two religions versus each other and the amazing thing is for two sects of what are basically the same religion finding enough differences for bloody dispute; military doctrines, forms of government, even just rulers related by blood

you can enforce one like the elimination  of the cathars  by papal catholicism in the albigensian crusade, but another variance, protestantism will naturally arise

there ought to be a word for that gap between when you hear or see you have done something to your fingers and actually feeling the pain

confucius  says

To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it

"the skye boat song"   sung  by the news of new college  ( december 2024 )

royalty in europe and britain in the late medieval period was in effect a caste system bound together by marriage and blood relationships and its ranks constantly pruned by execution or otherwise "violent death"

exercise should be like goldilock’s porridge, not too much or too little

google AI gave me this when i asked about "parasocial interaction" after my reading about k-pop fans with boundary problems

“ Parasocial interaction refers to a one-sided, psychological relationship that an audience member experiences with a media figure, like a celebrity or character, despite the lack of real-life interaction

This can manifest as feeling like you know the person, even though they don’t know you, and its a common experience in media consumption

While often associated with celebrities, parasocial interaction can also extend to fictional characters in TV shows, movies, or even video games ”

ed.  now i think about it, "role playing games" are a more constructive and boundaried form of this

brotherly togetherness is an opiate dream ?

accutane can cause dry eyes by killing the sebaceous/ meibomian glands in your eyelids that synthesize and deliver meibum into the tear film

endless the dialogues of nonsense

the meaningless mazes of talk

the infinite libraries of babels

and you still claim to make sense of this world ?

sleep paralysis is a brain dysfunction and not good, look at your diet, circadian rhythm/ sleep pattern

the oddness of reddit, i just got a reply in r|poetry to my reworking of jorge luis borges poem "suicide" from five years ago  (which i am now banned from for being too poetic)

google translate has come a long way, its translation from the spanish (immediately below), really you can’t fault it, better than professional translators i suspect, there must be some AI involved

not a star will remain in the night

there will be no night

i will die, and with me the sum

of the intolerable universe

i will erase the pyramids, the medals

the continents, and the faces

i will erase the accumulation of the past

i will turn history into dust, dust into dust

i am looking at the last sunset

i hear the last bird

i bequeath nothingness to no-one

my reworking :

he died and neither were the pyramids nor continents erased

the faces of the accumulated past

continued to accumulate

the universe remained tolerable and intolerable

he became the dust of history

the failure of making sense out of nonsense

life

this crazy maze of steps and avenues

infinitely regressing leading everywhere and nowhere

some worn hollow by others

some created by ourselves

however

their stone

eventually

beats

us

is dying the road to death

or rather the unpleasant leaving of life ?

rather that catastrophic cliff fall

going

from something to nothing

a poem by the zen nun miazong

a one-leaf skiff drifts across the misty expanse

its oar dances beyond the pitches of the courtly keys

cloud, mountains, sea, moon  —  all cast aside

what remains is zhuang zhou’s unending butterfly-dream

my  reply

butterfly dreams are not unending

the skiff on the lake

should tell you that

this idea of a secret understanding behind the "external beliefs" of the religion, there being an inner circle of cognoscenti so to speak was de rigueur in gnosticism, and you can see the same thing in zen with its inane dialogues where a member of the cognoscenti approves the "understanding" or attainment of someone else via their response in the "performance"

a youngish yuja wang  playing   (2009)  domenico scarlattis, sonaten  K.455

it must be a bit weird for these famous performers to have what is in effect a history of themselves on the web like this, a calendar of aging so to speak

her dresses have got tighter and more revealing for sure !

out of bounds

those in bounds

will never

understand

what is wider

cannot

appeal

to

the

narrow

words lead to more words

how could it be any different ?

looking for an ending

one traverses the road of more and more

this is the way

dusk transforms

it always was

and always is

transition

how can you write good poetry if you are so self-unaware ?

words have their own logic and can create new interesting spaces with associations, but without that background of a depth of interrelations you are just creating a raucous mix of dysfunction

those who talk

backed by the iron fist

so much of history

and our lives

violence

is taken for

validation

and nonsense

persists

fancy ideas

that can’t be knocked into shape

the sculptor chisels

when he needs

a new quarry

a curious feature of the CCP and soviet russia  (not putin’s russia with its defenestrations and "hits")  is the necessity of legalism, you can execute your opponents with show trials, but to  secretly assassinate  like xi jinping appears to have done to his rival li keqiang is infra dig

i think this is due to the pseudo-utopian roots of communism, that legalistic death is "the will of the people" and not psychotic pathology on the part of a dictator

elan barenholtz  says that Large Language Models  (which basically predict the next word or phrase in the text)  are also the way the brain generates language and i have noticed i can do this in my writing so it seems a viable hypothesis to me

noam chomsky’s objection to this thesis is that children by the age of three have a fully functional grasp of language on very sparse data, however, in my estimation, evolution can have provided the structural neural substrate to function as an LLM, ie, childhood proficiency in language is compatible with both barenholtz’s hypothesis and chomsky’s view of language acquisition or maybe even a slightly blended reworking

my neighbour

said

last night

this morning

the frost

was beautiful

i

hesitated

the hesperides

and their  apple tree 

the dream of eternal summer

to fit their immortality

comprehension has its limits

knowledge is an artefact

understanding is a process

what is it we lack ?

the newly discovered  daguerreotype  of emily dickinson must be authentic, her likeness  to her niece , martha dickinson bianchi is so strong its disconcerting

martha’s  introduction  to the "single hound" is actually a wonderful piece of writing in itself

the banality of our days

wealth around the corner

when we stumble upon it

we should hang onto it

conundrums

flout reality

that consistency

always sought

never arrives

the road to bethlehem

trod by yeats’s beast

leaves

its searing

footprints

blinding

our vision

“ too abstract for your tastes ? ”

well yes

what you lose in heft

is made up for

in

applicability

the hour hand of aging

each winter

seems a little stiffer

than

the last

those too close

never seem a mystery

better some distance

to create

the illusion

of beneficial substance

between us

a semantic "mind twister" from one of emily dickinson’s letters to susan gilbert

To lose what we never owned

might seem an eccentric

Bereavement but

Presumption has its

Affliction as actually as

Claim  —

you can "reform" buddhism, but you still end up with the same problem, reputational merit that is held by the reformed community, being in effect stolen and debased by interlopers simply because there is value that can be taken and stolen and used for the purposes and self-interests of the interloper

this holds for any religion or group, its a mistake to personally invest in it

“ what is given will be taken from you ”

below is my reply to someone claiming the "dao" is the ultimate prior/ axiom

there’s no such thing as a "fundamental axiom"

the tao may be an inference springing from a particular ontology and you have axioms in that context

its very christian to fixate on a single underlying "cause", asian cultures tend to be more flexible or ambiguous

chromium GTF  (glucose tolerance factor)  improves insulin sensitivity and evens appetite

do you manage light colour and intensity exposure to keep your circadian rhythm ?

in what should be the hours of darkness close to bed, i use a red led headlamp with NiMH rechargeable batteries  (lower voltage compared to alkaline)  for a low intensity pure red light source that the brain takes to be dark, white led light (cool white) looks like midday to the circadian rhythm

its quite ok to not get married, just make sure your interests are wide enough to keep you from being narrow

so i’ve looked at about three or four youtube videos on how to prune summer bearing raspberries, but only found one that  makes sense  to me, this seems true of so much teaching, copious amounts of the wrong sort of detail and a lack of focus on the essentials

IgG4 antibodies created by mRNA vaccines mask cancer cells  from the immune system

this explains why, anecdotally, "turbo cancers" occurred after vaccination

“ repeated  covid-19 vaccination  as a poor prognostic factor in pancreatic cancer ”

i think the conclusions are generalisable to other forms of cancer and can possibly be extrapolated to "causing cancer" since we all have cancer cells in our body ,  its just they are supressed by a functioning immune system, we even have tumour supressing genes for the job

i have read quite a bit of medical literature over the years and the lack of uk and usa studies that would potentially create liability issues for companies and bureaucracies, ie "holes" in the research coverage has always been noticeable, its interesting that its a japanese hospital the funded this study, i cannot see any "western" hospital doing this

how to safely put a lawn mower  on its side

god

a mistake

a shifted reference frame

clarifying

what is ambiguous

is

not

necessarily

progress

disanalogous

anti-reasoning

the usual endless circus

of nothing

going

nowhere

compatibility

doesn’t have to seek its opposite

its

already

there

in his book "a two year interlude" by major "bob" wilson  (a friend of my great-grandfather  —  who fought and was killed at gallipoli)  which recounts his WW1 experiences commanding an artillery battery, he mentions checking the sighting of his guns by aiming at a house on a ridge on the frontline in france, the sighting was accurate because one salvo demolished it

here is a  colourized video  of the view from an airship several months after the armistice of what the front line looked like

time in fragments

larry eigner’s line

but i don’t know what time is

only fragments

totally fiction

everywhere

grains of truth so rare

you might as well

be

panning

for

gold

is that

what does that say

what does that say

what

some favourite lines from larry eigner

from another time in

fragments

again dawn the sky

dropped its invisible whiteness

we saw pass out nowhere

empty the blue stars

fiction

the personification of death

who arrives

and we leave with

but

the reality is

death dies

too

north and south

the cold latitudes

not so far as to be frozen into absurdity

rather like dusk before the deep of the night

something liveable

yet

different

what we notice as a child and keep to ourselves

my cousin died

a life from beginning to end not known by me

yet

she was my cousin

the problem with finaseride  (5-alpha reductase inhibitors)  is not that it doesn’t work, it does  (20% reduction in prostate size in BPH), but rather the way it works which is decreased angiogenesis and microvascular density, ideal for the prostate but problematic in other organs, basically you have decreased blood flow to and in them and various subtle functional derangements that follow, for example,   neurosteriods  in the brain

i think, at the least you want to keep fit, but be alert for subtle side effects, microvascular problems in the brain are a big issue as we get older

a good explanation of the effects of alcohol  and its toxicity

buddhists place a lot of weight in what they call "the dharma", but isn’t that the usual religious illusion like god or "holiness"  ?

revenge and forgiveness are not a pair, but equally useful, that is, not at all

“ a broad and ample road, whose dust is gold

and pavement stars  —  as stars to thee appear

seen in the galaxy, that milky way

which nightly as a circling zone thou seest

powder\’d with stars ”

milton

space opera has been around for a while

on being bitten by a jack russell

crossing the park

this dog

bred to nip

gave me instead

a full jawed crunch

my thigh

still sore

today

before and after

what follows doesn’t follow

puzzle this

then

ontology is the logical construction of systems from axioms, its truth in a context, the context being the axioms and permitted operators, the big problem is getting absolute truths outside of ontology and as far as i can see, its not possible

there’s a whole new "spiritual" epistemology arising from the newest developments in quantum physics, assembly theory, complexity theory, "the free energy principle" and those sorts of concerns, but in the end my thought is this doesn't really change things, one of the greatest philosophers/mystics if not the greatest was heraclitus and his views on the physics of the world where very conventionally "greek", totally off the wall to our modern eyes, but it didn’t affect what he said

Interestingly, even kurt gödels "proof" of unprovable truths is heavily dependent on certain axioms

some of the manufacturer added antioxidants like BHT in oils can make sleep more difficult imo

voynich   :   something that sounds and looks impressive but doesn’t mean anything at all

on my fortnightly shopping trip to town i noticed the small rural graveyard i often pass had been beautifully tidied up, flowers placed, weeds removed, all the headstones cleaned and the lawn mowed and i thought, what’s below doesn’t care what’s above

daylight moon

a fifty cent coin

half slipped

in a blue pocket

ed.  a new zealand fifty cent coin with HMS endeavour under full sail with mt. egmont in the background on one side

dusk moon

half an eye

protruding

one thing people miss about trump is his surprising resilience and mental competence for his age  (79), this is partly due to his being a teetotaller  (his brother died of alcoholism)  in my view

if you think in terms of "mixed bags" rather than absolutes, you can make much more sense out of theological and philosophical "directives", wisdom literature and advice so to speak

black and white rules are to, the greater extent, la la land, but of course, not entirely

“ What’s a "harmless" habit that people don’t realize is actually damaging in the long run ? ”

shift work or staying up too late and a disrupted circadian rhythm

After   the Buddha   kim jong un spoke this sutra, the   monks   victorious workers heard what the   Buddha   great leader said and followed it with joy

ed. my "reworking" of a sentence in the 749th Sutra of the Miscellaneous Āgamas (Volume 28)

not a lot of difference really, buddhism , like christianity and islam has its origins in "social control"

art markets/auctions are not something everyone finds interesting, but i do, here is  patrick boyle  offering a view of the contemporary state of affairs

i do think the removal of russian and chinese oligarchs is affecting the market, the top end anyway

the first godzilla film was only nine years after the ending of the war which was the largest trauma japan ever suffered, if you understand this, he and his ilk appear in a different light

for all the fuss about the painter of "salvador mundi" is silence about the fact the "man" in it is "trans" which might be expected from leonardo da vinci, interestingly  the copies  of it vary in ambiguity from being authentic in this respect to the original to shifting the sexual identity to being more plainly male

  the history  is quite a riveting read, the media reporting on it at the time was pretty garbled

walking across the lawn and seeing a blue heron there for the second time today

thinking it was a thing of beauty

hearing the sound of rain falling but its a clear day

looking up

brilliantly white cockatoos feeding in the macrocarpas

AI video could become an artform ,  this one  for instance, looks surrealist, the great weakness is a lack of coherence in terms of a theme at an artistic level, to get that is probably the next level up in intelligence and with bananas being taped to a wall sold for millions by sothebys, you can see the bar is not very high

"tampo" a philipino/ tagalog word meaning something along the lines of sulk, but not quite

“ its a concept in filipino culture that refers to silent withdrawal or coldness when you’re disappointed or hurt, especially from unmet expectations ”

fills a semantic gap in english imo

its interesting the way WW2 has been whitewashed in japan, when is reality it was the largest trauma it has ever suffered

this whitewashing has done japan no good since the cultural social control problems the war highlighted, in particular the authoritarian structuring of seniority over competence has not really changed

so, they got

fukushima

the zen of no-statements

conversion

introversion

self-reflection

there

are

more

worlds

than

this

flowers

eyes

faces

natural

memes

meta-analysis studies can be flawed, but i think they have a basic point here, that  drinking your sugar  creates a significantly higher risk of type two diabetes, the big surprise is that fruit juice is a problem, if you read the label showing the amount of sugar is most commercial fruit juices, its just off the charts

“ Researchers analyzed data from over half a million people across multiple continents, revealing a surprising twist: sugar consumed through beverages   —   like soda and even fruit juice   —   was consistently linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Meanwhile, other sugar sources showed no such link and, in some cases, were even associated with a lower risk ”

looking for strangeness

not finding it

yet

in abstraction

its there

xin quji

poem/ci lyrics    :   self-portrait as the mountain

i feel there is a massive contradiction between his career as a general and a poem as delicate as  this ,  even in a drama, it would not be regarded it as believable

this seems incredible ,  but thinking about it, it was a performance art and the actual buyers were sucked into being part of the performance, it really crossed boundaries and is also, i think, how propaganda works, they accepted the contextual reality that had been socially imagined

wikipedia

ed.  on some reflection, it must have been a jack-up between the artist, sothebys and the buyer, not an unusual state of affairs at auctions, however this takes the cake and actually the auctioneer was looking not quite comfortable with the farce and wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible

you can take things in different ways, judging from the comments on this  new stalin frieze , most take it to be a promotion of stalin, but to me its a subtle satire on the fakery of those years, a bulgakov reality behind surfaces

The researchers  found that just three to four one-minute bouts of VILPA every day is associated with up to 40 percent reduction in all-cause and cancer-related mortality, and up to a 49 percent reduction in death related to cardiovascular disease

“ VILPA, or Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity, refers to short, high-intensity bursts of activity  (1-2 minutes)  integrated into daily routines.  This could include things like brisk walking to the bus stop, carrying groceries, or taking the stairs ”

chinese women and their obsession  with status objects

this would have to be "drama" territory, these people are so slick, teflon gets put into the shade

the trouble with anybody older than about 25 is they don’t want to be troubled with extending their horizons by something even as simple as looking up the meaning of a word or a quick search

from an evolutionary viewpoint, this is disadvantageous, but reduces susceptibility to parasites since brain growth factors are reduced

you just have to look in the political and geopolitical spheres to see this in spades, decisions made in the contexts of generations ago, from the failed french WW2 invasion response to putin’s attempt to restablish soviet geographic hegemony and xi jinping’s winding back the clock to mao to the current western reversion to marxism and neo-marxism

for 24 hours we meet

two strangers

becoming less strange to each other

enough to impart

a melancholy tinge

to our not meeting again

ill

with a virus

forced to lie down

looking around the room

how strange it all is

kill the chicken to scare the monkey

a chinese proverb that applies to the power struggle in china at the moment, PLA supporters of xi jinping are being arrested  (and in some cases)  executed in an unmistakable message to xi jinping to step down

i suspect that’s something they literally did in a village to scare monkeys away, they can be incredibly destructive

“ High quality brand (Nordic Naturals 5000 iu vitamin D) ”

i wouldn’t agree with that, expensive brands are not necessarily better and the whole industry is bedevilled with stupid formulations

the ingredients include vitamin E as an antioxidant which may not be effective compared to sulphites, also virgin olive oil is problematic imo with its high peroxide levels

vitamin D is "fragile", i know nordic have a problem because they add "rosemary extract" as a preservative, but imo  (ie this is a speculation)  only sulphite works and i have been taking one with it in for years without problems  (blackmores, an australian company)

the further you go

the further there is to see

and not always

what you want to see

i did talk to joko beck once, imo she found the whole zen business way too stressful but was locked into it

a medley? of difficult portions of charles-valentin  alkan etudes played by yeol eum son

here you are and here i am

here we are

this brief moment of contact

as you read what i write

wasted or not ?

i will never know

the japanese  legend  of the lovers orihime and hikoboshi

the true "opium of the people" is the comfort of knowing we won’t be judged for our sins

czesław miłosz

read a bit of philosophy, you will see the gap between you and them

“ What text would you recommend I start with ? ”

its really like anything else, you read what helps your understanding, one of the problems however is the way different philosophers develop their own highly idiosyncratic vocabularies which can take a lifetime to "parse" out

schopenhauer requires quite a bit less parsing than most and actually his most important ideas tally quite well with new science like assembly theory, the free energy principle and the brain as a preformed cognitive structure determined by the requirements of evolution

at the other extreme you have that nazi, heidegger who really takes the cake for saying a lot of plain english stuff in a beyond obscure way

there’s some good derrida youtubes, he’s a bit out of fashion, but actually makes a lot of sense and became much more overtly mystical in his later years

nietzsche of course is well known

there’s topics like proving the existence of god and notions of axioms and the limits of truth blah blah

the hunting of the snark covers a surprising amount of ground as do the alice books

literature and philosophy is endless, but like "infinity" move away as fast as you approach and its only old age and death that break us out of these spinning circles with their endless rotation

with message boards, i am not trying to help anyone or change their views, rather i am using the energy to advance my understanding and skills so that if the message board closed tomorrow, i walk away with something of real world benefit, namely those skills and an improved understanding

writing in particular requires just a plain lot of writing, like millions of words to lift you above "the hoi polloi"

does "buddhism" "pivot" on "buddha" being an historical person ?

i have seen claims it doesn’t need that, but if he’s not an historical person, then buddhism is just a story  (albeit a very very long one)  and really in that case, why should it have any validity more than other fiction ?

lol, the writers  dream

exam mentality

linear ascension

within

a hierarchy

shaping

crucifixion

of

originality

Today’s world

self-centered bullshit

from every corner

of

everything

finding an old card

a collage of dried leaves gracing the front

opening up and reading it

“ happy birthday geogeous, i will always celebrate you ”

yet time blows its own dust

affection and life are dimmed

but echoes

carry their own weight

god

an imagined end

to

endlessness

but

endlessness

is

god

unlike the moon who returns

again

and

again

we

only

cycle

once

shangguan wan’er, real life c-drama, poetess, politician, prime minister, beauty, emperor’s consort, taken into the royal household as a baby after her family were executed, granddaughter of a famous poet, face tattooed with the mark of a criminal and secretary to the empress wu-zetain

and also the subject of this  remarkable obituary

there’s very little of her poetry that has survived, i have reworked the most well known one as per below

autumn leaves now litter the lake dongting’s shores

you who i want are so far away

the dew chills my quilt

moonlight illuminates the brocaded screen

giving an empty feeling

i want to sing southern songs with you

but all i have are your letters from the north

our long separation is a deep sorrow

that i don’t think i can handle

if you want  to read  a real life c-drama or game of thrones

as far as i can see, she was executed by the emperor she supported because he wanted to break up the clique of competent women who had run the empire under the empress wu-zeitan, for a brief and successful phase, china had been ruled by a matriarchy

another way of looking at the soviet and chinese communist regimes is they are highly sophisticated systems of controlling social behavior, the ideology is almost irrelevant except that they necessarily conflict with having a "free market" economy since for economies to work you need lots of critical feedback and the breakup of leadership cliques

a video on how this works  in north korea

huh, stalin was part of a russian tradition exemplified by ivan the terrible and peter the great and actually putin is part of the same continuity though not personally violent and lacking his forebears intelligence

peter, is known as the great, but could be known as  the filicider as he was also the man who personally tortured his son to death

history is very selective in what it permits in the public domain

cleaning the top of my desk

archaeological discoveries

going back

five years and more

in summer, autumn and spring i try to get a minute or several minutes of sun over the whole body at midday, maybe every second day or so and wondered how much vitamin D it contributes, what i have noticed this winter is that i need an extra 1000 iu a day  (an increase from 3000 to 4000iu)  to keep my joints and muscles supple which i presume is the loss of that vitamin D and other beneficial factors like immune system modulation ?

however, don’t get sun/skin exposure if viruses are around as this is immune suppressing

“ vitamin D supplements  protect telomeres  and preserve telomere length

vitamin D3 supplements significantly reduced telomere shortening over four years, preventing the equivalent of nearly three years of aging compared with placebo ”

a rather interesting  sculpture  by an austrian artist, deborah sengl, not a "them versus us", but rather a blurring of aspects;  sheep  —  wolf  —  priest common to us all

the masnavi story  about the healing of the sick slave girl is strange to western understanding, but i think its a deeply cynical comment on the physicality of "love", beauty may be loved ,  but ugliness, not

“ I never should’ve been born ”

there’s a zillion trillion almost identical to youse that were never born and your life goes very quickly, the proverbial meteor’s flash

ed.  a variation on the everettian "many worlds" hypothesis

snow on the river

our lives

imagined warmth

replaced

by

beauty

ed.  the above is a sort of reply to the famous tang dynasty poem which i have reworked just below  (written by  liu zōngyuán )

the many hills

snow has quieted the birds

no men

walk the tracks

yet

alone in a boat

an old man

fishing the river

a poem by tess gallagher called "opening"

i entered this world not wanting

to come.  i’ll leave it not

wanting to go.  all this while,

when it seemed there were two doors

there was only one  —  this

passing through

irving finkel explains the  babylonian  cuneiform "map of the world"

the last thing i would have thought was addictive, but it is

just like the nazis removed their most productive population by the holocaust, stalin removed anyone with moral fiber or intelligence from the breeding pool with the gulag

there’s no such thing as "correct", or rather its always evolving in terms of what you are trying to achieve, if you think in terms of that, rather than any method, you will always be ahead of the play

in the kaleidoscope of being

a synchronicity exists

where the world

and time

stands

still

the vocabulary you need to pass as a  wine connoisseur

after the tasting he gives good insight on the nature of "luxury products", something i have never understood

i always read the comments section of videos, you generally get a more balanced picture and one or two giving additional insight

photos of works  by the iranian painter and sculptor ali akbar sanati

two men  on donkeys

something missing

what is beyond

the holy

enlightened

deep in delusion

try to justify

something with nothing

an old poem i wrote while staying at the cambridge zen center in boston

unbending road, what do we say ?

existing because it can

constrained by possibility

strung between is and is not

curled within the vastness of inconceivability

enwrapt outside the universe

what do we say ?

i quite like "assembly theory", one of its benefits is it takes evolution out of the purely biological context and i think you can take it to the point where you can ask this question, does the universe self-assemble which has deep philosophical implications since you no longer need a vast array of "almost" universes to select this one universe able to support life and be "self-observed"

  a painting  of his model, then second wife, kathleen woodward, by  gerald brockhurst ,  lipstick a bit overdone, painted in the british realist style which gives a similar sense of space as the modernist/surrealist, an idealism that can be approached, but not attained

i think LLM’s  (large language models/chat gpt)  are effectively semantic maps of large bodies of text or perhaps even graphics that questions cause it to navigate what it sees as the most relevant paths

“ potential roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in hippocampal activation during  light exercise  ”

study

“ our research with animals and humans has focused on light exercise  (below the lactate threshold), which almost anyone can safely perform with minimal stress.

we found that even light exercise can stimulate hippocampal activity and enhance memory performance ” 

tip   :   household chores are light exercise !

waiting

something not working

time forced upon us

activity

in

abeyance

sometimes

i think i have the freedom to write anything

then i look at what i can’t write

its

significant

life

the slow acquisition of skills

and nous

to be ripped from us

multifactorial

below are contemporary chinese sayings

truth and rumour are born conjoined, they arrive together

excessive joy always turns to sorrow

what is done in bad faith will destroy you

medicine cannot be used indiscriminately without hazard

untruths cannot stand up to investigation

the universe sees all, on this matter, even heaven is disgusted  (ed.  on the matter being discussed)

if you stay silent, no-one thinks you are mute

an incompetent tailor will always be an incompetent tailor

summer itself

has its seasons

from its tenuous beginnings

in spring’s demise

now

early from what it comes to be

weeks of its summit

to fall away

existence in its absence

autumn

rolls

in

two pig brains are not enough to make a dish

contemporary chinese saying something along the lines of dunning-kruger

i think there is a difference between "significance/significant" and "importance" in that  significant  is more past tense and proven while importance is to a greater extent provisional and unknown, ie present and future tense

of course you make "significance" refer to unknown future states, but in terms of a contextless meaning it inheres as per the first paragraph

passages in the chinese i have looked at compared to "instant zen" show that thomas cleary has an agenda and is creating his own sectarian document, when you look at what he writes, its clunky, self-contradictory, has quite a different tone and is in too overt a semantic-pragmatic space compared to the original

his brother chris/j.c.  (they both had ph.d.s in east asian languages and civilizations from harvard university)  must have been a moderating influence on him because their co-translation of the blue cliff record is much better, however, being brothers the trauma must have been a bit much because they never translated together again

"inner peace" is an illusion

so is "enlightenment"

that people chase these conceptual baubles just blows my mind

two heads are better than one

and three heads are better than none

“ Clinicians have long noticed that people with periodontitis, a common form of gum disease, seem more prone to cardiovascular problems ”

in english, the bacteria from gum disease  infiltrate the heart  causing scar tissue to build up, not good !

the full title of the study is "atrial translocation of porphyromonas gingivalis exacerbates atrial fibrosis and atrial fibrillation"

there’s a portion of the population extraordinarily naïve about medication side-effects, like they live in a world of unparalleled medical benignity

one of the surprising "beliefs" of south korean culture is its monism, due to the large christian population it has, and a surprising dissonance for western visitors expecting exclusively asian religions

its really that you are not being discriminating and taking the endless religious nonsense as real

most people go along with what is "culturally appropriate" to a certain extent, but its much more like "lip service", however you go totally over the top, to what is really a degree one might class as disturbing, touching on the schizophrenic

“ he is the buddha ”

in the fairyland of whatever, just another character in a story, dream and illusion, what can i say ?

if you have concerns about your own objectivity, pretend some-one else wrote what you have a question about and ask yourself, what is going on here ?

liene andreta kalnciema plays bach’s  toccata and fugue  in D minor on the riga cathedral organ, you can argue this composition is "overexposed", but the sound is very smooth and being built in 1883 has a degree of finnese no longer available where a research project is necessary just to build a new one, so much of the technology has been lost

one of the commenter’s tells the following story

“ Years ago I was teaching Lighting in a college theatre in CA, and we were adjacent to the music department

One day I was passing by the room with the department's most expensive organ - only a few people were allowed to play the thing, and I heard someone playing Toccata and Fugue in D minor

I quietly stepped into the room and sat down to listen  (love this piece), and when the young woman finished the piece she looked up at the ceiling and said something like  (it was back in 1971), "I heard you come in to the room.   Who are you ? "

I introduced myself of course because by now I realized she was blind. Playing Bach, on an Organ, and hearing someone quietly enter the room!!  Mon Dieu.  Something I will never forget ”

bland yellow

the daffodil flower

how much more

the iris

with its deep stripes

bland yellow

the daffodil flower

how much more

the iris

with its deep stripe

everyone seems to skip over the way layman pang’s  (ed.  famous zen story)  wife and children died and if you believe he chucked all his wealth in the river, take $10 and try to put it in the rubbish bin and leave it there

when you look at the famous sonnet 116 supposedly written by william shakespeare and then look at the   chandos protrait  you realise the sonnet was never written by him and in fact had to come from a member of the aristocracy with its highly idealised sentiments

sonnet 66, even more so, written by some-one near the top of the social tree and with political experience, see a modern english version below

“ Exhausted with the following things I cry out for releasing death   :   for example, seeing a deserving person who has been born into poverty; and an undeserving one dressed in the finest clothes;  and someone who shows trustworthiness wretchedly betrayed;  and public honour shamefully bestowed on the unfit;  and unblemished goodness forced into bad ways;  and genuine perfection unjustly disgraced;  and conviction crippled by corruption;  and skill suppressed by those with the power to do it; and stupidity restraining the advance of knowledge;  and simple truth being dismissed as simplistic;  and good taking orders from evil.  Exhausted with all these things I want to escape, except that by dying  I would be abandoning my love

autopoietic

a being’s self-creation and its ongoing process

enactivism

“ a broad perspective that views cognition as an emergent property of embodied, embedded, and extended interaction between a living organism and its environment ”

autopoietic enactivism

a beings self-creation via interaction with its environment and the emergent cognition

i think these are pre "free energy" ways of looking at things that incorporate into it fairly well

when you come under pressure, you resort to intellectual sophistry when its totally unnecessary and this lack of personal honesty is the ceiling you hit again and again

you need a "reading iq" several levels above what you currently have to address this stuff

it takes work and years to get there, but no, you just wade in the shallows of "intellectual sophistry", frightened of deeper waters and unable to move beyond your own inferences

the historical origins of the KGB/FSB go way back to ivan the terrible and the "streltsy"

murderous despots are nothing new for russia, in fact the last two czars were more benign than could be tolerated to keep the place under control

peter the great  wasn’t so constrained

“ cake-ist ”

one who wants to have their cake and eat it and oddly turns out to be everyone except yourself

“ Is it possible to understand koans without knowing the context ? ”

your question is illustrative of a philosophy of contemporary academic english literature, that text is independent of the writer, eg it doesn’t matter whether george eliot or jane austen wrote "middlemarch" which is a patent absurdity

if you look at the historical context of the koan  (the blue cliff record #8)  you quote which was likely a hermitage or small monastery where "the executive" has been keeping the monks hard at work with planting, the harvest and food preparation for winter and maybe a small retreat fitted in somewhere, the koan is much more cynical

and as an incidental, theft was major problem with monks who of course were not getting any stipends for their work

there’s a lot of modern work on axiom systems and what you can and cannot prove and imo the upshot so far is you can prove or disprove anything provided you have consistency with the axioms and its extensions

however what is outside the axioms of course escapes this necessity of proof, even kurt gödel's famous theorems have assumptions and premises ie dependencies for validity

so my question would be, how do you prove "zen" is not some literary illusion which can be a more general theological question like "does god exist" and the answer is you can prove god exists which makes for the world viewed a certain way, however, because it takes the limitation of axioms to make it that way, in the larger context its not true and here you get into questions of cascading infinities of the enlargement of context

"zen" discussion boards like r|zen are themselves an axiom system with its restrictions that remove real life aspects like meditation

so, my question is, how do you get outside jorge luis borges’ "library of babel" ?

gen Z and later

lacking

intellectual honesty

sun quan the emperor  (  guzheng  and drum )

moyun making an interesting cover of  thunderstruck " by ac/dc

there is only one truth, that there are other worlds besides this and you need to experience the aforementioned for yourself

not running with the herd

aborted careers

wasted years

truth does not sit well

with

fulfilment

great painters

  their vision  outlasting

their life times

how

unique

ed.  i quite like  this one  as well, its clearly an influence on the later following "modernism"

“ This is the liberation through the tathāgatagarbha ”

this is the liberation through the tathāgabblagabbla

gen Z probably knows nothing of the  my lai  massacre but in my generation the impact lasted decades

what i didn’t realise is that not for a  helicopter officer  forcing it to stop is it would have also occurred in other villages

so much

an illusion

a meteor track across the sky

that

disappears

the catholic church is not facing its basic problem of a need to relax "doctrinal certainty" ie it has to accomodate jesus being a fictional rather than historical person

hinduism and buddhism seem to be more tolerant of that ambiguity about their founders and beliefs so it can be done, but the new pope won’t be doing it

of course, if you scratch the surface too much, you get the revelation about what catholicism really is, a novel by augustine of hippo

an interesting  perspective  by elvira bary on shortages of marriageable men after wars or other crises creating a very potent female support basis for dictators

“ a landmark  study  exploring canadians’ consumption of chips, frozen pizzas, breakfast cereals and other ultra-processed foods typically loaded with fat, sugar and additives has confirmed these foods are directly and significantly linked to poor health outcomes ”

i’m not out to change the world, just bitch about the way things are occasionally

i’m not out to change the world, just bitch about the way some things are occasionally

“ What do you need from me ? ”

its not what i need but what do you provide ?

women

that mutual burden

of

childbearing

bondage

their

collective

experience

the best painting  i have seen for quite a while, banned from the hawkesbury show, n.s.w. as a security risk !

its pacifist, but politically neutral which i think is quite an acceptable stance

painted by matilda emmerich who is only 16, obviously a great future as an artist ahead

not everybody dies of coronary heart disease

not everybody dies of cerebrovascular disease

not everybody dies of cancer

not everybody dies of dementia

not everybody dies of lower respiratory disease

yet

everybody

dies

drone’s eye view (4K) of the   norwegian fiords , better on mute

a woman’s poem by izumi shikibu

topsy turvey

are my feelings

but however they vary

the result is the same

tears

the coast of new zealand ,  a short story by cynthia ozick

story interview

video interview

“ gennady mikhailovich dobrov  (1937-2011)  was a russian artist who became famous for his  drawings  of the victims of the second world war, which always evokes a deep reaction in the soul of any normal person who sees them ”

war is not a "clean business" of the killed and the survivors

should there be

what forgets

 or what is forgotten ?

what is living

 or has ceased ?

what is distant

 or to hand ?

or where are we

in this fluster

of being ?

should there never be

what forgets

 or what is forgotten ?

what is living

 or has ceased ?

what is distant

 or to hand ?

where are we

in this fluster

of being ?

the above is my "reworking" of a poem  (below) by the famous japanese poetess  izumi shikibu  titled "things i want decided" and looking at her life you can see the "bullet points" she raises were very much her life experience

what shouldn’t exist

in this world

the one who forgets

or the one

 who is forgotten ?

which is better

to love

one who has died

or not to see

 each other when you’re alive ?

which is better

the distant lover you long for

or the one you see daily

 without desire ?

which is the least unreliable

among fickle things

the swift rapids

a flowing river

 or this human world ?

brittany jones, self-portrait nursing son  new madonna  finalist for the   archibald prize , which incidently looks to be much higher quality than usual this year  (2025)

worlds

that are neither imaginary nor real

have more to tell us

than the imaginary or real

worlds

that are neither imaginary or real

have more to tell us

than the imaginary or real

children mirrored in the parents

parents mirrored in the children

a violent clashing or asynchronous melding ?

of similarity and dissimilarity

i’ve looked at a few youtube videos on cooking and they are at what you might call a professional level, yet there is almost no understanding of how to maximise the nutritional value of the food, avoid toxic transformations or what constitutes a balanced diet

i don’t know if some sushi and sashimi variants are such healthy foods, the seaweed wrapper is an indigestible polysaccharide that can cause biofilm problems and raw fish has a danger of parasites

AI worlds

senseless yet transfixing

kitsch

formed on

the fabric of inconsistency

mirrors of fable

entrances to other worlds

or vehicles of prophesy

marvels

imaginary or not

beyond the blank other side

looking for one

not even finding two

the scattered fragments

glint in the light

i was asked   :   where this poem is from ? i like it a lot

my  reply

i was reading the dialogue quoted below, trying to understand it, not getting anywhere, and then i read "One cane, two canes slanted" and that made sense to me, its one of the basic criticisms zen masters make, that people are always looking for a fundamental source but its not like that and i wondered , how do i express that and so those words/ poem came to mind

“ let me tell you another story.  when huaitang started to study zen, he first saw yunfeng yue for three years, but he could not understand what yunfeng was talking about

he also studied with zen master nan, and after two years still did not understand

then he went to spend a summer retreat in a cloister.  in the "transmission of the lamp", he read the story where someone asked duofu, “what is the bamboo grove of duofu?” he replied, "one cane, two canes slanted" at this, huaitang finally opened up and awakened ”

the above story quoted from the bottom of  page 52 of thomas cleary’s "instant zen"

its an interesting crossover between history and  literature  you are doing, congrats on popularizing it !

yukio mishima and his time warp between pre and post war japan might be another

endings

bring

change

previous

directions

falter

and

we

drift

into

new

ones

sometimes

no answer

is

better

than

an

answer

a salvador dali  sculpture

venus à la girafe solid bronze c. 1970’s

there is no "hard problem" of consciousness, the only difficulty is the fuzzy nature of the thinking of people who don’t understand recursion in this context

of course you can join them and be eligible for a million dollar prize by sending an essay to the   berggruen competition 

the billionaire funder, nicolas berggruen himself is almost a  creature of fable ,  held on picasso’s knee as child and his father a one time lover of frida kahlo, his mother, bettina mossi was the daughter of the famous stage actor alexander moissi, sorta all a bit out of "ada" by valdimir nabakov

i think the holocaust destroyed this tightly knit european artistic cultural world

lol, my "essay"

there i am

there you are

where we are

a sigh beholds

maison  sung by "lucie"

i preferred the version  without the strings , the voice stands out more

female to female rivalry

and cooperation

a world of persons

men

have

no

idea

how

different

the

intersects

are

socrates was  taught philosophy  by a woman, aphasia, his lover at one point and wife of pericles

a multiplicity of worlds

each with its own truths

we look for the common ground

but can’t find it

because

its there

a multiplicity of worlds

each with its own truth

we look for the common ground

but can’t find it

because

its there

huh, there’s a "meta" in opposition to "occam’s razor" that you never hear about

“ epicurus’ principle of multiple explanations    :    if more than one theory is consistent with the observations, keep all such theories ”

they are both conjectures in a sense and actually speak to a shortcoming in whatever theory is being evaluated, a bit more work will take you past the limitations of the currently proposed hypothesis, this can become a cascade that eventually gives results that the conjectures no longer offer relevance for

its a modern fallacy that occam’s razor is taken to be a method of proof

infinitesimals work much better than infinity because they have a limit

a leading  candidate  for the "darwin award"

definitions interlacing with other definitions

they think they get somewhere

but

nowhere is adequate

we know how abstract ideas transition from specifics, but how do specifics transition from the abstract ?

doppelgänger

no merging of being

what stands apart

stands apart

i quite like gertrude abercrombie’s paintings,   this fake  purporting to be by her but in fact being by db hankel is indistinguishable artistically from the authentic which is an interesting state of affairs

the lady with a dog ,  an audiobook of the short story by anton checkov, considered by valdimir nabakov to be amongst the best ever written which i am not so sure of

what i like about chekov is his gentleness, a bit artificial, but not traumatic to listen to and gives subtle insights on reflection

axioms can be extended to create different universes with opposing binaries

belly/ visceral fat is an intractable problem of aging, not simply due to lack of exercise or hormones, but is caused by overactivity of   the stem cells  that make the fat

it seems to be a deep philosophical/ theological/ mystical question as to if there are other universes and what form they take which doesn’t need to mean they have to be real at all, whatever we mean by real

of course the problem the cardinals have with electing a young and competent pope is the visibility sexual and financial scandals have these days, at least with the old the skeletons can be kept somewhat in the closet

supermarkets

mothers with children in tow

their little mirror images

so, william shakespeare was  not a nice person and while his wife was literate, we still have no firm evidence he could write or read

the principal author of the plays had an expansive spirit and sir henry neville fills that bill

the death of another ineffectual pope and the media have not hesitated to act as unpaid missionaries, promoters and apologists, with the usual hypocrisy of not being "believers" themselves

the election of cognitively and age impaired popes is putting vatican catholicism into a slow death spiral

the accelerating rates of colorectal cancer in the under-50s is due to what must be a new mutation of E coli secreting a carcinogenic toxin called colibactin, obviously a lot of modern dietary trends are not helpful, but the basic issue is a hidden pandemic and unlike covid, is taking out a more demographically useful portion of the population

“ the patterns of cancerous mutations are thought to arise when children are exposed to colibactin before the age of ten ”

for years i have used a combination of chillies and grated ginger as my standard spice combination for cooking as i read a study saying in combination the ginger  offsets  the carcinogenic propensities of chillies

ginger by itself study   

as a side note, i only use fresh herbs and spices and peel and discard the skin of ginger

“ So, my question is what exactly do you need to do to get enlightened in the zen tradition ? ”

well, the trouble is, if you look in real life, is there anyone you would say is "enlightened" ?

NO !

enlightened people only exist in stories ergo, its a fictional concept

the christian, islamic and hindu equivalents would be holy/ saints and in india this sort of thing verges on being a total racket

if saturn lost her rings

jupiter her whirling colours

mars her red dust and the moon her shine

this blue-white eyeball

would have nothing to see

at all

if saturn lost her rings

jupiter her whirling colours

mars her red dust and the moon her shine

where would we be ?

when you jump

from the improbable

to

the impossible

then

life

starts

to

make

sense

dealing with women

like walking in a snake pit

keeping your distance

is

safest

men

your brain

is designed

to

make

you

vulnerable

popes die

of old age

in

the comfort

of

painkillers

heading a church

that historically

could

be

unspeakably

cruel

religion only likes art that acts as a propaganda vehicle for them and conversely they don’t like art that doesn’t because art makes people think and has a much broader horizon than the religion

in terms of ch'an and zen art, if you remove the overtly buddhist, there’s almost nothing in ch'an, i think because ch'an was such a small sect and not well differentiated whereas there is a reasonable amount of japanese art, sculpture and pottery because the "slot" it operated in in japanese culture was much more artistic

zen in japan became a religion of "imperial nationalism" in the meiji era and never recovered from the disaster of WW2 and now in japan its in the main a religion of undertakers, but historically, it wasn’t always that way

what disturbs

and frightens us

will pass

like we pass

and the painful truth

is god too

passes

what disturbs

and frightens

will pass

like we pass

and the painful truth

is god too

passes

ed.  the above is my reply/ mirroring of st. teresa of avila’s famous prayer  nada te turbe

i’m not disturbed

or dismayed

by life’s constant changes

patience observes

life’s mystery

is my reworking  (immediately above)  of the more literal translation below to take "god" out, i feel her inclusion of it was to keep the inquisition happy, they were burning people

let nothing disturb you,

let nothing frighten you, all things are passing away

god never changes patience obtains all things

whoever has god lacks nothing

god alone suffices

museums

the reverb of those large empty spaces

and reflective exhibit cases

the spookiness and removal

of what has gone before

ed.  what follows below is an explanation of why, in the main you can’t take ch’an records as the "literal" historical fact of whatever "master" bestowing whatever words of wisdom

this is  wumen ,  13th century, medieval, so no iphones, no tape recorders, internet, 99% of the population illiterate, lots of oral history, centuries can pass before anything is written down, an empire fractured into different dialects, languages, governments, fluctuating central control, constant wars, invasions

from the wiki, he sounds like a bit of an iterant monk and collected stories as he travelled around, there were written records as well, but as to the veracity of what was recorded, its all up in the air, zen is basically a literary religion, mostly fictional in my view

however nanquan and zhaozhou lived in the eighth  —  ninth century, we don’t know if they were literate, i suspect not, so you would need some sort of oral history, perhaps passed down over centuries, then you have transcriptions of varying accuracy, copy after copy and language meaning changing with time and geography

and then you have the usual problems of translation being full of biases to serve the various "hobby horses" of the translators and the organisations they belonged to or felt affinity for

there’s this whole subject area called "philology", usually untouched, but needed

so basically you have got layers of problems, the authenticity of the texts, then "translation" and its philology and then the next layer of the reliability of what he wrote and his sources

you will get the whole span from a faithful portrayal (unlikely) ,  to highly embellished nonsense to total fiction

north korea

fiction becomes fact

variance

is murderous

the daoist "way"

just a path

in infinity

never ending

like everything else

a path

of

confusion

a lot of zen is standard philosophical tropes or literary fictions and is bedevilled by translation and textual difficulties

"truth" may seen like an obvious and intuitive fact, but its not an underlying condition of reality which is why, from our frame of reference, its so elusive

so, theologically, no god, just a sea of nothing

i keep posting  these studies , but the reality of what i do is a bit short

however, more and more i feel what you eat is more important which i think at least i have right, no sugar, no grains, plus offal

so against the norm of processed and ultra-processed foods, additives, endocrine disruptors, sugar, toxic sports drinks, alcohol, drugs, microplastics [ article         study ]

yes a demographic disaster is occurring

loss

the netherlands of nothingness

are

what speaks

we know the name

but

not

its

faces

cosmetic surgery

there will be

a generation

of children

not looking

like

their

mothers

cosmetic surgery

there will be

a generation

of children

not looking

like

the

mother

time translates

what we couldn’t see

into

what we can see

meister eckhart

talks about god

and abnegation of the self

i

don’t

talk

ed.  maybe the translations are of poor quality, but he’s never really gelled with me, however there is something to him, his main audience would have been monastic renunciates, in terms of which the highly personal approach makes sense, especially the way nuns would think

of course he lived in a "police state" environment in terms of the church and was constrained in the way he could put things, however this didn’t stop him being tried as a heretic, there are "gnostic" touches which would have been like a red rag to the ecclesiastical bull

contention

that nature of being

to stop you

being robbed

of your identity

or anything else

that can be pried from you

cut chilli peppers

floating in the stew

looking

like goldfish

to the mind’s eye

swishing around

waiting to be fed

cut chilli peppers

floating in the broth

looking

like goldfish

to the mind’s eye

swishing around

waiting to be fed

maybe why  musicians have such a high rate of drug abuse and  suicide , that is, being a musician is selective

my translation  (made many years ago)  of eihei dogen’s supposed "death poem"

54

years

confined

in

the river

of life

the

universe

fragments

SHIT !

i

always

was

the

living

dead !

fifty-four

years

caught

in

infinities

stream

a

universe

fragments

SHIT !

i

always

was

the

living

dead !

sky burial

nobody

to

be

fooled

the sea courses in and out

and in again

covering and uncovering

what would you name ?

i vanish  —

in the window

snows of eagle peak remain

ed.  shiko lived in the eastern section of kyoto, in the foothills of the mountain called washi-ga-mine (lit., eagle peak). he died  (in 1743 aged fifty)  during the height of the snow season and this is his last poem

quoted from "japanese death poems" by yoel hoffman

my  "reworking"

eagle peak

where i never was

now

am

always

is

why try to mould yourself to fit manufactured social stereotypes ?

the insolence of the faux, with their babbling of endless conceptual nonsense

what i was taught

at school

a vast sea of irrelevancy

that wasn’t the worst

what had to be unlearnt

that was the worst

prince albert and queen victoria were first cousins, i wonder if the disaster areas of two of her grandsons was due to this inbreeding of a not really talented for ruling couple ?

ballet, piano, violin, school grades, horses, the straightjackets of upper middle class convention or those that aspire to it

intention always contains possibilities of circumvention of intention, some of which, of necessity, will be realised

thus the world is the way it is

an interesting talk  on assembly theory by sara imari walker which really sounds a bit heideggerian, the very mixed bag of our social behaviour is due to an evolutionary fabrication of ourselves based on space and not time, whereas our being is an almost endless cumulative construction in time

AI  breaks boundaries  with satire

JRT  is a modified form of LSD with therapeutic potential for schizophrenia

study

interestingly it does not exacerbate gene expressions associated with psychosis, something one might assume LSD does

i have had quite a few interactions with LSD users on the web over the years and none of them were what i would call "sane", maybe they are chasing "neuroplasticity", but the package LSD gives is a vertiable pandora’s box

i think some people are chasing a beneficial effect with recreational drugs, but of course the "pandora’s box" of the chemistry makes the whole business personally and socially destructive

deflecting, so you keep going in circles

ed.  so characteristic of the thought processes of the younger generations, highly skilled in such sophistical techniques, but unable to act and think rationally

imaging is so essential to modern medicine, but in the case of  CT scans , each scan has a measurable cancer risk, it used to be thought that radiation exposure had "cut off" values, but its now known that the risk is incremental from the background radiation level and imo short "integrated doses" are disproportionately damaging compared to linear incrementation

there’s so little understanding of the basic problems of translation or source veracity in quoted texts, ignorance is wonderful, but it doesn’t lead you to getting things right

an interesting and effective "dramatization" of   madame mao’s  life, she’s a piece of work certainly, but has the typical ruthlessness and effective obsessiveness of historical chinese empresses or "powers behind the throne"

prodrome

winged feet that fly

up hills

and

down

until the crash

migraine

charles bukowski’s poem  the sharks  from his book "the days run away like wild horses"

spiritual prescriptions for living

fantasies of lotus eating

equanimity

is momentary

fantasies

about life

ptsd free

dream

on

sometime empress chen jaio’s life,   a slice  of imperial dynastic history, more drama than dramas !

cycles

of

commencement

resolution

and

ending

dream

on

and

on

and

on

rather

at some point

a spinning merry-go-round

we can

no longer

hang

on

to

writer’s block

is not a block

but an absence of threads

tying together/ that tie together

what lies suspended

waiting for the brain to catch up

i notice in the cataract surgeon youtubes, they completely avoid any discussion of time stability problems and subtleties like the capsule shifting the lens, the inevitableness of pco, glistening, astigmatic progression, smooth vs diffractive ridges etc

they don’t actually think about these things i have decided, rather they focus on what they do which is surgery, so you are advised to fill in the gaps yourself

two

was asked for

so

i gave

three

why would you say the story about heidegger approving the writing of d. t. suzuki is not "apocryphal" ?

1.  its not the sort of thing that heidegger would say about any living person or their writing

2.  the book itself from a philosophical point of view is just blowsy nonsense

3.  “ Barrett reports  :  “A German friend of Heidegger told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of Suzuki’s books; ‘If I understand this man correctly,’ Heidegger remarked, ‘this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings’ ” (Barrett, , xi)

The truth of this story is  unverifiable  and irrelevant, but Barrett considers its moral undeniable ”

4.  gaslighting in the religious world is the norm rather than the exception, someone with zen buddhist leanings attempts to build the reputation of zen by inventing this story

before it begins

is ever after

after

so they say

but don’t say

say

before it begins

is ever after

after

so they say

or don’t say

say

dramas

plays

when possibility

walks

in the improbable

for without this

entertainment

is withheld

without "compression"

you are back

in

the

real

world

the "normative world"

created

by

blinders

uncreated

by

deficiency

women

the power of ovaries

and they know it

women

the power of ovaries

its not much else

the world within

the world without

the magic of being

within and out

retrocausality

the future causes the past

well we know what it causes

but what it is

is

unknown

narratives

top to bottom

left to right

south  to  north   east  to  west

this

world

i’ve met temple grandin, she’s not as "off the wall" as portrayed in the  biopic ,  has a penchant for strawberries and is physically intimidating

what "zen" is, is open to debate, if you are looking for a theology then its difficult to extricate it from european philosophy because hume was familiar with and incorporated buddhist ideas from jesuit missionaries

but if you have taken zen to be more open-ended and mystical than buddhism, then if you read the records they negates more than anything else, the sayings of joshu are exemplary for this

conversely buddhism and zen are very heavily infiltrated by greek philosophy from the bactrian kingdoms, and i would say, zen has also been influenced by nestorian christianity which was around in tang dynasty china

the way life is these days with its constant and extraordinary demands for change and adaption, that even moderate social drinking is problematic, ending up with a frozen brain at thirty leaves you out of the flow

the whole problem of modern arts education is the channelling of mediocre talents into a life path they are not intellectually suited for with the unpleasant artefact of swamping whatever field they are in with truckloads of artistic junk some of which local councils seem doomed to pay for to create permanent  eyesores

“ Zen’s not-self ”

this can mean anything and isn't heidegger paradigmatic for philosophy being an obscuration of ideas that can be expressed in english simply ?

the real "verfallen" parallels of heidegger and zen go back to pre WW2 and his being an unrepentant nazi and zen being a manic propagandist for japanese imperialism ie whatever their claims, both are deeply flawed to the point of being discredited

fishing the flesh from the bones

not only caught

but

eviscerated

abstract poetry

should abstract from something

not

nothing

zen and their circles

ninnies following their noses

around and around

how

pitiful

women

eyeliner

eyeshadow

glitter

mascaras

primers

false eyelashes

palettes

a window

into

what ?

a

 cosmetics counter ?

myth versus actual history

what happened versus what was imagined to happen, glamorized or gaslighted

or never even

happened

at all

fictional worlds

of the never was or will be

a stasis of ever was and will be

entries in the library of babel

 or pearls on the strings of infinity ?

fictional worlds

of the never was or will be

a stasis of ever was and will be

entries in the library of babel

 or pearls on a string of infinity ?

ed.   the library of babel  by jorge luis borges

advertising

you know the content creators don’t have any brains

those comforting male voices or female hysterical ones

so

off-putting

the hilarious notion

of any safety in the first

or truth in the second

slow motion

life or physics

it shows something

culture differences

from quirks

to

major divides

existence

outside

materiality

the puzzle

that

perplexes

an interesting  painting  by jean fouquet, in reality a sort of death mask of the king’s mistress agnès sorel with a rather discordant blend of mysticism and realism, a bit creepy, but of course its modernity that has the prohibitions against picturing dead bodies

if you have ever been in a supermarket and wondered about  the logic behind  being assaulted with whatever sonic crap

“ There’s a tendency to create clichés ”

thinking in clichés

how

pathetic !

ed.  the quote is from the "song of focusing the precious mirror" translated by thomas cleary in "the five houses of zen"

life

its thousands of unadded sums

without the necessary conclusions

we cannot move forward

life

its thousands of unadded sums

without the necessary conclusions

you cannot move forward

the space of life

the circularity

going around and around

constantly changing

but the pattern is the same

if reincarnation has a deeper meaning

this is it

the past

what we can’t change

the future

what we can’t see

the present

the no-man’s land in-between

the familiar

even if it didn’t exist

we would build it

to

look

the

same

there’s no illusion like giving advice, for thinking you know something

two online tests that can tell you an awful lot about your vision are the duochrome and amsler grid, worth becoming familiar with to get the subtle aspects, so you can with more certainty navigate the health system to get what you want/need

i just had a YAG laser treatment  (capsulotomy)  for PCO in one eye yesterday and its been super successful, the eye is back to what it was when the cataract operation was first done and the lens replaced, also, surprisingly, minimal floaters, though i was warned to expect them

i can already feel a huge difference in less eye strain as previous to the yag, one eye had to do most of the work and now its the other way around, the "yaged" eye is actually better than the other good eye

PCO doesn’t just mask the lens, but can also shift the position of the iol as it tightens the capsule on the lens

contemporary YAG machines are one of the big breakthroughs in modern eye treatment, previous to them, you had to have a surgical operation to remove the capsular obstruction

there’s research saying that poor eyesight can be a contributing factor to dementia, i must admit to feeling a lot less stressed now knowing that the YAG operation is so quick, easy and successful and will get the next eye done when the time comes, that the brain seems to calibrate itself on vision quality and its projected function; poor vision or its prospect and its not happy

getting old is just a process of slowly being taken out by your weak links and i am fortunate in that even in the last decade very substantial improvements are being made that directly address my areas of health fragility and i remain "medication free"

"social justice" is a recent concept and alien to historical cultures

you don’t get it until marxism and you know the reality that followed that, so really its a marxist and neo-marxist concept and like some ideas of that ilk, not without utility, but of course "inequality" is in the eye of the beholder and becomes part of the usual gaslighting stable the species seems to so admire

two minds about something

resolution

is an illusion

understanding runs along the watershed of nuance

what i have noticed is that whoever you are, how capable or whatever is we all have blind spots that are more than a walkthrough to injury to ourselves, rather an active abetting and you just have to hit it and its an eventual disaster

life is only safe if you don’t come across them

what is

always is

except when it isn’t

and is

always isn’t

but isn’t that

always is ?

when medical or iatrogenic effects being examined in a study you can get things occurring which are called "not statistically significant" but still happen, ie its difficult to relate cause and effect because of data "noise" but all the same you can’t rule out the relationship

you have this in particle physics which can test hypotheses over decades and get an almost certain 2 sigma result, but its not regarded as proven until you get 5 sigma, however, two sigma or five sigma, it was always the case

to those claiming that the covid vaccines are without long term side effects, well the astrazeneca vaccine was withdrawn because of blood clotting problems and denmark and sweden stopped the use of the moderna vaccine in young men because of the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis

i have had two pfizer  (well separated)  that gave me sore kidneys for months, something i never had before and i won’t be getting any more MRNA vaccines until they solve the problem of the lipid nanoparticles carriers crossing the blood brain barrier so you get the spike protein being made in the brain

“ . . .  but I know two different men who got the moderna and had heart attacks at 20 / 21, both of them had fluid buildup around their hearts.  One of my mom’s friends got moderna and had a heart attack at fifty which I don’t know the entire situation but legit got the jab, next day dead ”

the moderna had a lot more MRNA in compared to the pfizer, in fact pfizer deliberately kept it lower which means moderna knowingly went for a higher risk, perhaps because the larger amount gave better protection against covid or their formulation needed more

vitamin D mutes inflammatory responses so that can be a factor in a variable reaction to vaccines and of course there are underlying conditions being exacerbated

scenery  from the kagbeni to chhusang trail, upper mustang, nepal

4K and superb photography, better than being there !

a park seat  in the middle of nowhere

moderator behaviour on message boards can be incredibly "political" at the expense of being rational, just showing an extensive vocabulary can be upsetting to some

philosophy

is not bound

in views

but

is

an endless

open-ended

mess

heinrich himmler’s favourite book was the  bhagavad gita

its very uneven, of the sort that comes from having many authors, some of which with multiple religious axes to grind, others more objective, like other forms of "wisdom literature" you can read what you want from it i guess

hanging on

doesn’t bring the dead back

nothing

does

i think   WW1  wasn’t inevitable, however serbia had developed a specialist assassination culture reflecting a nationalism that placed austrian dignitaries at constant risk and the only way for austria to curtail this was invade serbia

both russia and germany could have backed off supporting their allies and this would have kept the war small scale, but the leadership of each lacked the inclination to do this, neither the kaiser nor tzar had the foresight or competence to steer through the crisis to their own and their countries best interests

the kaiser was in part a figurehead, but his cousin the tzar did have the power to change things and this mismatch between the system that empowered him and his lack of ability to steer it adequately, in my view created a chain of disasters for europe and russia that has persisted up to the present day

people do make a difference in history, but the usual course in international politics is for mistakes to plummet countries through extremes, though in this case the connectivity and lags of the then current technology, ie alliances formed and kept to enabled, but the quick modification of positions and depth of renegotiation not enabled also contributed and of course WW2 was just the whole business on steroids

memories becoming real

people we meet later

aging in-between

the silent destroyer

of what was

out of which

nothingness

gapes at us

we

are

dismayed

i disagree  with this , HMNZS Manawanui was sent to sea in a non-seaworthy state, that is, there was no integrated control system (sorta AI in fact) able to identify and resolve conflicts in the various functional segments, $100 million lost for want of $450,000 being spent to develop one

same thing with the Aratere ferry, only the crew knew more what they were doing and got away with a minor grounding

this is subtle, but none the less the real issue, humans responding well in panic situations is against ,  rather than the rule

forgiveness

old hatreds

injuries

fade

time

washes

all

away

something to think about if you come from the pre  varicella zoster  (chickenpox) vaccine generations

“ Unmarried people are  less likely  to develop dementia than married people ”

in my view this is because of the increased viral exposure associated with families and living with people

you’re missionizing, straight into sophism avoiding the detail of what i say

i was just thinking that from the russian cultural "anti-semitic" point of view, christianity and  marxism  had the same flaw, their founding prophets were jewish and oddly the western "far-left" today has an obvious anti-semitic stance

the problem with "substances" is, do they cause permanent brain damage ?

the way the brain is, unfortunately, is that temporary damage or changed function also leaves a footprint of permanent damage

i don’t agree that psychedelics leave no footprint, however there may be contexts they are useful like PTSD, but in general from what i have seen people using them not only do not benefit, but become more stupid

the great weirdness of drugs is the way users won’t leave you alone, but constantly missionize their craziness, like they are some sort of good advertisement !

of course social reference points like "normal" alcohol use and TBI from sports are not helpful as they are already in the damaging area

what is already a problem, but going to accelerate is living longer and the degree of dementia that is occurring, join the dots .    .    .    .

the korean director kim ki-duk was becoming resident in lativa to avoid reputational problems in korea and ended up dying of covid there, not much in the way of skin vitamin D in that climate of course and imo could have been a factor in his death

the trailer of his film  dissolve  which is all i have seen of it looks promising, its a pity he died, i don’t know why art films are not more popular, but they are too disjunctive from the way most people think or view the world, ie the viewing experience is traumatic

most questions have no fixed basis to ask from, so the answers running around will reflect this

a translation is an opinion, so when you give an opinion on a translation, you are giving an opinion on an opinion

john cleese explains  dunning-kruger  syndrome

i do think if you look objectively at results, despite being very unskilled in a certain area, you will pick you are no good at it

the key word here is "objective"

be careful, skills and competence, like incompetence are uneven landscapes full of surprises

“ i feel bad for you ”

lol, hang onto that feeling !

outclassed

you

are

boundaries

gender

male

female

children

cats

dogs

animal

people

countries

division is raw

and

ongoing

TLDR;

all that text

and no-one

is any the wiser !

korea is totally weird and actually very autistic

seoul is only 150km south of a nazi style concentration camp, there is always an underlying tension, culturally and militarily

sleep does something to memory because if i have something to do after i wake, then when i wake it has gone out of my mind

an exception to that is if i really focus on an important task, then i do remember

a sign of writing professionalism is you want as large an appreciative audience as possible so it doesn’t pay to indulge in unnecessary obfuscation

writing is a skill but words are many and can overwhelm any ability to have them carry a freight they don’t harmonize with

religion

the banality

of the stupid

suicide

you think it doesn’t affect you

but

the memory

doesn’t

die

she strips away

poetry

to

get

to

the

core

of

her

ideas

this

is

how

banality

works

the barriers between us

razor wire down the line

thank-god

the segmented world of the cut and dried

seems easy

except

when it bleeds around the edges

women

make-up

like

aging

can

be

reversed

these people who blur their own words with some quoted to fool you into upgrading your opinion of them, such a shoddy trick

it does appear that there is a large increase  in cancer  related deaths occurring, possibly or in part due to the MRNA covid vaccines for which there are known mechanisms

it was always apparent to me at the time that the underlying assumption was that infringements on the health of the general populace and children was a justifiable sacrifice to be made for a few years of extra life for the medically fragile, that is, a radically new untested vaccine was mandated on this basis, even pushed onto children when the evidence was that children responded differently to covid and didn’t need the vaccine

i can’t see that any real data/studies will be funded for this because of the huge liabilities involved, i notice this even in research papers on matters as minor as diet, that only countries outside the western orbit and its legal system will research areas that conflict with strong commercial or governmental interests

i had two pfizers separated by months, maybe that was optimal, some protection against covid without getting too far into increased cancer risk and in fact i don’t think i have ever had covid

this may all sound like a conspiracy theory, but actually, sometimes the conspiracy theories are true, you cannot say, per se, something that sounds like such a theory is necessarily untrue

god must traverse infinity

like the rest of us

because

if he/she arrived

"they"

would cease

to

exist

ed.  there’s no concept more gender blurred than "god" if you think about it

growing old

listening to a ryokan poem

calms me

my brain is not what it was

but

was it ever much ?

its like there’s nothing

going to absence

then what

is just filled

with

me

you

fragrance

that

stays

the chinese have a saying that approximates our "tall poppy syndrome"

ripe ears of wheat should keep their heads down

the female face

more draw

than all the horsepower

of the world

underneath the stars i’ll meet you  (composed by kate rusby) in an arrangement by jim clements sung by voces8

its actually quite stressful being famous, they are constantly having to deal with people who don’t understand boundaries and the asymmetry of knowledge, ie the general public know a lot more about him/her than the other way around and strangers are always an unknown and potentially dangerous quantity

its interesting to compare the situation in today’s world with the 19th century, schopenhauer had a letter of introduction to lord byron from goethe, but he passed up on the opportunity to use it and meet byron because his girlfriend was so clearly enamoured of byron, a decision he later regretted

a "power couple" of the time, robert browning and his wife elizabeth had a constant stream of strangers just dropping in at  casa guidi  and this was considered a normal thing

and something that is not quite the same, but shows the attitudes is elizabeth bennet and her uncle and aunt on their holiday calling in at, and being shown around darcy’s pemberley

i think the difference today is without the filtering of social class and a highly structured society that placed a lot of emphasis on manners and social skills, results are much more random and of course another factor is the huge number of people on psychiatric medications that once were incarcerated in institutions, you can never be sure of what you are dealing with

“  the detrimental impact of   ultra-processed  foods on the human gut microbiome and gut barrier ”

this study crosses a number of boundaries into very significant contemporary health problem areas

“  our results  challenge the common view that longevity is invariably associated with low cholesterol levels

furthermore, moderate hypercholesterolemia does not preclude the oldest adult from attaining advanced ages, contrary to common belief ”

go suck eggs that doctor who tried to put me on statins

the tragedy of aging

being an island of non-adaptation in a tempestuous world

i think in all art, you are looking for a multiphasic simplification of complexity, good art must have both

a lot of modern art is just simple, well the fools pay for it so the demand is going to be met

benign and not benign

we can skate around the edges of infinity

and get too high a doses of both

there’s a lot of good chinese poetry around from the various dynasties and time periods but the question i have is how does that differ from celibate recluses who really have given up the world, and there’s not many of them, ryokan, shiwu/stonehouse and possibly han shan of cold mountain fame though its quite possible he had a family

stonehouse is incredibly nihilistic, so much so its almost hard to take and i think that’s what the difference is, though you do get a more subtle abrogation  -  abnegation of the world in the classy poets like wang wei

its something no-one can force

besides knowing there’s nothing to know

the moon shines bright above the flowering plum

but who can look past the blossoms ?

the poem above  from

shiwu

ryokan   :

a cool breeze

a solitary mirror

index

you know, its no surprise all these famous figures in sports where there’s  a head injury risk  end up in the courts for some offense anyone half sane would have steered well clear of, yet these same sports are promoted in schools and universities

the nature of a decoy is it decoys

so don’t be surprised when you find yourself trapped

in autumn now

i dreamt of spring

blossoms

a vitality

i could never reach

it didn’t sadden me

only

the receding

from them

i think DNA and RNA are fundamental to a definition of life and you need to have replication at the cellular and species level

you might even say RNA viruses are half alive which gives a continuum

i don’ think life extends to machines outside biology because "biology" is the only machine that can create the required functional density and self-organizational ability

in support of this, there is nothing so far to suggest life outside biology anywhere in the universe, of course there could be other biologies on other planets but i suspect they won’t be that different or will be at least recognizably similar to ours on earth

arthur schopenhauer’s "the will to live"   =   karl friston’s "the free energy principle" on different scales, representation is in the area of the epistemological allowance carved out of "reality" by will/ theories of mind

all these doctors on youtube trotting out what they were taught in medical school with no idea how the latest research varies from that

new research is showing the universe is not uniform with regional variation of the physical laws, why do we think one size fits all ?

the problem with autocracies/dictatorships like russia is they are too dependent on the leader making competent decisions and that is the case with putin in recent years, probably because he is getting too old and has health problems

trump’s election gave putin a get of jail free card, but he’s fluffing it, could have walked away with his life and a face saving deal

he should read the history of prolonged conflicts, its the alliance with the highest economic mass that wins and sanctions matter

i’ve read  this poem  by maggie smith before, what it helped me understand was how the female mind works, i think in general how different it is is not well perceived by men at all, in fact, so large, its frightening

parents and children are different people

one may mimic the other

but they are not alike

parents and children are different people

one may mimic the other

but they are not the same

if i have ever followed through with anything

please tell me

empty successes

that

never

eventuate

life cries

but

i

ignore

her

i think you "meta" things too much, deal in explanations rather than the thing itself

this is a great weakness of zen and any religion in fact

africa

land of rains

red roads

forests

deserts

shining

black

picaninny

faces

and

song

ed.  "picaninny" was not always a pejorative term, rather derived from the portuguese "pequenino" and its a pity it lost its neutral meaning of being pleasantly descriptive of children of any race

the dancing  is quite sensible and used to be done for british factory work, it moves the lymph and venous return, helpful for jobs that have limited movement and is the propaganda any worse than corporate culture and advertising ?

long roads

from nowhere to nowhere

meaning is garnered

in-between

talent

prodigy

aptitude

genius

retarded

so

intelligence

spans

from

the knowable

to

unknowable

the problem with myopia, particularly severe myopia is it makes a host of eye diseases much more likely or even certain and its not just asian populations that have this issue, there is a developing epidemic due to the amount of close work and lack of bright sunshine that children receive these days

dr. michael chua  talks  about the causes

love may be blind, but its in your interests not to be blind

progress

by inches

millimeters even

living longer

helps

heaven and earth

one steps from the other

giddy

we

look

down

mesmerised

by

the

distance

the buddhist "dharma"

hot air and cold

blowing away

meaning

painting

a scene that builds

not 100% fidelity

rather

happenstance

and

interior

imagination

also

take

their

part

in

shape

“ its an ill wind that blows no good ”

its a truly beneficial wind that blows no discomfort

funny how we get one but not the other ?

some jobs like say hairdressers, everyday you are going to be in contact for a short period with a lot of different people and maybe this gives them some unusual insights, lol, there may be hidden depths below the usual babble !

“ but I tried posting to r|lonely and it was autodeleted for some reason ”

hilarious, made my day !

the real life zen i’m familiar with, doesn’t emphasize meditation as the be all and end all, but as something that facilitates the "dai kensho" experience which is in effect, the key that opens the door  (ed. from the sayings of joshu number 4)

there are adherents to a strict interpretation of dogen and his "meditation" being the end result in itself like brad warner, but even brad says his dai kensho experience on the bridge over the sengawa river in tokyo’s setagaya ward was primary

the problem is there are very few authentic "dai kensho" experiences, most are manufactured which is why zen is infested with "wokism" these days

edit :   i just came across this in the "gateless gate"

case 9.   daitsu chisho buddha

a monk asked seijo, "daitsu chisho buddha did zazen (meditated) for ten kalpas in a meditation hall, could not realize the highest truth, and so could not become fully emancipated. why was this ?"

seijo replied "your question is a very appropriate one !"

the monk asked again "why did he not attain buddhahood by doing zazen in the meditation hall ?"

seijo replied "because he did not"

the theory of wars is that they are an active inferential process of gathering information about relative strength and the projection of its trends

you can see from this that any ceasefire in the russo-ukraine war is still ambiguous and the process of "discovery" is still occurring

an interestingly "topsy-turvey" feature is that nature of language alignment in most wars which would lead to the conjecture that russia and the ukraine would be natural allies, however this is not the case and this perhaps in part explains the tardiness/misperception of NATO in providing the "boots on the ground" the ukraine so desperately needs

déjà vu

has it happened before ?

it has happened before

an intersect with another world

the magic

quickly passes

a footprint so transient

we can hardly believe it

after the event

we find out

before the event

is real knowledge

i just had three fillings put in, totally painless, the marvels of anaesthetic though the effect took five hours to wear off, funny feeling with half your face not there

none of this "warming up" the instruments of amputation that lord nelson insisted on before battle because he knew how painful the cold tools were when his arm was removed

the dentist was a young bangladeshi woman, very intelligent and articulate, but all these years after the problems of mercury amalgam fillings are now well known and publicized, she still didn’t understand the full extent of the hazard because even at this time they still don’t teach that in the dental schools and she even thought that "burnishing" the amalgam fillings was a good idea !

however she did say there was a growing awareness of the toxicity of fluoride in the dental profession especially flushes given with dental work for children, i use a sodium fluoride toothpaste and occasionally supplement with topical iodine to counteract the fluoride, but that’s it

different types of the real

include the fantastical

if you can’t make sense of this

you are right

different types of the real

include the fantastical

if you can’t understand  this

you are right

this is really  depressing ,  how can people be like this, but that’s how the world is !

the other side of war is a break down in social order ie lawlessness and what emerges from lawlessness

i think today we are seeing some degree of a social break down in societies where you would not expect this

an interesting factoid from the french revolution is that the political terms ,  left and right came from where the delegates in the national assembly sat

before the revolution, europeans did not think in terms of left and right or really much in terms of national identity at all which is why the revolution is so fundamental to modern history with an unfortunately bloody template that seems to have been followed by various later rebellions

the media

politics

unending  gaslighting

one thing posting on net message boards has taught me, is rather than do a direct personal attack, is present information in such a manner that the conclusion drawn has the same effect

there’s no point in putting people’s backs up because they also benefit from the different perspective, however be wary of those who both take the advantage of the information and still will try to kick you down

most people might be "sniffy" about net message boards like reddit, but they do teach you write and be able to handle "dissenters", lol, which from my point of view is just about everybody

ignorance and a propensity to spiel misinformation are such deep human traits

“ let go, and even rubble radiates light; hold still and even gold loses its lustre ”

the above quote is from the pointer to case 31 in the blue cliff record

let go, and even gold loses its lustre, hold still and the rubble radiates light

women go through the massive and irreversible phase change called pregnancy

men have no idea and never will and no wonder women put it off if they can

is before god more god than god after ?

god knows ? !

myocardial infarction and cardiovascular risks associated with cannabis use   :   a multi-center retrospective  study

adults under fifty are more than six times as likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke or other life-threatening heart conditions if they use marijuana according to the above study

six times in terms of a medical statistical study of this nature is huge, its hardly surprising youth mortality is increasing

sounds of dropping

softly

clanking

the abilities we take for granted

aging

my revisionist history of the world

everything that happened didn’t happen

everything that didn’t happen  happened

this is the social template

of madness

i don’t think its helpful to think of alternative courses our life might have taken

there are a number of reasons for this

what we are

consists of revisiting

what we were

or else

we would not be we

sad and joyous

and so we plough on

the arc of the circle

always returning

to a blurred beginning

the french revolution was born of a disparity between the governance competence of the monarchy and the needs of an increasingly more complex state, illustrated in part by the diamond necklace  scandal/scam  which was very badly handled

a deep flaw of the european hereditary monarchical system compared to chinese/ asian and middle eastern/ islamic emperors was the very small pool of heirs and consequent limited intellectual diversity that monogamous traditions have by their nature compared to what large harems produced, louis the xvi and marie antionette were too ordinary in emotionality and ability to provide the governance strength and changes needed, rather like the last tzar and tzarina

interestingly the other approach to retain or generate the necessary skills was the egyptian and spanish marrying within the family, but you know in the end the deformed tutankhamun and those very ugly hapsbergs, only works for a while

and at the other extreme when you get super competent rulers like napoleon and alexander the great, they have no institutional constraints and ultimately get disastrously overextended ,  or in the case of stalin and mao, murderously effective at suppressing internal opposition

life went from prebiotic to the last universal common ancestor  (LUKA)  which was a bacteria like organism with a large genome in several hundred million years which is extraordinarily fast and shows how quickly life can arise if the conditions are right

conversely the length of time from LUKA to us is 4.5 billion years, an order of magnitude and a half  slower

life will be relatively common in the universe, but the jump to a radio communicating civilizations is huge and explains the absence of signs of any others

segments of life make sense

can’t say much for the rest

the virtue of migraine is

you know the approach to death

then

rebound

its happened so often

i won’t know

when the rebound

doesn’t

happen

"the great death" of zen

no single point

but a flowing river of being

"the theory of everything" which is a scientific restatement of the theology of "god" are/is inherently recursive and meaningless

why people have trouble seeing this, i don’t know

there’s nothing more destructive than war between two equally matched parties, a quote from sun  tzu

the peloponnesian war being one example and the russo-ukranian another, and of course WW1 and WW2, the problem is for alliances to form in a manner that makes for relative military equality

it is only nuclear weapons with their immense and fatal power that can break this cycle so there has to be armament and a preparedness to use them, the ukraine is a living and unfortunate testimony to the effects of the unilateral nuclear disarmament that occurred, driven by bill clinton and the americans who clearly had no understanding of the geopolitical realities in eastern europe

the circumference of the sea

as wide as wide can be

stretching corner to corner of my eye

and top to bottom of the sky

and so i reap what i do sow

further and further have i to go

the circumference of the sea

as wide as me

stretching corner to corner of my eye

and top to bottom of the sky

and so i reap what i do sow

further and further have i to go

ed.  the weather was very fine that autumn day, and all along the coast you could see a very wide horizon as you looked out to sea

researching luggage allowances for a flight, the exclusion of pacemakers in the count for electronic devices amused me

the complexity of the regulations of what you can and can’t carry are mind boggling with a very big elephant in the room, lithium batteries are an extremely dangerous  fire risk  and really shouldn’t be allowed, but of course, that’s impossible

if you have to deconstruct an argument, look for the axioms it based on and deal with them directly rather than argue the detail on the ontology that follows, if the commanders are killed then the soldiers will become dispirited and flee the battle field

any marriage or relationship is full of "gaslighting", even parents with their children, that being the case, you can't expect life in general to be any different

atheism is simply a disguised  (well not that disguised)  humanism

everyone

pictures of reality

they try to impose

only fools listen

plato

known for

the farce of his involvement

with the tyrants

of

sicily

the socratic dialogues of course

but

that mysterious orb of platonic space

outshines

them all

dried flowers

still retain some colour

interesting

even

in

death

“ I am pissed with this shit, i’m gonna get drunk ”

that’s a maladaptive strategy

“ because if i act on what i’d like to do them, i’d get totally fucked by the legal system ”

you don’t want to be like prisoners who can’t beat "the system" rather all their focus is on messing each other up

i think you would benefit from reading  the art of war  by sun tzu

its not an even world

some have abilities in areas others don’t

the problem with education, is that to be taught effectively, it has to be done is a way that resonates and it may be that different ways resonate with different people, so you are always going to get large gaps in what is attempted to be conveyed

when buying a laptop, go for a terabyte rather than 512K of ssd because reliability is inversely proportional to wear, also 16 or 32 gig of ram, 8 while ok for android is too little for win 11

of course battery life is another variable, but that wasn’t a high priority for me

a way of looking at the "collapse of the wave function" is that it represents the transition from a mathematical description into physical reality, that’s what being an "observer" means

you can call it decoherence, or emergence, or a number of other things, the physical world is so complex and pulls in a rather large number of ways, the simple theoretical world of quantum mechanics no longer exists

god or no god

unending answers

because

of

the

stupidity

of

the

question

what we can see

but ignore

makes life

harder for us

not right or wrong

but difficulty

teaching us

if

we

listen

the argument is that the cultural revolution was so destructive that the chinese society lost any finesse and sophistication in its manners and attitudes and you get a very crude and violent materialism in the absence, you can also see it in attitudes like "wolf warrior" which is less than functional international diplomacy

crass  beyond belief

three shang civilization  poems  (1600 to 1046 BCE ) translated by arthur waley

feminism  on steroids

the mechanism for large language models is quite simple, they are trained on mind bogglingly large amounts of text by the selective removal of words and having to predict what in fact was there before removal, then, to generate text in response to a query, they simply predict what the next word will be as per their learning

you can actually write like this, sorta fun, except the "tokens" might be several words at once, i do this for some of my poetry/ homilies now, treating it, a bit like a puzzle, you write some lines that you feel have semantic coherence, then hit a blank and come back later when a new batch of words turns up, that the brain has been attempting to generate in the meantime

so the training and generative aspects are two sides of the same coin, the problem and limitation of large language models is the text and i’d hallucinate if i was reading that much too !

so meaning is in fact a bunch of associations and i think some of these networks are more elegant and beautiful than others, and some can be messy snarls of tangles and we have trouble differentiating between them

rejection

dysfunction

disorder

retardation

incapacity

travail

all

the

holy

attributes

All things being one thing makes   sense   nonsense

the west has aleksandr lukashenko to thank for the recent russian debacle in the ukraine, to be successful in the ukraine, russia needed to have annexed belarus and have it integrated into the russian federation for a decade and modernised its economy, this was not done because lukashenko was so successful in pulling the wool over russian eyes, the ukrainians should give him some sort of medal

now he’s simply waiting on the sidelines being somewhat obstructive to russia and seeing how the dice rolls and get what he can take advantage of, foxes don’t come any wilier

i don’t think consciousness is scale free, it comes about as a happy conjunction of a certain functional physiological density that opens desirable/ necessary quantum effects to become available to it, ie the brain is only permissible at the scale we see it

the interesting thing about consciousness is how it defines a similar but separate state for all of us/ conscious beings

we infer others have this, but we cannot know it, nonetheless there is some commonality in terms of it being shared

i started thinking about this thirty years ago and its still an almost totally obscure puzzle

mechanistically, say in terms of the "free energy" theory you can see some basis for the "sharing" in a certain commonality of perception, but it doesn’t seem the whole story, especially once you factor in "platonic space"

something is

and something

isn’t

reality melts

wasn’t it all a dream ?

tom holland and dominic sandbrook discuss  helen of troy

how christianity created  the industrial revolution  by breaking down kinship obligations and enabling genetic diversity  (aptitude)  to steer occupations and knowledge acquisition

there’s a lot that makes sense in this video, you can see the problems with the russian and chinese governments being still based on elite family networks and how communism is actually an attempt to simulate what the church was doing in terms of breaking up the primacy of kinship groups, a change that took only decades compared to the centuries of the church, no wonder it was all so violent

in my view a lot of the social problems with modern education come from its partial failure to facilitate the matching of aptitude with skilled occupations through various ideological inhibitions

an extract from Mendelssohn’s piano concerto no.1 in G minor  played  by Alexandra Dovgan

the composition  in full

i think the performance is in russia, alexandra is in a rather plain dress that looks homemade, and the conductor’s and orchestra’s clothing doesn’t look much different, a culture of scarcity though the piano is yamaha, i bet its not top of the range

a society with the extremes of artistic excellence yet so often victim to a coarse, low brow, state organised brutality/ violence

our flicker of light

the beginning and end of the universe

one contains the other

speculation

a world of probabilities

future being

more scattered

than can be predicted

or

coped with

humans

supernatural powers

overlooking

the supernatural power

they exist

i love writing, its much more equivocal/ ambiguous than conversation, but it also enables abstraction and generalization in a way that talking with its extra cues doesn’t

modern fruit varieties have so much sugar in them, its just crazy that there should be any other sources of sugar in the diet at all

consuming sugar is like putting mileage on a car, its what wears the body and if you believe in a creator god, ask him/her why the pancreatic islets find insulin toxic ?  do the three types of diabetes make for holiness or present more opportunities for free will ?

a surprisingly  listenable  performance of philip glass’s études no. 6 played by yuja wang who, i have to say, is consistently the best dressed concert pianist

history’s eye is dispassionate and has no place for the "holier than thou"

re-interpretation of the past in terms of today’s values gives no insight at all

do memories have an autonomous agency ?

one might think so

what does the "off label" use of a drug or medication tell you ?

that any drug has a collection of effects and the division into wanted versus side-effects is somewhat arbitrary

germaine de staël  led an over the top life, absolutely extraordinary, fiction doesn’t come close

obscure works of art need explanation or be consigned to oblivion

seen in the supermarket this early evening, four young men moving quickly through, one having hid on his person some device blasting rap/gangsta music, carrying no groceries and earnest, forward staring, purposeful faces such as the angsty insecure might expect "gangstas" to look, they then marched out into the mall and disappeared, hardly certain of the impression they had created and quickly disappeared from sight and hearing

the other odd thing that happened today is at lunch waiting for my order of chicken and some very oversalted chips at the kentucky’s a man kept staring at me intently and it later turned out he thought i was a friend of his, claiming i was his spitting image, this also happened many decades ago so i suppose myself not to be without "doppelgangers" or at least having some plasticity of being that allows people to stamp whatever projection onto me

later that afternoon i walked along the beach by myself which had a spring low tide and the benefit of a shorter walk to the point along the exposed sand, the sea was moderately rough and having no wisdom to impart, i looked for some myself, but couldn’t find any and after looking along the coast from the point walked back along the beach to the prospect of more shopping 

dr. karl friston explains the  free energy principle

a bit tedious, but worth the listen as it is becoming foundational to modern philosophy and biology, its a fundamental shift from "tabula rasa" to a brain pre-loaded with "theories of mind" trying to fit what it sees with what the theories predict

"apologism" an attempt to justify something untrue, but held to as a belief

you get it in every religion and ideology, it seeks to persuade rather than use force, so i guess that is the positive side of it, just a form of "gaslighting" i guess

what to choose ?

already

the answer

is

wrong

i don’t think its well understood that  fever  provided it doesn’t get too high is actually the body activating its own immune system to be more efficient and therefore taking fever supressing medications in most situation is dysfunctional

a year ago, in hospital for the "turp" operation, i will never forget being woken for the usual post op checks several times and almost being forced to take (which i didn’t) by some young idiot of a nurse (male) a temperature dropping medication for a half degree rise, and that was after people offering pain medications earlier when the pain was far from justifying that sort of "remedy" and the consequent side effects

it dawned on me that to navigate yourself through a hospital stay you need a good degree of medical knowledge as a counterbalance to staff ignorance and their pill pushing psychology, fortunately another nurse had told me that you always have the right to refuse medications and treatment

there was a hilarious episode where the nurse didn’t measure my blood pressure properly and it read way too low so soon i have the entire floor staff standing around me unable to understand why i seemed perfectly well

i searched the web on what happens post op ,  and after the catheter had fallen out the next night and another incident with a nurse checking up on me with a fallen out catheter and me suggesting to him something was wrong and he looking all around and not spotting the obvious fact, fortunately having read up on google i knew i didn’t need the catheter re-inserted so i refused to have that done and left early the next morning on my own account, had breakfast at the hotel opposite the hospital, slept and rested for several hours in the room i have previously booked and then drove the three hour trip back home

when i talked to the surgeon for the checkup a week later, he was quite sympathetic, not having a high opinion of what can happen in post op care, interestingly he was surprisingly opposed to the MRNA covid vaccine, only having it himself because of work requirements and never let his family be vaccinated, one of the advantages of being a doctor is you see the extremes of what goes wrong

spread too thin

the surface tension of our being

breaks

and

so

do

we

yet

new

life

rushes

in

lives lived together

and apart

strange resonances

creep

between

knowledge

the slow knitting of the world together

so it doesn’t fall apart

aliens

the male and female worlds

are as strange as you can get

an interesting  account  of the roman emperor claudius and his wife messalina who got way out of her depth, a failed political plot against her husband that ended up with her body being thrown  at her mother’s feet  aged only eighteen, btw i think the stories about her promiscuity are just propaganda, however claudius was no fool and must have taken the objective decision to have her killed, the great grand niece of augustus and the mother of the next roman emperor made her too potent a political rival and she had proved she could not be trusted

these actual historical lives of course have been made famous by the BBC series "I Claudius" based on robert graves’ novel

young women

empowered beyond

their ability to handle

by the time their brains catch up

the potency

is over

young women

empowered beyond

their ability to handle

by the time their brains catch up

the potency

has gone

the power of young women is more than what they can handle

men become fools for a reason

the young fear death for a different reason than the old, the loss of an unexperienced life bites deep, but the fading to a welcomed end is hardly to be avoided

memory

that condensation and reconstruction of ourselves

how time

gilds

our

lives

“ the  komusō  called themselves the 虚 無 僧   —   "monks of emptiness" ”

monks of the "boundaries of nothingness"

is "enlightenment" something real, or just the usual flakey religious nonsense ?

if you look in the context of zen or buddhist literature, well that's fiction so you can make anything whereas if you look at what's real today, can you find one person who you would call enlightened ?

i don't see any and if you look at the christian equivalent, "holiness" the last candidate was mother teresa and how did that go ?

bottom line : people are uneven and claims of "spiritual superiority" are masks to disguise "bad/ socially unacceptable" behaviour

dr. michael holick who is the preeminent vitamin D researcher  in an interview  about the science

its a bit heavy going, but totally worth listening to the whole video

one thing i took from it is the importance of adequate calcium in the diet which i get from dairy, interestingly this might have been a factor in the evolution of dairy tolerance as an adult in europeans, the genes for which i fortunately have

he’s his own best advertisement, a vigorous and mentally "all there" 79 years old despite being treated for   prostate cancer

the problem  with heaven

one of the unforeseen consequences of "chat gpt" is its showing up the failure of the "bucket approach" to education, since it is in effect, a full bucket and so, in conflict with current  pedagogical attitudes

education has become so intellectually "unstretched" and conformist that chat gpt has hit it between the eyes, being both those qualities and actually even a bit more original than most humans

does education have to be a 15 to twenty year brain anaesthetic ?

ed.  to be fair i think the early years of learning to read and write are productive, but the great weakness of later stages is a lack of specialization for interest and ability and no adequate courses addressing life skills

the binary world, autistic spectrum versus neurotypical is not a helpful way of looking at things

there are always portals that can be walked through if the work is put in to bring you close to them

why "the observer" is such a problem in quantum mechanics is that you have a conflict in levels of reality

sara imari walker

supercompetent rhyming in a poem is an indication chat gtp was used

i suppose this will be "the new normal"

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/ chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is somewhat extreme to reason off, but in my view there is definitely such a thing as  too much exercise  with unwanted metabolic side effects

heavy manual labour has been a part of human history until recently and had a debilitating effect on cognition to the extent i think it stratified classes and made for vulnerability to the usual dogma/ copium vending

this is, in some measure, explanatory as a contemporary social undercurrent and the increased public questioning of various authority bodies and figures

an interesting perspective on buddhism vs christianity is to compare reincarnation which is cyclical and heaven/hell which is more "the arrow of time" which you might say reflects a more scientific versus mythical world view

however the root cause of these beliefs is the same for both, the need to justify their various moralities in terms of a reward or punishment after death, though honestly, neither of the options thrills me

as fyodor dostoyesky in his book "the idiot" points out, life works differently or even in hypocritical ways from these "codes"

in terms of "zen", i think, since it is based on reflective meditation and hence observation it somewhat aligns with dostoyesky

just remember buddhism has had a significant influence on european thought since david hume’s contact with jesuit missionaries at the royal college of la flèche where he lived from 1735–1737

when buddhism became popularized in western culture in the 20th century, a lot of the ideas were already in circulation which explains its rapid uptake

gotta love these AI  mountain goat  videos

infinity

and

nothing

are

a

pair

but

to

actually

find

them

we

must

despair

the  ptolemaic model  of mars and the sun circling the earth, isn’t actually wrong, rather its just how the motion appears using the earth as the reference point which is how we, here on earth perceive the motion

its an interesting example of the limitations of occam’s razor, that the simplest answer is one is a sea of alternative viewpoints and the way you define correctness is somewhat arbitrary

the voyagers

fascinating for their extension beyond design life

outliving their engineers and possibly  even the solar system

henry ford, eat your heart out !

ed.  henry ford was notorious for his requiring designs not to exceed minimum lifetime specifications to cut costs

truthful lies

are

the

right sort

of

ambiguity

on the one hand we have st. agnes

on the other we have the current pope

i don’t think he is going to be dragged naked through the streets to his execution

you need to have a sense of humour to be a catholic

everything i write is a koan

if you’ve got drunk to the point of having your memory during the inebriation affected then that is the equivalent of having a concussion

one might foresee a significant portion of cognitive impairment in the 50+ age group given some of today’s casual attitudes to alcohol and drugs

not to mention sugar and ultra-processed food

assembly theory takes a different view of life to the conventional which is of biological organisms only, rather it extends to a system view of evolution and includes the operation of the products of its complex entities, a bit like science fiction ?

cloning is essential to evolution, that’s what we are as a species, a multitude of not quite identical clones traversing our way through a maze of difficult to foresee possibilities of what can be constructed

from a theological point of view you can regard evolution as god since all it does is create increasingly complex objects, well beyond the minimally elaborate inventions of the physics and chemistry of the universe and in our case, are capable of appreciating "our creator"

dreams

out of your control

don’t imagine otherwise

this world of seeming

has its pitfalls

horatio nelson lost an eye, then an arm, then his life

battle in these ships was a "meatwave"

the trouble with these "yoga" cults is the people are a bit stupid, they'll believe any nonsense, hence the constant stream of sex and money scandals

the world of women

species survival

pays its price

beautiful women

uniformly dull

one talent

does

not

translate

into

two

beautiful women

uniformly dull

one talent does not translate into two

the soviet system was selective for removing anyone with any brains from the breeding pool

there’s this notion that we are "deep in time" in the sense of being the product of 3.7 billion years of evolution and in that sense every one of us is the 3.7 billion years it took to arrive at ourselves

the narrow road of life

broader vistas intimidate

still   .    .    .    .   .   .

i almost trod on a tiger snake this evening, about one meter long with its beautiful golden stripes, not aggressive at all, slowly working its way around the base of a huge old pine then threading its way up the coarse chunks of bark covering the tree to disappear into it

renior    :    child with a bird

full length version

his  algerian art

“ i’m mentally slow, which alongside autism makes everything so difficult, and I can’t do even basic simple math beyond adding, subtracting, and some multiplying ”

i’m ahead of you, i have given up on multiplying and subtraction is getting marginal, 8-3 = 5 takes a while to figure out though counting fingers help

“ copium vendors ”

an interesting phrase being a slang term meaning a type of gaslighting where you have denial or rationalization in the face of defeat or failure

copium

“ But yeah life is not fair, and some of us will do double the work for half of the reward, meanwhile being gaslighted into oblivion by copium vendors.  I just accept that ”

its an indictment of contemporary zen that it promotes the daoist/monotheist document "faith in mind" as a cornerstone of their belief

i think "assembly theory" is the notion that living things are constructions and this constructive process itself has evolved in time and will continue to move into new probability/possibility spaces there being some enabling interaction between the construction itself and the process that built it

“ the female of the species is more deadly than the male ”

they think and act differently, they are not men in dresses

fake angst

buddhist nonsense

ungrounded concepts

blow away

simple rules

patterns

above

the reality

they

describe

euler’s formula relates cosine and sine to exponential functions through extending in the complex plane

a good visual  representation  of what is happening

this discovery by euler is interesting from the perspective of "plutonic space" ,  if the universe ceased to exist, this formula would still be there