this is work in progress or homilies or miscellaneous items

that don’t warrant a page by themselves

or seem to fit better here

pending poems  index

chronological order is from the bottom to the top of  the page

audio files can be complemented by listening to them  with the eyes closed  !

the first step in upgrading your reading age is to be aware you don’t understand something

its probably the last step as well

first or last the idiots miss both

“ do you think personal experience can ever be wrong ?

even over long periods of time, are there people who misinterpret their experiences and arrive at false beliefs or conclusions ? ”

the source of all error is fragmentation

if you give something enough complete attention over a long enough period you won’t get it wrong

to answer your question, people arriving at the wrong conclusions in  “ spiritual matters ”  is a consequence of a lack of attention which is why celibates have a head start  (not always taken btw)

“ knowing ”  and  “ believing ”  overlap, but are not synonyms

“ you might be thinking of the implication that there is a requirement of  ‘ no proof ’  (ed. in the meaning of the word  “ belief ” ) ,  but I don’t mean it in that way.  I mean the broadest definition of something you have trust, confidence or faith in, something you accept to be true or real, to paraphrase ”

what was i saying about you redefining the word away from the dictionary definition ?

“ I mean the broadest definition of something you have trust, confidence or faith in ”

i don’t think its the  “ broadest ”  definition, the question of a lack of proof constrains it

if something is fully proven, you don’t believe it, rather you  “ know ”  it

what was i saying about you redefining the word away from the dictionary definition ?

“ how do you know you’ve experienced ultimate reality/ final causality as opposed to another kind of either one’?

what would it take for you to believe  (or think if you like that better)  that there’s something more beyond that ? ”

something beyond  “ final causality ”

it wouldn’t be final then would it ?

how do you know ?

its a profound state and there’s nothing else

there’s really no  “ you ”  in the experience, at least in the way we commonly understand it

“ how you know it’s really final ”

a lifetime of looking at the question

i think you are trying to construct your own meaning of  “ belief ”  away from the dictionary definition

its an  allergic  response to the ink, it may pay for you to get it removed

you can become  “ sensitive ”  after a while when intially you weren’t

you would be advised not to get any more

a bit of strong sun on the arm may help, it down regulates the immune system

its rather freaky to get a sense of how differently we all think

even in agreement, there’s almost nothing in common

one of the advantages of web message boards is you can actually see what people think and its not what you think at all

what is unique about medieval zen, mystical christianity and isalm ?

the societal investment into an investigation of  “ final causality ”

“ what can zen lead to the discovery or personal knowledge of ?

what can it help you understand ? ”

ultimate reality  aka  causal finality

“ why do you think that ? ”

i experience that

beliefs are always flawed being projections rather than approximations

“ what if you believe in the laws of physics, are they not useful for good approximations of what actually happens ? ”

the are not approximations but accurate descriptions of what actually happens and hence not a belief

they also come with proofs

of course you can have unproven laws of mathematics, but they effectively exist with at least a partial proof, that of there being no contrary instance yet discovered

however a non-proven law of mathematics does edge a bit into it being a belief its true

beliefs are always flawed being projections rather than approximations

i think zen is about  “ discovery ”  and knowing for yourself rather than taking some   “ belief ”  on board and going from there

buddhism, christianity and islam require beliefs to get around the  “ foundational nonsense ”

understood truely, zen has no  “ foundational nonsense ”

rather it steps the path of coherent understanding if you choose to pick the steps out

beliefs are always flawed being projections rather than approximations

i can’t believe it, stupidity squared

you are too  “ presentist ”  in your approach, politics historically is  “ an also ran ”

lying evader, what did i write ?

sooo dishonest

have you any  “ meditation ”  experience ?

you are talking about something from the outside, the records are full of  “ masters ”  telling you, you are wasting your time

“ if you haven’t been past the checkpoint ”

you can take the checkpoint as a  “ gate ”   “ no gate ”  combined

a  “ gate ”  that swings open is  “ no gate ”

“ paraphrasing ”  is a very strong  “ trope ” in english

you are in the nature of a bomb site

why not meditiate so at least you can see the wreckage the drugs left

“ the great way is gateless

approached in a thousand ways

once past this checkpoint

you stride through the universe ”

if you haven’t been past the checkpoint, you won’t understand

you haven’t

 why pretend ?

lsd  —  thunderclouds  with sia, diplo, labrinth, maddie ziegler

i have a low reading age, but my writing age is surprisingly higher, but i don’t know why that is

improvisation sorts the sheep from the goats

khatia  (younger sister by one year)  and gvantsa buniatishvili  improvising  on astor piazzolla’s libertango

its out in a class of its own, perhaps because they are sisters ?

i  .  am  .  don  .  quixote

“ dishonest to the bone ”

“ I’m not sure I understand ”

wow, classic  “ faux humility ”  with straight deception woven in

you clearly don't have the reading or writing age for valid criticsm, what can i say ?

writing is an epistemological process, you have to get into the epistemology of it

“ you say that that i’ve learned to stop trying ”

its not entirely your fault, you come from a generation taught  “ post-modernist epistemological strategies ”  at the breast

you haven’t learnt to  “ do stuff for real ”  and then evaluate the changes for success and failure

affirmation or rejection only works to a point, you need to be able to get to grips with a subject in salient detail

some quality writing by jason

the portuguese vet went on her trip to the blue ridge mountains with her boyfriend over the weekend, i asked her to take photos

she said she loved it, she went to some historic mansion which she didn’t enjoy, but her boyfriend likes history like that

she said she liked the drive through the blue ridge mountains, which was about two hours total, but they’d stop along the way and climb up the mountains, she said she made her boyfriend carry a tripod up and down the mountains so she could take photos with it, i just thought to myself  “ oh god, having a girlfriend doesn’t sound so great ”

then later i was having lunch in the office, she was talking with the owner about something and then he went out to get more coffee  ( he drinks a lot of coffee ) ,  and then she walked up over to me and started saying she needed to show me the photos, i thought she was getting sort of close, then our gay coworker came in and said  “ oh, so you’re replacing me and trying to get a new assistant ! ”  maybe then she thought it was a bit strange to be talking to me alone like that

i also didn’t give her my complete attention, maybe i’m playing some mysterious character trying to get her more attracted idk, well i didn’t get to see the photos cuz she walked out, but i look forward to seeing them

she’ll bring her boyfriend to the company-wide christmas party, i’m still deciding if i’ll go or not, i already went last year and it will probably be much of the same, except this time i’m working for a different hospital

she worked with james last weekend and they got along well, james was considering giving her advice about a treatment administration, i told him to do it knowing she likes advice, well she really appreciated it, and james was happy i told him to   .   .   she wondered why others don’t like james, it was probably the assistant manager and some of the other women who spoke badly of him to her

james was saying he’s a complicated person, and says i’m the same, its tough to understand us

i was telling james that its special when you meet someone who likes nature, going out to parks and such, talking about the vet

he starts saying  “ oh is this a potential girlfriend for you ? ”  and i say  “ no, no and she has a boyfriend ”  well then he screams  “ jason ! ”  he can be pretty funny

basically you need to be able to measure voltages and current to debug electrical problems in cars, skills you have shown no interest in acquiring

jason then complains that when he looks at a multimeter and thinks electrical skills, it seems so daunting

my advice is to start with measuring voltage, with car batteries it will be  “ direct ”  ie not alternating like mains and be from say 10 to 16 volts depending

electronic appliance battery voltages will be much smaller

with some people, you can see the spinning windmills as they talk

[its the lack of cognitive skills]   [that meditation/contemplation provide]   [that is the problem]

there is another level to all this that appears to be completely beyond people

its the lack of cognitive skills that meditation/contemplation provide that is the problem

without them, you will imagine the cutting and pasting of  “ scripture ”  is meaningful

“ learned helplessness ”  is a common epistemology in the  “ mentally ill ”

if she’s not going to get exercise or pay attention to the circadian rhythm or diet then her depression is not going to improve

she has some deeper issue of  “ learned helplessness ”

women and women with children always get more favourable treatment by the legal system than men

you are stuck in the wrong  “ epistemology ” ,  all these years and you still have no inkling what the right one is

“ presentism ”  is being overly stuck in the present, a modern disease

its the weakest link in the chain that takes you out first so you want to find the weakest link

if they are missing the target, don’t engage them

you have better uses for your time than futile fighting

medical test ranges are set to show very overt illness, they won’t pick anything subtle

“ meditation ”  in the broader sense develops cognitive skills essential for the changed  “ epistemological ”  approach necessary for   “ mystical inquiry ”

its easy to spot those without that development

stuff can be repeated so often you start to believe it, even though you know its wrong

you have to think  “ extra ”  about it to get it right again

a lack of real life zen experience strands you in the literary constructs called  “ the records ” 

you live in a literary fantasy not understanding that zen is an institutional product

so easy to attend a local zen center, yet this is so far from what some who post on r|zen can do

posted on reddit

But in realistic terms, pain over long periods really, really sucks.  It wears you down, like that torture of water dripping from a faucet, it really does become miserable.  It changes you mentally, your personality, everything.  You cannot concentrate completely, you cant rest or relax, it is just this constant nagging ,  even something small

a  reply

As someone who is in chronic pain, day after day, all the time, it never stops, I agree.  I live at a three  (ed.  out of ten ) every second of my life, and it is a living hell

I had a bone marrow transplant from a non relative and had a lot of issues related to the transplant

Worst living hell on earth.  Never do it

I had no siblings, so I was given that option.  But then again, I was promised that I would be  “ fine ”  in a year and never be on steroids or pain meds.  None of that is true, and I am now stuck in a very broken body

Why ?

Because some doctor either couldn’t handle my death, or wanted the money for the hospital

if there is something that cannot be questioned, its because there is no-one to question it

jason, you work with women, they are a different species, why do you expect them to act like men ?

our guts get  leakier  as we get older

“ flies eating a spartan diet are protected from leaky gut and the systemic inflammation associated with it as they age

conversely, flies on a rich atkins-like diet are more prone to developing intestinal permeability, a condition linked to a variety of human conditions including inflammatory bowel disease

clonal analysis revealed that gut turnover in protein-poor conditions is slower than turnover in protein-rich conditions in drosophila ”

fourth and fifth photos down, a real mafioso  funeral

they kill themselves too readily to make it a rational career

there is only one way to deal with people who act in bad faith

take something from them of benefit to yourself that they have no control over

the best known  “ enlightenment ”  in the western world is st. paul’s revelation on the road to damascus with a mythological jesus who came part and parcel of a judaic parthenon of heavens and grades of angels

his version of christianity almost died out until an  “ historical ”  jesus was invented

also interestingly islam had its roots in early christianity

has zen always been caught in a post-modernist conflict ?

taking the post-modernist  view  of language as a vehicle for obtaining power and permissive of hypocrisy and internal contradictions in the pursuit of a personal power goal

a lot of the zen record dialogues are simply about  “ post-modernist monks ”  arguing with teachers who use language as a vehicle to pursue knowledge of the true state of affairs and ne’er the twain shall meet

a corollary of this is  “ post-modern zen ”  regardless of whenever it was, in the tang and song dynasties or today, is its adherents are forced to always revert to scripture for claims of authenticity since, by taking the post-modern linguistic approach which is a naked and fanciful grab at some misperception of power without regard to semantic coherence, they are clearly inadequate when put up against some-one with a real understanding of the matter

since making my criticisms of  “ scripturalism ”  on r|zen i have seen a few OP’s stepping out more  “ into their own knowledge ”  and the results have been worse than pathetic ,  “ shameful ”  really

so basically r|zen is consigned/doomed to revolve in post-modern scriptural circles forever, the   “ not too bright ”  chasing whatever hubric illusion of power they envisage

real life zen is very post-modern too because it has a strongly enforced  “ power hierarchy ”  and needs to sustain that

i think you can generalise from that to all religion

there is nothing new about post-modern, its a personal, social, societal and  “ state management ”  strategy system

______________________

the argument is that a failure to understand deep structure is intrinsic to the post-modern approach to language with its extreme relativism, tolerance of inconsistencies and orientation to power and rhetoric

the  “ unborn ”  is yet another pretend state of enlightenment ,  pushed by the usual idiots

its quite something to see a viking ship  sailing ,  so much of northern european history is written around them

real men are not afraid to wear pink

rather than  “ buddhism ”  being invented by the west, it was the other way around, intial jesuit missionary reports indicated separate religions, but on examination it turned out they were all buddhist

david hume was the first western philosopher to incorporate buddhist ideas, so there’s nothing new in them to the west

the neo-advaita scene is just the usual bullshit plus a lot of promiscuity mixed in

narcissists don’t believe in  ‘ process ’  which is why they are always unchanging

philosophy is the attempt to achieve in prose what can only be achieved in poetry

if it can be achieved at all

philosophy is the attempt to achieve in prose what can only be achieved in poetry

jesus, some women  are trouble

narcissism prevents or springs from you not seeing yourself clearly

narcissism prevents you seeing yourself clearly

you can tell from what a person says whether they are  ‘ enlightened ’  or not

and its a process actually, your thinking is going to change over time

if you are not going to do the work, why would you think you are partaking of the process ?

is religion a form of communal narcissism, the separation of a group from public domain reality ?

paradoxically atheism and humanism also fit this definition

is religion a form of communal narcissism, the separation of a group from public domain reality ?

you may not think of yourself as a martyr, but you are

what r|zen really is, is a subreddit preoccupied with moving the definition of zen from the public to various private domains, an activity that impinges on insanity and is centrally located in narcissism, hence all the narcissists

it makes me wonder about  ‘ insanity ’  actually since it is a similar activity, overly and incorrectly solipsistic

i think there’s always a degree of physiological cognitive loss by one of the partners driving a divorce or separation, in older people anyway, not the very young

be wary

humans are very concious of energy expenditure

minimising their own and maximising their benefit from others

coloured eggs are a therapod dinosaur trait with the same genetics as modern birds

its a sign of insanity when you get a word redefined away from its common public use, that’s a little group or person that’s gone mad

my basic contention is that you can’t redefine a word away from the common public perception of what it is, so the question is, what is that perception ?

so looking at this  travel log  of the zen masters and acolytes of one of the best known zen centers ,  you can't get away from zen being buddhist

and actually john loori was not as strongly buddhist as the mount tremper monastery has become

i was thinking even alan watts does not dissociate zen from buddhism and since his zen contacts were buddhist, that’s to be expected

the western perception of zen is overwhelmingly dominated by the many soto/rinzai zen centers

a huángbò quote

there are some people just like mad dogs barking at everything that moves, even barking when the wind stirs amongst the grass and leaves

when the losers think they have won, what hope is there ?

you are pretending to a competence you don’t have

the world’s biggest loser thinks he’s the world’s biggest winner

“ how do you plan to save all sentient beings ? ”

send them to dharmerlitz

following beetroot juice  ingestion ,  oral microbiota on the posterior surface of the tongue is able to reduce NO3− to NO2− by means of their enzymatic machinery

fukushima is illustrative of why the japanese lost world war two, incompetence at the highest levels

its gobblydeegook

don’t be dishonest with yourself, just because you can’t understand it, doesn’t mean its not underrstandable

a man with a history of poor mental health advises the sane they are insane

zen is where narcissism meets insanity meets stupidity

a question can be an answer to a question

the actual answer to the question i gave in reply to your question answers your question

its sort of a double play

the question answers and the answer to the question answers

a question can be an answer to a question

to study a koan is to jump into a latrine just because   .   .   .

studying a koan is jumping into a latrine just because   .   .   .

there is no  “ right position ”

its just fraught

and

you

can

pay

heavy

penalties

for

getting

something

right

the problem with mulitvitamins is the minerals are in  “ garden fertiliser ”  form as this takes way less space

minerals bound to proteins take way more space, they are called  “ chelated minerals ”  and this is how the body naturally absorbs minerals

with a few exceptions we are not designed to take minerals in their  “ garden fertiliser ”  form

the problem with the  “ garden fertiliser ”  form is they feed bad gut bugs

the use of magnesium oxide as a laxative is a classic example of  “ feeding ”  the  “ bad ”  microbiome

“ why did bodhidharma come from the west, go to the east and return back again ”

the full quote i made has deep  “ spiritual ”  meaning that is not accessible to you

that’s the sense within the nonsense

however, its like reading computer code, you have to know the language and algorithms

the learning curve can only come with solitude and reading quality, neither of which you do or even have an interest in

my reply to an ironic suggestion i become a psychic

unfortunately, as you may have noticed, i tell people what they don’t want to hear ,  rather than what they want to hear

good psychics are in effect therapists working outside the accreditation system, the problem is most believe their nonsensical bullshit

“ going from the idea of  ‘ non-duality ’   —   this isn’t simply the opposite of duality, because it includes the negation, which itself creates a duality   .  .  . ”

you are actually arguing that everything is nonsense because of self-referencing  (recursion)

that’s quite a reasonable argument

the trouble is, that its like lewis carroll, within the nonsense is sense, hence bodhidharma’s trip to china and his return

correct  ‘ spiritual understanding ’  says there is a process, that there is a  ‘ reason ’

that is the enlightened view, whereas the buji view is  “ there is no reason ”

we would all escape life’s circumscriptions if we could, but its just not possible

“ why did bodhidharma come from the west, go to the east and return back again ”

is more meaningful than the bare standard quote

the real life of bodhidharma was surprisingly comfortable, he was supported by the local ruling clique and his hermitage was in easy distance of wealthy donors

he was such a part of this clique that he got executed with them at heyin and he should have blushed to be caught there, they were lured in by the promise of a great feast

between east and west

killed in a banqueting fest

bodhidharma tripped up

and drank death from a cup

you can’t beat a madman in his own territory

often, that territory

is

just

his

brain

you can’t beat a madman in his own territory

religion

is

nonsense

elevated

to meaning

by idiots

who are you

and why are you ?

without celibacy, authentic zen doesn’t exist

its a medieval construct, not post modern

fayan pointed to a quote  “ fayan once pointed to a dog right in front of him and said  ‘ an engraving ’ ”  saying where’s the rest of the quote ?

drunken braggadocio,   a song  from the three kingdoms period (220 - 280 AD) in china

i say it, therefore it is so  .   .   .

its only in the narcissistic universe that  “ criticism  =  hate ”

it must be obvious even to you that you are just going down a dead end street !

it must be obvious to even you that you are just going down a dead end street !

it must be obvious to you that you are just going down a dead end street !

you enshrine ignorance

“ i am genuinely curious as to how one watches their thoughts ”

its a case of thought watching thought

practically its a non issue

“ false problem ” is another way of expressing it

just let thoughts flow

napoléon was a victor by virtue of running a meritocracy, only he couldn’t quite pick 100% and  villneuve  was one and it doomed him, the french and spanish failure at  trafalgar  was the long term loss of the control of continental europe

i am not so much concious of my own failings, as that i have failings but can’t see them very well

sometimes you have to smash yourself against a wall and see the fragments to understand yourself

a very  interesting  series on the napoléonic wars

napoléon was off his rocker fighting the battle of waterloo, he was well outnumbered and then crazily moved into a situation where he could be exposed to two armies on two flanks

maybe the world is a bit wider than a computer screen ?

maybe the world is a bit wider than the computer screen ?

where am i going and what am i doing

killard house school choir  hallelujah

message boards, a vast array of people in shells

that will not be pentrated

why would one voluntarily deal with narcissists ?

c.f. handel   sarabande

obscenity needs to be genuinely funny to be carried off well

i looked at the world in a certain way when i was younger, but i never believed it because everybody was telling me i was wrong

now i am older i can see i am right and they are wrong

some people would fall apart if they meditated

one glimpse of themselves and they would run screaming

prince harry’s and megan markle’s 2018 visit to australia and new zealand is an orgy of middle class values on both sides of the tasman

the elephant in the room is the damage done to the foetus because of jetlag and crossed time zones

its a major disruption in a period of very rapid cell divison

i don’t know what it is about drugs, but they drive every ounce of orginality out of the brain

the weird thing about jane austen as writer is her writings are actually mystical, and actually the theme of romance was used a lot in sufi and islamic traditions

that’s because she was celibate, there’s a sting and outstanding impetus forward in that

when emma compliments mr. knightley on being a good dancer, its the pivotal point in the book, its opened her eyes to him as a potential partner, that he is a diamond hidden before her eyes

“ why worry about safety ? ”

a woman asks this ?

there’s nothing more conventional than druggies and ex-druggies, middle class waste

“ there’s nothing wrong with shining brightly.  you ought to try it sometime ”

there’s everything wrong with shining bright, its not safe for a start and who gives a fuck about illuminating for narcissistic retards ?

the unreal can be more true than the real

i was thinking, the  “ real life ”  zen system spat me out

i was unpalatable to it

if everybody had a good reputation ,  a  ‘ good reputation ’  wouldn’t mean anything

“ disappointment is what you get for expecting anything ”

from ratbags, yes

in the beginning was  mr. deity

when things are really wrong, its a lot easier to see clearly what the problems are

when things are really wrong, its a lot easier to see clearly what the problem is

“ one month of  abstinence  from cannabis improves memory in adolescents, young adults ”

zennists, get enlightened first

then speak with your own voice

don’t blather in meaningless quotes

you don’t seem to listen, i’ve been a lot around real life zen, you don’t have a good career trajectory

“ well thanks for looking out for me    .   .   . ”

its more like you are lit up in lights i am afraid

a huangbo quote

“ the buddhas, on manifesting themselves in the world, seized dung-shovels to rid themselves of all such rubbish as books containing metaphysics and sophistry ”

i’m handing in my shovel

conciousness is  ‘ mechanism specific ’  from the brain in terms of the most accepted theory of conciousness

its called  “ global workspace theory ”  though there are differently named variants from all the researchers pretending they have discovered something different

its about the function of the broadcasting of information in the brain as conciousness

why do you think you don’t dream forever ?

“ objects have stability IRL which is lacking from the dreamscape ”

objects have a stability in the dreamscape which is lacking in the real

one of the miracles of the roman empire was the way it encompassed different language groups in relative harmony

its the culture that must have been the cement

a lot of things unruffled or stable on the surface have deep powerful currents underneath

harsh words upset you ?

hard words upset you ?

the standard debating technique of the millenials seems to be to try to rob you of your self-respect  ie narcissism

the standard debating technique of the millenials sseems to be to rob you of your self-respect  ie narcissism

if you quote nonsense, why would what you say about it be any better ?

when the unreal is true and the real not true

when the unreal is true and the real untrue

if you are fasting, then take maybe a teaspoon to a desertspoon of jam in hot water a day to keep some sugar to feed good microbiome, but eating an orange is too much

nazism was a product of a combination of technologies that permitted a huge concentration of power in the hands of one man or a small group

the flawed decision making that resulted from this was to the detriment of everyone

the technogy  “ flux ”  today has the permissive empowerment of dissent that will not permit the empowerment of doctrines like nazism again

these scammers are getting very brazen, he had an indian accent, and was obviously eating so i pulled him up on it

he claimed he was drinking and when i pressed him on it he said he was drinking wine

i told him he was a scammer and to bugger off

all you have got to work with is all that’s prepared to work with you, whether they know it or not

time spent effectively in meditation or contemplation will bring some self-awareness, what can i say if you want mystical understanding but don’t do the workhorse stuff ?

truth is not solid in itself, but a wispy vapour

truth is not solid itself, but a wispy vapour

the narcissist’s strategy is to use good natured, easily put upon people to compensate for their imperfections

“ what’s your story ? ”

well i’ve actually done quite a bit of real life zen including staying at several centers in the usa and its become clearer to me that zen is actually fictitious bullshit and one of the reasons i like r|zen is you get a clearer picture on how its bullshit !

having said that, zen in its history does have authentic masters like joshu who clearly understood what it was about, so there is a real  “ mystical truth ”  that dovetails with christian and other mystics which you would expect, like how in all of human history could one sect have a monopoly ?

“ utlimate truth ”  is not either fully religion or poetry and philosophy as you might expect, its at some midway point between religion and poetry, i wish philosophy was more use, but it doesn’t seem to be

i was lucky enough to stay at the springwater center when toni packer was still quite active and that was a great help

there s only a tiny few who ever understand, its hard to get used to with the millions claiming their bullshit is valid

joshu said that over thirty years of monks passing through his temple, he never came across one with any understanding

when you read the records, its all the same, people stuck in a fixed conceptualisation thinking that is what it is about ?

maybe what bankei really meant by living in the unborn is just live in a questioning fluid conceptual process, constantly reworking what we understand with objective impartiality

its wearing and taxing which is, i guess, why people are so adverse to it

how much easier to blather meaningless nonsense on r|zen

zennists are encouraged to have  “ great doubt ” ,  but it doesn’t seem to apply to their ideology, so called teachers and especially not to themselves

the result is a lifetime of calcification

not something they show in the tourist publicity

combined high winds and tide pushing in water from the lagoon causing  flooding   in venice

“ if I tell you, it’ll strip my tongue; if I don’t tell you, it’ll silence my mouth ”

if i tell you, it will take more than i can give

if i don’t tell you i will be too isolated

i’ve come to understand ewk is quite mentally ill and needs some forebearance, its not something that there is any control over

he’s got worse so there must be a biological issue with the brain

he’s helpless before whatever changes are happening

ewk  writes

i don’t have to understand a book to quote it

my  reply

i would never talk about  “ understanding a book ”  because i don’t think books are that coherent

one might understand a chapter or paragraph or sentence but a sustained overall view from beginning to end does not exist

its not quite expressed right, but ewk is correct in this case

it always surprises me that he gets some things really quite right that take me a while to see are right

“ what would it be like to dream forever ? ”

why do you think we don’t dream forever ?

“ what would it be like to dream forever ? ”

why do you think you don’t dream forever ?

ronin  asks

how would you be able to tell if i wasn’t enlightened ?

my  reply

enlightenment is like being able to see colours others can’t see

you can’t even see colours normal people see

its a  “ no brainer ”

why you people waste your lives pretending, i do not know

ronin is concerned about me being  “ the 7th zen patriarch ”

if you aren’t joking, you do realize that believing something like that makes people think that something is wrong with you, right ?

it doesn’t bother me personally and you can believe whatever you want to believe, but it will make people deal with you much differently here and in more negative ways overall.

my  reply

neither you or these people are enlightened and therefore can’t understand

i wouldn’t have myself

its the actuality of me being the 7th (or 2nd depending on if huineng ever met the 5th patriarch, if he didn’t then huineng is the first)

ewk is narcissistic, ronin is depressive

its like  “ piranha ”  meets flesh

berthe morisot really  takes you  into a different world

a weird connection,   debussy  as child learnt to play the piano from the mother of the suffering wife of verlaine

not a happy situation for those involved

i don’t feel that eihei dogen’s uji/time-being is at all well translated, i’m looking at the last line of section four

this one  is just too western  “ pop ”  philosophical, makes me feel ill

“ each moment is all being, is the entire world

reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment ”

another  translation

“ [because it is only time of this sort, uji is all time, and each grass and each appearance are time  —  preceding sentence] in each moment there are all existences and all worlds

try to think  —  are any existences or worlds separated from time ? ”

another translation, don’t know where its from

“ let us pause to reflect whether or not any of the whole of existence or any of the whole universe has leaked away from the present moment of time ”

i think i’m going to have a crack at re-translating it as

infinity sums to the being of time

the  “ furries ”  scene, like body modification, is mentally ill

you have to be careful in paris from reading travellers accounts on reddit, its an unsafe shithole

the supreme ability is to use your opponent for your own advantage

the cost is courage, focus and extra effort

a quote from the  art of war  by sun tzu

“ if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat ”

web message boards offer the opportunity to develop social skills and the ability to converse amicably where there is disagreement

an opportunity some take and some don’t

an eihei dogen quote

a flower fades, even though we love it, a weed grows, even though we hate it

appeasement didn’t work for neville chamberlain

yah gotta face off the hitlers directly

people who listen to music when meditating are listening to music, not meditating

they are fucking themselves

“ if you sit outside and meditate is that called listening to trees rustle and birds chirp, not meditating ? ”

music is some-one else’s thoughts, not your own

its the discovery of yourself that its all about

that’s why people who get too absorbed into media are so vacant and berefit of any life sense

narcissists eat depressives for breakfast

i can make an inference that it  (ed. a bankei talk)  was something about making your own observations and being yourself

bankei wrote practically nothing himself so all the records are people making  transcripts

my personal view is what we get of bankei is somewhat garbled or lacking the rich layers of meaning in what he was saying

also he was talking in the 17th century and just look how english has changed in the same period

what he says is not that radical imo, its the age old problem of people being stuck in ceremony and scripturalism

the message is so simple yet so hard for people to grasp, just do the work yourself, trust your own senses and don’t get tangled in the usual religious nonsense  (which japan had a surfeit of)

ed.  well i have thought about this again and write

there’s something off with bankei, what he describes as the  “ unborn ”  is in effect  “ automatic conciousness ”

its hard to say for sure, we only know what he said through transcripts

“  automatic conciousness  this is good, did you come up with this phrase or get it from elsewhere ? ”

i have done quite a bit of reading on the subject and brain studies as well so its my informed opinion

its funny, when i was reading bankei, i kept thinking, he could do with some up to date brain studies

i think he’s well off target with the  “ unborn ”  but he deals with people in the public exchanges very well

so he’s a mixed bag

everybody is a mixed bag, everybody wants unequivocal saints but they don’t exist

wow, rap by hookdump

  ronin and ewk

religions in large part are a projection onto voynich

BCR  case  60

yun men showed his staff to the assembly and said  :  this staff has changed into a dragon and swallowed the universe

mountains, rivers, the great earth  —  where are they to be found ?

ronin’s  comment

walk up to yun men and take the staff roughly from his hands.  throw it to the floor and leave without saying a single word

my

comment

take the mountains, rivers and great earth and wind them up into a staff

i found most people in zen had very good social skills, way better than mine so i could learn

there’s a whole world of body modification out there, people be crazy

if you are teaching meditation ,  you will need to be careful of mentally ill people going psychotic, it can deepen the psychotic beliefs

that’s actually why the social side is important

brad warner on how to do  shikantaza  meditation

basically shikantaza is  “ instructionless ” ,  you are not actually doing anything because there is  “ no self ”  but there is observation and memory so things happen

if you do anything except shikantaza you will get damaged

by the time the universe closes there will be trillions of man hours spent meditating that were effectively walking in the wrong direction

you won’t get a better introduction

what he doesn’t mention is the  “ hidden ”  advantage of sitting in a group which is the development of social skills, so desperately needed by some

any other form of meditation fucks you up, the problems are actually obvious if you do them, just empty rattles

my  maxim

“ middle age women lie about their weight ”

a surprising number have thyroid problems, women are more suseptible to them

excess weight itself drives poor health via inflammatory pathways, even includes being a factor in cancer

typical american, overweight, up to their gills in medications

like what’s the problem ?

if you want to hunt  “ dangerous game ”  try razzing middle aged women about being overweight and matronly

it is amazing to me how conventional drug users are

glasses fixed amblyopia for me, even though they thought i was 50/50 as to whether i needed glasses in terms of correction to normal vision

mental illness is a sad state of affairs and gets sadder unless  “ managed ”

well let’s say  “ everything continually points to  ‘ mind ’  ”

but that’s actually only part of what zen is about, its the practical, but inferior dimension

there is another dimension

“ Now I have to ask; what is the other dimension to Zen ? ”

if you do the real work of inquiry, it will open up

i could explain it more, but people just plagiarise and repeat without understanding and really its no help anyway, you have to  “ discover it ”

you have to look outside zen and more broadly at other mystics amongst whom i would include toni packer, emily dickinson and john of the cross

if that’s too much, go for walks by yourself in areas of natural beauty

ewk really does have affective schizophrenia, you just can’t deal with it

real life zen has a problem with these people too, they get excluded as too destructive to the institutions

all i can say is i find him helpful to my own development and oppose any banning of him

jason is developing life skills !

“ i think others are more tactical about office politics, meanwhile i tend to take a more ‘ natural ’  response on things in the moment, then later on in the day when i’m home i might reflect on where i went right or wrong and adjust to the next day ”

i think bankei makes the point of thinking for yourself and using your own words as what he means by   ‘ the unborn ’

the translations and transcriptions are buggered to hell

the most blind sort of idiot, a zen-christian scripturalist

another crazy, there’s no end of you half witted self indulgent twits are there ?

in the main, science fiction is a rather poverty stricken form of magical realism to the point it is no longer  “ magical ”

a poem by  ursula le guin

so the unwanting soul

sees what’s hidden

and the ever-wanting soul

sees only what it wants

the religious

and endless bunch of clowns

each

trying

to

put

one thing

over

an other

the religious

and endless brigade of clowns

each

trying

to

put

something

over

the

other

r|zen

and endless brigade of clowns

each

trying

to

put

something

over

the

other

i have made my points, if you don’t want to see what i am saying, i don’t care

interestingly passionfruit have twice  the protein  of bananas @ 2.2 grams per hundred grams compared to 1.1 grams

“ fruit fly larvae with a noted mitochondrial DNA mutation showed a pronounced increase in development when eating a high carbohydrate diet of banana, but stagnated on a high protein diet of passionfruit

conversely, fruit fly larvae without the mitochondrial DNA mutation thrived on the high protein diet, but dropped in frequency when put on carbohydrates ”

translation and philology are the attempt to answer the question

what was actually said or written in the first place ?

issues with translation tend to be systemic throughout the work

i read somewhere  “ there are as many poems as flowers ”  which is probably a good way to look at it

to understand infinity

is without profit

except to

understand

infinity

i can’t think

i can’t rhyme

but in time

i shall think

and

rhyme

that’s what narcissist does, rather than argue to the point, they attempt to demean the opponent

yeah, ewk can’t take on board being wrong, but just flips into insult instead of investigating the error

so that all the energy goes into the insults and the degrading of the person who has opposed him

so he stays convinced of the rightness of his position and its just a returning circle

that’s actually is a definition of narcissism

“ two years ago i consumed a psychedelic substance  (ed. likely LSD)  in search of  ‘ something ’  and may have experienced a prolonged psychosis

after taking it there was no boundary between my cat’s flowing fur and the floor

i spent time in an actual psychward and was given anti-psychotic medications

i’m back to seeing boundaries ”

yeah, safe for sure

it amazes me how concealed negative information about  “ recreational ”  drugs is, a conspiracy by users

you can’t substantially alter brain function even temporarily without leaving a permanent imprint

roasted beef   bone marrow  bone on toast

amphetamines make people nonsensically aggressive

marzia has her man and he has income so  she might  start to breed

the whole notion of  “ koans ”  and  “ solving them ”  is deeply flawed, its a pretend process

religious thought is just pretentious nonsense, as i say ,  “ playing ”  with the ill thought out

shit, the new york art market is off  its rocker ,  money for jam from the suckers

you are just into feelgood fairytales

therapy attempts to shepherd insanity back into the fold

mysticism celebrates insanity and co-joins it to functioning in normality

therapy attempts to shepherd the insane back into the fold

mysticism celebrates insanity and co-joins it to functioning in normality

why do we have difficulty understanding the translations of tang and song dynasty zen records as at best as partly fictional and at worst wholly fictional in terms of the fidelity to what was originally said ?

its because modern technology covers all the bases from the spoken word to publishing with almost 100% fidelity, a state of affairs that has existed for less than one hundred years

dynasty china didn’t have shorthand, but it did have the problem of transcribers trying to keep up with speech with impossibly slow characters to write

it gets worse, each copy which is made by hand introduces errors and over hundreds of years who knows how many copies were made, each introducing more errors than the last and can have interpolations put in

you don’t even know what person actually said what, often stories get ascribed to the wrong people or are out and out memes

as i said before people take translations as  “ too solid ”

the meaning of characters changes over time and requires intense philological sleuthing to untangle meaning and often through the lack of contemporary script, it will not be possible

into this vale of uncertainty steps the translator who like an artist with a canvas concocts his own vision of what he sees

the naive then take his picture as a literal representation when the reality is at best a bold guess that necessarily falls short

these dynasty zen masters constantly state that the rock on which you must stand is your own understanding and not the repetition of voynichated written records

all these pretend scholars who can’t be bothered to do basic research should do some real work and locate the source documents

then count how many years  (often many hundred)  between the earliest or most reliable source document and when the person quoted died and you will begin to get the picture

a translation is just an opinion, its a mistake to get too definite about what was actually said as in a lot of cases it can never be resolved

its interesting to think about the degree of equivalence between hearing and reading since they are not identical

you can be enlightened as a child and know what people call god

the last thing you want is  “ sudden enlightenment ”  believe me

stick to being bound by the walls of  “ normality ”

to be continually outside them is traumatic

“ if your experience is traumatic a therapist can help ”

therapy is fundamentally different from zen, it seeks to re-imprison one in  “ normality ”

which of course is where you are, taking the  “ walls ”  for an unbounded vista

“ in what way is the negativity of zen advantageous or in any way beneficial ? ”

well the basic theme is the zen master being right and everyone else being wrong and not being nice about it

its almost  “ anti-prosperity ”  i would say, the pointlessness and meaninglessness of human existence

another hazard of the web is the endless persistence of the drug brain damaged

jordan peterson takes umbrage at the phrase

“ the symphony has no meaning because it ends ”

but actually that’s true

“ what computer games do you play ? ”

html 5, regex poorly

oh, and r|zen which i flatter myself i am becoming proficient at

a zen priest on assisting at funerals, my strike-through

but to be there with people in emotional distress is a real    honour   horror

when you can’t dialogue, you attack

not a good thing

what dream are you in ?

religion is hypocrisy on steroids

“ doubt ”  is just another zen cliché the stupid gets stuck on

dillon has a go at me

you have a sick fixation on violence

yet your words don’t pack a punch

wildly scrambling

thousands of miles away

my  reply

wildly scrambling

the

vacant

moron

takes a

punch

at himself

dillon’s  reply

glass

shards

everywhere

one light reflecting endlessly

my  reply

glass

shards

everywhere

one light reflecting   endlessly   uselessly

dillon, you are reeling after i hit the nail on the head ?

i don’t doubt that having no real life zen experience, spending all my time playing computer games and having a low reading age and worse written expression abilities

that by looking at few words in a zen text and quoting a paragraph and then gracing the world with my abysmal written expression i’m now a truly great zen master

some people are way more adversely affected by pot than others, they have low BDNF and are stranded in some  “ desert island ”  neurological space

alpha and beta-carotene, as well as retinyl esters, were  inversely  associated with metabolic syndrome

however, no association was found between serum retinol and metabolic syndrome occurrence

metabolic syndrome is a condition characterized by central obesity, hypertension, and disturbed glucose and insulin metabolism

the syndrome has been linked to increased risks of both type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases ”

i got a call from a scammer claiming to be from the telehone company and he told me my computer needed to be fixed

he had a heavy chinese accent

i told him i needed to go away from the phone and would he wait an hour on hold

he obviously has a limited command of english and seemed genuinely happy to have got what he interpreted as  “ a kill ”

i left him there waiting and hung up the phone  (landline)  several hours later

the ability to write sense is the other side of reading literacy

the ability to write sense as well is the other side of reading literacy

ewk  writes

i guessed that you weren’t going to quote zen masters or even reference them

my

reply

don’t you know, i’m the patriarch ?

what would i have to do with zen master’s quotes when i make my own ?

some-one else asks

how did you become the patriarch ?

my  reply

by re-establishing huineng’s lineage

what is the most basic skill needed in zen ?

i have been thinking about this because i am a bit ambiguous about meditation but after four years on the r|zen subbreddit and seeing the endless verbal circles and hostility people get entangled in i am convinced that most there have yet to develop the basic skill needed which is objective reflection

in addition social skills are lacking

probably people need to start with group meditation and attend a retreat or two

how vitamin MK-7  is made

infinite regress is a classic buddhist trope

i learned to take the view the only value of a web forum is its value for me

you can have a popular well run forum and all that happens is some weasel winds his way into becoming a moderator and then screws everything up so its what he wants, ie views he doesn’t agree with are removed or harassed

with office politics, always try to work with others as numbers count

don’t give a fuck about helping others on the web, to do so is big mistake

the most useful zen video i found was of the hermits in the hills in china because to my mind these small one to four man hermitages are what a lot of the records were based on, not vast monasteries

it deglamourizes for sure

i actually lived for a while in such a hermitage  (greek orthodox)  in the hokianga

“ the bodhisattva’s mind is like the void, for he relinquishes everything and does not even desire to accumulate merits.

There are three kinds of relinquishment  .    .  blah blah ”

its like a monty python skit

there are four kinds of relinquishments, relinquishing the relinquishing

there are five kinds of relinquishments ,  relinsquishing the relinquishing of the relinquishing

ad infinitum

“ monks ”  in japan are actually in training to become undertakers in their fathers business/temples

zen in japan is basically an undertakers business

jason, brittany is female, you are projecting her as a man a bit i think

i had been having a  “ dry run ”  in the visionary department for quite a while and i was thinking, maybe i’m getting too old and it won’t happen again then just this morning i saw myself riding a bikie type motorcycle with a human sized chimpanzee very garishly decked out in vividly coloured clothes on the back, a lot of red and braid  .   .

yeah i thought, me driving the r|zen idiots around

or maybe i’ve been reading too much  MGTOW  : o )

the web has a disproportionate number of people with some combination of narcissism and borderline personality disorder

rather stupid unpleasant arseholes that can’t see it

materiality is a subset of the visionary and not the other way around

its not a perfect world and i just take people for what they have to offer

laurence olivier  talks  about marilyn monroe

i tamed you ewk, i didn’t have to do anything, i just let you work for me !

i hesitate to use the word  ‘ vision ’  but whatever, its like getting into some magical elevator and you go away on a long journey that is basically unremembered, and when you return you remember some of what was going on when you come out, usually with some words that pop into mind

the journey is like aeons and lifetimes, you don’t remember that at all except some sense of that vastness, you have to infer it from the amount of change in you that has occurred, its literally like you have gone through several lifetimes the amount of change is so great

i went into a zen sesshin in nelson new zealand and had this experience half way through and immediately my views were so changed i couldn’t agree with a thing that was being said

you start to express the new viewpoint and everybody reacts against you and from then on it was downhill in zen, it wasn’t until i ended up at the springwater center with toni packer that i found some-one i could relate to

in terms of this sesshin visionary experience i remember seeing the 6th patriarch before it all closed out

even though real life zen doesn’t talk about it, in fact the transmission system is based on this  “ dai kensho ”  or visionary experience, so it occurred to me that in terms of the  “ conventional ”  zen approach i have effectively received transmission from the 6th patriarch

i have kept an open mind about it over the years, i keep looking at it with a question and still adds up, like i think the 6th patriarch was an historical person despite him possibly having never met the fifth patriarch and lot of what is said about him is straight legend

also once you get the  “ eye that sees ”  you can tell an unenlightened person from an enlightened and none of the supposed 6th patriarch heirs were enlightened, that answers a question, like why would the sixth patriarch be interested in me, well he had no enlightened heirs and when i knocked on the door he answered

mazu who was enlightened and is accounted the seventh patriarch never claimed to have met the 6th patriarch or got approval which he couldn’t have as the 6th patriarch died when he was a child and mazu himself was dismissive of attempts to tie him to huineng or being transmitted to at all

the person mazu supposedly received transmission from was and is generally accounted as having been made up to fill the lineage gap

you have this huge irony  (which i enjoy)  of there being only one authentic heir to huineng and its it me

as i say i keep an open mind and have yet to come across anything conflicting with the transmission

i don’t and have never taken drugs, don’t even drink tea or coffee

jesus that’s a lot of writing

so me being the seventh  (or 2nd)  patriarch may be play, it may be reality, i’m just keeping an eye out for contradiction and so far i haven’t found anything, there’s even permission in astrophysics with some limitations that weren’t violated, which is that you can get information, but not material transmitted across time ?

when i talked about this years ago on r|zen someone made the point that they could claim the same thing, then they did it in mock real saying  “ i’m the xth patriarch  “  and my response is you are lying and know you are lying and he had no answer for that

this is whole point and why the masters diss the scriptures

its your own experience and only you can know the validity of it

if you look for it you can see references to this experience in the zen records ,  even in daihui and huangbo ,  certainly in dogen

i do not recommend it, its too life changing and there are many more such experiences to come, which if you are wise would take to be unsettling information

you’ve gone to sleep and woken up in a completely different world, one of more extreme cruelty and beauty

me being the 7th patriarch is not case of me sitting down with the 6th patriarch and him saying you are the seventh patriarch

its that, in terms of the way the real life system works, i am

“ perennialism ”  implies a coherence to religion that’s not there, so i don’t  “ subscribe to it ”  the nearest thing philosophically to my views would be  “ final causality ”

it wasn’t during meditation at all, i was lying down in the rec room

i don’t know that its  “ dream like ”  i have had  “ visionary dreams" and they are a bit different, recognisable as dreams and remembered

the details i remember are not fuzzy, very intense

its nice of you to ask me about this actually ,  i feel like i am putting down forgotten lore, experience that has been lost centuries ago, the really weird aspect is i feel this was a known mystical tradition that has been almost completely lost and i am recovering it by my own experiences and decades of working through them

a raider’s of the lost ark/she sort of thing, heathen dancing all around me in the bowels of a millenia old tomb while i hurriedly copy out the sacred lore

i have had a lot of visionary experiences since then and actually some before but i never knew what they were, really for me that one was just one amongst many, except for ewk and r|zen   “ reminding me ”  i mightn’t be paying much attention to it now

it does intersect the real world of religion so there is that and it is an opportunity to explain what doesn’t translate well into poetry

also i was able to fit what had happened to me by reading historical literature, contemporary information on visionary mysticism is non-existent

you suggest the possibility of a mild stroke ?

well i have exceptional stamina and circulation, but also the principle was wrong, mild stroke reduces function, its destructive, this is more stepping into what dogen calls  unlimited potential

yeah, i think you are right, i’m not doubting i’m the seventh patriarch, but really to say that causes such a ruckus on r|zen i avoid the topic

TL;DR

i am the only true successor to huineng

that’s all i care about, however in conventional zen terms it makes me the 7th patriarch, because the 6th patriarch never gave transmission to anyone else

my translation of  ‘ zenki ’  is  “ going forever ”

its the title for  an essay  of dogen’s

the problem of translation is each word has a mutliplicity of meanings and a spectrum of philological integrity

a translation is one person’s opinion of what the rendering of the web of meanings might have conveyed

people very similar to ourselves can be less than useful to us

people very similar to ourselves can be less useful to us

if some-one or a group is being disagreeable to you, they are often most useful to you that way though it may not feel like it

a lack of consideration for others or giving validation to their needs is one of the hallmarks of narcissism

just some advice from some-one that has been spammed for four years by ewk on r|zen

you can’t say anything to him without him distorting what you say back to you

so just ignore what he picks up on, its a mistake on his part and i even got to enjoy spam content, especially once seigando picked up on it

you are posting in a  “maison de santé ” ,  its not the  “ normal world ”

i didn’t like it at first but in reality it has been very helpful to me ,  “ polished me ”  damn !

real life zen is pretty crazy to, just the flaws are not so obvious but it does teach the socialization skills missing in net interaction

if you can’t be bothered to research in any depth, the knowledge deficit makes you vulnerable to being wrong, something people seem to pick up on

well public discourse is more than a frame of reference, you have to conform to it to be meaningful

you are trying to say something, but lock it into a private definition which doesn’t work and actually this process is seen in the insane a lot

you can make a criticism ,  but why do you feel the need to make a private definition to encapsulate it ?

its difficult to discuss the visionary, especially in a very hostile environment with people with no background of quality mysticism like for example john of the cross

as i said earlier to you ,  a quick search of what  “ psychic" means connotes  “ telepathy ”  to some extent which is not a useful connotation in terms of the   “ visionary ”

there’s also a fruitless in discussing this because you won’t believe in the visionary until it happens to you, i know that because i used to be very  “ materialist ”  in outlook

i say celibacy is essential because of the level of detachment and sheer volume of work of investigation you are all are welcome to play on r|zen, it suits my purpose which is generating writing material from these discussions we have, but you are pretending to something that will always be beyond you

do you see that you are imposing your own private definition of what a  “ zen master ”  is compared to what most people regard as a  “ zen master ”  ?

i think what makes zen unique amongst any religions is its permission of severe criticism of zen and buddhism itself without the usual executions and torture

so its saying things relatively directly and not having to conform to whatever dogma, like john of the cross, teresa of avila and catherine of siena had to

contrary to what some might think, zen is a mystical tradition, just not flowery and this mysticism in western culture has pretty well moved from christianity to literature and the arts

western zen at the moment is caught in materiality as being final causality and hence is false

for those lost in the endless harangues on r|zen, the buji argument is that materiality is the final causality and ultimately everything is null

mysticism argues that there is a different final causality and it can be known solipsistically

so in actual fact the strong conflict between myself and most noticeably ewk, but in fact also most other people on r|zen has its basis in a fundamental division, i guess that’s not going to change since experience with the  “ visionary ”   is required for the  “ truer ”  perspective

ewk, you have never quoted me, just made up your own distortion that suits your narcissistic personality

you’re impossible to talk to because you always distort what is said to you to suit your own agenda

what zen master behaves the way you do ?

brad warner is a lineage holder almost the most authentic zen lineage around ,  a  “ roshi ”  even, since he was the most senior disciple and nishijima is now R.I.P

that is, there are no  “ war criminals ”  (rabid japanese imperialists)  in it unlike a lot of the other japanese lineages

my  black stream  poem was written after reading some dogen

“ what is the difference between the broken skull and the buddha ? ”

a broken skull is real, buddha is an unreal soap opera character

the problem with r|zen is not simply that the  “ mentally ill ”  can run unchecked, but that the  “ thinking man’s ops ”  are deleted in either an unconscious or conscious  “ dumbing down ”  program

its heaven for the  “ mentally ill ”  with no brakes on bad behaviour and the OP content is now so dumb they look intellectually good as well and unresearched and erroneous opinions are forcibly imposed by those lacking the ability to dialogue and explore truer horizons

“ what is more true than something that shows up ? ”

if you read what i say, its the biased OP deletion that is the underlying problem, which in the terms you express is  “ removing the true ”

you can’t just leave things that  ‘ show up ’  in an entirely neutral atmosphere because some of the things that show up will forcibly attempt to dominate

you asked a good question and i hope this makes sense to you

“ removing isn’t true ? ”

was stalinism true ?

“ yes ”

actually in its context it wasn’t

it was a doctrine of social reform that could never have worked and only very brutal repression could sustain it for any length of time

its true gauge was the way it treated its best writers and poets of which the tragic death of osip mandelstam in a gulag transit point is an example, the incarceration of anna akhmatova’s son and the execution of her ex husband, the sending of boris pasternak’s lover pregnant with his child to a gulag are other examples, you can guess what what happened to the child

“ it was a true thing that didn’t work ”

can a thing be true if it doesn’t work ?

“ yeah, otherwise we wouldn’t talk about how it doesn’t work ”

is something that works different from something that doesn’t work ?

if you take the essence of theoretical communism and socialism to be  “ from each according to his ability to each according to his need ”  and what works as  “ an ordered conscription of assets to the state for the function of the state ”  , how are they compatible since its the need of the state that always dominates ?

in actual fact real life communism and socialism do the latter anyway

“ working and not working are true.  if you reason about forms there is working and not working.  zen is about truth, which is beyond forms ”

how do you distinguish true from false then if  “ not working ”  is true

surely the reasoning process is to sort what works from what doesn’t work ?

“ you don’t.  that’s the point of Zen.  why do you need to distinguish ?  you will not be in trouble anyway ” you are comfortable with saying things that don’t work, what can i say ?

“ i’m talking about zen.  when did zen masters say it is about working or not ?  when it doesn’t work, it’s buddha not working.  you worry about not working but zen’s point is the buddha part ” 

joshu’s dialogues and repartee work, the monks replies don’t

all of the zen records are about master reprimands to monks for  “ incorrect or mistaken views ”

“ views are incorrect but they are truth themselves.  everything is buddha nature but few recognize it

or you are writing complete nonsense

“ but is it true or not ? ” 

is what you have just replied a view or not ?  is it incorrect or correct or both correct and incorrect ?

what i would say is the perspective is mismatched to what could be said that is true, its from the wrong viewpoint and therefore anything you try to say is going to be distorted

“ incorrect is a concept.  it only grossly applies ”

lol  “ grossly ”  is still  “ applies ”

inconvenient detail doesn’t apply ?

god is the solipsist being

for sheer repetitious nonsense its hard to beat buddhism

a dream of dribble

the broken skull

leaks its

contents

onto

a

page

the r|zen creed

everybody is crazy except me

of those who are crazy, some are more crazy than others

its hard being the only enlightened person in the world

another day, another battle

“ what asks ? ”

a thoughtful question

by a thoughtful questioner

that’s what asks

the nature of translations is such that you can’t take them as what bankei yōtaku actually said, they sound too european for a start

what is quoted is often a bit bizarre, but bankei was very popular so i suspect what he actually said was more interesting

for a more accurate translation i think you have to go back to the source documents and then you would need a philological study of the period, probably a solid man year of work

the other interesting thing about him is he was a sculptor of some repute

you’re sorta like a square with none of the corners meeting

if you’re going to behave in a mentally ill way then its going to be commented on

a poem by bankei yōtaku

not angry when abused, not happy when praised

a great blockhead of the universe !

 going along as circumstances carry me  —

north, south, east, west

between heaven and earth

showing my ugliness and clumsiness

my  reply

being ugly and clumsy

he takes an insult and flips it back

it lands upright

disagreement mellows into agreement

north south east west

he blows and is blown

criminal pisses on the gallery from the dock

judge laughs and sets him free

i think  “ argumentum ad hominem ”  has its place, its just  “ excessive use ”  is an issue

its more a debating technique, it doesn’t enforce that what is said about a person is true, but its punch does come from being true

some lines by the enlightened tang dynasty poet wang wei

strolling along the stream up to where it ends 

i sit down watching the clouds as they begin to rise

i think  “ spiritual enquiry ”  should lead you to be more sophisticated in dealing with the extremes of life

mental illness is always upsetting and it changes people in contact with it

i feel my experience with r|zen has been positive, but i don’t think that’s always the case, there’s a lot to work through

jason  writes

my brother chopped off part of his thumb, from the cuticle up, the doctor tried to reconnect it but it’s not going to reconnect, though he suggests it may grow again

he was using some saw, he has very little experience with saws

it was his left thumb and he’s right-handed but wow i’m in some shock

my  reply

i used to get my meat from a small rural abattoir which had a butcher with two fingers missing, i took note of that

i write poetry

without capitals

somehow

this

is

illegal

your hostility and closedness are just unbelievable

you are preoccupied with attempting to invalidate everyone who disagrees with you

it has a name  “ narcissism ”

and  i’m told  narcissists never change

you are closed and your lack of breadth of experience and knowledge locks you into being very wrong

marsha linehan  speaking  on zen and behavior therapy /pyschotherapy

she studied zen with a catholic priest zen master  (geburtstag von willigis jäger) ,  those who have done any real life zen know that catholicism is deeply embedded in real life zen

her talk is to a zen center audience

marsha exudes  comfort  and has a certain charisma which is problematic in my experience

maddie ziegler  dancing  on sia’s  “ chandelier ”

the world is not an artistic abyss, its just where you don’t  expect  it

you are on the rails of a million miles to nowhere

pardon me if i don’t join you

you are on rails of a million miles to nowhere

pardon me if i don’t join you

successful transactions require humility, you are too scared to go there

put down the shell and armour

the bottom line is there is a substantial, well accepted branch of psychiatry that was started by  marsha linehan  based in part on a visionary experience she had

research it

you’re a creep because of your mental style, underhand, toxic, stupid, smarmy where you think you need to be, lazy to a fault

ewk, saying something on r|zen doesn’t make it true

your posting is constantly littered with declamatory statements that have no substance

ewk, you are like brad warner, an astoundingly poor level of general knowledge that sinks you every time

reading the title of books and taking that as some sort of received wisdom does not go very far

you need to see the world in black and white and if the world was black and white that would be ok, but its not so its not ok

there’s something that doesn’t quite add up about huangbo to me, i don’t know what it is

there’s a certain degree of re-invention in him, the insertion of doctrine that doesn’t tally with what the rest of him says ?

if the earliest surviving record dates to 1004 and huangbo died in 850, that gives quite a bit of time for the subtle alteration of the text to fit whatever crazy lineage politics was going on

you can even see the potential for biases in the original transcriptions with the input from the   “ disciples ”  on pei xiu’s transcriptions

the stuff that rings like a bell are likely to be the original transcription and then you have a lot of the supposed transcription material with alterations from various sources

this is what i mean when i say you have to come from outside zen and know what the master likely really meant to sort out this morass

zen is not some mystery, you can find pretty much everything is zen said quite well in english and more

being in the presence of women is like being nose to nose with dangerous game with fuck all armament

i really don’t think men understand the central fact of a woman’s life, pregnancy and raising children

its like they are always looking for something else

i really don’t think men understand the central fact of a woman’s life ,  pregnancy  and raising children

its like they are looking for something else

lol, i’m here and not here, or at least that’s what i tell myself !

i’m here and not here, or at least that’s what i tell myself !

asked for his own words he fails again

you are fooled by yourself as well as others

you would find the ancient greek notion of the afterlife more helpful and intelligent than all of what passes currently

you would find the ancient greek notion of the afterlife more helpful and intelligent than a lot of what passes currently

only on r|zen, where the mentally ill harass the sane telling them they are mentally ill, in duplicate !

“ what certainty ? ”

you are not enlightened so you wouldn’t know would you ?

you can’t take a ruler straight can you ?

gollums gobble nonsense

gollum gobbles nonsense

people who take their certainty or basis for discussion from quotes aren’t zen masters

what good does pretending do you ?

what good is it being endlessly at war with everyone ?

what good is being endlessly at war ?

women are designed to play with men the way cats play with mice

women are designed to play with men the way a cat plays with a mouse

it is meaningless to ask what death is in terms of not being alive since there is no reference point after death

therefore it is meaningful to ask what death is in terms of being alive and the answer is very surprising

death in life relates to love, the erosion of personal boundaries and fugue states of infinity

that is the only death there is

be very wary of not following your own inclinations, there can be more afoot than you realise

is this what death is like ?

a lovely distant view that forms the backdrop to our life or to walk through a beautiful garden when the light is just right ?

is this what death is like ?

a distant view or to walk through a beautiful garden when the light is just right ?

i’m old, dreary and depressive

not

fun

at

all

charles bukowski style honesty ?

not  quite

i’m old, dreary and depressive

not

fun

at

all

r|zen stupidbrag

you know what i mean

the quote followed by

oh master, i’m really the master for quoting you

with the subtext  ‘ i am such a genius for foisting this meaningless bullshit on you as the work of a genius ’

yup the hollow men live on

god seems to be busy talking to jordan peterson these days

its better the mad are left to natter to themselves

jordan peterson speaks of purpose

i don’t

speak

of

purpose

jordan peterson speaks of purpose

i don’t speak of purpose

jason  writes

you can tell you’re talking to a sensible person when they don’t immediately react negatively, instead they listen, think, and then respond

i think there’s some sort of imperative that says, if you interfere with the insane it will cost you

in my time on r|zen, i haven’t really felt i have interfered with anyone

ice, you could be  concussed  with brain damage

ed.  in hospital for stiches to the head

under no circumstances should you fight people

brandon could  have beaten  you way worse, be thankful it wasn’t

you are an intellectual, not a fighter

i can’t believe people are so incredibly hostile to you, yet in some sense are your   “ followers ”

ed.  apparently brandon has a misdemeanor record, there’s no way you should fight a guy who was careful enough to make you throw the first punch so that if there was trouble with the police you would be up as instigating it

stopping an addiction is not immediate, there’s a stepping down through several stages, most likely over several days

you can see how  pewdiepie  and   ice poseidon  lift themselves above the pack

more open, intelligent and adventurous

constant hostility gets one down, too much work to fight against

you want to read the  art of war

get some strategy into your game, those women there at work will use any male they are not afraid of as a scratching post

the bottom line is what they are reading is simply a translation ie a translators opinion

if they think its so great why don’t they contact the  “ translator ”  guru ?

because its all about r|zennists having  “ secret knowledge ”  that no-one else has

the reality is fools dancing around nonsense

there's nothing wrong with being angry at an animal, but it should never translate into inappropriate action

everybody get angry, its an autonomic response

yeah, he went to some trouble to become a moderator, i’ve seen it before, people who want to control subreddits are the least suitable to run them

the whole circus of human continuity

we live

breed

fade

passing on precious little commonsense

and the whole charade begins again

do we exist as an age or rather a span of ages

do we exist as an age at all ?

the literary world has unusual semantics

a literary world has unreal semantics

a literary world has unusual semantics

its a funny thing education, so much time spent to a contrary effect

its a funny thing education, so much time spent to so little effect

jane austin’s books are plays about acceptance and rejection

a r|zen poster asked the 7th patriarch who had accused him of being a narcissist and gaslighting

how am I one ?

the 7th patriarch replied

what else would you call your blind hubricity ?

the poster replied he was no such thing

the 7th patriarch replied

you are blind to yourself

a monk asked

what is a saint ?

joshu said  ‘ you ’

a monk asked

what is a saint ?

joshu said you

my critiques of zen are that its actually about something that no-one is interested in

and also it has equivalents in other religions  (or at least used to)  and literature

r|zen, land of gaslighting narcissists

religion, second-rate intellects gaslighting stuff that is clearly insane

what gets me on r|zen is the amount of copying me, then they can’t wait to kick me

its mistake to show mercy in battle

hindsight cures nothing

i’ve actually cleared a gun barrel of a stuck bullet by the same method as brandon lee was accidentally shot and killed, there’s no way i would let anyone fire a gun at me without me checking the barrel was clear and looking at the blanks used

even blanks up close enough can kill

he was only 28, i’d put it down to inexperience with how props and stunts can go wrong

bruce lee was an idiot and died an idiot’s death

there was quite a bit going on, a death so young has to have causes

god his  “ creepy ”  followers sucking up the bullshit

i don’t think people on message boards can read long before being driven to reply

not replying ain’t human nature

damn, i replied !

people don’t naturally bullshit the way you do, there is some sort of  “ being taught ”

anything except answering my question

people can lie in the short term, but they can’t lie in the long term

“ humblebrag ”  is the boot that fits ?

relax, you are never going to be enlightened, just one of the millions who can’t be bothered to think straight for their entire lifetime

r|zen humblebrag

you know what i mean

the quote followed by

oh master i am not worthy to shine your shoes  (fix your sandals i guess)

with the subtext  ‘ i am such a genius for recognising this meaningless bullshit as genius ’ 

yup uriah heep lives on

there is a huge difference between a journey seen in hindsight and one with an intended direction to start

the  “ spiritual ”  journey is the former and not the latter

there are no other people so who would be pursuing what ?

“ what use use are the sayings if you don’t understand them   .  . ”

i think what you said goes off the rails because intially ,  you don’t distinguish between sayings that have something to them and those that don’t

more affectation than a woman’s make-up

where on earth is  “ earth ”  ?

martial arts people are all muscle memory and no brains

you can assume with women that anything you tell them will be all over the place

is there such a thing as wrong and right ?

you seem in denial of this ?

writing is just like anything else, its open to criticism

there is an intrinsic problem to translations, ignore at your peril !

a literary world has unreal semantics

a person making a valid criticism of someone is not being arrogant, they are making a valid criticism, that’s all

you are taking this personally and attacking me personally

with language, you cannot really isolate sense independent of expression

philosophy tries to do this and fails

good poetry doesn’t and succeeds

jordan peterson is overrating religious and psychiatric writing and this is putting him in a  “ sub literary ”   space

religious people overvalue what they read and are consequently stuck in a nonsensical sub literary space

you are hostile to sense, so much for your koan study

these bigoted zen turds !

zen is very literary, i think naive people get sucked into crediting sense when its not there

“ with most koans, there’s a certain feeling i get when it  ‘ clicks ’ ”

i think the  “ click ”  is imaginary, you just have never read enough good quality english poetry and prose to know from experience what can be achieved with language

another way of putting it is a click is not enough, there should be a  “ well ”  of associations and cross references which of course ,  even in good translations only a few are got

ryokan being a very literary poet suffers a lot from this, his poems are not as childish as they are usually translated which feeds the  “ humblebrag  “  zen fiction that naive people take as the reality

you are stuck in the wrong space ,   “ click ”  is the wrong feeling, but you are overvaluing what you read in the first place

fayan asked two monks to roll up a blind

as they were doing it he said, inside the blind is darkness, outside is light

ed. i also mean within the wound blind itself, not simply the contrast in the room with the blind rolled up or let down

basically you are after a simultaneity of meanings, to get that fusion you have to rewrite the koan/story so the simultaneity appears naturally in english

no translator is going to spend a week thinking about three lines

nanquan was becoming infirm and congshen asked him

“ what happens when we die ”

nanquan replied, its just an idea like everything else

congshen  asked

“ what is not an idea ”

nanquan replied

last night out by the lake under the moonlight

nanquan was becoming infirm and congshen asked him

“ what happens when we die ”

nanquan replied, its just an idea like everything else

congshen  asked

“ what is not an idea ”

nanquan replied

last night out under the moonlight

what understanding do you think your dense use of clichés shows ?

cameo  from emma

young women never realise they get older

fame is like the internet, you get exposed to extremes

you may think your social circle has some extremes in

but man

that’s

nothing

compared to what’s

out

there

“ self-taught ”  obviates  “ master ”  and  “ student ”

don’t fish in a puddle, fish in the seven seas

ronin he rap

like a balrog on heat

only

the 7th patriarch

he can’t beat

this is a true story

there’s this guy called adam tebbe who created a little zen empire on the net called  sweeping zen

really gung ho, into meditation and started making a film on zen travelling around zen centers

quite the missionary, in your face even

well he always had a problem with depression and it was getting worse

he ran out of money to film  (funded by web donations)  and had to work in a physically demanding job shifting boxes

it was a revelation to him, his depression was greatly improved from the physical exercise and not meditating

having seen the light and demons apparently he became a  born again  christian which in ohio? is probably safer than being a buddhist

research is showing huge health costs to being sedentary and being seated, sitting meditation is sedentary and actually korean zen has always been wary of it using lying down or walking or standing meditation

ok, the demons are threatening me with red hot pokers if i don’t say this

sitting in front of TV screens and computers is sedentary in spades

madness is intrinsic to the fabric of reality

madness is intrinsic to the fabric of society

you can write to be understood ?

faux obscurity

is

faux

obscurity

the most abject object in the universe is a relgious clone

the most abject object in the universe is a clone

is religion more than idiots pumped up with their own self importance pretending the meaningless is meaningful ?

is zen more than idiots pumped up with their own self importance pretending the meaningless is meaningful ?

my comment on jason making a criticism of brittany to her

you are getting too involved and want to back off, her life isn’t yours

as if you don’t have enough female problems at work

you don’t have to  “ fix ”  brittany or her life, just like you don’t have to  “ fix ”  the women at work, its all beyond your control and efforts in this direction will just wear you out to no point

just sit back and focus on things more of benefit to yourself

you do have to be careful with public criticism, often its enough to just make suggestions for improvement, those suggestions contain the criticism without saying it

my reworking of an extract from joshu’s  “ the twelve hours of the day ”

sunset

i am

by myself

it is now

dark

and quiet  except for the annoying

scurrying

of rats

is enlightenment

any more

than this ?

don’t go belly up to the enemy

brad warner has a nostalgia problem for sure and the people he appeals to share the same culture

however he might be the best living zen master, there’s a freedom there the others don’t have

the basic thing is for the sort of fish you want to catch with mystical inquiry, the net has to cover all oceans and more, so i do that

i really have no advice for people without the time to do that

some sort of sense of the inadequacy of knowledge can only come from the experience of the failure of knowledge

people take the shortcut of restricting what they look at, but its not the experience of limitation or failure so they stick in fixed views

sonata  in D minor, K. 517  by domenico scarlatti, better than therapy

why i think eihei dogen went to china

he was a fluent chinese writer

there is a likely high ranking japanese sponser of his trip

his description of a chinese monastery interior has been proved correct despite it previously being supposed incorrect

necessity can create the need for small lies, but he was a celibate monk searching for answers, why would he lie on such a major scale ?

some things you willingly particpate in only add scar tissue to the brain

some things you particpate in only add scar tissue to the brain

one of the reasons why i think dogen went to china is he obviously has spent quite a bit of time at sea, brad warner has a new  translation  of  “ zenki ”  that really captures that sense of a long voyage

at sea

just

suspended

there

between

the

sea

and sky

sailing

at sea

just

suspended

there

between

the

sea

and sky

you people don’t do any real research work, if macdonalds don’t serve it you don’t want it

i love ewk taking steven heine’s  “ did dōgen go to china ?   :    what he wrote and when he wrote it ”  as evidence dogen didn’t go to china, he read the title but not the book, formed a fixed opinion and that’s it

joshu in the latter part of his life was so destitute he had to resort to verbal trickery to win fruit from his monks by bets

hilma af klint is quite interesting, but needs in depth research, there’s some good  videos

i wouldn’t get side tracked by the spirits thing, just look at the work, it is rare to have such a well preserved record of an artist’s lifetime work

zen is celibate for a reason

the olden zen was celibate for a reason

its a life’s work to sort out, it takes total attention over a lifetime and a level of failure in life that really sticks in your throat

in addition  “ married with kids ”  has conflicting demands with what zen is about

successful people cannot become enlightened

see from the mystical point of view life is failure, that is the actual fact

if you are successful you can’t see life as failure, simply because you are successful, its a blinder

no-one willingly is a  “ life failure ”  its something you get cast into, but your circumstance now is the actually of being true

let me put it this way, you have a fixed view, there is no fixed view that really survives intact some investigation

there’s something very unstable about charisma, dangerous and not productive

in war, no quarter is given

what really strikes me about ewk  (the r|zen resident sociopath)  is how he doesn’t care what other people think, its only his own views that matter

you can disagree with some-one, but that’s very different to being utterly indifferent to their views

sleep inertia

why can’t the  “ polishing a brick ”  story be just another meaningless koan that people pretend has special import

those stupid lip flappers ?

st. peter, john and the other disciples were at their morning prayers and jesus came over and asked what they were doing

talking to god they said

jesus then asked out aloud, god, what are these people doing ?

the disciples interrupted him saying, that’s not prayer

jesus replied, am i not talking to god ?

etymology, philology and translation are the rocks and bridges that meaning is conveyed to us over vast periods of time, just be aware of the illusions they can create as well as oasises of sanctity

the costs of  “ enlightenment ”  are too high for the  “ clones of normality ”

plus its something that has to happen in childhood

work in later years is simply recovering what happened as a child, but was lost

if you know anything about developmental history, you will know this is the case

well you can argue christianity is a  “ meditation ”  religion, the origins of the word go back to latin, hebrew and greek

its use as meaning some sort of sitting in a lotus posture is very recent and totally ignores the vast amount of its history in english as simply meaning  “ contemplative ” 

“ infinity is always accessible – methods of cultivation are against its spirit ”

meditative contemplation however is not

why people think regurgitating quotes and being anti any contemplative work is what zen is about i can’t even begin to imagine

ed.  i got a reply denying the primary role of contemplation

my  reply

lol, some-one who has actually read what i wrote, congratulations !

i get so many replies where plainly they do not read what was written

you can’t escape conceptualisation, however the process of developing or redeveloping concepts does in a way escape, the process of change needs flexibility and orientation to discovery

so contrary to what you say, you do actually  “ go through ”  by contemplation

the evidence is that when you do this working, things happen that are difficult to explain

so what i am saying is  “ process ”  avoids the problem of being stuck in  “ fixed objects ”

if you look at a painting ,  its a fixed object

if you look at a lifetime’s work, you can see there’s a process that the paintings are reflective of

“ so is pushing through forward something resulting in the same kind of experience as turning around and stepping through ? ”

i’d say the first is gradual and the second is sudden

i went to town on my fortnightly shopping trip and had a late lunch at kentucky fried; chicken wings and chips

it was quiet, the only other people were five teenage school girls a table across

i could not believe what i was hearing, they did not talk but were simply making noises at each other, maybe one or two words where decipherable, but that’s all

maybe its their development of their pubescent emotional intelligence, they are exploring their own and each other’s reactions ?

i got interested in this question and started listening to older women talk when shopping and really there is something else going on with women, their conceptual range is so limited compared to men

its makes me realise how rare and articulate woman like brittany venti is ,  but the blinders are still there

no wonder women need men to navigate the world

i think articulate women are rare

a monk asked nansen if there was any truth not taught to the common herd

nansen said yeah

the monk asked  ‘ what is it ’  ?

nansen was silent

“ sounds like people are not well acquainted with dung shoveling ”

i’d be one of the few people who have, living on farms and cleaning out septic tanks, you have to watch for cuts getting infected

“ she’s uncomfortable running because she’s big breasted and she has asthma ”

yeah well that would be a problem, plus women are not really built for running, bone structure is not right

just doing chores and gardening with reasonable vigour is good exercise

going for a walk with hills in

there’s a lot of options

what was the meaning of the word at the time it was spoken or recorded is a question with old texts and often not answerable

huangbo was a literati appointment, good with the gab, but not fully enlightened imo

basically he makes some sense but is missing something

well educated literati would pretty much explain him

‘ literati ’  means of the educated governmental elite in this case

the thing is the original language is lost, even in a short as time period as several hundred years and the gap is called  “ philological deficit ”

the gate of infinity is fluidity and open to fluidity

islam, is quite simply, a social control theology designed to keep the reins tight on subjected populations

the problem the catholic church has, is its so much rubbish why would you be a priest except you have some hidden agenda

we all know what the hidden agenda is !

what mysticism is about is entirely continuous with your life and what it has been, therefore any notion of  “ beginners ”  is false

what zen is really about is unabashed mysticism, visionary experiences that take you into a different and more complete reality, hard to understand until it happens to you

that’s what dahui is talking about and as i say, until it happens you will not believe in it, i did

you can flap your lips forever, what good will it do ?

“ if you can turn the light around for a moment and reverse your attention, critically examining your own standpoint, it may be said the gate will open wide   .   .   ”

and of course the next step is to walk through it, a step a surprising number are to afraid to take and don’t

its a funny thing, i was going to make an OP on r|zen about true adepts not quoting and then doing a commentary, but being able to say their own words and if quotes are used, they are interwoven into what they say

then i thought, what r|zen is mostly good for is the quotes and i don’t want to change that so this is the only place i am recording these thoughts of mine

psychiatry has no responsibility to the patient, only to the mental health system for keeping the patient from being a hazard to others without regard to the patient’s long term welfare

that’s the bottom line and if you think you are going to be well  treated by such an approach, think again

one of the new areas of knowledge is the very negative effect on health of sitting and being sedentary

this  study  about the consequent thinning of a brain region is disturbing

what i love about buddhism is the spectacle of the very stupid standing around being told complete crap and applauding it

“ where the fuck is this  ‘ mind ’  ? ”

 where   what the fuck is this mind ?

“ i don’t know ”

its a meaningless word

the four horsemen of the argumencalypse

argumentum ad hominem, distortion, unsupported contradiction and fabrication

“ you still haven’t told me what the self is ”

the suffix of  “ yourself ”

jason  writes

i was walking by the portuguese vets desk yesterday with her sitting there and she flipped her hair at me with her hand

i was very male-blinded by her when i first met her, she was also acting a different way   .  .   i have to look at her hands a lot when we are working with animals and i used to admire that she didn’t wear glitzy jewelry, and some of the bracelets she wears aren’t, they’re leather wristbands or something, but for some reason i reasoned with myself that her two rings were fake jewels, but now that i’m seeing a bit better they’re actually real and are probably super expensive !

you just can’t get your into head all the endless story telling shit being wrong can you ?

that which is right you ignore

let me requote foyen

“ nowadays most zen students create interpretations based on words, arbitrarily assuming mastery, or else they take the stories of the ancients’ awakenings and make up experiences based on them, what relevance is there in that ?

when xuefeng went to touzi three times and dongshan nine times, do you suppose he did it for the sake of words ?

you should simply step back and study through total experience ”

all this crazy extreme and endless repetitive argumentum ad hominem you do  (ed. ewk)

diagnostic of what ?

narcissism on steriods ?

bodidharma was a story, there may actually have been an historical person surprisingly, a blue-eyed persian come along the silk road, but 99% of the stuff will be myth

you do get little odd snippets of historical reality leak through like his possible execution at heyin, all the time he was supposed to looking at a wall was him living quite a comfy life in his cave within a kilometre of wealthy donors residences  (who were also no doubt executed at heyin) ,  he was part of the  “ in clique ”  then became the dead clique

some people think endless aggressive senseless ad hominem, unsupported contradiction and twisting what is said are the right ways to argue

you are scratching the surface of something that needs a lot of solid work, like say writing software for a couple of hours a week is not going to make you professional

you are failing to accept you aren’t/can’t put the work in

IQ is a measure of stupidity, the higher, the more stupid

Iq

standard deviation

what rot

what is expressible and what is not expressible ?

no idea is so junky there isn’t some-one pushing it, somewhere

no idea is so junky there isn’t some-one pushing it

no idea is so junky there isn’t some-one, somewhere pushing it

chris langan is not a great thinker, or indeed, any sort of thinker

gobbledygook really

“ what is the absolute truth ”

there is no absolute truth

i don’t like either of them, they are well matched

why

arm

your

 enemy ?

“ not zen.  get out. ”

out.

get

zen

inventor abandons invention

creepy acolyte

picks

it

up

and

gets

it

working

poetry

is

 terrible.

i remember advising a woman in kentucky years ago not to eat squirrel brains because  of this

glad i got that right !

for all the bluster, laziness and nonsense you are surprisingly trollable

a case of the troll trolled !

talk about a fish eating its own tail

munch  munch

talk about a fish eating its own tail

man, talk about a fish eating its own tail

basically you are saying you have arrived and there is no further to go and i am saying there is further to go, its an impasse of sorts

you have to sort it out yourself

well i have nothing to add, i just don’t have the time to spoonfeed you

“ how will you know if i have sorted it out ? ” 

from what you say and how you behave

i don’t have the time or inclination to go through it with you

where you are going will become apparent when you get there

you have further to go, drifting won’t get you there

get solitary time, read quality and that’s for the rest of your life

“ can you point out a mistaken view of mine ? ”

that’s for you to sort out, as i say its self-taught

it only matters to you

just look back through what i am saying, it will eventually make sense

you are getting wound up in tight circles, you want some other involvement

what is mind ?

what zen offers is teaching social skills and some induction of questions

a pupil more apt than the master

i have aged compulsorily, it will happen to you too

i have aged compulsorily

views change as we age

“ how many lifetimes have i worked ? ”

whatever fraction you have currently lived

all i can say being many many years older than you is spiritual inquiry is a lifetime’s work

all i can say being many many years older than you is spiritual inquiry, its a lifetime’s work

“ enlightenment ”  is actually the fruit of a lot of work over the entire lifetime

well, its the sudden and gradual thing, both

understanding the process of ourselves opens up to clearer seeing changes, its a lot of work

i think elephants and whales and dolphins are on par with humans

my view is buddhism is just bad soap opera

my view is buddhism is just a bad soap opera

self is a construct within the brain, toni packer says that essentially

its origin is not mysterious, its a developmental construct designed by evolution

“ so uhh  .  .  are you going to die ? ”

no

“ spiritual inquiry ”  is self taught so i never  “ had ”  a teacher ,  however i did spend time with quite a few

well you have to grow beyond their bullshit, but i found it helped greatly with my social skills

the one who wasn’t bullshit was toni packer

she was actually enlightened ,  but unfortunately died in 2013 and the world is poorer for it

just making stuff up and endlessly recycling bullshit on the net doesn’t make the jump into what actually happens in the real world

people who are mentally ill are very difficult, but they should have some measure of sympathy as well

your reply is unnecessarily aggressive

i told you some sense ,  you don’t have to take it

don’t get caught up in useless battles

some people are like dogs that stick their nose in your crotch, you can’t ignore them

highly idiosyncratic definitions totally divorced from public domain meaning are diagnostic of mental illness  ( ed. ewk’s saying zen is unrelated to buddhism )

even in the terms of tang and song dynasty zen, the records are replete with the deconstruction of buddhism which means they lived in a buddhist milieu, ie buddhism was part and parcel of zen

in fact its only in recent times that you get zen divorced from buddhism, the springwater center and one or two other places

actually the springwater contrasting with the rochester center is a very good example, the rochester center is unabashedly buddhist whereas springwater is  “ zen like ”

IOP’s are a pretty good indication of eye health, an optometrist should be able to give an inexpensive check, record the results if you go

if understanding neglects life smarts and social skills, then you will remain spinning in turmoil

on the other hand if you have a successful life you will never understand the ultimate truth

your voice and reading timing give you away as inept, intellectually lazy and insane

you write crazy shit and think you are sane !

“ where is my mistake ? ”

not working it out for yourself so you don’t know bullshit quotes when you see them

“ humblebrag ”  is also a role

convert to a religion with more money, zen is always broke, they work the monks hard for thirty years then toss them out when they pass their use by date

“ zen ”  is an illusion like everything else

there have been a billion insane lunatics in religion, you are no different from the rest

everything just rolls on and on, one day after another

yesterday’s problems become

today’s

continuities

everything rolls on, one day after another

yesterday’s problems become

today’s

continuities

women are a different species, they need careful handling and caution just like handling any animal

women are a different species, they need careful handling and caution just like handling any feral animal

a correspondent asks

i’ve been meditating on and off for several years, i was trained by a vipassana teacher over ten years ago.

for the last 4-5 month of this year i have made an effort to meditate daily, i do 40 mins a day

the question i have is about sensations i encounter inside my head during meditation and particularly during the end.  these sensations started couple of weeks ago.  so what happens is that there is a slight tingling behind the eyes, and then at times a sharp pressure like feeling behind my right eye.  now when i say behind, it doesn’t feel like its in the socket, it feels like its in my brain

these sensations aren’t at all unpleasant, they are just weird, i couldn’t find much online about this, do you know what this could be ?

now on further enquiry he does a lot of sitting during his day and yes, you guessed it, is a software engineer and also he sits in the quarter lotus postion which is quite constricting

my  reply

ok, there’s a lot of recent research showing that actual sitting is a significant contributor to  “ metabolic problems ”

we are evolutionarily designed to be always on the move

“ so what happens is that there is a slight tingling behind the eyes, and then at times a sharp pressure like feeling behind my right eye ”

the eye consumes huge amounts of oxygen, more than anything else in the body, you could be getting some early warning for a circulation problem or even if you have had  “ natural ”  chicken pox, some sort of mild shingles dermatome problem

the point is that since you are sitting down all day its just crazy to do more  “ sitting ”  and actually as you age it can get quite risky

my  “ meditation ”  is walks or an hour to two hours under a red led headlamp light in the evenings before bed, the red means you can move around ,  but the brain thinks its dark

when i was travelling visiting zen centers in the usa i noticed that the zen masters never sat a second longer than they had to if they could help it and in general the centers had a very poor degree of health

my view is that if there is a spiritual  “ path ”  it can only be seen in hindsight and all the endless projective suppositions are from unenlightened men

meditation is just the default circuit of the brain running riot and you seeing the patterns that underlie  “ you ”  and your behaviour and thinking

if you don’t do quality reading so you get some realignment outside yourself, you will just get ingrained into craziness

its that simple

answers create new questions

this

is

the

true

way

answers create new questions

this

is

the

way

pink martini and the von trapps

kuroneko no  tango

dream  a little dream

crying  bloody water

learning to work with and survive women higher in the company hierarchy is a major skill

learning to work with women higher in the company hierarchy is a major skill

this is the way women work, create rumours, see how you handle it

yeah  “ shit testing ”  you  lol

as you get older and the important people in your life die, the past becomes increasingly remote and one is some sort of strange being stranded in the wrong time

a legless monk who could balance himself and move with crutches hobbled up a mountain to visit a zen master in his hermitage

the zen master who had come into contact with and was impressed by christian healing shouted, throw away your crutches and walk

the monk threw away the crutches and hobbled along on the stumps of his legs

see  said the zen master

note:  nestorian christianity was alive and well in tang and  yuan  dynasty china

when you do a good bit of writing, everyone tries to re-write it for you

that’s how you know its a good bit of writing

when you do a good bit of writing, everyone tries to re-write it for you

r|zen is an infinite sink of time spent to correct the incorrectables

demosponges ,  the first multicellular life

will scientology update ?

you can’t think your way out of a paper bag and that backs up your point ?

globe trotting royalty and and a new zealand prime minister are completely unaware that its not a good idea to change time zones when pregnant, mucking the circadian rhythm around disrupts fetal development

all these millions of hours of attention on these people and not one spent telling them this

nothing is more certain that what i wrote will not become a meme

i’m not interested in sorting your confused thinking out

women and men are blind about each other

you are willing to yak and be a pain in the butt, but you are not willing to do the work

you are willing to yak, but you are not willing to do the work

i think jordan peterson is conflicted between his existential concerns and his need for life to be productive and have a point

he is unusual, he has   a take  on some subjects i have not really seen in anyone else living

he’s a lot about the conflict between solipsism and the objective world

i’ve got in a circle of work and can’t get out

the young are oblivious

the young are oblivious to their elders

the young are oblivious to the travails of their elders

r|zen is a bunch of missionary zealots using the arguing process to missionize themselves as adepts at the center of whatever universe

i was thinking that pride and prejudice was an unconsumated sexual fairy tale

a lot of the zen records are in fact meaningless nonsense with fraught source, transcription, copying and translation problems

this is why one of the fundamental tenants of zen is  “ transmission outside the scriptures ”

streaming is like r|zen and a lot of the net, a selective accretion of douchebags

i use the word  “ schizophrenia ”  a bit on r|zen and what i mean is that to totally ignore the real life institutions that form the basis of most prominent public domain meaning of  ‘ zen ’  is schizophrenic

since no end of crazy ideas abound with no social consequence to their participants, being mentally ill has to be a desynchronous decoupling from social life and institutions

yeah so we agree on the meaning of  scripturalist  as one who  ‘ adheres literally to ’  and  ‘ studies ’  scripture

but scripture is not restricted to christianity but can apply to any  “ body of writings considered sacred or authoritative ”

so zen scripturalists are people who take a body of zen writings as authoritative, like for example you might exclude alan watts and include most of the tang and song dynasty records

scripturalists then take these  “ authoritative ”  texts as a bed rock foundation of whatever truth you think zen espouses

if you actually look at the content of these  “ zen masters ”  most of the time they are deconstructing buddhism used scripturally

the emphasis in meditation in zen may have come as some sort of antidote to scripturalism, but the weakness is inadequate or nonexistent quality reading, a problem that shouldn’t exist today with the vast amount of material on the internet, but it does

jordan peterson studies religion, myths and psychiatry, sort of making a synthesis ,  still its a  “ married with kids ”  philosophizing and ultimately deficient

poor fellow, he’s going to die wealthy

the walls r|zen people build and maintain

thinking in clichés

thinking thinking in clichés is actually thinking

thinking anything they don’t understand when reading is because there’s nothing to understand

projecting crazy ill thought out schemas on voynich

failing to understand that translation is at best a very loose interpretation

using writing to reinforce their role as a missionary of their own unique religion

failure to use writing as a tool for exploring the unfamiliar

alienating the real world from their religion

having considerable reading and writing age difficulties and refusing to address the need for skills upgrading

taking contradiction as a personal attack and responding aggressively

its interesting to contrast this  keira knightly  with her role as elizabeth bennett in pride and prejudice

“ my vagina split, you came out with your eyes open.  arms up in the air.  screaming.  they put you on to me, covered in blood, vernix, your head misshapen from the birth canal.  pulsating, gasping, screaming

you latched on to my breast immediately, hungrily, i remember the pain.  the mouth clenched tight around my nipple, light sucking on and sucking out

i remember the shit, the vomit, the blood, the stitches.  i remember my battleground. your battleground and life pulsating. surviving.  and i am the weaker sex ? you are ?  ”

a good bit of writing

in defence of the ducchess of cambridge she has shown herself to be unusually physically robust and some women really do have an easier time in childbirth and for security reasons she had to be out of the hospital quickly

its also interesting to contrast strong artistic talent with an average brain

yes, the eiffel tower is  “ a folly ”

jason writes that brittany just got a  $20K donation

my  comment

wow, there are some wealthy guys around, bitcoin millionaires ?

she will do much better with donations if she keeps her current boyfriend free status

jason  replies

i spoke to this donator, this is the guy who made a lot of money from making an app

my  reply

well actually its a good cause, unlike a lot of charity

money well spent and he won’t regret it

how does it feel to be a ewk replicant ?

i mean apart from the bad taste in the choice of source ?

zen scripturalists can’t compete with jordan peterson

the real last case of the mumonkan

a novice monk asked master kempo

“ i understand that all buddhas of the whole universe enter the one road into nirvana

what or where is it ? ”

master kempo replied  “ why do you ask ”   ?

the monk was flabbergasted

my  comment

when you are enlightened you will understand, not before

even god  has trouble  with eve

mediation can mean being a bit  “ self reflective ”

you don’t have to sit on a cushion destroying your hips and knees

purple is a charles bukowski color, if you want to live that sort of life

proxy means giving authority for someone one to act in a matter for you, e.g. taking a platitudinous fake like the dalai lama as some sort of spiritual authority instead of doing the work yourself

if you want to see, look everywhere

not every stone has to be upturned

but some do

leave it unturned and you are tied down

if you want to see, look everywhere

if you take proxies for you own experience ,  you are going to get burnt

it always amazes me, the web, just when you think there can’t be anything else, something  amazing  comes around the corner

hilma af klint, childless, unmarried, a different sort  of intensity

i find the ethiopian orthodox church just amazing, that there was this whole different christian universe going on almost totally unknown in the west

one of the best  reads  you will ever do

depression is a  symptom  of an inflamed brain

“ the PET scans showed significant inflammation in the brains of the people with depression, and the inflammation was most severe among the participants with the most severe depression

the brains of people who were experiencing clinical depression exhibited an inflammatory increase of  30% ”

bankei’s reputation may have more to do with his skills as a sculptor than his verbal pronouncements which are lackluster

if there was such a thing as reincarnation, we would not be without some personal knowledge of it since according to that doctrine we are a product of past lives

there has never been less evidence for anything than reincarnation, i don’t know why its such a popular belief

jason writes

whenever i tell women i don’t want to date at all, then i start joking about getting a girlfriend or they see me flirting or something  “ i thought you didn’t want a girlfriend ! ”

my comment

women are always selling the value of having a girlfriend to single men, its like a merchant promoting the value of his merchandise

jason writes that brittany’s ex was advising  “ don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t date e-girls ”

my  comment

don’t date i’d say

new york is chock full of very damaged women and men

to these long term monks and faux monks who waste their time

why has your time been such an abject failure ?

you are what one might call  “ contrary – enlightened ”

its bizarre to waste your life in this way

its important to understand we only live once

why not let go the assumption you can never be wrong ?

mystical inquiry is like a puzzle, in the center of the puzzle after you have unlocked enough and had a stroke of luck is the answer to the problem  “ is there final causality and if so what is it ? ”

that is what enlightenment experiences are, the solutions to these puzzles

its a life’s work and takes celibate attention, i don’t recommend it

however if you have some sort of involvement its important to read quality like  william hazlitt  which gets the mind thinking along the right avenues

most people sink in the abyss of religious trash or pop writing

mystical inquiry is as simple as quality reading and getting some solitary time, but no-one does both

you sound happy enough in your life, but actually in terms of the sort of inquiry i am suggesting its a blinker

stay with the happy life

“ you are making a presumption ”

you have to ask yourself, what are the parallels of zen in historical western cultture

its a simple question, but the answers will blow your mind

the  “ piranha spirit ”

 if you get a good bite you will get a good response !

in my experience its only zen that emphasizes enlightenment

the nearest parallel is not in buddhism but visionary christianity

a bit odd if you think about it

the buddha wasn’t enlightened

disappointed he joined a travelling band of actors and the  “ buddhist road show ”  was born

several thousand years of script rewrites later its still bullshit

you can’t argue with him, whatever you say, he flings it back is a distorted form that suits him

“ dharma ”  is an illusion, like  “ holiness ”

“ which zen master has the most resonance with you ? ”

i think joshu/zhaozhou was the outstanding one because he lived  “ the talk ”  and really the hardest truth of zen is lack of success in life and he certainly was that

the other thing he epitomises is the role of a long life in effective zen

“ ideas  >  events  >  ppl ”

people  >  events  >  ideas

the clarity of a fine winters night, the snow lit silently by the moon

the quiet wash of a windless sea

what else is there ?

wikipedia is quite strongly censored, i have had first hand experience of this, anything that disrupts the views of very conventional morons

van gogh was accidentally shot by young idiots

what the public does not want to know

its been around  a while  but never made the main media, like sir henry neville really writing shakespeare’s works, too disconcerting for the general public

there’s even two mona lisas !

we know a lot more about  ozymandias  than when shelley was alive

shelley’s death was the strangest and saddest thing, it may have been a result of piracy

i replied to ewk

lots of zen masters wrote poems, you not going to  ‘ take the plunge ’  ?

he didn’t take the plunge so in that absence i wrote a poem for him

on r|zen

that dratted zaddar1

beats me

right left and center

and i can’t even make

 a pun !

write a poem

free the soul

write a poem and free the soul

once i dreamt of winning

on r|zen

a million fawning minions

hanging on my every word

such pearls of wisdom

i deigned to pass to them

this dream started to decompose

with the odors of a compost

yes

r|zen turned into

my personal holocaust

ed.  i have been listening to pam ayres lately, i like her simple no nonsense style !

you are too nice and these people are arseholes  (ed. r|zen), its more than bruising

you are too nice and these people are arseholes, its more than bruising

in this new world when some-one dies in a way that makes the news what does the family do ?

make a gofundme page to cover the cost of the funeral

brick walls are brick walls

some places on the net are psychwards, be careful of your own sanity

r|zen is a psychward, be careful of your own sanity

“ chewing on these bones will not break them ”

chewing on these bones will break them

“ you know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world ”

william hazlitt

a  quote  by william hazlitt

“ we do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts ”

my  reply

we see nature with our eyes without our understandings or hearts

what happens if you stop explaining things ?

what happens if you stop trying to explain things to people ?

jet boating up the  godley river

turn the sound off

working away at a problem will usually present an answer

you’re man of limited, offensive repetitions

women need a certain mistaken intensity to spend half their lives raising those monsters called children

women need a mistaken intensity to spend half their lives raising those monsters called children

you just sorta

get the same message

get the same message

get the same message

you just sorta get the same message get the same message get the same message

“ yes, that is an  ‘ ad hominem  ‘  and irrelevant ”

people are always relevant, its a form of psychosis to think that’s not so

banzan one day went to the market and saw a man buying wild boar’s flesh

the customer said to the butcher   :   cut me a slice of good meat !

the butcher threw down his chopper, folded his arms and said   :   your honor does not know that this is all good meat ?

my  comment

a bit of mis-information by the butcher actually, however the customer was unintentionally insulting, what he meant was  ‘ give me a tender cut ’

a monk asked   :   master, where is your mind focused ?

joshu replied   :   i have no mind

someone asked   :   master, where is your mind focused ?

joshu replied   :   i have no mind

one of life’s lessons is its very diffcult, impossible even to compel behavior

we are autonomous beings and motivation is internal

jason is getting it in the neck at work

oh and the women at work at PMSing, their cycles are linked up because they’re around each other all the time

so they’re extra bitchy right now, it will be interesting to see how their behaviors change over the next weeks

my  comment

there is a theory women go through this by evolutionary design to break up infertile pair bonding, that only the care of children would make suffering this sort of hassle  (both genders)  worthwhile

if you do something, you are expanding the activity you do, but you are becoming blinder in the activity you don’t do

if you don’t accept the premise, how much point is there in our arguing  ?

if something is self taught you have to steer yourself

if you go right or wrong, its the way you steer yourself

if something is self taught you have to steer yourself

right or wrong, its the way you steer yourself

why is there something rather than nothing ?

the observable fact is there is something

if there was nothing, you wouldn’t be here to observe

why is there something rather than nothing ?

the observable fact is there is something

if there was nothing, you couldn’t observe

if you can figure life out, you are doing better than me

the whole point about texts is what zen is really about is also what the great mystical poets like emily dickinson and mystical figures like john of the cross and sa’di say

so why would you rate highly voynichated chinese texts above these when in fact you need to come from this broader range of texts to develop the understanding to decode the chinese voynich

zen is just one mystical tradition, its that simple

some-one was complaining that i was putting zen out of reach

“ a couple of days ago you said celibacy was a  “ pre-requisite ”  and now you are saying that you need to have understanding of other mystical texts to decipher zen texts ? ”

what i am saying about texts is surely enabling what zen and mysticism is really about to be in reach ?

the point is that people in r|zen are heading down the wrong road, its their own actions that place a real understanding out of reach, just a hubric trust in their own sufficiency, which again if you read the masters they all warn against !

if you are going to show an interest then what is the point of not getting it right which can place you in quite disastrous extreme places

its known what chinese characters mean today, but it is completely unknown as to what they meant when first written/transcribed a millenia or more ago, or even that the characters were what was initially written or said

the meaning of words can subtly or overtly change within the space of a hundred years

that’s the philological problem that has been ignored and why modern ch’an/zen translations are not true translations at all, but philosophical artifacts of mainstream western cultural ideas

the problem has always existed, even in 8th century china, that’s why zen lays its emphasis on  “ the transmission outside the scriptures ” ,  obviously even then there was a constant trying to pass off  “ scriptural ”  understanding as authentic

r|zen is just this crazy imposition of scriptural validity and a denial of the importance of self understanding !

understanding infinity is within our grasp if we stand outside self-partiality

i am reluctant to post on r|zen anymore, it causes a degree of physical revulsion

jason  writes

so brittany was waiting to leak  this stuff  about her ex until his potential  ‘ sue ’  was past

its all one fight from one night, about her ex failing to become a model   .  .   brittany seems insensitive to that, the last video is just of her crying, why did she have to share that ?

she made it sound like she had all these recordings and videos, but its just from one night

she might’ve not posted that directly, but she sent it to people and has to expect it to be posted

my  comment

i think brittany comes off better in those  “ leaks ” ,  but of course she made them available

any relationship breakup has that sort of trauma imo

the net certainly makes for a different world of  “ social punishment ”

kardashians, eat your hearts out

its hard to beat zen and buddhist centers for the intensity of their political infighting and the paucity of what they fight for

does zen have theory

if it does

what is it

if it doesn’t

 what does that mean ?

listen ,  what do you hear

the distant stream

small frogs chirping

an owl

 look  what do you see ?

the starry sky

listen ,  what do you hear

 look  what do you see ?

i had an insight, that i am fundamentally depressive becuse i put knowledge before myself

the american world war two effort was incredibly intelligent, from the outset of the war, even though they were not yet at war they were gearing up for war production and actually the efficiency of this was faciliated by not being at war yet

george c. marshall  is one of the unsung heroes of world war 2  !

bismark can have never anticipated the disasters to follow his successful work in unifying germany

his work was used by idiots to their supposed advantage

he gave them good advice they always ignored

‘ english speaking countries will act together in war ’

i really take an historical view, people don’t understand how life and institutions work without being knowledgeable about history

any army is so many clones

just an olympic games like any other  NOT

“ if a claim is fallacious, it isn’t necessarily wrong, as you’ve pointed out, but then to accept the claim requires faith ”

i assume we agree on this definition of fallacious

“ based on a mistaken belief ”

why can’t there be ambiguity about the truth of the claim, in fact there must be some limited evidence for it or it wouldn’t be made ?

for instance it has been assumed to be proven that there are only nine planets in the solar system (now pluto has been readmitted), but some astronomers are now claiming there is a very large  planet  in the outer solar system that they have indicative, but not conclusive evidence for

by your definition that claim is fallacious which to me impiles you have future knowledge about the validity of the claim

proof of the existance of  “ dark matter ”  is also tenuous

“ based on a mistaken belief ”  ie they turned out to be wrong

i don’t think claims exist in a vacuum of evidence, there is always some evidence for them which might be overturned or confirmed at a future date, so basically they are not unambiguously certain

a claim may be fallacious, but it could also be certainly true, only the future knows

so unproven claims are not necessarily fallacious and if they are not necessarily fallacious, you have to allow the possibility they are true

if a claim has a logical fallacy then per se that bit of evidence is incorrect, ie the evidence is contrary

i know of no claim that exists without some degree of proof

its a misrepresentation to present something lacking empirical truth as empirically true

the position of claims being possibly true if there’s no contrary evidence they are not remains unchanged

the argument is not that all claims are true, but those without contrary and sufficent supporting evidence may be true

“ the argument is that saying someone who won’t believe something unproven is asserting contrary evidence is bullshit ”

yes, he’s asserting future sight by saying contrary evidence will arise and disprove it

some-one asserts there is a  “ ninth/tenth planet ”

i don’t believe it, i reject the hypothesis, that is, i have future knowledge there are mistakes in the astronomical reasoning

alternatively i neither reject or accept the belief and wait for the truth of the matter to unfold in the future

this was your original argument

“ a lack of evidence makes a claim fallacious ”

that is the belief is mistaken

it may be mistaken, but it may be true

just circles

i’ve read though what i have written and am quite happy with my position, you clearly have some sort of agenda, i don’t know what it is

who knows what  “ zen masters ”  say ?

i can tell you what  translators  say

a lack of evidence does not make a claim wrong

contrary evidence makes a claim wrong

if you cite a lack of evidence as making a claim wrong then you also claiming that in the future there will be contrary rather than supporting evidence

some of new york is going to be  underwater  by 2100

ewk, you are so disrespectful to people its a disease

there’s a complete philological vacuum on what medieval chinese words mean

they have no idea

saying  “ i’m holier than thou ”  takes many forms

ewk, why not turn your anti-social personality disorder into something productive and upgrade your  “ arguing style ”

“ if you can’t quote zen masters, you might be making it up ”

even if you quote a zen master, its already made up

joshu’s style in his conversation with various monks and it is a conversation, is constanly renegotiating what the monk says

since everyone on r|zen thinks they have the understanding of joshu why are they so dogmatic and declarative ?

its this way and i will defend this down to my last bagel

a joshu style convo is very like tennis, back and forth, then one of the shots ends the game, and its not necessarily the last shot

declarative statements are like acing on a first serve, maybe it happens but its rare

when i’m in a miffed or disagreeing state, it often gives rise to good writing

if its contrary to what is said then its an imposition

ewk says he is not interested in like and dislike

that’s the profile of anti-social behavior

indifference to dislike is different from having to tolerate it for whatever reason and its always wearing

you are well into insanity, but can’t see it

the five ranks of master tozan are garbled nonsense

i was surprised to see fayan wenyi cover ground i have often thought about myself, the roles and interactions of theory and observations

in any sort of inquiry, including the mystical you require both

soto zen suffers particularly from inadequate ”  theory ”  and their meditation just leads them nowhere

one needs to read very widely across the ages to garner helpful directions and condensed ways of looking at things to give order to  “ observations ” ,  of course again, people never do this, rather reading half a paragraph of some pop nonsense then proceed to strut like a bantam rooster for the rest of their life on this half witted knowledge

the big problem that you get in religions and r|zen is  “ meta-ing ”  in a crude imposition without any attempt to fit to observation and actually observations are never made

couples try to mould each other in their own image

but they are very different people

if they realised how different they are

they would never marry

couples try to mould each other in their own image

but they are very different people

if they realised how different they are

they would probably never marry

religion, the insufferably self-confident about things they are quite wrong about

the insufferably self-confident about things they are quite wrong about

women are endless need, a bottomless lake you die trying to plumb the depths of

the internet is a counter-intuitive world, it doesn’t work the same way as normal reality

therefore you have to be careful

“ meaning is to be found   on the border  between order and chaos ”

you  (ed. ewk)  are too far into your imagined order

links can disrupt, that’s why you don’t look at them, the winds of chaos appear too terrifying to you

the only people i have seen stick so rigidly to a viewpoint as you ewk are the criminally insane

you are able to do this because you shut out the wider universe by not looking at links and having nothing to do with real world zen

r|zen is just one world, not the whole world !

“ why is there something rather than nothing ? ”

obviously there is something

you see a competition where there is none

jordan peterson speaks in terms of some coherent continuation of the world, i speak of its complete ruination and survivng in that

when reason fails, insanity steps in

jason went to a jordan peterson lecture and got referred to in the question time

he  writes

jordan peterson probably made fun of me being the next albert einstein cuz of my round glasses along with looking intelligent

my  comment

yeah its interesting how one can eventually figure something out and its quite explainable

also that in large audience he noticed you despite you not asking a question and singled you out, in other words you stood out to him and this is man with a huge experience of people and the mentally ill

to me that says you are wasting your time with computers for income and are better to go the guru route, you are so abnormal which i presume is  “ charisma ”  that nothing else will work out for you

i certainly do not have charisma, and neither did toni packer, but john loori certainly had it

actually louis rossmann has it too, he’s a bit of a fish out of water, he has a large youtube following with his apple computer repair, but actually it could be anything

ewk, you can put anything on a subreddit, why don’t you say something useful to yourself ?

you can put anything on a subreddit, why don’t you say something useful to yourself ?

master xuansha lectured the assembly   :    the old masters everywhere all speak of dealing with people to help the living; suppose three kinds of handicapped people come to you  —  how will you treat them ?

those who suffer from blindness will not see if you hold up a mallet

those who suffer from deafness will not hear anything spoken

and those who suffer from muteness will not be able to speak even if you try to get them to say something

my  reply

those who are blind can feel the mallet

those who are deaf can read

those who are mute can write

those who dance around meaningless old tropes you can’t do anything about however

ewk, who posted the koan/story made some avoidant reply and i replied

the  “ koan ”  and my reply are about significant deficits and work-arounds

i think  “ meditation ”  or contemplative work is actually a  “ work-around ”   a refolding of the brain into more adaptive patterns

your problem is you won’t do, indeed strenuously avoid, doing meditative or contemplative work which can be as simple as writing a diary or going for a walk by yourself

you so strenuously avoid these that you fixate on creating a semantically oriented scriptural version of zen that in your view denies the utility and essentialness of these

“ the cock crows.  the first hour of the day  (ed. 1 to 3am)

aware of sadness, feeling depressed yet getting up

there are neither underskirts nor undershirts

just something that looks a little like a robe

underwear with the waist out, working trou in tatters

a head covered with thirty-five pounds of black grit

in such a way, wishing to practise and help people

who knows that, on the contrary, it is being a nitwit ”

i think  “ black grit ”  refers to stubble in a saved head, it may just mean his head needs shaving

as far as i can see joshu had a nice life as a monk travelling around a lot with one spell in the boondocks during a buddhist repression

“ the song of the twelve hours of the day ”  was when he had become old to the point of not being able to continue the travelling life and was living in a abandoned temple in an unfriendly town which he stayed in for the rest of his life

he was reputed to have lived unusually long ,  120 years which fits in somewhat with  “ calorie restriction ”  ie starving a lot extending the lifespan

“ just as the ocean and its waves cannot be separated, so too in the mind the unconscious and the conscious cannot be separated ”

an r|zen poster raises the interesting point about  “ uncertainty ”  being a better translation than  “ cutting off thinking ”

it took me a long time to realise these masters were just saying sensible things like  “ be open and don’t get bogged down in closed minded systems ”  and the translators had such problems with these ideas they deliberately distorted what was said to suit their crazy agendas to be followed by readers who also read to suit their agendas

“ just be open and investigate, there is no system of meaning ”  why is that so hard, yet it is

buji, buddhism, the occult, all the crazies with their sand castles of meaning unable to observe the tide

you can say anything but your history doesn’t lie

you can say anything, your history doesn’t lie

there’s nothing worse than women behaving badly

so arguing back and forth

up and down

east and west

north and south

 achieves what ?

everyone is competing for what ?

a bit of the buddhist myth

a bit of the zen myth

a bit of the christian myth

a bit of the guru myth ?

the road to hell is paved with   good   any intentions

you mean well, or do you ?

if you do something, you have to decompress it

i get so far into doing something that any time spare goes into decompression and i can’t do anything else

“ silence implies consent ”

or  fatigue

or  fear

or  indifference

what has always puzzled me about the crazy is the sheer paucity of their ideas

you would think they had some flamboyance

i’ve been in a real life  “ dharma combat ”  with a well regarded zen master

he says a cliché and you are supposed to give a clichéd response

i didn’t do that

people speak zen-ese or r|zen-ese to avoid any real dealing i suppose

boring stupid people afraid to confront themselves

same as r|zen

the art market is depressing

the dead great ones

so shittily treated in this life

keep afloat a raft of fakes and wastrels

its such a weird screwed up world, why should i expect zen to be any better ?

books are books

ewk is ewk

bleating

“ read them ”

makes me puke

i’m called arrogant by the arrogant

i’m called deceitful by the deceitful

i’m called depraved by the depraved

i’m called unintelligent by the unintelligent

what is the pattern ?

the modern art market is a complete mess, huge sums paid for total, inane even rubbish

its a cultural bubble ,   to burst  at some point

all the buyers have to do is ask themselves, what will it be worth in 100 years, but they never do

oddly the  “ great master market ”  is much more sane because the price must have curation, restoration and security costs as a proportion and these are huge

art has the most sophisticated  con artists  ever ,  jeff koons, damien hirst, the auction houses, smarmy with their wealth and the joy of leeching fools

the lyrics are random

you love lies in your comfort zone

your love lies in your comfort zone

you love lies in your comfort zone

i am personally not amoral

but i think the whole thing is amoral

brutally so

hmm michel foucault’s view of history as a storehouse of useful ideas

he has a number of wide ranging viewpoints so i thought it better for those interested to search him rather than me provide a link

tragedy ,  his art stolen

his channel conveyed too much information, some idea about the apartment, that he was single and there was significant lego  art

interestingly they didn’t take a laptop or computers

“ does an idea about all ideas contain itself ”

does an idea contain itself ?

“ could someone tell me the ultimate truth ? ”

the philosophical equivalent of your question is  “ is there causal finality ”  and the answer is yes, there is an ultimate truth

you might ask  “ well, what is that truth ”

wittgenstein would answer, well you must be silent about whereof that you do not know, which is the conventional viewpoint

the great mystics however all say you know, so if you can know,  what is it ?

well i actually could tell you something, but i’m not because people just plagiarise and soil what would be said

btw great mystics do not go around in some special state, call it samadhi, ecstatic or holy or what not

there are special states ,  but they are entered and left

martin heidegger, despite his personal shortcomings was the only honest philosopher is the sense he admitted philosopy was second fiddle to poetry

only heraclitus could answer the conundrum

what is the meaning of meaning

what is the meaning of life ?

what is the  “ meaning ”  of the word  “ life ”  ?

well we can’t really say can we ?

i think philosophy is like horse racing, the horses are all lined up in their stalls, ready to go and the vet is going through disqualifying each for some injury or problem and the race never gets started

“ how does one pass through the final barrier ? ”

pay the toll

no amount of theory can compensate for a lack of experience

do you meditate at all ?

even in the sense of going for a walk by yourself ?

you can feel yourself going through the barrier

its you looking at you and that’s what makes the changes

authentic people in any religious tradition are so rare as to be nonexistant these days

a zen monk came to a barrier, but couldn’t see through it, but there was sign saying   “ meditation ”  on it

the gate keeper seeing he was from r|zen came over and told him to go around the corner

the monk did and came to a vast field of others like him, chatting, playing chess, checking their iphones, role playing, reading reddit, playing computer games, a few were chanting  “ i am on the other side ”

he settled in and joined them

what this  ‘ fable ’  is about is its really that it takes  “ meditative ”  or contemplative experience to cross the barrier

that said a lot of people get stuck in what is called  “ a ghost cave ”

they may have the outward form of meditation but they are doing something else or simply not enough

sand blowing in the wind

its best to shield one’s eyes

so the dreamers say

dillon writes a poem

sand blowing in the wind

its best to shield one’s eyes

my  reply

so the dreamers say

i don’t think celibacy is possible if you are living with the gender you find attractive

basically i use r|zen for writing material, it burns out after a while

i’m not masochistic, just depressive

real life zen is minimal jewellery

zen basically is pretty conventional heterosexual

surprisingly  “ normative ” ,  episcopalian really

“ there’s a message in the way a person treats you

just listen ”

to argue that a translation is an exact rendering of what was said is a complete misunderstanding of what a translation is

to argue that a translation is an exact rendering of what was said is a complete misunderstanding of what translation is

you are welcome to your opinion, i think the point is you shouldn’t be banned for expressing it and the same holds for me

occultists use zen to provide  “ conceptual wallpaper ”  for their beliefs

what can i say ?

i’m not criticising the lack of education

i’m criticising the bluster instead of arguing to reason

you can’t learn if you think you already  “ know it all ”

jason  writes

i was actually talking to another girl at work about brittany, she’s my age and in a straight relationship, i showed her brittany’s instagram and she said she can tell she’s crazy

she told a story about how she was in a relationship with a woman, who later became trans, and this relationship was very difficult

she spoke about how at the time she thought that when things went right 2% of the time it would make up for the 98% of the time when things were bad, but looking back it really didn’t

my  comment

that’s a good insight about the 2%

i think trans actually is half mental illness, not the gender blurring part, but failure to accept the practical reality of conversion operations and hormone treatments being too destructive to long term health

trans has always existed, they used to be subsets of lesbian and gay and even heterosexual

translation is very neutral, it is the conversion of meaning in one language to meaning in another

‘ conversion ’  is a fraught process

you obviously have no real life zen experience, net zen tropes are not the same as real life zen

look you are all fantasy  “ meta ”  and give no actual examples with reasoning

people seem to have lost the notion of valuing talking/writing from a postion of competence and experience

paradoxes generally don’t mean anything except that sense breaks down

however special cases can be made continuous and illuminate the real world

escher takes paradoxes and makes them meaningful

that’s where he shines

“ master baso said to his disciples   :   if you have a staff, i will give it to you

if you have no staff, i will take it away from you ”

to rescue the baso story from being a futile paradox it needs to be restated in the form most likely intended

to those that have understanding ,  more will be given

to those that haven’t, what little there is will be taken away

my research and experience leaves me of the opinion there was an historical person we now know as the 6th patriarch

baso said   :   if you don’t have a staff i will give you one and if you have one i’ll take it away

at these words the monk was enlightened ,  made a bow and went back to cutting up cats

you can parse paradoxes a number of ways ,  but beyond them being paradoxical there’s not much you can say

that’s the nature of a paradox

religions are full of tropes, when you scratch the surface, there’s nothing there

if the occult were true ,  it would be the most interesting thing around ,  but its not  so its bored acolytes constantly appear in unrelated areas claiming kinship hoping to slake their thirst for novelty

peeled apple slow cooked until soft is anti-biofilmic

some areas of the net  (jason and streaming, me and r|zen)  suck too much emotional energy at the expense of attention to other needed areas in life

you know r|zen has a severe moderator problem when ewk is permitted to behave the way he does

the more intelligent and personal you get the more the likelyhood an OP will be deleted on r|zen

its style of hurbic bombast weaving around nonsense quotes is actually created and enforced by the moderators

i take it as a caution, if they are treating you badly, should you be there ?

meta  :  the despair of writing OP’s nobody reads

they reply for sure, but when i read an OP i do the courtesy of reading the OP in depth so that when i reply, what i say relates to what they wrote, i may not agree with it but at least i have done them the courtesy of seeing what they say

with my OP’s i am getting a large proportion of people who just fit what they want to say without paying any attention to what i have said

another thing is i don’t put links in casually, they are instrumental to what is being said

on the other hand if you just view r|zen as random shooting range   .   .   .

“ sounds like looking for something, not my kind of cake ”

sounds like not looking for something, my kind of cake

“ to cast doubt on everything and give rise to nothing ”

to cast doubt on nothing and give rise to everything

“ never be serious, if an idea is just an idea then what are wrong ones and what are right ones, its an idea, an idea is an idea ”

be serious, if an idea is not just an idea then pay attention to what are wrong ones and what are right ones

“ seeing ideas as ideas is escape from ideas ”

really  ?

that’s a highfalutin idea for sure mr. self-con artist

a typical zen  “ literati ”  poem glamourizes manual labour and the simple life

you can be sure the writer never ever lifted a load of firewood

life is full of gollums making themselves known in various ways even though you can’t see them

ideas are not money

what’s the point of hanging onto wrong ones ?

and you can pick up new ones for free

we have these weak points and we go around and around until we hit the same problem and it will be like this for the rest of your life

the net seems to be home to self absorbed idiots

there is an endless supply

you can beat one or two

but mostly it pays to withdraw

“ wonderful ideas ”   (ed. meant sarcastically)

another idea ?

the problem is not with ideas, but wrong ones !

you cannot escape ideas and actually why would you wish to ?

jason is getting wrapped up in the  “ days of our lives ” ,  streaming and discord scene again

my advice to him

a good phrase that guides me a lot is  “ too much autism under one roof ”

worth a bit of a think about in the context of streamers and discord

you are doing them a favour, how is that returned ?

jason  replies

i’m used mostly for entertainment now

it’s nice to be  ‘ popular ’  but i get made fun of a lot

my reply

“ but i get made fun of a lot ”

that’s not healthy and damages your self esteem, its so unhealthy you shouldn’t hang around there

jordan peterson says, don’t pay attention to what they say, look at what they do and the streamers are not protecting you, but throwing you to the wolves

hardly value for the money of the free time you give to them is it ?

what is the real work of zen ?

if you went by what everybody does on r|zen then you would assume its posting a meaningless quote from the  “ records ”  then prancing around like a deranged monkey pretending it meant something, to the tune of  “ what a wonderful monkey i am ”

let’s discard that one

another one is the creation of a scriptural system based on tang and song records

let’s discard that too

in real life there are indoctrination systems that crash the brain leaving   zombies   zenbies

so putting all this bullshit aside is there anything real ?

yes, there’s a mystical process of personal change from reflection that i was surprised to see jordan peterson give a  description  of

“ the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and saying  ‘ you don’t really believe that, you don’t really know what you are talking about, that isn’t true ’ ”

“ what are your thoughts on the idea that the mind can be uploaded to a computer and still function like a person ? ”

you can have the same function from  “ hardware ”  that is unconscious as conscious, so, yes you can get  “ function like a person ” ,  but it won’t be a person because its not conscious

the test of being enlightened is being able to  “ parse ”  the literature

you know where its wrong and right and can explain where its wrong and right

in terms of a person being enlightened, the  “ experiences ”  are multiple and speaking personally i go through replete and dry periods and i way prefer the dry as less traumatic

in my view this is really only available to celibates for a number of reasons

yeah people certainly get insights, but its a life’s work to wrap the whole thing up into something coherent and this is extremely rare, one reason being you have to live a long time, the process is so painstaking and incremental

“ they claim that they are themselves  “ enlightened ” ,  how else would they be able to judge others on this topic ?

they are special and are in possession of some sort of gem ”

the gem is enlightenment experiences and plain slog and in theory this is the basis for ”  lineage transmission ”

in the christian and islamic paradigms ,  “ saint ”  or  “ prophet’s friend  “  huang po would be quoted as scripture and taken as a  “ fount of knowledge ”

if you dispute this  “ knowledge ”  you will be excommunicated or die a nasty death  (as it used to be) ,  possibly resurrected as a saint yourself a century or two later as you are now safely dead and somewhat borg like absorbed into the church

zen is different, it says you develop the knowledge to become the  “ saint ”  and its actually organised this way, each  “ transmitted master ”  is his own pope, they are independent and accountable to no-one hence the sex scandal problem

interestingly joko beck repudiated the transmission she had given to two of her disciples but those disciples claimed that transmission once given could not be repuditated and the zen community at large has upheld them

its quite clear in the records, they all say the same thing ,  “ sort it out yourself ” ,  bending at the knee to whatever quote is not sorting it out yourself, its the christian genuflection to a saint whose sanctity you can only admire from afar and never aspire to

you would think it was clear enough ”  but these  “ genuflectors ”  cannot stop themselves !

huang po himself is constantly railing against the scriptural approach !

ewk knows, it all just rolls on and on and goes nowhere

the questions i have about zen are

why is everybody so narrow-minded

why is everybody so stupid

did these characterstics make them susceptible to  “ enlisting ”  or did zen practice make them this way

or is it a combination of both ?

brad warner’s reply

there is indeed a tendency for people who have rather rigid personalities to begin with to be attracted to zen

but we’re not all like that  (i hope)

stupidity, i feel, can sometimes be a good thing

but it can sometimes lead to just being stubborn

brad warner, you’re an outsider telling insiders  “ how it is ”

all they are saying is  “ bug off ”  to you