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



there is quite a different scenario where germany and japan could have won WW2

they would have combined their weapons programs and produced the atomic bomb

they would have worked together strategically in the invasion of russia and japan, probably with germany’s advice would never have taken on the americans directly

this "synchronising" would have to have started in the early 1930’s, but fortunately the advantages and necessity were not realised until about 1943, way too late

youthful misperceptions

bedevil

adult and aged life

youthful misperceptions

bedevil

aged and adult life

after watching quite a few holocaust survivor videos, i really am in agreement with hannah arendt and martin heidegger, the holocaust was created as much by the passivity of judaism as anti-semitism, particularly in eastern europe where people were much more religiously jewish

the religion had been moulded around survival during "mild" pogroms, the passivity may have been survival oriented in the face of what occurred historically and it must be remembered that the aristocratic rulers usually stepped in to stop the harassment of a very productive portion of their subjects, but with democracy that changed, the brutality of working class sentiment emerged as a hugely potent force with the consequences we now know as the holocaust

the destruction of the most productive portion of their population who fought loyally during world war one doomed germany from the start, just like japan’s problems with incompetent seniority running its war

the problem with meditation, apart from thrombosis, is you are being introduced to the notion you are insane

you need some sort of context of the world and yourself being insane, the best literature gives this context, but of course most people only read junk and get so traumatised by meditation that they do all these stupid practices/ guided/ music/ theological nonsense /whatever to avoid seeing themselves and life as crazy because they lack the context to handle it

"contemplative work" is "discovery" and what you find, why this never seems to be done and people rely on theological or other templates instead of their own work is beyond me. its like a different species, one so stupid in this respect you can cut it, interestingly most are like this also in health matters, its so bad i think there are biological blinders in place here

the need of the world is infinite

it will suck you dry

the problem with mystical experiences, is you never believe them until they happen and the import is always to drive you into increasingly idiosyncratic views which alienate you from all the conventional nonsense and in my observation, very few zen or other "spiritual" teachers have had genuine experiences, a bunch of pathetic pretenders

mysticism is a process of development, there is no final understanding to be arrived at, what has always amazed me is how anti people are to this notion and of course they react strongly against the possibility there is any real work involved, rather wasting their time with inane "dharma talks" crazy waffle in books and stupid ceremonies which have nothing to do with anything

mood swings

we can’t tell what is normal and what is not

because

mood

defines

its

own

normal

the theory of everything

like there’s some sort of overall theory

well everything is its own meta

theories that arise

are necessarily transient

the thin skin of health and freedom from injury

the dark winds of aging ripple

showing underneath what is not recognisable

which becomes recognisable

snow white’s black hair

made the white

plausible

however

the dwarves

were

never

plausible

anne sexton   reading  an early poem "unknown girl in the maternity ward"

poetry is a window, not a door

poetry is a door and not a window

poetry is a window and a door

poetry is wall-less

ann sexton is perhaps an extreme example of a "confessional poet"

but actually my writing is "confessional"

only indirect and laced with decoys

the reader will never know where they are

its interesting how poetry reflects the person yet doesn’t

the writing is a a cooler more abstract space than the actual being

what constitutes a desert ?

well it has its riches and oases

but mostly you are sifting sand

life is premised on continuities

occasionally the discontinuities break through

the real

"ground of being"

startles us

with its unpleasantness

we

the creatures of

continuity

this problem of correction

repairing the world

walk away

somewhat

life’s remnants

we read about

the famous, less famous, the well known

not ours

but theirs

my own experience

the experience of others

validity seems to get lost

between them

parenthood

the genetic binding outweighs everything else

you can’t deny

half yourself

the pain of choice

which is really not choice

but where you put your time

the past

no clarion bell ringing

down the steps of time

rather

a murky infiltration

everywhere

two of sylvia plath’s readings

a birthday present

the ghost’s leavetaking

the everyday

every day

seems not much

but contains

universes

sylvia plath

crippled polymath

jointed in this world

one then the other

gates open and close

but caught in one world

denies another

the fabric of polymath

spread

and eventually

tears

being  betrayed  into a trap, but escaping

ed.  the above link is good cinema and not traumatic viewing

a mother killing her own son

ed. a bit gruesome and weird to link directly, i don’t recommend it; search youtube "alien resurrection  —  newborn death scene (sort of)"

simple themes

but eternal

in hollywood

other people’s problems

as well as your own

life

becomes ungovernable

the midnight sun

lights everything

if only we could see it

but when it occurs

we can’t be really there

and conveying it back

is difficult

forget bridge and chess

i have enough mental trauma

just getting

my paypal ID

sorted out

i don’t think i would make a public speaker

i can’t talk well

why would i talk better than i do to others ?

barely coherent at times

the nothing of nothingness

is the something of somethingness

hard for people to understand

but that’s people

i’m just the empty absurdity of myself

you have to live it

the empty absurdity

those who live full lives

live it

and don’t understand

the meaning

of empty absurdity

where alice and charles

hold hands

walking into

nowhere

i’m not a man

or a woman – man

or a man – women

or a man – man

what am i ?

i have no meaning

just a cipher in the void

that’s my meaning

mazzy star  fade into you  covered by im2

the stone monsters

of the north

are really there

staring at us

patient

we wither

under their gaze

good art and writing always has an element of the insane, something the "ultranorms" gag on

the vanity of words

castles in the air collapse

to be re-formed again

ad infinitum

getting sidetracked

like an army whose wings go wandering

the center is exposed

death is a forced condition

endless rough edges

untied by life

catch up

lonely

in nowhere

the joy gone

to see

truly

loss is all we have

it measures gain

even the loss passes

permanently

loss is all we have

it measures gain

so many wrong roads

i can’t count them

but enough wrong roads

is right in a way

nothing like seeing a photo of what a broken bit of a grinder cutting disk did to some-one’s eye to make you buy some safety glasses

“ opening the hand of thought ”

“ the open hand of thought ”

the idea of thought opening up itself is sure difficult to describe

“ the opening hand of thought ”

yeah, i think that’s it

actually its interesting how people steer clear of the lives of "'zen heroes" because if you examine them they generally turn out to be bad tragedies or bad farces

eihei dogen spending ten years dying of TB in an ill suited climate, kobun chino, stony broke forever with a family to support and drowned with his daughter in a swiss swimming pool because he never learnt to swim, kodo sawaki, a japanese nationalist working as a police chaplin in a concientious objector’s prison in WW2 ,  alan watts, an alcoholic, maezumi roshi, seducer of young women and drowned drunk in a bath tub, sasaki roshi, embezzler and sexual abuser, the list is endless, nishijima and joko beck with dementia

you look at the lives of these people and think "what the fuck" i’m not trusting a word they say

zen is a book

its different chapters

fantasy

historical drama

endless bad fiction

the final chapter

insanity

at last

i feel we have arrived

somewhere real

there’s an interesting contrast between hitler who was not personally sadistic and the people implementing his ideas at the lower levels who were

neither was stalin, but beria was

theoreticians versus implementers

the million theologies

libraries of books

tomes

all summed in one word

fantasies

words

a ladder

from

here

to

there

and they pull themselves up

after you

traversing

distance

time

one end of which universe to the other

beyond the traversing what is there ?

traversing

while we can

traversing

distance

time

one end of which universe to another

beyond the traversing what is there ?

traversing

while we can

the botez sisters have   never taken drugs

so much of the net is deadhead drug takers its unbelievable

super entitled and in your face

selling their pathetic validity

some-one i know in the usa is involved in the political unrest and protest movement

my view given the lack of ideological coherence is that this is anarchist and history shows that anarchists always come off worse

this has been the case for him, its interesting that history shows such a consistent pattern

the problem with anarchism is its too unstable socially so is always going to fall victim to a more organised socially stable ideology which would then view anarchism as a competitor or threatening its own existance

by socially stable, i don’t exclude incredibly brutal regimes like stalinism or maoism since they do maintain social order of a type, i’m not saying all socially stable systems are desirable, its just they punch with more weight than anarchism

in western society the threat to the existing social order is not anarchism or any ideology but organised criminals who would quickly evolve into warlords if given the chance, i guess mexico is partly down this road

gangs are actually nascent armies under potential warlords, the police and law are all that’s between a stable society and a murderous mayhem

when they are disturbed by not understanding what i write

after all its in english and seems to be able to be understood

but they can’t get there

they don’t behave graciously

marry some-one from a different culture because you will put up with more

you’ll think oh, its just their culture when its really them

the converse is also true

the problem with imagination

is

imagination can undo the past

so it diverges

from reality

there is an inherent schizophrenia

in

day dreaming

which makes schizophrenia

not.   all.   bad.

the fools chase meaning

meaning chases them

words upon words

what is empty

cannot be made full

don’t underestimate drug users

they get very skilled at manipulating people and situations

goes with the territory

just because its written down

doesn’t make it true

does it ?

maxwell’s equations

einstein’s equations

one a generalization of the other

biological rules

they govern the world

how it came to manifest them

is the puzzle

ed.  you can see with evolution how biological systems can increase in complexity, but its very difficult to see how such workable systems of matter from astrophysics to molecular chemistry can arise and there be literally nothing else, it was just born working with no precedent

the answer has to be there is some precedent and what form this precedent takes has yet to be shown

it may be that persistence and an entropy gradient creates the conditions for biology tautologically, other universes that fail to support biology are not persistent or are "entropy dead"

god is not a theory of everything

god is not god

that is a theory of everything

meditation has the same false premise as prayer

a unitary infinity

the misguided ratbags pray and meditate

that’s about it

the joining of the glistening fragments

is unknown to them

a sense of something  conveyed  without words

what is it ?

michael palin investigating the danish painter vilhelm hammershoi

when you look at the battleship yamato, just be thankful the japanese imperial navy put $16 billion into that and her sister ship the musashi and not their nascent nuclear weapons program

so much of our "mental activity" is meaningless chatter to ourselves, deep trenched roads getting deeper

on the other hand it can take us into areas of surprising and useful conclusions

when you "forbear" with others you will be more open to forbearing with yourself, which, often is all you can do

i don’t think "forbearance" however is a beneficial attribute without context, it is arguable a culturally ingrained forbearance to wrongs inflicted enabled the holocaust and soviet russia

i’m having a problem with climbing out of bed while asleep, its relatively new, never had it when younger

so i put up some timber on the sides

last night i leapfrogged them and landed on my feet

for a minute or two there’s that very weird world of being half awake and in a very strange place as you walk around trying to get your bearings

blythe baird reads her poem  relapse

i don’t normally link to "def" though this is on the edge of being more reflective and not tainted by politicisation, but it seemed very real and i immediately thought of doing it

we create our own reality

“ how can that be ?

the world is full of things we have no control over, some quite unpleasant ”

we exist

how does existence come from non-existence ?

is it that non-existence is itself a form of 'being" with tension within the fabric of itself arising as platonic forms ?

from these forms come "being"

a wehrmact soldier in belorussia complaining to his jewish "housemate" about the execution of the soldier’s "girlfriend" that day because while he could save her, he couldn’t save her mother as well and she elected to die with her mother

video

the charles bukowski haters

can’t accommodate

his

genius

increased entropy and decreased coherence

this is  the problem  with drugs

interestingly this also applies to "medical drugs" where a loss  (that shows in side effects)  has to be balanced  (and discovered)  against a gain (what it remedies)

its looking like 10 to 12 weeks and possibly longer  between shots  gives better covid immunity

i almost left the word "covid" out as being obvious but of course in ten years who knows ?

dr. john

didn’t the japanese  learn anything  from world war 2 ?

there seems to be the trauma in ultraman of the violent futility of a defeated nation that has not got to grips with what happened

a different sort of shadow

more real than the object

memory playing tricks

on us

sylvie and bruno 

a tired charles dodgson

petering out

not absurd enough

and too real

in the wrong direction

yet there are traces

of a viable

shadow world there

ed.  he was quite  an artist  as is shown by his drawings on the "alice in wonderland" manuscript

resolution

a hundred fragments come together

only to shatter

resolution

a hundred fragments come together

and shatter

you can steer

through the wrongness

by virtue of

strangeness

you can steer

through the wrongness

by virtue of

the wrongness

the eye once opened

cannot undo

what it sees

i think what hannah arendt is talking about with "totalitarianism" is the construction of very malfunctional socially accepted "tableaux" underpinned by coercive violence

real life examples have a span of non conformance to the idea

plato or not to plato ?

i like hannah arendt, she is very  robust

an interview

as i have got older i have learned that "errors" of omission are usually so huge you can just hang there wondering what you have not been told

even worse is that often the omitter doesn’t understand that something significant has been omitted and can't even see it if its pointed out to them

but in lots of situations they are quite aware and everyone does this

omission and commission are a never ending juggle, always full of surprises

recommend something

get blamed for something

method and truth

truth is not a method

or even

truth

go to hell

eihei

method and truth

truth is not a method

or even

truth

go suck eggs

eihei

ed.  eihei dogen

philomela, procne and medea

those greek women were savage

its not just american football that has  TBI problems

one sees continual behaviour and health problems with league players in the news in australia and even new zealand has some well known instances of a deprecated "oddness" like keith murdoch who actually must have seen the light

joe karam getting sucked in by the very guilty david bain is another instance and there always seemed a sort of dullness that was not right to "pine tree" meads

humans have a taste for gladiatorial sports and these heavy contact ones with their direct brain injury satisfy the masses

even soccer with its "heading" the ball successfully gets a foot in

the ancient greeks had a form of contest where two men were chained to rocks , but within arms length of each other and they had to pummel each other until one was dead

so much of human behaviour winds around the act of mating and its consequences

this notion of "bearing the sins of others" and thereby being a proxy to enable "the righteousness" of others seems the most deeply flawed aspect of christianity, i find the notion repulsive, enabling and apologetic for any amount of bad behaviour, which of course is what you get

if this idea is new to you, its a well known criticism

i got this reply

you need Jesus praying for you

my  reply

see, you can’t even pray for me yourself, it has to be the work of some fiction !

how lazy can you get ?

link dense "homilies"

when "publishing" on facebook and reddit i might put these by themselves, they have a different "feel"' to most of my writing, because in fact they are the work of others and interest in the topics will vary

the positive thing is they break and provide some relief from my writing which in effect is a monotone

when you see media interviews, most people don’t realise the interviewer is only half, the interviewer may or may not be favourable to the interviewee, but unseen is the twisted soul of the editor racked with anti-creative impulses and perversity,   “ fools rush in where angles fear to tread ”

to hijab    or    not to hijab  ?

the bbc didn’t take any risks with tommy hilfiger, a spineless toad of a man used to dealing with women for money, don’t tell them anything they don’t want to hear

mennel ibtissem

the adage "beauty is only skin deep" you can see in spades in models, they are the most ordinary minds and somewhat stupid to boot

the fashion industry isn’t any better, its basis is confusion

endless suppositions about an afterlife

me

the moon tells all

one cycle

waxing, then waning

thin crescents

there is no going beyond

calling and answers

the different roosts

magpies under

a bright moon

hanna gosler pick’s  account  of meeting her friend anna frank in the bergen-belsen concentration camp

lacking completeness

we seek to be complete

we die on that road

mirrors break

that is their nature

the uncomprehending

vaunt the incomprehensible

comprehension

sees

this

the uncomprehending

vaunt the incomprehensible

the comprehending

see

this

the road of chaos and catastrophe

stalks me

i try not to tread, but what can i do ?

“ with meditation i’m less likely to be chasing my personal narratives down countless rabbit holes ”

the rabbit holes are not so many and have a pattern

my comment on the famous zen poem "xinxin ming"

the great way is an illusion

suckers everywhere fall for the bullshit

prescriptions and methods

are candyfloss for the ignorant

unitary infinity doesn’t exist

what i just wrote will be misunderstood

ed.  the xinxin ming is in fact a condensed version of a longer, earlier poem called the "mind inscription", however both suffer from the "silent illumination" heresy of which "zazen is the only way" soto doctrine also suffers from, though is not "silent illumination" per se and eihei dogen in his later years moves away from his earlier views into something more naturalistic

trench warfare was not introduced in WW1, the sieges of vienna  and  candia were based on ottoman strengths in that form of warfare

a really interesting study on "challenging information" having to come from  peripheral  rather than mainstream sources

central or mainstream that gives information conflicting with existing world views creates antagonism

well i guess i am on the periphery

what andrei tarkovsky’s film  nostalgia  gives is the sense of life lived in "slow time" which is pretty much how all lives are lived if seen more truely

men follow ideas

to their and other’s deaths

that doesn’t make them right

just ideas

men follow ideas

to their death

that doesn’t make them right

just ideas

the hell of nostalgia

the re-digging of old tracks

no comfort

in that

nothing like a virus

to put you in a strange mental space

what is normal looks strange

and there’s truth in that

a road of words

cobblestones of letters

jolt

the twisted snakes of thought

tangling into insanity

untangling out

into sanity

“ you should like the person you marry ”

puts a different perspective on it, doesn’t it ?

time ticks by

the slough of nothingness appears and disappears

we call this living

god, the absolute, out there

over the edge

but being of this world

we can’t go over the edge

the boundary is as far as we can go

paradoxically the edge having no sides has two sides

at the boundary we are of both worlds

those of the interior have no idea what i am talking about

education

cartoon about life

fanciful

deranged

a fake universe

we are supposed to treat

a

s

real

education

cartoon about life

deranged

fanciful

a fake universe

we are supposed to treat

a

s

real

men don’t understand female psychology

if they did, they’d never get married

i have always known that MFA’s were  a scam , only the extremely untalented would waste their time with that sort of nonsense

good writing and art doesn’t fit in a box and is confronting, things abhorrent to a university education

i’ll never forget a professor on a web page selling his courses by creating an imaginary scene of the student, complete with degree going on to his first "exhibition" within months and then becoming a "name"

such predatory behavior stinks, but you can argue its justice for the deserving given the narrow-minded dullness of those taking the bait

abstract expressionism is not wrong

just a waste of time

or

bad dream

the unbearable weight of the net

the unwashed

each its own publicist

the sum has factors

what the factors are

is said by the sum

why do we treat thinking different to our own as "harmful" ?

its not necessarily so at all, beneficial even

with the mind

doors open and doors close

you can hear them

with the mind

doors open and doors shut

you can hear them

“ i get it ”

what is it you get ?

beyond words

you have the clichés pat

even an idiot

can wear a mask

there’s a surprising number of people out there

if you stress their ideas about life

mean you harm

and will do you harm

a low profile is best

there’s something fundamental about recursion

self examining self

the doors of infinity

spring open

a poem by eihei dogen ,  translated by b. unger and k. tanahashi

waves recede

not even the wind ties up

a small abandoned boat

the moon is a clear mark of midnight

my  reply

the moon

no mark of midnight

the boatless sea shimmers

the stairway

goes both ways

one circus

two circuses

three circuses

an unending multitude

claims to have finished

will be disbelieved

how reality works

we tease out

by trial and error and observation

yet we find ourselves in loops and neverendingness

and it doesn’t occur to us

this is how reality works

in the beauty of death

the landscape remains

the perils of wandering

become manifest

with the approach

of winter

the above is my retranslation of a poem by matsuo basho  (below)

i’m a wanderer

 so let that be my name  —

the first winter rain

great questions need to be answered

i can’t answer them

people have god and his prophets

tomes of books try to explain what cannot be explained

i walk along the breakwater and look out to sea

there is nothing else

stark unpleasant perspectives

re-occur

so they must be true

to some extent

wallpaper shot 

snow covered cliffs, lofoten islands, norway

“  The clear star that is yesterday is a storyteller without equal ”

a dream of stars

is neither clarity or obstruction

storyless

points of light

it just amazes me the way these made up stories  (ed. the bodidharma myth)  are accepted without question by the pompous wishing to impress

if there was an historical bodhidharma, his "hermitage" was in reality quite close to a wealthy donor and he must have been a member of the power clique that was executed at heyin

what i find interesting about the "myth" of bodhidharma is his being a blue-eyed barbarian, ie more than a hint of the greco-bactrian origins of zen

when the brain blinks

it sees

before and after

and now

the hubric wannabes

only wannabe

any real work never

the activity of children

forming their own world

children

are

forming

the

world

around

them

for interest i took a keno card for $30

at the RSA after a good lunch

that took me into the bar somewhat

an alien world as i don’t drink

the only one with any energy was the bartender

the man next to me was bossy to her

the keno paid back $10

didn’t seem random to me

i have never played much chess and still really am at the beginner level  —  hitting some sort of road block, but looking at this  link  you can sorta see how to play at a much more advanced level, strategies based on space and position and being able to trade pieces for position is where its at

there’s no road that leads anywhere

there’s roads everywhere

one of which leads

anywhere

you can see the path you should have gone

unfortunately that clear view only comes from having travelled another path that gave the vision

a life that goes "over well" leaves the few who travel it, ignorant

+   .   +   .   +   .   +   .   +   .   +

your sum

the sum of life

you can objectify

bad as the devil

and good as angelic

but what we mean is harm

and benefit

which are

perspectives

of self

and other

i look at something

i look away

when i look back

something has changed

somehow there’s a difference

on one side

the absurd

on the other side

the not

absurd

i know which side i am on

the absurd

on one side

the absurd

on the other side

the not

absurd

i know which side i am on

a million billion trillion

words writ

one letter after another like they mean something

but they don’t

depressing

huh, a poem i wrote a year ago

i can’t remember writing it and at first glance it doesn’t seem like mine, but rereading it, its mine and a good one

i think good poems have to be "mode-ed" into, you may react against a poem on first reading, which i often do on my own poems, then reading later you can get into it

its a reply to one of emily dickinson’s best, if not her best poem "as imperceptibly as grief" which you need to read to understand the reply

emily sails on a breeze of thought

of summer’s highs and winter’s troughs

the empyreal and her garden

one wonders exactly where is she ?

westerns

chimpanzee territory fights

lethal

i’m not judgmental about others driving, i’ve totalled one car and severely damaged a 4WD ,  both my fault, i have been extremely lucky not to have killed several people

i’m a much better driver now, really "defensive", always anticipating what might go wrong, but its taken decades of driving experience and who knows, i could be in an accident tomorrow ?

diplomacy is interesting because of its lack of moral judgment, there really is no right or wrong, its the view of history

hamas is a police state like iran, under the control of militias

it survives financially because it is a proxy paid to wage war against israel on behalf of funding arab states and iran

every five years it gets its infrastructure partially destroyed by israel and then the donor funding is used to rebuild

more like science fiction than reality

“ US warns China it will  fight  for the Philippines ”

reading coded diplomatic language

diplomatic language is very indirect

what they are saying here is not that they will go to war over the philippines, since nobody, not even the philippines will go to war over such a poor and difficult to manage country, but that the US will to go war if china attempts to invade taiwan

so the philippines becomes the arguing point, but the invasion of taiwan is always the backdrop

since australia and new zealand will be dragged in, it should be of interest, i don’t think come to the crunch that australia is at all reluctant to fight

nz less so but would still join in

marxism in all its various forms, doesn’t and can’t work because it tries to turn the vectors of competence and self interest against their natural directions

this is why the political entities trying to enforce it as doctrine have to resort to extreme brutality

you can see similar thematic mistakes being made with today’s "neo-marxism" and its prioritizing or sanctifying human emotional realities over "objective"

history always has the same theme, the "oppressed" when "enabled" ,  go on to become the "oppressors" ,  human nature is territorial and group oriented and in those contexts, exceedingly brutal and it will never be any different

the most utopian of any political system, marxism, ended up the most brutal, if that doesn’t tell you something then you are not wanting to see my conclusion

results always subvert intention

life problems

small changes

adding up

are all that can be done

and in their way

enough

the magpies can wake me

and i can dream the magpies wake me

and wake

because of that

anaphora

so   .    .

so   .    .

so   .    .

so   .    .

 where’s the other half ?

the ebb and flow of thought

poems and homilies

have their own rhythm

currents that submerge and surface

otherwise

we’d never know

the ebb and flow of thought

poems and homilies

have their own rhythm

we lose our way in life

the way loses us

there is no way

just what happens

mght as well be lost in a forest

as walk along by the sea

walking this way

we overlook something

walking back

we find it

disabilities

crimp a life

unappreciated and unseen

in some it festers

in others

it doesn’t

what the difference is

i don’t know

downsizing

our income

interests

brain

relationships

whatever

not a pleasant experience

to prepare

for

the

coming

storm

downsizing

our income

interests

brain

relationships

whatever

not a pleasant experience

to prepare

for

the

storm

in whatever

form

from reddit  "TwoXChromosomes"

“ At Starbucks recently I saw a maybe 14 year old girl ordering and paying for coffee and at the same time struggling to get her father to stop looking at the cups and mugs and suggesting things they should buy

He was legit acting like a little kid and she sounded like his mother.  She finally spoke to him pretty firmly, ”No, Dad, we don’t need that stuff," and he stopped ”

when god decreed

men and women need to be in partnership to

produce children

he outdid

the devil

when we talk its like a sounding board

for the special dimension

writing

that hoofs it

in terms of being

correct

you introduce them to your world

then you can’t get rid of them

lame and blind they trudge on

crying "i need" at every turn

lorianne disabato  had a dream

Last night I dreamed I was assigned to teach first-year writing in a large, shady cemetery

As I walked the grounds on the first day of class, I wondered how I was supposed to teach outside without the usual infrastructure of a normal classroom

I also fretted because my syllabus wasn’t ready for a class that was abruptly starting in July rather than September

Eventually I found a flat, coffin-sized tombstone I figured I could stand on while shouting to my students, whom I assumed would be far-flung throughout the cemetery grounds

Right at class time, however, I realized none of my students had showed up, so after several more minutes of wandering, I found my class packed into a small, squarish chapel, where some students were standing and others were sitting on an assortment of rickety wooden chairs they had pushed against the chapel’s stone walls, with everyone’s backpacks and other belongings piled in a messy heap at the center of the room.

After introducing myself and explaining that I’d post the syllabus before our next class meeting, I sent my students outside to complete a small-group icebreaker while I took inventory of our makeshift classroom

There were not enough chairs, no desks, no podium or table for me, no projector for my laptop, no electrical outlets for my students’ laptops, and not even a chalk or whiteboard to write upon

But since my first-years had never been to college before, they were unfazed by the weirdness, even as I explained that today’s class was in July and our next class wouldn’t meet until September

my added "creative" ending

the lesson dragged on interminably and with dusk falling i decided to send them home whereon they all headed for their graves and “melted” down into them, i scarcely had time to be astounded when i saw the ground next to me open up and before i had time to shout out “this is my dream you know” it swallowed me up

nothing lasts forever

people don’t get they don’t last forever

run

death

the dream of life comes to a finish

was it just a dream

what was it ?

so many times i write

maybe it means something

but i don’t know what it is

then i find it

i can’t believe these people

hassling me so i leave the message board

then when i leave they want me back

to hassle more

it must be a definite progression

steps to get somewhere

called nowhere

one day

the train of thought

will run out

its wagons empty

track disused

purpose gone

i will be the happier

for that

supposed loss

when we correct another’s thought

we have to jump out of ourselves and into them

we get wrecked and they benefit

a wrong equation to be in

we look at the boundaries

always rearranged to hide the interior

but to the eye of insight

they inevitably

give the interior away

we look at the boundaries

rearranged to hide the interior

but to the eye of insight

they inevitably

give the interior away

"mini monovision", say .75D in the non dominant eye with monofocals is a relatively riskless and very effective implant combo imo

any IOL with "diffractive ring" "ridges" will have some degree of dysphotopsia, look at a photo of a multifocal to see what i mean

latin

its "inflected" forms clash with the looser analytical style of english

try to learn it and it scrambles your brain

“ res ipsa loquitur “

“ similis simili gaudet ”

like rejoices in like

like likes like

if there’s any one source of the world’s troubles

its this

a good  video  on vincent van gogh’s year in an asylum

recently it has been discovered he did not shoot himself, but was accidently shot in drunken horseplay with some young louts, weirdly one went on to become one of the wealthiest men in france

also it is quite possible he did not cut off his own ear, but gauguin did

i wonder if his so-called insanity was in fact heavy metal poisoning from various pigments in his paints ?

“ if there’s one thing we have learnt in the last ten years, its that string theory  is not  a theory of strings ”

nima has an unusual ability to tailor the level of abstraction to the audience without confabulating which makes him a good communicator

interestingly, robert kuhn has become a much better interviewer, a subtle progressive development with a targeted, more spare style that brings out the best in the interviewee

different levels of understanding

one subsumes another

or does it ?

levels of understanding

one subsumes another

or does it ?

“ is there life after death ? ”

is there life before death ?

what is this life before death ?

“ is there life after death ? ”

is there life before death ?

we

a supposedly "tough" species

ruled by ideas

about ourselves

and others

space and time

divisible ?

indivisible

quantum states

the real is unreal

off track

it never seems like we can get back

on track

but we do

try to explain

what can’t be framed as a question

leaving it alone

isn’t an answer either

the trouble with being a public figure is you unknowingly introduce yourself to people who react strongly against you and want to take you down, they are almost certainly men with what might be called "socially acceptable mental health problems"

i don’t have a benign view of what’s out there in terms of these arseholes

i have never been comfortable with my involvement in the comments section of brad warner’s vlog, but my spending any time there now is becoming seriously unproductive compared to what else i might be doing

i was thinking i have in effect become an apologist for his version of zen and buddhism, identifying various inconsistencies

previously i have felt this "work" offered some sort of return in figuring things out, but now its effectively decoying me away from my own thinking, the process of rectifying his thinking, is itself a running away from my own

the other issue is the exremely aggressive dunning-kruger syndrome types, who set out to destroy me, personal attack takes your attention like nothing else and one puts way too much time into "defense"

so the next step is to not view his blog for a month, starting now 8th july

sesreim canyon ,  namib desert

i really think video conveys something photos don’t

an apology   :  a half-hearted attempt at repair

how the art market works

abstract doodle   =   pay for disposal

abstract doodle   +   sotheby’s promo   =    $100 K

cherry blossoms by damien hirst   =    $22.5 million

let what has been disappear

the present

is

already

crowded

things like you

sorta you

sorta not

the gap though

is wider

than

you

think

up to your neck in involvement with something that has ceased to reward

time to move on

if you can

pretentious   :    pretending to be something that its not, an appearance garnering the reputational advantage of some substance it falls short ,  or is a travesty of

you close the book and it won’t open again

isoroku yamamoto’s  death ,  richly deserved i have to say

a good wiki  entry  on him

the americans got lucky on midway,   the battle  could have gone against them

knowledge

successfully captures us

before the war has begun

since knowledge is endless

and we have no choice but to traverse its wastes

this entails involvment in various hells

as part of the normal course

of existence

as job found

there’s no rhyme or reason

to the balance

nothing comes together

genealogical, hell, representing time in space

nothing

the discards are mountainous

“ i’m a slow learner ”

actually its not bad thing to be a slow learner, i have noticed with some or even most prodigies, few continue to grow beyond high competence when they reach adulthood, that there is some impairment or limitation as a consequence of their rapid skill acquisition as children

that those who really go on to "greatness" have an additional facility for "slow learning" that was always there and always continues

the past washes past

in a roar

its surprising

we remember anything

the straw that broke the camels back

wasn’t really a straw was it ?

there is no defence against the intrusions of the mad

at the best they take your time

at the worst they take your money

at the worst they violate you

at the worst they kill you

meditation is a surprisingly effective remedy for addiction, you get some self-awareness that gives you a different perspective and more depth on the problem

just go for a walk by yourself or sit in a chair for half an hour or so, not doing anything else

to "dialogue" with people requires some recognition of "commonality", its there if both parties look, its not something that can be denied when actually come across

writing and reading can take you into a more open and larger view with an improved an ability to deal and converse with people from different walks of life ?

constant antagonism is destructive and self-destructive, but it only takes one party to make a situation so and all you can do is remove yourself from it to the extent possible

for some things there’s no remedy except leaving

you will discover the remedy as you leave

and after

words echo across the page

lewis carroll, emily dickinson, charles bukowski

they echo and echo

where we would stay and dwell

seems to pass

inadvertently

when you’ve got some-one in the wings

waiting to pounce on every move you make

time to pack up and leave

there’s a broader view to take

there’s a conclusion out there

a decision to be made

you need to reach it

its high

you can’t jump that far

how do you get there ?

i eat a fresh wallaby brain

i get there

i don’t even have to try

to write the strangest thing

i just do

rainbows

sun or lightning

one lasts

the other doesn’t

ed.  lightning can create enough light to momentarily see a rainbow in the dark, however the poem is ambiguous as to what is "lasting"

all victories have a cost

work out what it is

“  Being an ethical vegan is the single most effective thing we can do as individuals to be positive members of society and reversing the climate crisis.  Are you vegan ?  You reading this now  .   .   .  If not, why not ? ”

i’m not arguing with 2.6 million years of meat eating hominin ancestors, what the genes need, i give them

tool use giving access to bone marrow became a significant hominin evolutionary driver because of its high energy density

if you have ever done any butchering, the way our arms move has obviously been designed for the task

rainstorm

a beautiful feeling

when there’s no drip drip

in the ceiling

stalking

when you have mentally-ill people hunting you

its the most awful feeling

i don’t think physics and philosophy have to be in any sort of identity

to try and make it so is a big mistake and very common these days

there is so much beyond our immediate ken

if we could see just a fraction of what lies ahead

we would collapse

i am having an ongoing problem with being stalked on the web by some mentally-ill idiot calling himself "belligerent man", every six months i seem to get people like this on my back

my latest comment to him

don’t call me andy, i don’t know you
you should seek therapy, there’s some massive problem you have unable to perceive your totally inappropriate full on personal attacks on me, complete projections on your part btw

since what i say doesn't sink in. consider this vlog from the owner’s point of view (brad) ,  he wants an interesting comment section to bring new readers and hopefully more donations, your comments to me are very off-putting since they are so obviously manifesting some disorder or other, its costing brad readers

don’t be mean to brad who is obviously pretty broke and needs the money, participate here in a way likely to bring him readers, use a light touch and address what people actually say

its a wide world, i’m just one person, your obsessive focus on me is unhealthy and frankly a bit worrying

i do feel you are failing to address an underlying problem of some involvement with zen and not having got anywhere, indeed gone down the wrong road

we all have situations like this, all you can do is recognise the mistake and move on

failure to recognise the mistake just keeps us going in the wrong direction

death is necessary

can you imagine the complexity of history without it ?

when a man sets himself up as a "teacher" ,  he has already made an unrecoverable mistake

when a man sets himself up as a "teacher" ,  he has already made an irrecoverable mistake

a quote from the hagakure written by yamamoto tsunetomo

matters of great concern should be treated with a certain frivolity

a comment by master ittei

matters of small concern should be treated seriously

my comment on the above

advice women already take and implement ?

the hagakure is interesting, not a "fighting" text but is "wisdom literature"

in actual fact a more accurate translation of the quote would be

matters of great concern should be treated with a certain casualness that comes from having considered them previously

  I            II 

you will have to not take some of the aphorisms literally ,  but rather the general and abstract sense

for instance the quote below has an easy to understand nonliteral meaning relating to coping with an apparently overwhelming multiplicity of problems we can encounter in everyday life

“ no matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfilment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down, starting from one end ”

it pays to leave almost everybody

to the echo chamber

of themselves

“ Is it a Good Idea to Try to Change Society for the Better ? ”

stalin believed he was changing society for the better, the problem with ideas about improving society is that the value judgements involved justify the use of force to conscript society to conform to the imagined "improvement"

of course ,  socially we live with this force all the time, the difference between current western value systems and the bolsheviks is that mostly the current social ideas are reasonably adaptive, not chronically wrong like marxism

in terms of mysticism, there has always been a ongoing debate about the requirement for "good works", especially an issue with eastern orthodox and i think you can make a very valid criticism of the purely contemplative which doesn’t produce anything since it doesn’t interact with the world at all and so can become quite schizophrenic

a competence in explaining is in fact a "good work" and i notice here with "belligerent man" who seems to have some soto background that he is hassling me because he perceives me to have that competence and manifestly he doesn’t and personality disorder issues on top of that

if you meditate or do "contemplative work" you don’t want to end up more incompetent, which unfortunately is usually/often the case in my observation, the primary cause being a lack of wide ranging quality reading, without that you are cutting yourself off from your peers over the centuries who actually understood what it was about, today’s "teachers" are just the usual deranged pretenders that make the majority in any generation

to be a "teacher"

involves a moral as well as skill difference

between the teacher and the taught

the moral distance at least

is an illusion

that is not sustainable

battle sorts three ways

the living, injured and dead

doesn’t matter which side you are on

if you argue with a shark

you are going to get bit

swim away and let him feast on others

when you have seen lions  maul  a hyena

you know its that sort of world

songs

a deceitful conscription of the emotions

they promote

not truth

but ease

they mightn’t look like the enemy

they mightn’t act like the enemy

but they are the enemy

there is a case for  aspirating  covid vaccine shots

interestingly, the vaccine needs to go into muscle so it drains into the lymphatic system

if it goes into blood vessels then there will be problems, so "aspiration" is to check the needle is not going into a blood vessel

all the same i’m not trusting the astra-zenca vaccine, there’s an intrinsic flaw with the design in terms of the way antibodies are generated in the nucleus

i’m gonna try to wait for a second or third generation vaccine

itchy boots does it again

  drone shots  in the namib desert

i only have one rule when posting, does it extend my writing ?

a man  (or woman)  of sense would be learning from me, but those who are stuck in the vale of bombast, deceit and stupid belief systems, what can i say ?

the fish with "golden scales"

fool’s gold

the great bright pearl

turned out to be plastic

reading from a book goes nowhere

yet there glimmers something

beyond the morass

ed.  the above poem refers to eihei dogen’s shobogenzo essay "ikka-no-myoju" (one bright pearl/jewel)

“ As long as I am not clinging to the truth, I cannot be deceived ”

a variant of the "liars" paradox ?

as long as i am not deceived, i am not deceived ?

am i not deceived ?

the mud of history

clarity is fiction

one wanders

too far

into the strange and not so strange

only, foresight is needed to know

what is relevant

and

not

relevant

men  women

wars  childbirth

everyone takes them for granted

but there is another space

beyond

only to walk there

leaves everything

behind

people who are smarmy and over-nice to those that agree with them

and brutal and obnoxious to those that don’t

make me sick

things happen to us that are unseen, unremembered and unaware of

yet we are changed

different somehow

there may be cause and effect but it is unknown by us

in more abstract terms solipsism implies we are complete and sociality implies we are incomplete

so we are incomplete and complete

what does that mean ?

that we are faceted

which exactly matches the brain, it is functionally segmented/ has facets

and a special case of facets is the unitary

and in terms of the brain you can argue that consciousness is unitary

that could be what is interesting about existence, a vast accidental biological experiment in the mystical

imo "sociality" is developing in an inextricable way  (genetic)  as part of the brain from conception, just like for language, yes colour me chompskyan

the intransigent

you can’t hurt them

they wait on the sidelines

to peck at you

the odd thing about war

would you rather be dead on the winning side

or

alive on the losing

a deep contradiction

that has always

bedevilled

violent conflict

and in particular

the nature of prisoners

a world of blind alleys

a prophet at each one

the voice echoes

as i walk

down

a wind shift

they no longer love you

still

in their season

the wild flowers

flame

more beautiful

answers

to no questions

looking for home

no need to look

sorrow and grief and dissonance

are my home

the flame flickers

before it goes out

the milinda/menandrous/nâgasena dialogues are actually socratic, menandros was racially and culturally greek

they are a very interesting read, a snapshot of a religion from a very different culture to ours, obsessed with transmigration, re-incarnation and various other buddhist tropes like justifying abandoning your family and  selling the children  into slavery

today’s western buddhism is clearly yet another religious reinvention to fit modern western mores

a good video showing how the sheer greekness of buddhism was result of the existence of the  greco-bactrian  kingdoms

the logical or socratic aspect of buddhism leads to claims its not a religion, but you can see from the milinda dialogues that is not the case, it was a full fledged religion designed to suit the state, in particular, buddha has become a person and there is "supernatural retribution" for "misdeeds" in this life which is essential justification for any moral code

on a moonlit night

everything has its own shadow

literary

fictions that are supposed

to convey insight

literary

fictions that are supposed

to convey something


this crazy world of  hazardous nutrition  we live in

“ pathogenic bacteria can invade and kill caco-2 cells  —  cells which line the wall of the intestine.  the researchers found that an amount of sweeteners equivalent to two cans of diet soft drink can significantly increase the ability of e. coli and e. faecalis to attach to caco - 2 cells.

they also found sweeteners to have an effect on the formation of biofilms – clusters of bacteria that are more likely to secrete toxins and less sensitive to antimicrobial resistance treatment, potentially increasing the risk of disease ”


life

its expectations

a garden without a gardener

a half-filled gift shop

something there

we cannot penetrate

an illusion without source

we wander

"mind" is like "god", people use the term without any discoverable meaning behind it, to embark on discussions involving these terms is to take a journey going nowhere and to no point

facts match evidence, of which you produce none

an interesting thing about "soaps" is the male characters have their own "genre stereotype" not resembling too much except female fear and distain, and of course, themselves

china’s history is periods of internal division interspersed with periods of imperial expansion

we are seeing the second phase emerge again

historically it has only been stopped by force, hopefully the modern world is sufficiently different that it doesn’t come to that

if its not at the beginning

and not at the end

and not in the middle

why can’t it be all three

and it is

and

is

not

does hypocrisy exist at a physiological level? ,  that the mechanisms in the brain for the perception of others is different from our perception of ourselves

we wouldn’t survive if we weighted equally our sense of ourselves and that of others

at the beginning and end of the universe there is no time

a really good  interview  with sir roger penrose

infinity or not infinity is simply two different ways of viewing the same fundamental geometry as exemplified by escher's angels and devils prints/tessellations

interestingly sir roger has a more abstracted view of time than   carlo rovelli ,  there are differences, i’m more in agreement with penrose than rovelli

“ we are all in the same present ”

actually we are all in different "presents" its simply a coincidence that we appear to be in the same "present"

a rather massive coincidence, so improbable it is at the limit of statistics, but that is the nature of existence

following a long thread of thought through

leads to

surprising conclusions

productive

i’d

say

a meister eckhart quote

whoever speaks of god as nothing, speaks of god properly

my  comment

i’d retranslate that as "ideas of god are empty"

my response to yet another person totally ignoring what i said in a comment reply

you are imposing a nonsensical meta, projecting into the air so to speak, totally uncoupled from any real response to what i have written, schizophrenia if you will

we don’t have heads or bodies

they are just constructs

we could equally well exist without them

being time

is time

and not of it

time and timeless

timeless and time

do you understand ?

“ just more words trying to explain ”

you are not addressing my point about the contradiction, some robot reading my words without understanding what is said

"explaining the unexplainable" is actually what "enlightenment " is about, your stance is not enlightened so to speak

there is an old zen koan about this, a needle cannot pass the border guards but a horse and carriage go through

“ well u said explaining the unexplainable is enlightenment ?  that’s absurd, u can’t explain what is unexplainable ”

how you can is what the koan was about, you are taking the theoretical position, that the needle can’t pass, that you can is fundamental to zen and enlightenment, otherwise there’s no point  (excuse the pun)

“ if i am the past aiming for the future.  what is zazen ? ”

spinning wheels that don’t grip

a waste of time

at the end of time

one of life’s fundamental problems

how to extract "benefit"

from

"choosing beggars"

meditation

the spinning wheels have nothing to grip on

and so spin forever

youtube news flash

yet another warthog is killed by a lion

warthog police refuse to investigate

a spokesman said they have their families to think of

a member of the mbiri pride said they were open to meeting with the relatives


a shrivelled life

time shrivels us

age is a slow leaking away of ourselves

drifting in the desert

we might as well may be

aridity

a mood settles on you

unbeknownst a tap is turned on

its amazing what comes out

just as mysteriously

the tap turns off

the sense of escape

what escapes you

you also escape from

one side or another

or the other

of

one side or another

or

the other of the other of

catch this and you catch everything

A is B

but

B is not A

people in effect say this, but the contradiction escapes them

if you say that something "cannot be explained" then that is in effect an explanation about it

for instance, its contrasted to things "that can be explained"

also it subsumes a series of "proofs" that it cannot be explained, which are of course, "explanations" in themselves

even if there was only heaven and no hell  (actually a zoroastrian intrusion into christianity)  it would still worry me

i think i’d prefer non-existence to heaven

life

a woven tapestry

or so we think

more like

or what isn’t it like

or there isn’t

any

likeness

life

a woven tapestry

or so we think

more like

or what isn’t it like

or there isn’t

any like

the ending wound up in the beginning

the middle ran off with the afterword

the index shuffled into incoherence

the writer was written about

this is what makes

a

book

we make stories

with a beginning, middle and end

how little we understand !

there’s a certain type of thinking where opinions can and should change within minutes

one certainty is replaced with another

so much for "certainty"

at first glance it would seem logical that men transgendered to women would have an obvious advantage in any sport, but in fact what we are seeing is the imposition of a neo marxist ideology where complete biological plasticity is assumed and the unyielding effect of developmental processes are ignored

in terms of this ideology, this plasticity is assumed to be general; intelligence, social class, income, practically any category of being is assumed interchangeable with the exception of an aspect of racial identity, other aspects are of course assumed to be as exchangeable

transgender operations and hormone treatments necessarily significantly compromise later health because the male or female developmental process has been markedly disrupted, what sex you are born as is at its base chromosomal and can’t be changed without consequence

in most cases to go ahead with the operations and treatments is diagnostic of a degree of schizophrenia and the high rates of suicide and mental illness amongst the transgendered are not surprising, there was an initial misperception of the only partially discrete nature of male and female

nor is the misperception engendered by ideology surprising, its a facet of "social learning" a core human facility, untested ideas picked up and disseminated

i’m a man

i’m a woman

i’m trans

i’m gay

i’m  i’m

its just social media

but they treat it like life and death

why ?

its just social media

but he/she treats it like life and death

why ?

its just a message board

but they treat it like life and death

why ?

its just a message board

but he treats it like life and death

why ?

death is just another state of being

only we can’t access it

as if we could

the man of no self-awareness

ploughs on

disaster for himself

and

others

opinions usually lack the dignity

of being right or wrong

but are

instead

meaningless

those whose hunger

is to take from you

and punish in return

for showing them needy

you have to be introduced to it

to

believe it

but its there

always has been

the modern reality

vacant opinions

hitting their own vacancy

public attention

a world of intrusion

in varying degrees

destructive

it must be tough as a herbivore

everything else looks at you as meat

things undone have a certain tension

escalation

is the fear

“ belligerent man ”

thinks stupidty is a virtue

his of course

tongue tied

i wish

ed.  interestingly there is also a physical condition of tongue-tie present at birth

words

jumbled together

the fraud

exposes

himself

i really favour plato over neo-plantonism

plato doesn’t meta, but lets "absence" speak, neo-platonism is too overt

what the fakes do when they go into denial

its pretty effortless

because they are too lazy to even put work into denial

“ what is the meaning of life ? ”

there’s really no answer

because

there’s no meaningful question

that

can be

asked

spiritus mundi

spade in hand

we go to dig its treasures

does it work like that ?

or from a bleeding wound

the diamonds tumble out ?

when you begin

your concern is to impose your view on everything

when more advanced

everything

is

grist

to

the

mill

"belligerent man"

not a fan

of my poems

but

won’t

write

any

himself

how strange the world is

dreams

imagination

other worlds

in

writing

open the walls

of the hereafter

the brain can sense something

and follows it like a hound

over a lifetime

the brain can sense some things

and follows them like a hound

over a lifetime

words

the

order

matters

everything that occurs

is not right or wrong

or wrong or right

because

it

occurs

transgression is an important part of writing

it can’t be otherwise

the secret is to keep it legal

there’s a skill to giving offense

just about anything can be phrased that way

we think of sleep as a passive state that we go into in the absence of activity, but in fact it is itself a process of highly organised active states that do fundamental physiological things relating to memory, cleaning the brain of waste and doing repair

when we wake the brain has to "boot" into consciousness and lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, sleep walking and other problems are all malfunctions of this process

by god sleep walking can be dangerous

something else not appreciated is an ongoing sleep insufficiency physically damages the brain

the easy way to look at "god" and "jesus" is they are literary fictions, you don’t need to do any more deconstruction, its sorta soap opera material, sometimes with a bit of literal historical nastiness to make it all seem more real

“ is it just me ?  i find dogen’'s endless repetitions  (thousands of eyes here, thousand of eyes there  .   .   . )  really annoying, this never adds up to more than just saying it once ”

yeah it does add up, its just the translations don’t convey the back and forth and the shifts of meaning that go with the movement

its so fundamental that you don’t take a translations what the author originally said, but people just don’t get it

so much of translation is viewed through the eyeglass of contemporary culture and are effectively, re-interpretations

languages are a dime a dozen

its their expression of the deep root of meaning

that matters

demons are machines

their behaviours run like well oiled gears

all quite explainable really

they don’t negotiate

with you

but are not

uninfluenced

literary writing is like an extreme

its always partly fictional

“ mentalese ”

this idea of "non-verbal" thoughts

prior to verbalization

verbally expressed

in circles

arguing with idiots

the same idiocy

each time around

in circles

arguing with idiots

the same idiocy

leaving before you can

we would like to

but even if we do

we don’t

ordering our lives

well forget it

ordering an understanding of life

there’s something to that

the malevolent deranged

who mean you harm

wait in the wings

to strike

of course

being deranged

they never target

that well

thank god

autistic women

and the way they try to

re-invent various wheels

autistic women

and the way the try to

invent various wheels

sometimes

the vacancy

behind

a

pretty or handsome

face

is

simply appalling

sometimes

the vacancy

behind

a

pretty or handsome

face

is

appalling

there’s some sort of limitation in talking

compared to writing

 not enough density ?

the problem with fame

any sort

is

you

become

a

target

for

predators

a cat outside the door

coughing

it sounded like a distressed child

it had my immediate attention

what you most hate is probably telling you the most

more thought to investigate the matter

rather

than rush on

with an ersatz opinion

living in a child’s world

brooking no disagreement

unable to argue a point

unpleasant repercussions

some adults

and what did hakuin, dogen and keizan say about death ?

what does anybody say ?

a million people, a billion answers

my one answer is this

when someone dies they are gone

that is all

insanity

that thinks its so normal

what can you do about it ?

women weaponize anxiety

and

tears

the brain can accommodate small changes

that’s what we have to do as we get older

do enough and be on target enough that after a while

they

line

up

leave the insane to their ramblings and erroneous views

they only get hostile when you try to correct them

sometimes dangerously so

now it so happens we have first hand accounts of what soto zen monks and priests thought about what death was in 16th century japan because the jesuits argued with them on it

it was very solipsist, that the world ceased to be when we died which i thought was interesting

personally i don't think the question has any real meaning

if not for the brutal  repression  of christianity, japan could have ended up with a majority christian population

learning to think for yourself is such a skill

its taken me most of my life

we are so swayed by others

there is nothing

a terrible emptiness fills the world

until the fullness

returns

understanding history adds so much insight and depth to foresight, so many are oblivious to this fact with their immature opinions of the transient

"gesshin" claire greenwood "trained" at a zen convent in japan

her  book  about it "bow first, ask questions later" is a good read, her time there was a lot of fun to follow when she was blogging

she doesn’t have much of a sense of humour, but her experience is in the nature of a farce so its very humorous

accomplished writers i notice have been writing from childhood, they can be successful by their thirties because it takes twenty years at least to learn how to write, unless you start young then as a rule its too late

me, i’m more inclined to charles bukowski’s  view

lord jesus christ

son of god have mercy upon me

if i ever believe this bullshit

stalin and hitler both killed more of their countrymen by bad strategical and tactical errors in world war two than was possible by intentional means

i think religion gets re-invented all the time, you can pick it over a generation or two, but not within a generation where it is always assumed to have been like that eternally before and after, a necessary illusion or so-called absolute beliefs would have to crumble because they would more truly be seen as relative

the historical reality of monasticism is very mixed, so much so you have to wonder at the human ability to maintain social facades in the face of so much contradictory evidence

medieval european convents were often high class brothels for the nobility and one subtext of teresa of avila setting up her own order is trying to get away from this

the jesuits were paedophilic, greek orthodox was homosexual, asian and european monastic orders involved in orphanages were paedophilic, its sorta endless the hidden agendas, religious orders were more like half way houses for insanity and perversion, though with orphanages its likely the children would have died without the monastic care so there was a high social tolerance for what went on

like islam , i think monasticism was reinvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to look "cleaner" or more "pure" than their historical medieval realities, islam was certainly a much more pragmatic tolerant religion than it is today

there's something unique about religion and the medieval period where whole societies turned themselves over to an extreme level of social control under some theological banner or other and it think it was what by any standard were extraordinarily high death rates for war or disease

i got criticized for painting with too broad a brush so to speak

my  reply

true, its a wide swathe, but substantially true from my reading of various historical accounts and records and actually the contemporary  eg the catholic and greek orthodox churches

the high point of the catholic church is the last pope, pope benedict, a flagrant queen with his very handsome assistant /lover

benedict had a superb "dress" sense

the greek orthodox church is always having various homosexually related scandals

religion is nonsense, why would anyone join these orders ?

its all "fringe benefits" isn’t it ?

don’t mistake me as being negative on homosexuality, its more the context i’m critical of

my favourite story goes right back to "the desert fathers" and two "saintly " men of good public standing ended up having to spent the night in a convent that was lesbian, boy they got "roasted" starting with a mock hosanna complete with palm leaves held over their heads as they entered , then not being permitted to eat because they were so "saintly"

hmm

pre meiji japan not like north korea, the only thing like north korea is orwell's book 1984 to an absolutely weird and horrifying extent

how can you explain non-literalism ?

the literal seems like its true

but its not

“ how can i be the only one right and everyone else wrong ? ”

if there’s only you then of necessity you are going to be right

the chaos of events

keeps us returning to the same old tracks

we need to break out

even to form the idea

is difficult

vitamin D deficiency makes opiates  much more addictive

women need money

“ what makes you say that ? ”

you are kidding me ?

sorrow

so wide and constant

the details we forget

what we do remember

burnishes into

something else

more

than

a memory

the lady of shalott

stepped into life

and

was

vanquished

she wove the web of image

for

a

reason

the trap of correction

a whirlwind

that sucks you in

the hindu gods are the best

the zen pantheon is bereft

give me brahma, vishnu, shiva

compared to whom

sariputra, huineng and bodhidharma

are a pest

age

so many roads

you have cut and made yourself

and travelled them

but new roads are required and some of the old ones have to be abandoned

its

disheartening

but

necessary

the dream of time are we

lesser, greater

the known and unknown

all different

yet subject to the same erosion and accretion

finally

to

fade

forever

ozymandis, too

one day

will be gone

unmissed

ed.  the weird thing is you can actually see ozymandis today, aka  ramesses  II

to be fair to shelly, his mummy wasn’t discovered until well after shelly’s death

the dream of time are we

lesser, greater

the known and unknown

all different

yet subject to the same erosion and accretion

finally

to

fade

forever

ozymandis, too

one day

will be gone

“  No worst, there is none.  Pitched past pitch of grief ”

well gerard

categories of grief dismember

you wring a perverse comfort from your supposed miseries

but outside categories

what is there ?

a leaden dullness

 or something else ?

when i was staying at the cambridge zen center many years ago, it seemed odd to me that mary baker eddy never entered the dialogue, but after many years of observation i have concluded this "blinkering" is fundamental to religion, a self imposed "crimping"

zen shows it in the wilful ignorance of literature as well, i don’t know if you are familiar with the russian theorist mikhail bakhtin, but his ideas of what makes literature, inverted become what makes religion

so literature and religion are opposite poles on a continuum, or more like some sort of perverse parallel, a star trekian "evil universe" so to speak

well stalin was an evil overlord of course, bakhtin’s life is interesting, only escaped death in a gulag camp because of a bad leg

saints talk to god

they are not really saints

saints see god

now they are really saints

there’s this fundamental shift in life

from wanting the world to be the way we think it should be

to taking advantage of whatever occurs

perhaps its a sense of time running out and the realisation that the expectation of a world consistent with how we think it should be is deluded

cancer takes us at our weakest point

the need to grow

girl interrupted  is fascinating, based on the real life of susanna kaysen you can see "the girl" has a strong though not overwhelming degree of schizophrenia, an inadaptive brittle streak that places her in a constant situational trauma

that conscious sort of double flip needed to adapt to the world that some of us have to do is being rejected because of buying in too strongly to the normative way of doing things, they  (the normative)  don't do "the double flip", so why should i ?

well you are "different" and not them at all

i died

heaven turned out to be an insane asylum

hell a sadist’s bloodbath

purgatory ,  well i had just left that

dante

you were a fabulist

and

not

“ you are a quite presumptuous and rude fellow. Take care then, bye bye now ”

you can say these things, but who are you fooling ?

yourself ?

you seem to be good at that

you’re a self absorbed little prince with no experience of life who thinks he knows it all ?

the sameness

going on forever

we call it life

depressing

caravaggio used a lot of  white lead  in his painting

it would explain his behaviour problems

dementia is an extreme of normal brain function atrophy in aging

don't think it won't happen to you

it does

painters   :   you want to do something photos don’t do

unexamined "personal competence" in a partner seems to be the elephant in the room for so many relationships and marriages these days

marriage is just a staging post, some journeys thereafter are not worth taking

what is loss ?

the sense of having missed out on something ?

its a wide term with lots of berths

i don’t think you can say eihei dogen was meaning anything except a monk as he understood it, which was celibate and not married  (japanese monks are not celibate since the meiji edict)

its inconsistent to take dogen as gospel in most of his writings and ignoring his views on being a monk versus a layman

there is a fundamental issue and its that "enlightenment" is a difficult construct and can’t be extricated from life experience, it is literally torn apart for people in relationships or with children, the directions are different and in a way opposite to celibacy, take one or the other, but cross them and you risk disaster

becoming a monk

promiscuity and poverty

these vows

he

takes

flowers at dawn

opening

infinite face

itchy boots visits  the fish river  canyon in namibia, the world’s second largest

i think video offers another dimension compared to photographs

interesting, men and women’s hip sizes are  a compromise  from what is ideal for either gender

i don’t know how the feminists are going to handle that part of the pain of childbirth is due to the male need for narrower hips

the mind churns

its not butter it makes

i don’t know what it makes

but its not good

there’s so many walking around these days with a degree of schizophrenia

when they are not reasonable on a consistent basis is when you can pick it

basically they misperceive the world to the extent of not being able to negotiate to their own benefit, sorta locked behind a door of self-inflicted incompetence

i don’t know why south korea, japan, taiwan and australia don’t take the obvious lesson from north korea, that they are developing the atomic bomb to keep china out, and the limited success they have had to date has been enough to stop them being invaded

its certainly the way china and north korea perceive it for all the bru-ha about the south

china’s huge coastal population densities make it very vulnerable to atomic warfare

if you look at history, china as an empire  (which it hasn’t been for two centuries but is now again) ,  has always been territorially expansionist, stopped only by defeat in battle

interestingly the yuan dynasty got as far as  java , while china’s south sea claims are not reasonable in today’s world, they are thinking back to historical glory

the world

a chinese puzzle of involvement

impelled to move the pieces

we suddenly discover

they

are

sticky

because most people don’t read widely in  quality  mystical literature, when they meditate they have nothing to work on, so they go some degree of crazy

the exception i would make is for those with addiction problems who certainly have something to work on

weirdly, recovered addicts make up a large proportion of r|meditation, which although quite schizophrenic points to some success in this area

the real deal of "mystical inquiry" is quite life destabilising and i don’t recommend it and in fact this is implicitly recognised by all the fake and pretend in supposed mystical work like zen, buddhism, kabbalah or contemplative christianity

married with or without kids is not the solipsist road, take the horse you have been given and don’t risk destruction by tying to ride two at once

that would be "enlightenment" but the grasping fools reach for what they can’t attain and all that happens is you get an aggressive moil of stupidity and its consequences

i have never really read anything so mind blowing

a societal pyschosis

stalin: the court of the red tsar

the cement of being joined to another

is not quite there for me

is it escape

or loss ?

sa’di’s janus head

how we see another

comes from our inclination

an excess of faults

or merits

we forgive and condemn

with a limited rationality

for a week or fortnight i can write prodigiously in a retired place and a day in london sets me up again and starts me

but the toll and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is immense

charles dicken in a letter to john foster 30/8/1846

no sooner than arisen

than fading

and

something else arises

the magic lantern show

of

life

no sooner than arisen

than fading

and

something else arises

the lantern show

of

life

there are limitations on the solipsist idea that "you made it all"

it is in effect an analogy of sorts and all analogies fail because they are not what they analogise

however there is a sense in "being all alone" given the world necessarily does not understand, humans are social animals and rejection hurts and it takes a lot of development to be able to handle this dissonance

you won’t find company in your own generation, you have to look across the centuries and millennia

randomness in art

doesn’t work

randomness in art

doesn’t really work

when you get to a certain level in writing and the arts you lose your sense of criticism of other works and your only interest is in what you can take from them

paradoxically your own works have the least to offer, because you have already taken from them

so many critics twist what they say against their idea of what art or writing should be about because they lack the conceptual repertoire to synthesize what they read or see into new understanding

the usa southern accent sounds  pretty close  to sir henry neville’s/ shakespeare’s english

if you research a health problem on the net and read recent quality research or look at a video by a professional who clearly understands his subject and can explain it, you will start to understand what is a known criticism of hospital teaching schools, that they are ten years behind

when you deal with the professionals you should take into account that you may know quite a bit more than them through that research, but also that with so much practical experience behind them they will be well ahead of you in some, most, and likely essential areas and that research has big gaps

its more than a difficult road to tread, "all wrong" and "all right" is more easily seen, but picking out what useful in a well mixed blend is going to be fraught, however just to go along with all the given advice is asking for trouble

you have to be very careful of the web, its sorta a mix of extremely good and extremely bad advice

its frictionless conveyance of information makes it not statistical in terms of what we are accustomed to in normal life, especially the very high percentage of borderline mentally ill people infesting it with their crazy missionizing, often, not at all obvious

i got banned from r/optometery for criticising someone  (in the industry)  pushing lasik on an OP who was entirely unsuitable for the operation

my reply to the mods

you have banned me

i lost the email saying so, but after a couple of days to think about it, i know what my objection is

you are not permitting different opinions which is leading to a lot of the advice given being "overly commercial" in the sense of favouring certain interventions like lasik

by this you are making the sub a hazard

your choice i guess, i am sure you will not see the sense in what i say


a reddit OP suspects that taking 400mg of vitamin  E daily has given him retinal haemorrhages/ valsava retinopathy

my  reply

yeah that’s a bleeding dose if taken daily, it used to be and still is used as a remedy for age related "blood thickening"

vitamin  E is extraordinarily difficult to take satisfactorily because it has many forms and different costs and benefits from a health point of view, you really want to research this

i don’t like daily doses of the d-alpha type at all because it displaces other more broad ranging in effect types of vitamin E got from the diet, but take a bolus dose of 300mg about once every ten days

ideally there should be a supplement with an optimal balance of forms, but have yet to find it

interesingly, one of the other commenters said

“ i’ve had patients who have had unexplained bleeding in their retina and i’m always sure to ask a thorough medication history. often there was excessive ibuprofen/aspirin/vitamin e/fish oil or some other blood thinner taken  “

malign missionaries

the web is full of them

specialists

in the half thought out


how big is big ?

not big enough

how long is time

not long enough

time to put

vast in the waste paper basket

anxiety

a knotted mess

no rest

the flaw of "scientism" is its root is "matter"

however "matter" is just another idea, however true

the spinal cord is important, it is not just an extension of the brain, but literally the brain

“ for the snark was a boojum you see ”

i have pondered over the meaning for this for many years and i think its something to do with the image being itself or the image also being real

huh, i am not the only one to have  mulled over  this

lewis carroll didn’t come out of nowhere ,  he is heavily indebted to w.s. gilbert and i suspect sufi writings

time can be reversed  in images ,  but not real life

big difference

another good  macro

brad warner gets asked to do paid "one on one" zoom interviews, but he always turns the requests down

my view expressed to him

why not try it and see how it works out, you can stop if there’s shown to be a problem ?

surely , one of the points of zen is to understand that the world doesn’t match our projections and its only through trial and error of experience that our grasp of it improves

you are stuck in an "authors zen" ,  you really don't understand how the teaching side works, i have considerable experience with different zen groups and its clear to me you lack a realistic understanding of how it all works in real life, too much a damn princess

ed.  well he wasn’t willing

you’re not listening, what can i say ? actually i’m so sure you won’t listen, that’s why i write this stuff, no danger of you following through, it always bugs me when people take my advice, they’re getting something for free

brad warner is complaining about a "meditation activist" debasing the/his coin so to speak

my  reply

brad, you are dealing in "intellectual property" and unless you are disney, there’s absolutely no protection from theft

if there’s money in something you are going to get theft

even if there’s no money, you get all the crazies grafting it for who knows what reason

its interesting to compare your books which are protected by copyright to your efforts to create your own brand of buddhism which has no protection at all and all the "choosing beggars" on your vlog with their putrid praise and self-puffery ,  all figuring they are somehow paying you with their fetid nonsense and absolutely no cash ever

"choosing beggar" is a net and real life paradigm, worth becoming acquainted with  what it is

why be a victim of such highly entitled idiots, yet you choose to be  ?

anne sexton

for whom "being" was agony

shattered and fragmented

death seemed an answer

was it ?

i'm sure   you  discounted the price for the sort of problems you are picking up in the yacht, but its an interesting illustration of how it takes a bit of a while of "use" to suss out the real condition of anything secondhand, i always feel that in general the secondhand market is overpriced for anything because of hidden problems it takes a while to pick up, especially since the previous owner is aware of them and tries to hide them

you can make good buys, but i feel its almost a "supernatural" skill to do that

when you get that sinking feeling, listen, its your brain telling you no

there was an OP on a feminist subreddit about rape jokes, i was thinking i have never heard a rape joke, but actually all the ones i have heard are about male prisoners

however i was thinking that conception is a form of rape, both parties getting raped by the newly conceived child

too subtle and existential for that lot i suspect

the spinal cord is part of the brain and  stenosis  is yet another "fun" problem of aging

interestingly, it is as susceptible to "knocks" as the brain and its no wonder the high rate of paraplegics as a result of heavy body contact sports

the eye is a dazzlingly complex mechanical, biochemical, biomechanical machine without peer in the body

the downside is that anything you do to it surgically has some degree of unwanted consequences

this is the huge unmentioned advantage of glasses, they provide vision correction without interference in the actual eye

i think there’s a bad tendency for this "existential substrate" to be ignored and operations embarked upon that don’t truly weight the risk reward ratio, particularly lasik and too early cataract operations

“  Our consent forms are 8 pages long for a reason ”

says it all doesn’t it, talk is cheap

i can say in one sentence what it says, no responsibility is accepted whatever and the client/patient bears all future costs

concert pianists seem to "match" some composers better than others

like yuja wang and  prokofiev

it amazes me

how proficiency

in one area

leads to blindness

in others

my writing

seems to be a machine

that doesn’t

stop

forming an attachment

that gets sundered

life

i

guess

“ kindness and compassion are all of ours to share, as are smiles and helping hands ”

what a load of dissembling nonsense

“ we are living in the end of days. the verse numbers in the last chapter of the bible are 20 & 21

20  he which testifieth these things saith, surely i come quickly. amen. even so, come, lord jesus

21  the grace of our lord jesus christ be with you all.  amen ”

worked out what you are going to say in 2022 yet ?

ed.  no reply, he might figure he doesn’t need to ?

occupy yourself with what yields fruit to you, a lot of what we do goes nowhere

eva braun was likely half jewish, but that  video  is schizophrenic

you don’t research adequately, look at the  shoah  interviews

are these people making it up ?

“ everyone knows that the sky is blue and the tree is green, but who is able to say it clearly ? ”

blue skies

cranberry pies

clouds come

striking us dumb

summer leaves

lost their green

all returns

and goes

in cycles

if you take nonsense as sense, you are going to run into difficulty

it is so difficult to be given and pick up effective advice that we have to work out most things ourselves


time slips away

like a river

strange and smooth

swirls and whorls

an opaque

mystery

for "essential peace"

you might as well say "disorder"

yet there is both

peace

and

disorder

rush rush

even for a spare moment peace

is busy

rush rush

even for a moment peace

is busy

to be patient

is to draw back an event before it happens

there it shapes itself

and seeing its development

we step in as needed and to our advantage

absence, nothing

the emptiness of ourselves

starting out

one word drops after the other

some trip

into a new line

sense builds

and fades

and goes in different

directions

to finally

sew together

making

a poem

writing is patience

well i am not that patient

but i have learnt

whatever the muse is

he/she waits

and delivers

what

suits

her

sylvia

your heaviness of being

some angel thrust into hell

not the safety for you of androgyny

following pre-programmed patterns

wrecked you

callously spitting you into the statistics of failure

and pain

sylvia plath

monolingual

can weave words

on a different plane


the importance of french windows

that sense of space

when

opened

what is outside

falls into

you

there are some "tricks" to mystical understanding i’m reluctant to divulge

one is that the auditory is not reliable

only the visual is reliable

don’t ask me why

in essence pornography  totally  at odds with the lyrics

all you had to do was follow the storyline of the lyrics a bit rather than this gratuitous display, bad enough to be ashamed of

"something is in the air right now" ,  hmm been listening to  sally’s song ?


a statement and question by stephan bielfeldt  (ed.  in quotes)  followed by my comments

“ recently, someone asked me what i have learned from years of experiencing this meditative way of being, and this answer spontaneously came, “i’ve become interested in what is here” ”

my  comment

honestly i would have to say i’ve really learnt nothing, i’m not sure i "learn" at all

“ is there such a thing as a place that is whole and sacred, a place of oneness, beyond thought and all imagining? ”

my  comment

what is a place of oneness ?, what is "beyond thought, imagination" what is a place that is whole ?

toss sacred down the well, give up ideas of place and oneness, arrive at where you don’t arrive is closer and you need to see it in thought afterwards

the neo-adviata, advanta and new age patter shows extremely limited reading horizons and no sense of its dissembling poverty, and actually i think that was a weakness of toni packer, too accomodating to the thought of others, but perhaps not so surprising given the trauma of her upbringing as half jewish in nazi germany

just as a side note, black africans in germany were not discriminated at all by the nazis, i watched a video by one african women who said the only trouble she and her brother ever had with the gestapo was on account of their association with a steiner school and it wasn’t on account of their race, but the steiner schools they were in the process of closing down, her brother worked as a chef on a coastal cargo ship for the duration of the war

the nazi focus on jewery was only because of their property, businesses and wealth, all the propaganda and ideology was just a disguise for state sponsered robbery, which was a long european tradition and what happened was super amplified into the ulitmate progrom by technological changes which was also heidegger’s opinion to be fair to him

i have a jewish ancestor lving in lübeck who emigrated to england in the early nineteenth century, i think that’s when the "thermostat" must have been starting to rise, that politics was becoming not the provenance of an intelligent aristocracy who could be relied upon to step in when their commercial interests were being threated by a pogrom, but more determined by popular attitudes which as we know can be quite brutal and outstandingly self-injurious

back to the topic, i would say "arrive at where you don’t arrive" is pretty much it and won’t make sense without without the experience, i was going to write it takes years and years to garner this perception, but actually i would have understood this at age  7 after "the experience"

there’s no circle like spiritual circles

chasing what they can’t find

enmeshed in conceptual poverty

flailing calling that direction

one pushes on oneself

leaving them behind

a dot goes around in a circle

how many times ?

one  two  three  four

time to bail

a dot goes around in a circle

how many times ?

one  two  three

time to bail

the world is full of virtuoso players

guitar, piano, organ, trumpet and so on

what’s short is composers who can think originally

our discussion at this point is just a dot going around in a circle, you don’t agree with me and i have spent enough time arguing fruitlessly on the web to be wary of wasting any more

tibetan buddhist mythology would make a good film script

catastrophe/ war/ horror/ science fiction/ opera/ love/ end times/ ghost/ satire/ armageddon

i understand you more than you think

people have surprisingly consistent patterns

age has an underlying fatigue

that saps the energy for life

age has an underlying fatigue

superfluity withdraws

we hope

beware

we all mean well

but when it comes to the crunch

exigencies dominate

“ peggy kennett wanted to be a church of england priest but women weren’t allowed to at the time ,  (changed in  1992) ”

quite correct, i stayed at a hermitage in the hokianga new zealand run by a woman who was rejected for the priesthood , so she became a priest in a puritan church, but she was totally anglican/episcopalian in her heart  (with some eastern orthodox trimmings of course) ,  it was big mistake on the part of the anglican church not to have women priests and significantly contributed to its decline

you are fondly remembered clem

the most extraordinary thing was she had a genuine illuminated bible worth many millions kept in a drawer in her house more like a shack

kensho can be directly visionary or something may occur that you only notice by a change in yourself so figure something has happened, though unsure when and what, diffuse or sudden

without the visionary you will never understand and of course hardly anyone ever does, and they just 'manufacture" the usual nonsense

i think zen like any historical monastic system always has huge problems with mental illness so its a bit of a fraught area and you have to be "enlightened" to handle it

with the real deal you can tell whether the experiences of others are genuine or relevant, this skill has been lost for centuries

the visionary does not fit into western zen because it does not fit into its philosophical rationalist take and actually seething snakes of mental illness below the surface, so for instance you get dogen's visionary experiences in china dishonestly translated as dreams when they are not

the not understood fact of true understanding of the "spiritual reality" of the universe is schizophrenia, autism and psychosis that happens to be true, a narrow long road hardly ever travelled, but it can be, but never even thought of by all the "sane" pretenders

circles return

again

and again

with no prospect of escape

what to do ?

so you are self-taught, but i’m saying you need to deal with the world to make sense of it, so this conversation we are having for instance helps me clarify my understanding, it can stop at any point and i have "made money" so to speak

i also write and web publish homilies and poems and it provides material for that

i had a look at your  song  again, its very good, but there is another level available to you but you would need to take an interest in poetry and folk music

the problem with self-taught is we don’t live anything like the ten thousand years needed

you don’t seem to get this

the country most like george orwell’s  1984 ,  didn’t exist when he wrote it, its like he called north korea into being

two roads

one real, the other unreal

ostensibly they cover the same ground

but

they

don’t


the moon washes herself every night

changing

untainted by the seething planet

below

if you have a problem, the most important thing is not to fix it immediately

but fix it enough

so you can be relaxed about finding a lasting solution

boarding school is like the army, its designed to break your spirit

when you look at something for a few years

you start to get it right

decades later

you get it righter

religion

its architecture of insanity

presumed

sane

“ i read what you write but can’t understand it ”

whose fault is that ?

“ yours ”

the web

message boards

sycophantic to what they agree with

devils to what they don’t

the janus faced

have no perception of themselves

the web

message boards

sychophantic to what they agree with

demons to what they don’t

the janus faced

have no perception of themselves

deep thinking

the pasting together of cultural memes and clichés

is not deep

or thinking

deep thinking

the pasting together of cultural memes and clichés

is not deep

or thinking

understanding

as with a staircase

to go

from bottom to top

or vice versa

is not instant

but requires work

and the passage of time

this dunning-kruger world

so ignorant of this fact

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

what was my staircase analogy about ?

you are used to "cut and paste" but it doesn’t work on the staircase

your complaint to me is i’m not giving you "cut and paste", but the ideas i express require you to travel the staircase

you don’t like this

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

at the top of the stairs there’s a parcel labelled "answer"

you open the parcel and go "oh that’s the answer"

only you can open the parcel

if all the words

we ever spoke or thought

were linked to make a daisy chain

how far would they stretch ?

around the universe and back !

she’s "out"

but not

gay

or

trans

so must mean

something else

she waves goodbye

a door closes

she’s "out"

but not

gay

or

trans

so she must mean

something else

she waves goodbye

a door closes

jacob’s ladder

had rungs

and on each rung

were words

even the angels did not stop

to read them

but angels

were

never

wise

one of the most disillusioning things about writing

is people hostile to you

throw back your words and phrases

at

you

quite unconsciously

they are walking you

and would you beat you to a pulp

with yourself

a library

is labyrinth of knowledge

knowledge is a labyrinth of meaning

meaning is a labyrinth of itself

a paean for luis borges

an empty strangeness

with a sense of

the inadequacy

of libraries

and labyrinths

despite poor eyesight

interior sight

enabled him

to

shoot straight

the garden of life

a confusing vale if ever there was one

ourselves

transient objects partaking

of it

who are you

my reader

who is not me

what byway

have you traversed

to get here ?

sleep

a gulf into which we drop

unsconcious

a mini death

our own perpetual crucifixion

and resurrection

teach your grandmother to suck eggs

jesus

what is it about falling snow ?

accretion without

noise ?

drone  panorama  in the karoo desert just south of namibia

its not too bad to appear as an idiot

especially when you compare it

to what doesn’t appear as an idiot

life

an illusion

pursuing

ungraspable

architecture

children

don’t be too depressed by your parents

you are and are not

of them

the potency of mirrors

even a lake reflecting a blue sky and clouds

lies in what ?

after all it is a reflection

everything has limitations

even "limitations"

there’s a huge strength in focusing and getting rid of the superfluous

there’s also a huge danger

"superfluous" is a difficult to make value judgment and to distinguish that from what might be essential in the future cannot be accurately done

coming

going

leaving

arriving

we never mark the transitions

important as they are

untangling female thought

no-one can do it

especially the thinker

"mansplaining" is now a negative attribute, but where is "femsplaining" on the cultural radar ?

the whole "isness thing" is a modern cliché, total rubbish

worse than a poor substitute its a mask to any real understanding and observation

exercise  increases  lactate increases  hippocampal neurogenesis  decreases  anhedonia

the eternal traveller

across

desert

mountains

jungle

sea

never stopping

to see

the problem with the press is they don’t know their enemies from their friends

its like a medieval battle with the protagonists constantly switching sides

“ i remember a singaporean author once observing on twitter that the most important lesson she’s learned is to never engage with people who are most likely arguing in bad faith

my  comment

you take care of yourself, by always learning through the arguing, you don’t have to worry about bad faith or not, they are simply wasting their time while giving you benefit

its all "process", there’s absolutely no advantage in missionizing a viewpoint

you think you understand, but you don’t really and you just have this problem of thinking you understand so you never investigate further which of course can be a rough road, but being ignorant invites catastrophe

to look at a sunset without thinking

its not a category

and walk away

when its finished

emily dickenson’s life and the "aftermath" reads like a  nabakovian story

so rare is sense

that not in a generation found

across the centuries one must peruse

to find a glimmer

or even

not at all

you cannot criticize a poem

all you can do is write a poem in reply

i’ve spent years ,  decades even arguing on message boards and its taught me to write and think better and in particular identify the usual sophistical techniques used by the stupid hubric against me, the principle one being "declamation"

to me dogen’s advice about avoiding arguments is self serving and simplisitic and designed to keep the peace in the close quarters of monastic living where cliques form and people can get assaulted and in the extreme killed, i call this containment "self knee capping", its how cults, centers and monasteries are kept together in a schema of nonsense

now i think about it, the privileged status dogen has as "non-disputable" within the soto sect is actually self-kneecapping

so, knock the shit out of the ox

in your world, views never change, that i can believe herr doktor

dogen is more understandable as a writer than sage, beats me why this escapes the entire soto sect

though the notion of "sage" is of course another writer’s "fiction"

“ please address ghosts/death/life after death views in zen ”

we never die, its just another idea though i am not so sure "being born" is an idea

ghosts are our memory

honestly the way some women think is like a tangled yarn ball

you can burn your life away on other people’s problems for little or no return, that’s for sure

something approaches on the horizon

only to walk away from me

story of my life

the platform sutra, at best contains some garbled recounting of things said by the sixth patriarch, the sutra does have an unusual and distinct voice, quite anti religious actually

the recounting of huineng’s life is myth

there is a contemporary reference possibly to huineng as a "meditation" teacher, and some steles that on balance indicate he was an historical person, but who knows the degree to which the platform sutra relates to him

to me the outstanding feature of the sutra is its what would have been dangerously anti clerical sentiment and that needs explaining

perhaps the explanation is it is targeted at the sophisticated administrative class where such sentiments were perhaps agreed with

my reply to a song composed and sung by  dark light

time’s running out

back and forth

we traverse

all is not one

the universe fractures

my soul

young goes to old

and old goes to young

harmony is a toxic illusion

dissonance yields the results

every day survival

you’ll see

live long enough

and be enquiring

dark light  replies

is this poetry?   see  .  .  .  i don’t know what any of it means.  the feeling i get is that you’re telling me i’m wrong in my song, but maybe you aren’t.  i can’t tell.  harmony is a toxic illusion?  my favorite thing to do is harmonize.  it is all very confusing to me

my  reply

i really liked the song and music, so surprising for here  (ed. brad’s vlog comment section)  with its swathes of the talentless

i don’t know whether you can call what i wrote a poem or not, but i wrote it as i listened to the song, its what i feel is a correction to your more conventional viewpoint which is "communal", whereas mine is solipsistic

there’s another level you can step up to, with both the music and the understanding expressed by the lyrics, you certainly have the talent, but whether you want to go there is a different question

it was a huge surprise to come across that song

if you come back to what i have written, its targeted very specifically at certain things your song says and should make sense to you eventually

another reply to her

i think what you are "writing" is more an "impression" than necessarily sense, there is a difference

"for entertainment purposes only!"  (ed. she made a deprecating reference to her song)

do you see how that’s a defensive reflection ?

what you wrote and played is really quite good, why trivialise it ?

there’s path of development which actually you are already on, which is the songwriting and composing, even going back a song or two you are moving forward so that’s positive

i do a bit of writing and its painful how useless the contemporary scene is, you have to go back over the centuries in the case of writing to read/find anything helpful

you are obviously somewhat familiar with the 60’s and seventies folk music scene  (ed.  she wasn’t), in terms of technique and composing there’s a lot to be picked up there and in other genres like classical

i’ve got some  music links  in various genres at the bottom of this page

karen dalton’s  blues jumped the rabbit  and   lakmé  are really outstanding

there’s a perspective from which life makes sense, if you give it time and show an interest it starts to fall into place

if you just sit on your depressive arse you will go nowhere

don’t be so sanctimonious, why not investigate what i say ?

you are sitting there behind walls of your own construction, there’s  a rich universe  out there, you don’t live long enough to re-invent it yourself

“ i’m a bit autistic  .  .  . i take everything literally, think in black and white, and can’t read between the lines, let alone people’s minds ”

reading quality poetry really teaches you how to read "shades of grey" "between the lines" and effectively, what people are thinking

because its a "theory of mind" you have grown, you will eventually be able to it better than most people

she further complains of not understanding my reply or even that there is any sesne in it

my further reply

first off i challenge your notion of time in the song, what i wrote won't make sense if you look from the perspective of time you use

"when I was young I used to dream of a place nobody's ever been more real than reality "

its like you have been to this place and come back, ie some-body went there and the different perspective you get from that journey would make sense of what i write

the conventional view is that nobody goes there, the enlightened view in terms of mysticism is that somebody does go there its real "alice through the looking glass" stuff, its a tangible journey and takes decades to process and it can't be done for you

since you are showing such an interest, its quite possible you have been there as a child and lost it in which case it has to be recovered, which if you pay attention will happen

it amazes me  how they  can completely lose memories of what is so precious to them, yet retain a good command of english

i guess the answer is that language is learnt so young and uptake is so genetic, it takes brain death to unseat it

if you want to understand women

look at the

width

of their hips

you are sorta seeking some resolution or going somewhere, but the truth is nothing resolves

something can be

and not be

all mixed up

hard for the black and white thinkers

out there

to understand

sentiment can be complex and a mix, ranging from the serious to the lighthearted all in a few sentences, its a skill of course both to express and understand

web message boards like reddit are not places to throw tantrums or browbeat opposing opinions, but to convey and receive information and be able to argue rationally without being offensive

in other words a school for the development of social and intellectual skills

i certainly feel they have done that for me

a more advanced lesson is being able to pick what is worth getting involved with and justifies the time and energy involved

below is my reply to someone criticising me for criticising a comment addressed to brad, in his words

“ it's like...telling someone not to do a thing, but you are doing that very thing ”

my  reply

i wasn’t "directing him" rather saying he was "telling his grandmother to suck eggs" so to speak

it wasn’t that big a deal but whether or not something is serious is up to the person involved to take as they see fit as we all know from experience when responses by people unexpectedly flare up

it can be argued you are taking my comment too seriously, or we are all falling into what is the usual web message board problem of getting too involved in the lives of others

i think what would be a fair criticism of me and the person whose comment i was criticizing, is that of getting too involved in what brad  (ed.  warner)  is doing, yet of course one can’t criticise us because that is getting too involved on the part of the critic

you make an interesting point about a class of "criticism" that really cannot be made because it commits the same sin as what is being criticised, ie is recursive which of course is very "zen"

subtle flaws always come out

however long it takes

there are consequences to error

"the dreaming" knows its own

"chaos" is a rich literary and colloquial use word way more vast than the limited notions of the mathematical "chaos theory"

another way of looking at it is "real chaos" is necessarily going to escape theory or efforts to contain it and descriptions always look a bit thin to me

that religions mean anything are an illusion

that religions mean anything is an illusion

for "ufo's" and "aliens" to be a viable speculation as per the views somewhat emdedded in popular culture, faster than light travel is required but all the physics says its not practically possible

its a wall that you cannot get past

to try to do so is to be tainted with mental illness

the basic attribute of a "better scientific theory" is not "simplicity" but that the range of explanation is larger, more predictive of yet to be made observations and more consistent with existing observations

if its simpler its a bonus but if you look at the contemporary theoretical scene in physics and astrophysics, simplicity got left behind a very long time ago and there's just "turtles" stretching away as far as the eye can see

i think in terms of zen there's no bottom turtle in the form of "enlightenment" or "meditation"

one never thinks of having dangerous mentally ill people in close family

but its there  for some

it took me twenty years to sort out the level of crap the zen system and teachers put out, its really just a form of schizophrenia

why was i so vulnerable ?

well i was brought up in episcopalian boarding schools

what is imbibed as a child is hard to sort out as an adult

i have found the easy way to extricate modern physics from philosophy/mysticism is to look at the crazy by our standards world view of heraclitus and how he had everything else right

in other words the correctness of physics and astrophysics has no bearing on philosophical and mystical purveyance

the truth is as simple as there being "no bottom turtle" and it applies just as much in science as everything else

“ what does buddhism teach about god ? ”

it doesn’t really arise as a question because of buddhism’s origins in greek philosophy

rather it has a pantheon of gods/supernatural figures and an abstract philosophical notion of some "final cause" for being, pretty much what was is the case for ancient greece, an interesting blend to say the least

vermeer’s   little street in delft ,  there’s a distance in it, yet acquaintance

this  docudrama  on claude monet by paul priestley is also very good

david hume stayed at a jesuit monastery in france and had contact with a jesuit missionary returning from asia, western philosophy from that point is very influenced by buddhist ideas, just like 18th and 19th century poetry was influenced by islam/sufi

philosophical and religious ideas are surprisingly easily and quickly transferred across cultures

buddhism itself was formed in part by the greek philosophy that came with the greco-bactrian kingdoms

christianity is heavily indebted to the ancient egyptian religion, islam is a form of nestorian christianity and got substantially re-invented in the nineteenth/twentieth century, endless circles of influence weaving back and forth and a testimony to the continual mutability of cultural ideas that don’t appear to be mutable to those living within a generation

"god" is an unanswered question

what about the accusations that eihei dogen didn’t go to china, or even speak chinese, that he plagiarized others, and lied about rujing’s teachings ?

my  reply

there’s good evidence he went to china, studied with rujing, however rujing never gave him transmission, dogen pretty well says this himself somewhere because transmission was really certification to be an abbot and always given in the context of being appointed to that position and rujing was dead against it so the soto transmission obsession actually comes from dogen himself and his supposed transmission "document" is a "medieval forgery"

"plagiarism" is really a modern concept, dogen certainly was taking from many many sources but i agree with ewk in this respect, that he did pretty much create his own religion

why dogen is an anathema to r|zen is that he is an unabashed mystic visionary and this is completely unpalatable to the hordes of the new "reading zennists" now infesting the web

it will be interesting if it ever "takes" in an historical sense, that in several hundred years there will be a "ewk" sect of zen, anti-meditation and based only on the chinese records, i think there could well be

actually most people on brad’s vlog don’t get that there’s more to zen than reading, that it is a lifelong process of discovery about the real nature of the world and really that’s the only rule

the question of "god" is not whether he/she exists or not, but is itself the question

"what is god" which is a very large and neverending question and actually unanswerable

so this notion of god being an unanswerable question and that is what god is, simply that unanswerability is actually god

the problem with nothing

is it must be void of something

yet to be void

is itself something

you cannot have a propertyless "nothing"

analogies are an odd animal

powerful harbingers of pragmatic reasoning

yet they saying nothing about their own truth

when you think its sunday

and its monday

what happened

to saturday ?

already shrouded

by the mists

of what has gone before

the average mind

is a turgid mess

and doesn’t realise it

nostalgia is constructed

get real

there’s a difference between complete fiction and that which is complete fiction but pretends to be real

the latter really messes you up

often, the expression of a question conveys

more than the answer

the "gone-ness" of permanent absence

hard to get used to

i don’t know that you ever do

consciousness, awareness, being in the moment, compassion

all the spiritual trivia

of

fakes

israel has emerged the clear winner in the current gaza conflict  (ed.  may 2021),  this time it has inflicted enough damage to cause major repercussions for hamas, yet no doubt hamas with its arab and iranian funding will hang on, and police states like gaza and north korea only go when invaded, oppression is a wonder worker for remaining in power and really the general population has no effective defence against organised cruelty

the big benefit to israel of hamas and the gaza strip situation remaining as it is, is the continued adverserial separation of the two palestinian nations, why do you think israel has not invaded the gaza strip and put in place a more popular and democratic government ?

hamas to have any chance requires missiles with larger warheads (nuclear of course would be a game changer and why there is such concern about iran being able to make them) ,  pinhead accuracy and the ability to avoid anti-missile defences, which is at least four or five generations of development away and anyway, faced with that the israelis would just invade

another war torn day in the middle east, highly intelligent aggressive peoples still stuck in the paradigms of centuries ago

when i think about it, the big problem is iran gaining the ability to make nuclear weapons, its effectively a government by multiple militias and even if the government intended to not use them, they would not be able to keep them out of the hands of the terrorist organisations they sponser, so a possible future senario is hamas or hezebollah getting hold of nuclear weapons, using them and israel responding to any strike by nuking tehran, gaza and lebanon and that would probably be about it, a lot of radioactive ruins in certain areas of the middle east, though i think saudi arabia has cause for concern which is why the whole anti-israeli dynamic has changed in the middle east, the media are of course at least ten years behind the times, just a bunch of posturing fools

the big problem with nuclear weapons is not their existence since in effect they force and enforce peace, but where the states lose control of them and in fact this was a big lesson for the soviets in the cuba missile crisis, the politbureau were at risk of losing control of missle launching to local forces in cuba as well as the soviet navy and its very telling that during the entire crisis the russian missiles were stood down to the lowest level of rediness to signal to the americans they didn’t want to engage at the nuclear level and the trauma of it all eventually lead to khruschev being "sacked", too close for comfort

these dunning-kruger know nothing stupids who run away when pressed and just start up again back at the beginning like they have no memory of their ignominious defeat in their last conflict

the point of meditation is to become aware of how your brain works

method and practices are an anathema to this, literal blinders to any self-observation

the fakes come to the cliff edge and turn back

its everywhere

the faux apology you see in media

like there was even a problem sometimes apart from publicity seeking

or there was a problem that required more than an apology

if some-one did that to you in real life

you wouldn’t have anything to do with them

too tricky

for words

today’s

social mores

education

is simultaneously a farce

and horror story

the young are too dangerous to leave uncrippled

so we cripple

them

oh no

"denial" is not a thing

i am never in denial

so many opinions

like and dislike

where does that go ?

erin hanson, an australian instagram poet has an exceptional command of rhythm and rhyme, but as far as i can see she has stopped writing

i suspect the perception has grown on her how in writing for an audience rather than working through her own truths makes the business somewhat sterile

i’ve seen a few really talented young poets over the years stop writing, or publishing in any form at least, so there’s really hardly any quality contemporary poetry around

the dullards persist and publicise their endless profusion of course

it is helpful to understand back posture in terms of "lordosed" vs "kyphosed"

“ a sustained  lordosed  sitting posture decreases disk pressure and thereby disc degeneration, exhibits less injurious levels of ligament tension and although it increases zygapophyseal loading, this is not of itself considered hazardous to spinal health

a sustained kyphosed sitting posture, on the other hand, increases intradiscal pressure leading to increased fluid loss, decreased nutrtion and altered cell synthesis and biomechanics of the disc, appearing to culminate ultimately in disk degeneration that is a cause of lower back pain ”

there’s nothing too deep for tears

the soul cries

its anguish

what accepts us

is ripped away from us

out of our control

the big themes of writing are

attachment  detachment

acceptance  rejection

all the great books weave these threads

rapidly you go somewhere new

time stops while you are there

rapidly you return

your time away has been breathtaking and productive, yet somehow

with damage that needs unwinding

a path parallel to yours

may go nowhere

but helps you

pick your

own

sometimes

something

fills in the gaps

run for it

the sorely missed

the longed for dead

are not coming back

 what does this tell us ?

no sense of foreboding

but something happened

while we were away

i’m

not

the

only

fatality

fading

appearing

fading again

people

life

some place

were all is

we visit

occasionally

imaginative worlds

so much more palatable

than the real one

imaginative worlds

are more palatable

than the real one

the mad are mad

its their very intractability that defines them

they cannot be corrected

men might smile to themselves as women flounder though some mechanical task they find easy

women laugh to themselves as men butcher vocabulary and expressive sense

where does the real power lie ?

“ i’m trying to understand ”

no, you are trying to shape the world to your understanding

“ now i understand ”

pity for others

then it happens to oneself

no pity

because after all it happened

no garnish

pity for others

then it happens to oneself

pity for oneself

a mouse

so small

yet so completely

functional

mice

so small

yet so completely

functional

you can sorta see how that alcohol has affected sydney lima, she’s halfway there, but has too dull an edge for the other half, unable to take the good and discard the bad  at this retreat

to me she’s a very typical low key alcoholic and won’t take any notice until the decline starts to accelerate

whether she was always a half talent rather than a full talent is an open question, but i have a feeling she could have done better, the sadness of the self injured

afloat on a sea of meaning

he sees no shore

a pity

for there lie

some answers

anything, something, all things

said or unsaid

the mystery deepens

one of the problems with aging

is the circles

the old patterns

are not really defeatable

when it comes to imagining the future, the  default mode network  actually splits into two complementary parts

one helps create and predict the imagined event, what the researchers call the "constructive" function

the other assesses whether that newly constructed event is positive or negative, what they call the "evaluative" function

the "not too bright"

spinning on the merry-go-round

of more thought

claiming thoughtlessness

buddha is mind

buddha is not mind

not buddha is mind

neither buddha nor mind

more definitions than rain has fallen

but the idiots still bother

the difference between stalin and lenin

is lenin hung by the handful

while stalin killed by the bucketload

when execution is not enough

there’s always a mismanaged war

to really clock up those numbers

only a man would think a woman is swayed by reason

elsa peretti; a busy life, then nothing

“ still, and you’ve  (ed.  brad warner)  spoken of this before, its so hard to wrap my brain around the idea, were you to leave ziggy  (ed. his girlfriends dog)  in the house waiting for you, then walk outside for ten minutes to film a video and then return to him, that for those ten minutes ziggy doesn’t exist simply because you were not conscious of him

maybe that just indicates a misunderstanding on my part ”

my  reply

ziggy exists as an engram of memory even though unconscious

discussions of "consciousness" and existence are just a play of cascading and recursive frames of reference and don’t go anywhere

its not that you "misunderstand", but of necessity for inclusiveness, you have to go beyond understanding and misunderstanding, how do you do that ?

all the modern variants of biological scientific theories of consciousness are, at their root, the "broadcast theory" which says consciousness is an artefact of a superhighway of information in the brain, that this large scale traversing and density of information/meaning intrinsically carries an ability to perceive itself

its not a mystery, there has been a lot of high quality research been put into this, but the "solving" of the problem of consciousness by and large has been ignored

i think in terms of "mystical inquiry" consciousness is a bit of a red herring, the bulk of the brain activity is unconscious so obviously there is more going on that what is called consciousness

what’s more of interest is the "limitation of meaning" and how this might be "bypassed" to make sense of what cannot be grasped in our conventional way of looking at things

religion, philosophy and the zillion theologies are all this failed attempt, and inevitably doomed to failure from the outset because they try to make "a nest" within meaning ,  but what is within, cannot be "without"

you can’t be simultaneously all stages of life at once, yet earlier stages do carry somewhat through to later stages

we are such social creatures that the hardest thing to understand when you get to the end of the road

is there is no-one there

there is only you

and this always was the case


forever the sea stretches

strobing and glinting

in silver

a cloud bank along the horizon

pale blue above

there’s nowhere else i’d rather be

eyeballs rolling on a glittering sea

forever the sea stretches

strobing and glinting

in silver

a cloud bank along the horizon

pale blue above

there’s nowhere else i’d rather be

eyeballs rolling on a glistening sea

time and space spread equally in all directions

men and women

before and after

infinite the nows

there is nothing special about this one

except its yours

supplements that  double up  on DHA are bad for heart health

i think the 2:1 ratio  (EPA:DHA)  of unmodified krill is ok on balance because the DHA is beneficial for the brain

interestingly DHA  kills tumour cells

study

though they are gone

many a year

in memory they remain fresh

only frozen

and only certain things

remain

little changes

are the way forward

more utilitarian realities

and a better understanding

thereof

the real thing

claude monet  painting  "en plein air" his pond, willow tree and waterlilies

when the shit hits the fan

it goes everywhere

non-involvement

is no defence

however

your own rescue

needs to

have

been

planned for

"process" is defined by the results, it does not define the results

12mg of oral ivermectin  (same drug as in in dog heartworm pills)  reduced  the time for covid viral clearance from 12.7 to 9.7 days

i think i will buy some, i’m trying to put off the vaccine until the second generation comes out that covers variants better

"ivermectin is generally given on an empty stomach with water; however, administering ivermectin with food increases its bioavailability"

i feel that by the fourth generation of vaccine they will offer a complete protection that is long lasting and eventually as this get rolled out we will see the virus become extinct within a decade

the astrazeneca vaccine i am wary of with its adenovirus vector blood clotting ,  a problem that has been known about with that vector for a decade which was why the hiv protein "molecular clamp" vaccine technology was developed, it was stupid to ditch it just because it put harmless hiv antibodies in the blood

i get migraine so with the astrazeneca vaccine having bad headaches as a clotting symptom, i wouldn’t be able to tell

i do think that not having type " A" blood is also protective and any vaccine imo will have some degree of a severe side effect problem in a small percentage of the population

agreements

don’t stand the water

of time

something that is

is revealed

slowly

sa’di hits the spot everytime

you read him and it doesn’t gel

and then it does

i don’t subscribe to the common beliefs

clichés, truisms

the knick knack of thought and thoughts

that passes for "wisdom"

magpies of intelligence

us

velázquez’s "las meninas"

explained

the hardest thing is the way the world is

a very mixed bag

beauty and craziness

competence and murderousness

knowledge and dullness

the benign with pretence

the body

so many hinges

the creaking needs oil

what diabetes does to the eye

scary

“ diabetics who have uncontrolled blood sugar are at a higher risk of what’s called proliferative diabetic retinopathy where new vessels grow in the back part of the eye and have fibrous material to support them

the neovascularization then can contract and in doing so pulls the "seeing" tissue part of the eye away from the shell and you get this, a tractional retinal detachment.

they can be and often are visually devastating and predispose the eye to other disease processes

they are sometimes called a wolf jaw retinal detachment ”

life

not even a needle

when an awl is required

error carries its own consequences

reality is not inert and usually, but not always  punishes

sometimes it rewards


deep in the vine

backlit by the winter sun

cherry tomatoes

glow

as i pick them

episode 2  from david adams’ series "alexander’s lost world" titled "the mother of all cities"

i have to say i always wondered why alexander and his army bothered with afghanistan, but in fact it was highly civilised with very extensive and sophisticated irrigation

the video conveyed to me how misguided modern western interventions there have been

the burden of thought

persuading others

is not needed

the context of need

defines us

and our desires

the badly treated

when in a position of power

treat others badly

because they know it works

you lose your way

to find it again

only to lose it again

the box of mystery

is simply

unknown

in science

its called singularity

yet discovery opens up the box

making what was previously obscure

navigable

in science

and life

there never was an intractable mystery in the first place

simply our lack of understanding

i can’t start out to write

more like a sprite of thought

condenses and expands

to make something interesting

the time scales of the universe are long if we lived them

but in thought things begin and end

and don’t end

how easily travelled

dental calculus is a 3D object, porous and with a very much larger interior surface, so its more problematic as a function of its volume and not just surface area

it is actually a bacterial biofilm hosting pathogenic bacteria and their toxins and a primary act of dental health is to consistently remove it

i brought "scalers" some years ago and their use has been invaluable

a disappearing life,   camel herding  in the sahara

humans

without mood

don’t do much

a lot of my thoughts are simply absurd

why have i never noticed this before ?

if you ask the question "what is god ?" ,  straight away you posit something single and not multiple

if you look at life, everything is multiple

even single

the branching ways

sorting them out

is a life’s work

sometimes

the sums seem to balance

but a large positive

always calls forth

a large negative