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

russian war and  early propaganda  films are obsessed with executions

i wonder why ?

that powerless of the individual confronting whatever state ?

interestingly pavlov’s  ideas  may have been behind the extraordinary confessions of the show trials

mikail bulgakov’s "heart of a dog" is an interesting satire, that i think alludes to pavlov

it was made into an extraordinarily good  film  directed by vladimir bortko

when i look at diseases or health problems i try to find something fundamental that circumvents cataloguing symptoms, an easy way of making assessments of the severity of the problem and avenues of remedy

COVID gives more than a hint with the results  of this study ,  that the spike protein can enter the cell nucleus and interfere with the constant ongoing DNA repair

it might even be a problem with the current vaccines since they generate one way or another full length spike proteins  (except the novavax) ,  but to me what says this is no ordinary virus is its severity which of course is quite apparent in its symptomatic effect, but probably, genetically some people are going to be much more susceptible than others

interestingly i think you can predict the moderna vaccine would be more hazardous from a side effect viewpoint than the pfizer and the novavax not hazardous since all its spike proteins are bound to a nanoparticle

oddly, i think the pfizer has done something positive for me, but i am going to space 7-8 weeks between the first and second dose

nobuyuki tsujii  (blind from birth with microthalmia)  playing  rachmaninoff’s piano concerto no. 2

when i first listened to it i thought a bit ho hum, but listening to other pianists they were not as good

he doesn’t overpower the orchestra which pianists in this work are wont to do

“ perception is semi-controlled hallucination ”

i think you could extend that to "life is"

neither fan nor troll

the dunning-kruger acolytes

cannot cope

with ambiguity

sexual undercurrents in religious orders are usually kept well disguised

sexual undercurrents in religious orders are kept well disguised

well, we disagree

and i’m voting with my feet

bye

a road that branches

as you look at it

despair is its name

life’s fairness

starting from conception

so uneven

it raises doubts

about

everything

life’s unfairness

starting from conception

so uneven

it raises doubts

about

everything

interrupt the "lotus eaters" at your peril

they will resent you

my experience of the kwan um school  (chogye)  is it is more institutional and not centered on individual teachers the way japanese zen is and there’s a lot of freedom in that, in hindsight japanese zen is way too "culty"

korean zen is not so much into sitting meditation, but chanting and walking meditation but in the end they are both religions and suffer the usual problems, i think one thing people won’t pick up from brad warner because he is "solo" is the intense internal politics zen /seon have, live with it for a while and you become oh so sceptical about the whole business

the other things that stand out are the general poor health and money problems and people putting too much of their lives into what doesn’t bear fruit for them

personally i found the people in kwan um "nicer" and less "anal" than zen, easier to get along with and more "worldly realistic", honestly japanese zen is so "fascist", full of "power mad" stupids in attitude and action

what i notice in terms of my real life zen experience which is across several different "zen" traditions is it is like a vaccination against believing any of the shit or taking it seriously and those caught in the "idealized world" of "net zen" are going to be stuck in an illusion they will never escape and to be honest, i think brad who also lacks much experience of "zen institutions in the real world" is also mired in this bog

different experience is such a fundamental divide, its interesting, real life experience of anything breeds scepticism, without it you are dreaming which of course most of the posting on brad’s vlog is

zen is not a "philosophy" but an "institutional/cult product"

r|zen is a bunch of dreamers if there ever were, they strenuously avoid any real life zen contact, i guess because the maintenance of "the dream" is what is really important to them

i suppose i should take my exit from here, real life versus "the dream" is very clashing and no bridge can cross it and i have seen what the real zen life is, poor health, being broke and wasting your life in a sterile avenue

everything has phases

even the phase

the unchanging view

cannot be

hume had an interesting take on "miracles"

they could only occur where there was no other explanation

this "slash of occam" is very clever and eliminates everything, even the bible

its a tautology

everything has an alternative explanation

a couple of hours each day

doing nothing

opens the brain

to "grooks"

"seekers" seeking

lookers looking

doers doing

yet the three

doesn’t cover it

they read rubbish and think they know something

well

what they know

is rubbish

bound up in words

they think they have an answer

to what question ?

the stupids abound

stuck in the mud

forever

“ no attainment with nothing to attain ”

no attainment with something to attain

i’ve been following this question of psychedelics and mystical experiences for years and never come across anyone having done that develop any true "mystical understanding", on the contrary you just get a bunch of gabbling idiots who can’t hear anything they don’t want to hear

surprisingly ayahuasca seems to give more utility because it involves memory more which is a step in the right direction, whereas LSD, besides the risk of permanent brain damage just makes for a type of "madness"

the "benefit" of "mind altering" drugs would be in the area of PTSD, not criticising that, but the sheer quantity of all the fake "drugged " mystics are like a virus infecting the web

there’s no such thing as "samadhi" or "enlightenment", there’s just this process of understanding, a path that dissolves as you walk on it, its cognitive and no drug even slightly mimics it

chanting, meditation and ceremonies do not cut the ice

you know this dissolving path when you are on it and are competent to deal with people who challenge its and your validity

pretenders don’t simply abound, but infest in plaque proportions, the dunning-kruger stupids

his friends run away from him

frightened

yet his enemies show no fear

does he ever ask himself

what is going on ?

well that’s experience for sure to take time for difficult problems, these days i try to look ten ways at something before doing anything, the devil is in the details, but so are the angels

dementia is more uneven that people make out, for instance i have been demented for years

synchronicity

on a closer look

doesn’t happen

a verse from sylvia plath’s poem  lorelei ,  one of the greatest poems ever written imo

promising sure harborage

by day,   descant  from borders

of hebetude, from the ledge

for all their lauding of wagner’s opera "the ring"

the nazis paid no attention to the ending

“ the special time between asleep and wake ”

where the brain breaks down or wakes up

not quite this world or the next

something seeps through

i went over some  old poems  yesterday, its actually quite beneficial, nostalgia in that context is productive. one looks at how one’s approach has and hasn’t changed

if i was fighting a war and you were on my side, you are so inept i’d be worried

i’d rather you were on the other side

wait, you are !

writing "grooks" like i do

is like travelling in a landscape

provided you keep moving

is always opening up

  and is   limitless

there are those who

not wanting to understand what i write

pluck a few words like a "lucky dip"

then

make their own projection

then proceed to tell me what i wrote

that corner of the universe

so stupid

is surprisingly wide

there are those that hurt their friends and benefit their enemies

better to be hated by them than liked

i wouldn’t go chasing wisdom

it shatters on the touch

its a large world

paring the useful

from the trivial

is half its trouble

some moods

like moving through treacle

they pass, thank god

the dissonance of a person on youtube separated by several years is interesting, i think we find such a rapid and noticeable change traumatic

a woman can wear out a man

to

no

effect

a woman can wear out a man

to no effect

tunnel vision

vision in a tunnel

no

vision is the tunnel

the sky cracks open

a rainbow effusion

lingering

not

writing

is of the world

and

not of the world

the vulnerability of an alcohol problem extends way beyond the overt to the more subtle like bad "timeline choices"

why carry the footprint of alcohol damage with you for the rest of your life ?

the problem with "marxism" is it can only work in a world where the implementation is by supercompetent and unbiased committees with no shade of personal interest making decisons about the allocation of resources that are premised on an untangled notion of fairness that in fact can never exist

the actual implementation was an inverted travesty so bizarre and murderous it beggared belief

the world is wide

thought is wide

experience is wide

yet it all

is not so wide

our geography is now bounded

the once mystery of archipelagoes

unknown

vast stretches of the unexplored

a delirium of what might be

now

no longer "might"

but circumscribed

back to the beginning of time

where is the unknown ?

what it always was

tomorrow

one or two dreams in a life

i remember

the house i was living in

being swallowed by the sea

we escaped through a window

one or two dreams in a life

i remember

the house i was living in

being swallowed by the sea

i escaped through a window

thomism

so full of contradictions

you don’t know where to start

“ Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love ”

love and god

god and hate

the devil and evil

speciousness

with a mailed fist

well i have had my first vaccine, the pfizer, some side effects, mood swings a bit and bad migraines, but on the whole i feel better than i did before the vaccine, apparently it can "reset" the immune system, however i did "isolate" myself for seventeen days after the vaccine to maximise its effect

“ the philosopher is trying to dispel illusion ”

the problem with that is the dispelling of illusion is an illusion

a gwendolyn macewen quote

but it is never over

nothing ends until we want it to

look, in shattered midnights

on black ice under silver trees

we are still dancing, dancing

my  reply

midnights don’t shatter

they absorb and spit you out

that corner of the universe with the most stupid people in it

you are also stupid

because you go there

an emoticon

so innocent

behind its smile

or frown

lies vacuity

before and after

after and before

you can’t shut

a revolving door

how things look different

at the end of life

than the beginning

the middle aged couple

her hair white, his grey

their parked BMW convertible

roof down

don’t match

trying to understand what cannot be understood

even if "you" disappears

you still have "understanding"

then meaning has to go

so what have you then ?

"presence"

non-presence

trace

being

non being

existence

non-existence

a bunch of recursions

disappearing up each other’s arse

evolution is a quantification

it only cares about one thing

how many children you have

and their survival

driving past an irrigation pond

the sheen

calling me

to wander in the infinite

the jigsaw of life

one day

too many pieces

but i can’t give up

chasing the "present"

they devalue the past

and muck-up the future

jacques derrida making  a criticism  of the assumption of "the presence of the present"

you think you are "correcting" some-one

but all you are doing is giving them the energy to continue to be a pest

the human whirl

a busy-ness of occupations

that condenses to certain clarities

in life

xyz is no stalin look - alike

he kills by ones

a number

josef would find

beneath contempt

what is empty

what is abandoned

that feeling

of past activity

walked

or driven

away from

having no point

except the gap

left afterwards

i’m not a person

who carries the dead uneasily

they are gone

i notice their absence

without worry

except one woman

a friend, not a lover

a likely suicide

sticks

i don’t know why

dogen treads on shit

its not a dream

its buddhism

horror fiction

tortured convolguingies

only meaningful

in a migraine-free world

“ 26 year old female.  Dealing with advancing depression.  I don’t want to end up like my mom   .   .  I know things got bad around this time for her   .   .  Trying to see what my wonderful girlfriend sees in me before I go off the rails   .   .    The drinking isn’t helping ”

the brain needs physical exercise, not excessive, but some

krill oil can help

“ I’m  16 and my biggest problem right now is probably my drinking.  I get blackout drunk almost every single night and I don’t really know how to stop at this point ”

its a systemic poison and permanently damaging your brain

you future is being destroyed

drugs and alcohol, seen so many talented people crippled by this

an interest in the arts and literature helps, not the university taught crap, that’s just crazies blabbering

you will find this interesting,   gwendolyn macewen  had a dazzling career cut short by an alcohol related illness

clearly it matters whether jesus, muhammad, moses and buddha exist in an historical sense because if they don’t then you can see the world is mind-bucklingly crazy as the norm

historically, especially christianity and islam you have to add murderous

the present melts

a glass gold watch

incorporeal

the slow tick

extending

forever

ed.  the above poem was inspired by the lines below in gwendolyn macewen's poem "solar wind"

The past and the future are burning up; the present

melts down the middle, a river of wind,

wind from the sun, gold wind, anything  —

And suddenly you know that all mysteries have been solved

for you, all questions answered.

  her reading  the poem 41:24 and another one of hers i liked 31:06 "dark pines under the water"

he studied zen and learnt not to think

thinking that "non-thinking"

so he became a boor

the emoticon bandits

robbers of your attention in the wrong way

substituting

meaninglessness

for thought

people have a position

where their brain places them

they can’t go outside it

a child has no miracles but is natural in everything

which shrinks to effectiveness

wise is an illusion, age flounders

i am surprised by the severity of my reactions to my first pfizer dose two weeks later, bad headache, vomiting and fatigue, prior to that feeling "overwell" and a week before a rash over the vaccine site

they tried to push me to the second vaccine in three and a half weeks, but my reading of the research is ten weeks retains the memory effect better so will do at least seven

when we are younger we care more but are less wise, at least in that wisdom which tells us to avoid trouble

the problem with artistic talent

is it is only .001%

modern education tries to shoehorn .1% into .001%

with predictable results

  monique andrée serf   (stage name babara)  was a slow developer

she is most famous for her song "göttingen" beautifully sung  here  by claire pommet

the original version with english subtitles  sung  by babara

french light music is very sophisticated, but never seen in the anglophone world for some reason

les choristes  vois sur ton chemin

the   shiba-inu  cryptocurrency 

29/1/21  1 x 10E-12 usd cents volume $523

today’s (31/10/21) value 6.2 x 10E-5, with an astounding volume of $7.69 billion

that’s a gain of 62 million in 9 months

if you brought a thousand  dollars worth at the end of january, it would be worth 60 billion dollars now

i think that beats the tulips, south sea and anything else by a long long way

Vitalik Buterin "burned" $6 billion of shiba he owned

its actually  quite interesting ,  basically its an etherum "smart contract"

the only historical equivalent would be the conquest of persia by alexander

those bogs were  swimming pools ,  not puddles, 4 wheel driving and surviving is as much about what you turn back from, as going through

another tip is just because you can get there, doesn’t mean you can get back

wow, slow to .75 and david linden  sounds normal  and sir. paul  (a new zealander)  slurred

i have been all around scotland and had almost no trouble understanding the locals, except i never visited glasgow, electing to go to edinburgh instead where the traffic and one way system was the most intense i have ever come across

enlightenment

holiness

martyr

baubles for idiots

what constitutes "precious" in

the land of the long white cloud ?

vain sixteen or thirty year olds ?

that brittle suburban milieu ?

being on two islands in the middle of nowhere ?

no its the endangered bird you identify with

which is better

the kakapo or albatross

tidy towns, your time is gone

look for the wandering kaka-poo

a painting is a poem

but is a poem a painting ?

a poem is many paintings

“ What took you an embarrassing amount of time to figure out ? ”

Something specific to German : "Mir ist erst neulich aufgefallen, dass ein Wecker Wecker heißt, weil er dich weckt"

"i just noticed the other day that an alarm clock is called an alarm clock because it wakes you up"

me thirty seconds ago on google translate

i think you can infer from it "alarming you" that it wakes you up

it was a surprisingly good google translation

“ what took you an embarrassing amount of time to figure out ? ”

that paintings of jesus were not true to life portraits but the artist’s imagination

might have been 25 before i figured that one

then later the whole caboose, that moses, buddha, muhammad and jesus were all badly written scripts in soap operas and had no historical reality at all

to compensate i now spend my entire life living in fiction

the wisdom of patience

is waiting for the stars to align

and then act

well that’s the theory

anyway

talking nonsense

claiming sense

well its not nonsense to claim sense

its

out and out

lying

stasis

some imagined centerpoint

of non-existence

or existence

that’s stasis

imagined

or not

stasis

some imagined centerpoint

of non-existance

or existance

that’s stasis

imagined

or not

going forward

going backwards

you need to do both

to arrive at the truth

chanting

repetitive

hypnotic

way to fill the space between the ears i guess

not for me

let the idiots proselytise it

his spare time he spends

fixing the "blinders"

stopping

any light from coming through

“ the ultimate path is without difficulty, just avoid picking and choosing  “

the "ultimate path"

an illusion

traversed by idiots

hanging in air

they can’t perceive

their insubstantiality

life and death

trying to make sense of this world

and the next

you can’t

women are in constant competition with each other

for that lousiest of prizes

the male

why the delta variant  is different  and an informed target on the spike protein for future vaccines

so i would guess mid 2023 for the distribution of much more effective vaccines, we just have to hang on to then

“ what else has to be done ”

ah

eating the lotus

time passes like a breeze

afloat we drift on

but is this life ?

emoticons

the meaningless faces of the internet

not real

so fake

there’s something about rudyard kipling’s  own drawings  for the  just so  stories, which are bedtime stories told to his daughter, josephine, who insisted they be "just so"

she died aged 7 from pneumonia and his son jack died on the front in WW1 leaving one daughter, elsie to survive the kipling’s

he had no grandchildren

the art and stories are totally "out of this world" in a way any great art is, a wonderful natural talent

the wikipedia entry on him  is good

the kolokolo bird

so exotic

unnamable

not of this time

non-existent

the kolokolo bird

so exotic

unnamable

non-existent

wearing out a zafu

or their bums

they go in circles

returning from where they came

the same as before

except

more engraved

unpicking ourselves

an imperfect operation

at best

but

necessary

you have a much higher chance of death from all causes, cardiovascular disease in particular if your  vitamin D levels  are too low (deficient is defined as less than 50 nmol/ L)

i take 3000iu of the blackmore’s vitamin D3 a day and one capsule  (90mcg)  of the carusoe’s vitamin K2  (MK7)

i think the K2 is necessary with taking vitamin D, what’s the best ratio for you will have to be worked out

my claim to fame for health is to have a blood pressure for my age only seen in remote amazonian tribes, in the area of 96/65

8 days after my first pfizer vaccine i have a rash around the injection site, its a bit itchy and later feeling quite fatigued

the day after the vaccine i was fatigued then seven days later i had a bad headache, all this seems typical and indicates my immune system works on an average schedule

so its a "significant" vaccine, the immune system does react, i presume i am starting to build antibodies causing the rash so its a good sign

oddly on balance i have been feeling very well since the vaccine, its the first vaccine any of us have ever had that addresses coronaviruses so maybe its also knocking back remnants of coronavirus infections of any shape or colour so to speak ?

the research  saying that a longer "wait" between the first and second vaccines gives better long term immunity

“ the long dosing interval resulted in 2x higher neutralising antibodies against all variants of the virus tested, including the Delta variant, compared to the short dosing interval

absolute numbers of T cells to spike were lower after the long interval compared to the short one, but the Tcell response had more characteristics of a helper response promoting long term memory and antibody production ”

if you think about it, its the principle behind of the booster dose, otherwise it wouldn’t be necessary

breathtaking scene  near the dragon lakes in the zagori mountains, greece

for sheer waste of time

pointlessness

nothing beats

buddhist chanting

if only i knew what day it was

yesterday was saturday or monday

maybe its sunday

could be tuesday

if only i knew what day it was

ed.  it was tuesday

if only i knew what day it was

yesterday was saturday or monday

maybe its sunday

if only i knew what day it was

repetition

sound

images

the wrong place to be

message boards

waiting for the next move and analyzing

the past one

you only have to look at the conflict between the bolsheviks and mensheviks to understand how insane ideologies in the struggle for power can be

"woke" is no less insane but fortunately lacks an overt secret police to implement their ideas so inevitably are defeated in the inconsistency of their "doctrine"

with boshevikism and an unbelievably efficient secret police it took several economic collapses and a hugely attritive war for the fundamental inconsistencies to be exposed

the crusades were a similar event for christianity and since islam never failed in a similarly spectacular way and indeed is only starting to fail now with the dissonance with modern technological life, there is a much stronger cultural belief in it

i always had this image of the book of genesis being set in some distant unfathomable past and actually that sort of defined the limits of the past for me and how far back one could go

then over the last decade i have discovered that its basically a group of rehashed babylonian myths

from this perspective you get a much more "archeological" view of history, events and places and myths bleeding from historical events all over the place eg the  flood of noah  story being taken from the epic of gilgamesh relating to flooding of the euphrates and tigris rivers

moses crossing the red sea being a butchered version of the egyptian pharaoh ramesses II forcing the hittites across the orontes river in the battle of kadesh

i’m not sure what the distant unfathomable past is now, but really its just an image and one is left with the hanging question of how real the past actually is

one goes in circles

and keeps going in circles

and that never changes

but the spiral of aging

keeps

descending

the various health regulatory authorities have not got to grips with the mutation speed of covid and its ability to outpace prevention measures and the need to fast track re-designed vaccines

basically we should be all getting boosters designed to address a much broader spectrum of variants especially delta and i am sure such designs are in the works but face a long approval process

interesting

what must be a robert’s  44  sailing , everything seems so familiar, boat’s motion, wind direction, the way she heels, islands, headlands

being something

looking like something else

a life skill

its not a coherent world

there are gaps to slip between

“ only a trained technician/whatever can tell you such and such ”

obviously that’s not true since some-one trained the technician

or we have an infinite regress of trained technicians training technicians terminating in genesis where on the eighth day god created trained technicians

you half see something

ten years later you three-quarters see it

when you fully see it

you are dead

the normal state of human affairs is wars/civil conflict and exhaustion from wars and civil conflict with intervals of relative peace

if you are not in the first two situations you are doing well

a man searching

trying to understand things

but understanding never folds back into itself

except occasionally

as the day goes on

getting more tired

once i could walk

for a day

and still have energy

in the evening

i don’t always look at the moon

nor does it always

see me

i hope

i am more

than snow dusting

the buller river

i hope

i am more

than snow dusting

the river

the requirement of "woke" that it and its favoured ideologies escape from rational criticism is i think evidence of increasing levels of public schizophrenia like in 30’s germany and after WW1 in russia

the trains  of story books for sure !

time is a construct

what does that mean ?

how do we look at the past and future ?

i don’t know

carl jung was  a reasonable man ,  he changed his opinion on better information, i notice with zen, that dogen is always represented as infallible despite the clearly changed views from the shobogenzo to zuimonki, ie from his earlier to later work, the "disciples" just take what suits them and ignore the contradictions

"timelines" are an interesting sci-fi concept, i have seen a physics theory that says time travel can occur, but necessarily will only occur where no paradoxical conditions are created which if you think about it is actually our experience

i can time travel by reading say sappho and know her and times a bit from the limited fragments of her writing available (everything was lost in the great fire of of alexandria, the library of which was the ancient world’s "database")  but have absolutely no influence on her or her times

i don’t think her influence on our time is paradoxical since the information is already out there, whether discovered or not, in other words, it doesn’t feed back to her

i think there is some validity to visionary experiences in terms of this

its also interesting to bring the notion of "timeline" to our own lives, that we can find ourselves on lines we project to be problematic, but our habits and interests tie us in to them, like being on a train we think has a likelihood of crashing that we can’t get off, marriage, finances, health and so on

the trouble is outcomes are very uncertain and notions of "right" and "wrong" directions cannot be discerned clearly at all

charles bukowski was an alcoholic and genius, had he not been an alcoholic i think he would today have the stature of goethe with writings to match, but he dissipated his powers though the toxicity of alcohol and the sort of women he associated with, however he said that without the alcohol he would have committed suicide

really the path wanted was no alcohol and no suicide, but apparently that was too difficult to steer and to be honest his poetry as it is, suits me, the life he lead was what created the deep insights

i feel the future is a process of discovery and a careful feeling our way  testing our projections is the only sanity, if you jump too discretely into suppositions you will end up in trouble, however, changes forced on you are different because they are beyond our control, its what’s in our control that we need to be wary of being over certain about

very fit people seem to be at a higher risk for covid vaccine complications, especially damage to the heart

to my mind we will all have had the delta variant to some degree in the next six months

i had my first pfizer last tuesday, it went well, i was careful to have them use a short needle  (i don’t have any fat on the deltoid muscle)  to reduce the chance of penetrating a blood vessel and while they want me to be back in three and a half weeks for the second dose, i will delay 6 to ten weeks for maximum benefit from the vaccine

also by then the "authorities" may have caught up with the latest research and permit a different vaccine to be used

my arm hurt and i was a bit tired on the day after the vaccine, but i’m feeling pretty good now, its the second vaccine that has more side effects apparently

"woke" is a "meme" or virus that exploits weaknesses in intellectual culture, beliefs and attitudes

which would have to be the problem of today’s education system in spades

thoughtless acquiescence in idiocy

nelson’s column

a reminder

if you get killed in battle

you have lost the war

let the lions at the base

remind you of

lethality

intelligence is more varied than an IQ test, IQ measures a type of intelligence and the nature of ability in one area can be deficiencies in others which "mensa types" are somewhat notorious for

dying flowers

in a vase

have their own dynamic

they pay in compliments

not cash

thinking the smile of their beneficence

enough

and perhaps it is

the dead

no longer accessible to us

what did we inherit from them ?

something of themselves i guess

that we were changed by

ed.  i wrote this after reading some lines of hart crane, the second line refers to a coffin and/or bed

His thoughts, delivered to me

From the white coverlet and pillow

I see now, were inheritances   —

Delicate riders of the storm

happy endings

are a construct

see past the construct

i think dame judy dench is a good example of a very uneven intelligence

in many respects she comes across as "normal" ,  not a great thinker "out of the box" or even a thinker at all

however her ability as an actress and facility in picking up and learning "the craft" is like a tower, going straight up dwarfing everything around it

its an avenue that was open to her and not to others and she has walked in and taken up residence

intelligence is not like a pyramid, a very small number at the top and the vast unwashed at the bottom

rather it is a landscape, multivalent with undulations, chasms and peaks and to a degree self-similar in the sense of a person as a whole and their "aspected" intelligence

and i don’t think you can separate it from life experience, some of the most "mature" and sane views, way more mature and sane than mine i have come across are in the so called "retarded"

IQ measures a type of intelligence, that is all and for those who claim einstein had a high IQ  (despite his being expelled from school for being backward) ,  he was never tested

so someone was arguing with me, that you couldn’t say jordan peterson was "crucified" in that he didn’t die from his benzodiazepine withdrawl, that "near death" is not actually "death" and crucifixion requires actual physical death from which there is no recovery, a claim somewhat contrary to the culturally ingrained christian story

my  reply

that’s an interesting question, do "near death" experiences actually involve being dead ?

there’s lots of ambiguities here, crucifixion as an adjective rather than a noun and if you make yourself familiar with what happened to JP you will see the fit

i guess i should do the honours, JP became heavily addicted to benzodiazepines, so heavily it was impossible to take him off them as if this was done the withdrawal symptoms became life threatening so his family went to a clinic in russia that put him into a coma for eight days so the withdrawal could happen safely, it sorta worked, but he’s not the same today as you might expect

you have to be relatively blasé about crossing boundaries to understand life

if you feel the crossing in any depth, which most do, then you will never understand because you live within rather than outside life

below is my reply to brad’s vlog about a  hatchet job  being done on him at a conference

you are dealing with a form of  woke

i get pestered here  (ed.  brad’s vlog)  by "belligerent man" because i don’t conform to whatever "woke" views he has  (which are obscure) ,  as far as i can work out his goal is to save the "zen world" from me

there’s something wrong with their heads because they are utterly unable to dialogue or negotiate

everybody here  (ed. the vlog comments section)  has very different views, but most people can discuss differences at least, "woke" weaponizes viewpoints which are not negotiable and you can see this in political extremes like nazism and marxist-leninism

the mistake is to try to understand it in the everyday context of constant negotiation, but in fact they just use "negotiation" to try to harm you because the reality is the weaponization of opinion and in different sorts of societies especially historically, you would run the risk of being assassinated

"true mysticism" is always in conflict with the overt semantic vehicles of religion

being unable to argue content

they argue "on the person"

and can’t even get that right

meditation and prayer

the christian and zen crazies made crazier

calling it sanity

as if a lifetime of missing the point is that

well they think it is

theological squirrels

burying their nuts everywhere

well paper

won’t feed

over winter

claims

the distance between truth and falsity is lost

glowing moons are glowing moons

so what ?

zen and prayer

christianity and meditation

they try to fill your mind

with junk

some time

everyday

just not reading

letting what comes together

come

and what falls apart

fall apart

is enough

monotheism

transplanted

is still monotheism

one god or two

ego or non ego

the understanding lacks

what it has no experience of

and god can’t give

the voice of the rabble

is still the voice of the rabble

philosophy tries

and fails

religion tries

and murders

i try

when i don't have to

not understanding what he reads

he pretends to have an opinion

why not ?

he pretends to be some-one

when the sun rises

it seems sensible

when a hundred suns rise

what then ?

when they speak in emoticons

you know

their reading and writing age

is

zero

tight knots

unwound

through hardship

and necessity

the dreamers dream

doesn’t untie

nooses of ineptitude

strangle

they write in a fantasy land

unable to discern fact from fiction

they step into the unreal

non-existent steps

going nowhere

no wonder

nothing

holds

“ belligerent man ”

for whom sex was an answer

turned out

not

to be an answer

but another

question

paws stuck in pitch

yet still he thinks

that baby face

is real

tangled in words

he imagines unwinding

but the snarl gets worse

unlike br’er rabbit

when they get stuck on the tar baby

its forever

the buddha dharma cannot be known by a person

the buddha dharma can be known by a person

words

spill

like

jelly beans

from the mouths of idiots

the horizon

like the end of the rainbow

is never arrived at

why can’t you get there ?

well you can’t get to where

what is defined to be at a distance from you

its these "distances" that seem to be most attractive to us

but least attainable

spring leaves on a copper beech

an unattainable colour

i won’t attempt to name it

we don’t understand

we are the most marvellous construction

following a pattern

not of our making

and beyond our control

brevity versus utility

brevity and utility

brevity with utlilty

comprende ?

brevity versus utility

brevity and utility

brevity with utility

brevity versus utility

brevity and utility

comprende ?

daisies

a galaxy

covering the lawn

daisies

a galaxy

on the lawn

daisies

a galaxy

covering the grass

daisies

a galaxy

on the grass

surprisingly, bob dylan’s nobel acceptance  speech  is better than most, more real

the "supposed" chinese propaganda film  battle at lake changjin  is actually subtly "anti-war" in that you would never want to be part of what occurred on either side

if you dig  a bit deeper ,  it was in a fact a pivotal battle that so weakened the chinese military that the south was able to maintain its territorial integrity in the longer term

i bet its not being shown in north korea, whose missile program is not to antagonise the west, but keep out the chinese who considered invading it around the year 2000

what did cleopatra look like ?

it seems certain she had  red hair

you try to figure something out

but in the end

there’s nothing to figure out

you try to touch it and the point of touch evaporates

leaving you

bemused

there is a wide open book

it can fall open at any page

and swallow you up

a traveller i am

to other realms

it seems to me

i have travelled across glorious seas

to glistening isles and fairer lands

than is in one’s ken

to understand

the asynchronous man

out of touch with himself and reality

projects his version

across everything

khatia buniatishvili

rachmaninov concerto n°2

adagio sostenuto

different composers suit different virtuoso performers

i have yet to come across one virtuoso who spans all composers evenly

to hear the best the performer has to match the music

this is one of the best

the weakness of "interpreting" the writings of the dead

is you are relying on them being dead not to contradict what you say

a flaw to the claims of validity

so big

its outside the universe

the bleakness of on and on

the slow failure of the machine

what is sere

tears apart

i don’t 100% agree with sigmund freud’s  "thought is action in rehearsal"

in terms of oneself, thought is action

i like this other quote of his

“ the first indication of stupidity is a complete lack of shame ”

one sees that all the time on the web

i was always a bit negative on freud, then i realised that there is something to the division between the conscious and unconscious mind, he is very ineptly presented by his highly agenda-ed supporters so you have to see past that

some  quotes

i love the story about his daughter anna, getting picked up by the gestapo in austria soon after the german annexation and being taken to the local gestapo headquarters and just left there to wander about

there had been "disappearances" of jews and political opponents of the nazis so what she figured was they would come back that evening for her to take her away and kill her

fortunately for her there was a room of jews and others waiting for interrogation about their anti-nazi activities, so she slipped into that group and was interrogated with the rest and so able to leave with the others

the "woke" mob

the talentless

trying to justify an arts education

yet clearly

not coping

with the arts

the past can’t occur in the way we think it does

its too big

there must be another way of organizing or conceptualizing it

since we can only observe and not participate in it, there must be some quantum multiplicity of indeterminism

that is, though the past looks real. it isn’t, but rather a multiplicity of narrative

if you are engaged in correcting people

you are also shaped by their errors

danger !

my reading of new and emerging  research  indicates the public health advice about getting the 2nd covid vaccine the same as the first is wrong, that "the combination of two different vaccines may thus induce a particularly strong immune protection against SARS-CoV-2 variants"

most likely the booster should be different again, the novavax is looking like it will be a good booster, having the entire full length SARS-CoV-2 spike protein as a nanoparticle

an interesting  application  of vilfredo pareto’s rule

75% of western roman emperors were murdered, killed in palace coups or in battle, or committed suicide  (usually forced)

only 25 percent died of natural causes

the actual rule is 80/20, but close enough, it should indicate something fundamentally structural which you can of course see with roman emperors

@Muho Nölke  ok, to your credit you take a reasonable stance on the subject of kodo sawaki’s apologist dismissal of zen’s support of japanese imperialism

this idea that leading figures like sawaki and dogen are flawed and can be very flawed, to just about everybody in zen is sacrilegious, but one needs to see sawaki and dogen as just people and not gods and that’s actually what defines a religion, its leading figures are literally "foundational" and can’t be criticized

the most interesting thing about eihei dogen is the voluminous nature of his writings, its obvious he spent most of his time writing and giving talks and was not some silent meditating ascetic

writing is actually an important part of one’s "development" but soto seems to totally miss this

i think i would count vlogs as writing

what dogen is about is universal in nature and the moment you start "idolizing" people like him and sawaki and ignoring great "mystics" like goethe, robert walser and sa’di, then you are making an unrecoverable mistake, which is in my opinion what the soto training does and all you get is just a lot of narrow minded stupids

when you start to look at the "mystical panorama" you really get a sense of "nothing" or "meaninglessness" in terms of any pursuit or aim of a "goal", there’s very little that makes sense in terms of "crossover" except active inquiry in what might be termed "wisdom", something that falls apart as fast as it can be put together

within the whirlwind

yevgenia ginzburg’s  account of her life and years in the gulag

an interesting  perspective  on the gulag

job’s ending is more than a fiction, its malign deception

the ability of popular culture to avoid anything of historical insight always amazes me

why is it nobody talks about WW2 in zen ?

i feel sawaki is mendaciously tightlipped on the subject

its a facile world

advice

the speaker’s illusion

about the adequacy of his experience

sotheby’s has the best racket going

all legal

its stock in trade is the gullibility of the super rich when it comes to art

a pit which has no bottom  apparently

but credit where credit is due, banksy is a masterful publicist with his "everyman kitsch" persona

so much of what we do

does it go anywhere ?

do we ask ?

no

they understand recursion

they don’t understand how to get out of recursion

theologies are endless

so they make new ones

why ?

because theologies are endless

the greatest gift of the catholic church is the absurdity of its beatification process

if you are a believer, it has to be a foretaste of the bureaucracy of heaven

if the brain doesn’t have enough to work on

it will spin uselessly

the fakes

warn other fakes

be warned

in the "enlightened"

no brain

means

no brain

words rattle like stones in a tin

the dumbstruck

gape

can’t address content

indulges in personal attacks ?

what a fraud !

whenever i go to donate blood  (its not simply a charity, there is benefit to lowering  brain iron  as you get older)  they ask if i have low blood pressure because its in the area of 99 -92 / 66-62 ,  but in fact its not low but healthy and the "normal range"   is unhealthy

“ normal blood pressure is defined by pressure below 120/80, whereas an optimal and healthier blood pressure is closer to 110/70  ”

having no defence

he is caught out

and can’t disguise the fact

though he tries

the fools

resting on the reasoning of others

come to grief

“ jordan peterson doesn’t seem particularly "spiritual" to me ”

he’s the newest jesus, crucified by benzodiazepines and the "woke" mob, so "today"

eihei dogen must have friction burns from so much turning in his grave from the business of "interpreters" making claims for what he really meant

well the dead can’t argue can they ?

this is the fatal attraction, but really, work it out yourself and you won’t be blockaded behind the errors of others

this is what i noticed in zen years ago, once people started to use their own words, their understanding was so poor it was apparent they were talking nonsense, no wonder they stuck to the "record" stories and quoting

this observation slipped past me in my christian school years, i think because it was so obvious they were talking nonsense one never questioned it

he talks names

names talk him

all rubbish

btw

my reply to brad warner’s vlog on "everything is alive"

you might say "mountains and rivers are alive" because they are equally or even more "you" than "you"

but you can’t say a chair is alive from the perspective of being a chair because it is missing the interactive dimension of exploring "what it is"

alternatively you could say the chair was alive because it is part of your "markov blanket", that is ,  it is both animate and inanimate

so i think this notion of the "inanimate" being unqualified "animate" is not true, that is not to say it is not true in some contexts, but its really a matter then of definition like a children’s story

interestingly another "markovian" re-definition is animal into human intelligence eg "alice in wonderland" and the hallmark of a well written children’s story is it seems quite natural ie already part of our markovian blanket

if you go further, you can extrapolate any story as being alive in the sense of being part of your markovian world and in that sense its both real and unreal, but again the qualification is its a type of reality from your perspective, once you move into a more objective frame then it ceases to be real

to me, what is highly significant is the "quality" of the unreality, poor quality "unreality" eg, watching a bad film (aren't they all ?) or listening to unintelligent music which degrades the value of consciousness, compared to say something like reading sappho, bukowski, catullus or emily dickinson which raises the value of both conscious and unconsciousness

i guess one escape from poor quality unreality is to analyse its flaws, you could say doing this is being "enlightened"

in terms of zen or christianity, meditation or prayer without intelligent/quality reading just degrades and one sees this all the time, of course intelligent reading explodes the boundaries of the religion so the religions themselves carry this inescapable flaw of preventing what they might be truly about to be authentic

heresy and schism in this context is inevitable, an attempt to break these bonds, but gets caught recursively in the same problem

everything is fantasy

but when fantasy straddles the real and unreal coherently

then you have something else

the road to heaven

to those who dislike my writing and "grooks" please move on to whatever 'bad film" you are missionizing, it is so tiring to reply to those who get upset with their not being able to understand what i write, your low reading age and ignorance is not a problem i can solve

as a btw you are not going to have a clue as to what this is about without researching what a "markovian blanket" is

but hey, that would be quality reading, too much of a transition from the usual popular sugar and chocolate tastes of most

the wings of love

like those of life

flutter

deceivingly

the wings of love

like life

flutter

deceivingly

ed.  words most likely not to be tattooed on a teenaged girl’s arm ?

“ in my mind

in my head

 this is where we all came from ”

shuffle dance

  song history 

arrive

depart

depart

arrive

 which comes first ?

you have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles

across shell sharded rocks

your knees bloody and the skin hanging in tears off

this is my criteria for forgiveness

which is why

i have never forgiven

“ everything is found within ”

lol

within the without

“ everything is found within ”

lol

within "the without"

the CCP is basically a "bolshevik" party

if you understand the implications of that, you would run a  mile

the russian bolsheviks took one of europe’s most vibrant economies and trashed it

the CCP went through a menshevik phase with deng xiaoping and now its going more "bolshevik" again

north korea is a good example of what total "bolshevikism" does, what path china treads will be interesting to see

“ telling the truth ”

what is the truth ?

everything stops

time evaluates

"gifts" and otherwise

and ourselves

the burning of writing

voids you

building a stairwell

going somewhere

you don’t know where

and you know this

and you know this

so many times you are arguing with someone and you could add the above

there’s actually not much

we don’t know

about ourselves

blind as we may act

when the bad happens, religions like job, teaches us it is good

well the happy ending of job is a story

stories can say anything

between a cursory look

and a deep one

can be a million changes

of opinion

you know what the burden of age is ?

old tracks

that deepen

when new ones need to be found

our models theoretic

are we

asail in the sea of being

a wake carving existence

that melts

back into the sea

the past is immutable

but can be viewed with changing perspectives

but basically its immutable

food, diet, exercise, sleep are essential for mental health but i am much more wary of people, everyone is following their own agendas and some can be bloody cunning about it, like sharks that smell vulnerability miles away

i like this  poem  by charles bukowski

in the final analysis one needs to be "adaptable" and that’s the divide between functional and non-functional mental illness and really its the only distinction society makes, the former it calls "normal" and the latter "abnormal"

the whole secret of life is to be the latter passing as the former

the story of alison gopnick’s  discovery  of the jesuit connection between hume and buddhism

religious orders

extras

in movies of belief

ring ring

“ hullo ”

“ hi, i’m amy from the mastercard and visa security department ”

no mention of my name and a lot of background noise like what you expect from a busy scammer call center and the huge giveaway of not understanding visa and mastercard are separate companies, she got greedy in covering too many bases

“ why are you calling me amy, i don’t have a mastercard or visa ”

“ oh ”

she hangs up as i say "happy scamming amy"

a new life skill is identifying scam calls and email, almost got caught on an email once, didn’t check the web address

it always surprises me how upsetting it is, i think its because of our need to anticipate problems or benefit, this scam is keyed to propel us forward into some minor disaster, its our own actions that take us into trouble

the question before the question

takes the answer before the answer

if you know what i am talking about

why then you are a sophosmancer

the question before the question

takes the answer before the answer

if you think you know what i am talking about

why then you are a sophismancer

what’s happening ?

nothing

what can happen ?

nothing

why am i complaining ?

the secret of travel as i am sure you know is each day must be as sustainable into the next as possible

why is entertainment so convincing ?

well, from the point of view of the markov blanket, its not different from reality

same with religion and mental illness

just shows how fundamental the "free energy" principle is

words hit him

between the eyes

and

he

complains

of his pain

but not

low reading age

i’m not in the business of explaining anything to anyone

least of all

myself

axel munthe really was from a different planet

“ nordstrom always used to say that i had two different brains working alternatively in my head, the well developed brain of a fool and the undeveloped brain of a sort of genius ”

page 218 ,  first page of chapter 20 titled "insomnia" in "the story of san michele" ,  an unbelievable 83rd printing 1968

a walk down the  phoenician steps  the illiterate maria used to struggle up twice a week to deliver the post to anacapri, it must have done her good, she lived to ninety-five

the suicidal

the conventional

mishmashed

you would think the prospect of death would open windows

but it doesn’t

education is just so much wrong-mindedness

a natural home for

parasitical

memes

the net

ordinary minds do what ?

a hundred million salesmen

mired in

their ordinariness

selling

their gurus

their mothers

their nonsense products

think this is normal

and perhaps it is

the surprise of existence

we are not "surprised"

after all

we are we

the surprise of existence

we are not surprised

after all

we are we

tik tok

those brief seconds

eventually

pall

problem solving is never perfect, but you need to solve enough of a problem for it not to be a problem

i read covid research and my views at this point are as follows

blood type O is somewhat protective against respiratory disease, but its a case of "ceteris paribus"

severe disease is a genetic lottery of the immune system to a significant extent

the moderna is currently the most effective vaccine  (novavax is another contender)

the astrazeneca vaccine has a dangerous design flaw that has been known about for a decade with adenovirus vectors that can result in blood platelets "locking" together

these first generation vaccines are not the answer to covid, but they do provide effective protection against hospitalization and severe disease for up to  six months  after the second dose

ed.  just when you think you have it down pat, up comes another  study

there are second and third generation vaccines in the works, hopefully one day covid will be eliminated

supplementation like adequate vitamin D, B12, B6, vitamin A and germanium  (occasional use)  can go quite a way to reducing severe disease risk

mono-theism is a failed theory of reality

basically it argues that "god" is some sort of "singularity"

that is, unexplainable in the final analysis because at the point of singularity there is nothing or at the least no conditions for survival

however the "true" mystical doctrine is there is a road and alignment at the "final reality"

that what theoretically is "not known" is in fact known and accessible to us

unfortunately, culturally we are taught to accept and value the nonsense of monotheism or one of its many guises, reading into bullshit what is not there

its generally not possible to understand philosophers completely

they have spent their lives avoiding clarity

western philosophy has carried a heavy dose of buddhist influence since "hume" who was influenced by jesuit missionaries, that’s 250 years which is why a lot of buddhism seems natural to us

its because its already embedded in the culture

“ generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous ”

people claim to understand "depression" but that’s not the point

depression is not really survivable long term, one needs to address diet and exercise so one is less depressed

my reply below to some-one in a youtube comment, people seem to get very defensive and missionary to others they have no real life connection to, a mismatch between the degree of involvement and relation

you don’t have to sell an idea to me, really what we do is what we do, the net seems to create an illusory closeness

the problem with joint injuries is the original stability of the joint is gone forever and normal use now contributes to ongoing damage

where did sylvia plath get her imagery/interest in the holocaust from ?

well she was taught by anthony hecht at smith college and he had been involved in the liberation of the flossenbürg concentration camp

more light

and i really like this poem of his

death sauntering about

blossom in a vase

starting to brown

tuberculosis was endemic in medieval japan and eihei-ji was a most unsuitable climate for its victims to live in

this notion of dogen spending twenty or thirty years dying of TB doesn’t fit well with soto hagiography

TB is even a problem today in japan

predicting the future

easier said than done

what we call "the present"

is engraved with the future

and past

predicting the future

easier said than done

what we call "the present"

is engraved with the

future and past

every now and then in a youtube video you come across a scene for a few seconds that really captures something

in this case after a long day on her motorcycle ride through the skeleton coast national park in namibia and staying for a night in really basic accommodation, but right on the sea kinga tanajewska has a thoughtful relaxing moment

this is the  pic ,  the light and mood are just right

epistemological discovery combined with pragmatic action, while fraught can be much more effective than separating them

on the other hand "fraught" can be "dimensionally difficult"

education is the illusion that "separation" is a substitute for "combined"

at the end of the road

you poke the ground

nothing

you look ahead

just scenery

well that’s not much

then you notice

oh its the end of the road

and the ground opens up

and swallows you

english is the "borg" of languages

another way of looking at what’s happening to the maori language in new zealand is its dying and in its last breaths its porting a few words into new zealand english which is all that will be known of "te reo" in 100 years

there’s a ten percent rule, that if a language is to survive it has to be spoken by at least 10 percent of a population, interestingly welsh fits this and will be around for a while

just in my lifetime australia has lost or is losing three or four hundred aboriginal languages

how meditation can go wrong is that the default mode network gets super engraved

what meditation should do is show you its patterns and being more aware, you can work around them, this is actually much more difficult than it seems

highly "engraved" DMN patterns are really a form of mental illness and you see a huge amount of this is in "spiritual" cults/religions including zen

most people are unequipped to handle meditation, its a necessity to read widely quality "literature" to prevent deepening of "engraved patterns", of course religions/cults restrict the reading so its not wide enough so the deepening of the engraving is along the lines of the cults "doctrine"

win 11 is really about forcing an upgrade to cpu’s with better internal hardware for security

basically you need a new motherboard and cpu

i’m in no hurry at all, maybe mid next year or later ?

andy clark on what  consciousness  is

head bobbing improves depth perception in chooks

you can see the need actually, they have to pick things up with their beaks at quite a precise depth and position with a lot of force, so overshooting risks damage to the beak and undershooting misses the bug or whatever

what we all need in our lives is a little  circadian autophagy

in english its better for your health to go to bed a bit hungry

we don’t really have any theory of mind to accommodate the level of deceit in cultural ideas

the question of whether the universe extends forever is interesting, its not known whether its infinite or bounded, the problem being that bounded can look like infinite since for the bounded state you can still walk an infinite path

san michele

dreamers

the ghosts of

axel munthe

tiberius

neither was particularly "safe"

memory is a strange thing, what we think we ought to remember is gone a moment later, yet unbidden we recall something we paid not much attention to six months, years or even decades ago

its like my brain has a whole life that i can’t see, chock full of thoughts, images and memories garnered unbidden by me over the years that basically comes out in my writing and knowing myself its entirely characteristic to fruit at the wrong end of my life when it is now no use to me, yet the source flows with the full rush of a rain burdened stream

unbinding the shackles of conventional thought

invisible chains

that wear the soul away

you need to read across translations and the truth will come to you, that what you read is not the author, but a translators opinion/interpretation

the problem with having an opinion about heidegger is you first have to read him

fast forward twenty years and you still can’t work out what he is saying or if indeed there is any value in what he says at all

voynich that’s not quite voynich

interesting lyrics

an spailpín fánach

ed.  the itinerant labourer

i think from the fifties until the eighties there was a period of unusually high financial value to unskilled labour which has now gone the other way back to its historical norm of low value

there’s something fake about being a teacher

of anything

“ i think therefore i am ”

where does teaching fit into any of this ?

lacking god

lacking christ

lacking buddha

lacking muhammad

lacking moses

lacking the church

lacking faith

lacking heaven

lacking hell

lacking the moon

lacking the stars

lacking

lacking life

lacking death

all the absences

that make one bereft

key points

all knowledge twirls around

ourselves, our sense of being

twirl around

conundrums evermore

end to end a puzzle that cannot be broken

ourselves

from finer than quarks

to larger than brane universes

what can we say ?

spinning circles of speculation

about what ?

between "i" and "is"

man is in a tizz

restless searching

procreation

is the answer to his quiz

yet the question’s flawed

the sum of being

is not adored

that being the case

we climb an endless staircase

escher-like

that goes up and down

and around and around

seeking meaning

in that circular town

self drawing itself

until it stops

in that day

absence appears

well beyond this feeble pen

to sketch beyond the final ken

grooks

not gooks

an interdimensional semantic field

stretching in all directions

philosophers wave from the sidelines

the religious from a darkened room

scientists from their lab benches

the grook alone reigns supreme

and free

“ ambiguity is a form of openness ”

well i did wonder

i come from a different perspective on languages

which is the relative disposability of languages

and instead of value per se look for utility in context

and this means no multiplication outside of necessity

the failure of today’s education system is its ubiquitous "prescriptive nature"

children have their brains run through shoe horns to a certain toxic shape

the source of today’s social evils

the young sent limping and malformed out into a predatory world

free energy principle    =    maximising marginal likelyhood    =    minimising free energy

this world where we are models, modelling to maximise probabilistic gain to maintain time continuous validity of the original model, in short the creation and maintenance of existence

very recursive

no wonder the species is so obsessed with sex, a ball is set rolling in the court of existential validity

hmm, so death is the other side of non-dispersion, alive we build coherence, dead the context of self has vanished and the former entity now disperses, what was inside the markov blanket, is now part of the markov blanket

you have to interact with things or in situations to understand them

this is why "wisdom literature" is descriptive, not prescriptive

why can’t you add incompatibles ?

nothing makes sense until you do

brain-washing

is not a mystery

its the same ideas

repeated

ad nauseam

ad infinitum

the very wealthy act like the very wealthy

mansions

superyachts 

normalcy on steroids

with taste to match

the cheap seats

inevitably

chime in

the cheap seats

chime in

inevitably

some children

finish something

adults don’t even start on

there are several huge "discoveries" that have yet to work their way through to academic philosophy

the first is the consciousness is explainable as a self-referent artefact of the broadcast of information in the brain, basically all modern work on consciousness is based on "the broadcast theory" though each new study claims to be originally sourced

the second is "the free energy principle" developed by  karl friston   (andy clark is a leading exponent with good youtube videos)  which says the brain is primarily a prediction machine creating its own reality

what these both do to a large extent is unify a philosophical approach to "reality" with modern science in a way that has not been possible before

some of this new work looks very similar to eastern philosophy

where "zen" fits in and actually any religious mysticism is the brain as a prediction machine tunes its parameters to better predict reality, but the "mystical approach" at least in its "authentic" applications  (which are few, there is a vast swamp of nonsense out there)  alters the model itself, and actually properly understood is a process of alteration rather than any final "shape"

all religions assume a final shape and miss, nay even crucify the dynamic and "zen" is no exception

the basic argument of the authentic mystical approach is the model itself is flawed and in scientific terms its because it an an evolutionary machine designed to replicate itself and this is actually why you can’t separate authentic mysticism from celibacy, although this has grey areas

physics

physickers

reason with what ?

the quantum atom

sits on top

far down below

many worlds begin to glow

to evaporate

into non-existent air

so many bald heads

from pulling out their hair

physics

many physickers

reason with what ?

the quantum atom

sits on top

far down below

many worlds begin to glow

to evaporate

into non-existent air

so many bald heads

from pulling out their hair

brainwashing is not some mystery

its ideas expressed

ad nauseaum

cast before me the sands of time

10, 100, thousands

a few coloured ones

their rainbow hued sparkle

such is our lot

cast before me the sands of time

10, 100, thousands

a few coloured ones

such is our lot

sylvia plath

flailing on the edge of suicide

her words transcendent

 how do they go together ?

life as we want it

but isn’t

predictable

successful

at ease

how can we be so mistaken ?

the advantage of extremities is you see things more clearly

the disadvantage is their destructive natures

the advantage of extremity is you see things more clearly

the disadvantage is its destructive nature

two poems

almost the same

one evolves from the other

as necessary

driven by the desire to say something profound

we falter

because nothing is profound

driven by the desire to say something profound

we falter

because there is nothing profound

living in a world of projections

untempered by feedback as to what works

they founder

religious chants and songs are part of the brainwashing, one chokes on the idiocy of the wording

oddly the small zen group i was initially involved with had the best chanting i came across in my travels because a musician with a good ear was a senior figure in the group

i never realised how privileged we were until i came across the usual awful chanting in other groups

when i was travelling around scotland years ago, people seemed to assume i was scottish or  celtic  rather than english, based on the way i look i guess, certainly not the accent

needle length for the covid or any vaccine is important, you want the vaccine to be injected into muscle and not the blood vessels near the bone, so too long a needle is problematic as is conversely too short a needle

they actually specify needle length by weight for the moderna vaccine  (page 2) ,  i’m pretty light so i might even have to go to a 5/8th inch length needle, depending on if they pinch the flesh to insert it

from my reading of the research, if you inject into blood vessels  (veins?)  rather than the muscle, you are likely to get severe problems, this is a well known problem in medicine, in fact some of the deaths and bad reactions from the covid vaccine may be due to this

there’s quite an argument about whether  aspiration  is necessary

  a quote  from the comments section of the above video

“ I’m a cancer and reconstructive surgeon.  The nature of my subspecialty means that I have a better working knowledge of muscle anatomy than just about any other physician or surgeon outside my subspecialty.

In the deltoid, the large veins are only found on the deep aspect of the muscle where the blood supply enters the muscle  (ie: the neurovascular hilum). The large vessels arborise very quickly into much, much smaller and finer branches such that nearer the muscle surface  (the area where most IM injection needles would get to) ,  there are few if any veins of sufficient size that cannulation could occur leading to an inadvertant intravenous injection.  This risk is reduced further if the site is pinched during needle entry  (collapses the blood vessels).

That said, I have never understood why present day training seems to advise against aspiration prior to intramuscular injection in both medical and nursing courses. Perhaps I am a bit of a dinosaur  (graduated medical school in 1995) ,  so I still do it the traditional way.  I know full well that the likelihood of inadvertant IV injection with the short, fine needles (as used with Covid-19 and flu vaccination) is practically zero.  However, it does no harm to aspirate, seems entirely logical and sensible; and is hardly a huge extra task in the process.

I have seen enough freak events happen over my many years of work that I rather not take any chances.  I also do not understand the seeming active resistance that some medical and nursing practitioners have when asked by patients to aspirate prior to IM injection.  There’s no need to be difficult for something so simple and if it affords the patient a measure of reassurance, surely we should just do so rather than be a**hats about it. ”

squid game

mild of course

compared to what went on in  and after  the korean war

various massacres

swept under the carpet of course

not a peep out of those publicists for inanity

the media

sanitists of history

pretend mirrors

are better

in their book

i love whangapeka  (ed. retreat center) ,  stayed there for a while several decades ago, the "teacher" was away, the moment he turned up again it all went sour and i left

take what you will from that experience

there’s these "panegyrics" to anthony bourdain around

here’s  a more balanced view

not the first pot induced suicide i have to say

when you hammer a nail in, it takes quite a few blows

comprende ?

cultists have flawed gods

haven’t you noticed ?

fakes support fakes

ask yourself

what’s their skin in the game ?

there’s always something

ceremonies

everyone bound in the same mistakes

you don’t have to be

what is fascinating about real life zen is it is a complete political universe, running the gamut from tyranny to bureaucratic democracy, i don't think you can distinguish this "political" aspect from the ritual, its just as well killing is illegal because there would be bodies everywhere and in actual fact historically religions were murderous and warlike

what i did take from my involvement in real life zen was improved "political" and social skills, particularly getting along with people you don't agree with and being able to dialogue issues through, the lack of this sort of experience really shows in the online world of zen messageboards and its all or nothing "wolf warriorishness"

what i would say against ritual apart from it being a waste of time is it keeps things that are too disparate together, that really the group is so divided in opinions and approaches it should have disbanded

it is in effect a sustainer of illusions and without it, the "emperor" does not look very impressive

other people’s writings are not your own

they say something

but they are

not

you

some hills in the distance

call me back

to where i’d rather be

summer seems far away

sunlight flecking through the leaves

a dream

i always find i think better and write better when i am angry

it has a  physiological basis

better blood flow to the brain

inane you tube links on message board comments are more than a signal for "low reading age" aren’t they

in what world does the glorifying of "the dumb" wash ?

net message boards that’s what

literary sophistication and artistic skills are an unknown dimension to the disney watching hoi polloi

nostalgia

more than being stuck in the past

rather

the recreation

of a new

dead

world

teaching is not necessarily that productive an occupation, a lot of "people factor" and most seem to have no compunction about wasting your time, actually on both sides of that coin

very able people can get spread too thin, sylvia plath would be one of the more tragic examples

a certain scepticism about the claimed benignness of the world goes a long way

if you read me closely, there is always an ambiguity about what the critique is and of whom

there are other very different worlds

why do we always act as if ours is the only one ?

i have always had a concern for the toxicity problems of nail salons from my experience with some of these chemicals when i worked in electronics manufacturing

a reading  by ocean vuong concerning the hazards endured by vietnamese immigrants to the USA forced by necessity to work there

out of a dark cave

something trundled

half monster half man

what made him like this ?

well, he watched a lot of disney

hergé, interestingly was ahead of his time and film technology in what was effectively writing film scripts

best  action scene  ever

direct can get you nowhere

that indirect can go

a vast array of synchronicities

a lifetime to add them up

the answer is    .   .   .   ?

a vast array of synchronicities

a lifetime to add them up

and the answer is    .   .   .   ?

a vast array of synchronicities

and a lifetime to add them up

the answer is    .   .   .   ?

a vast array of synchronicities

and a lifetime to add them up

and the answer is    .   .   .   ?

the maze of language

its labyrinths

self-created

what does it mean to be real ?

you interact with the world in a way to improve its reward to you, whatever that reward may be, but it does need to be "reward", otherwise mental illness would involve real behaviour when its defining characteristic is unreality

of course "real behaviour" is not a bottom line or all there is by any means, the ability of "mental illness" to step over boundaries is important to understanding what we call "the world"

you can’t outsmart a car dealer

they are spiders who have laid a very proficient web

the bottom lines for buying a used vehicle are price, condition and fitness for your needs, dealers would die before giving a good price, i don’t even bother now

you have to be able to assess the vehicles condition or pay to get that done

any work needed on a diesel engine is very expensive

i have seen some extraordinary buys, driven once a week by a retired person sort of thing sold for a song

cars only depreciate therefore don’t get into debt buying one, debt is not a good tread mill to be on

i hate to be a drag but black tattoo inks are very high in nanoparticles, the inks are totally unregulated and some are quite toxic, imo they are a health hazard, the art of course is a matter of opinion and the stability of tattoos is a consequence of immune system activation which is not necessarily a good thing in the long term

i occasionally post this advice on the message boards and it earns me a lot of hate i don’t think generally people respond positively to tattoos either, our biological brains are adverse to anything that could be interpreted to be skin disease

on the plus side you would think people with tattoos do not anticipate any run in with the the law because you couldn’t otherwise identify yourself so completely

you will be arrested for buddha tattoos in sri lanka and in south america you better hope what you have can’t be interpreted as a gang patch

wisdom is a type of stupidity

a belief in its rightness

w. b. yeats is a poet who has grown on me, of course there is his famous unrequited love for  maud gonne  so one has this picture of him pining away in lonely celibacy, but this was not the case at all, he married a very much   younger woman  (52/25) who he had two children with and was a very competent executor of his literary estate

surprisingly given his age he was not faithful

he is more understandable as poet and person with this information

god is "multiplication beyond necessity"

i think "monotheism" is like a foil, a deliberate "dissembling" ,  like how can one be multiplication, but one implies two which is easy to see in the supernatural entourage of supposedly supreme gods

god is a bad soap opera character dumped with conceptual rubbish of various ages

god is a soap opera character dumped with conceptual rubbish of various ages

i was listening to sylvia plath  reading a poem  and thought it was her poem and felt it lacked, but in fact its another’s poem

there’s some magic divide between poets of her quality and the rest

god is a fiction, what is there to have faith in ?

offical health guide lines

don’t die

if you must die, don’t blame us

our shoe fits none is our motto

the industries of interpreting the dead

free carried nonsense

the time warp of alma deutsecher

elmayer waltz

unpublished  drawings  by hokusai

people claim to pluck the moon from the sky

they can’t

what i notice in brad warner’s vlog comments section on you tube is some people there are chasing  the same dream ,  to do something worthwhile and the way they do this is by missionizing some guru, thich nhat hanh, joko beck, rajneesh, any useless flake, they take the lowest position on some religious totem pole missionizing nonsense which is actually inappropriate on brad’s vlog and you can’t tell them they have a problem, just to mention it or contradict them, they can’t even manage a realistic dialogue but are aggressively defensive

its a form of toxic depression, and actually others there have a different form of it, "over sentimental " and lacking discrimination is another dream that can’t pan out

there’s a desperate grasp for self esteem, but self esteem can only come from doing something worthwhile and living in a fantasy land of "spiritual enlightenment" or whatever is the opposite of worthwhile

and of course they never do any reasonable amount of "contemplative work" which is to see the "fantastic nature" of so much of our thought and actions

a fool goes through life

thinking he can change people

“ my wife ”

times change

and change again

the shimmering waters

under the moon

under nothing really

just shimmering

the branching arms of thought

this way and that way

the right way and wrong

the branching arms of thought

this way and that way

the wrong way and right

huh, herman melville in his famous story ascribes a human intelligence to its hero

apparently sperm whales learnt to escape by swimming away upwind from sailing whaling ships which couldn’t follow them

kefir is a "polysaccharide biofilm" basically bacteria and yeast in a "sugar building", you can tell with the grains, they have a squishy "structure" unlike yogurt which pretty much flows

yogurt doesn’t have the yeast or "building"

you have to be careful with kefir, that the grains don’t get too much e. coli, bad yeast varieties or similar, its really quite a skill to make and keep the biofilm suitable

i think the commercial kefir product you buy is actually more like a yogurt without much or any biofilm, be warned, biofilms can be loaded gun, i found out the hard way, made a batch with bad grains, took my stomach months to recover

in general fermented foods are not necessarily a universal good because of this problem

yogurt made from a quality starter culture is generally the safest bet  (not from a supermarket brand)  and can be quite a bit better than store bought yogurt since the store yogurt bacterial compositions are usually not very intelligent

store bought kefirs i do like

childhood patterns

entrenched

to our detriment

old roads travelled on

get covered by the new

then discovered again

where we once went

lot’s wife looked back

who can blame her

heading out into the desert

a pillar of salt she became

i’m not sure who would do that

god or men ?

i think the weakness of nominalism is the denial of valid forms of existance except for what we call "reality"

abstractions, including "abstract" itself do exist and the abstract space, while not directly tangible, is still in fact tangible and existent

these missionizers forever

for whatever deranged and lunatic text

they promote

there’s not even any place

there’s something you may know

and that’s it

those who prefer

a plethora of shallow understandings

to a single

in depth

the harp

inducts a mood

fragile temporary

outshining

the moon’s wisdom

ed.  debussy’s  clair de lune  played by héloïse de jenlis

if when going forward

you grow multiples

be wary

what does and doesn’t work

creates a path

we follow

one thing easy to miss in "the wind in the willows" is the magical resurrection of the baby otter "portly" who is as the story hints killed by a hunter’s trap and mole’s and ratty’s journey to the place of pan to find him and bring him back

there’s three types of insanity

institutionalised

outpatient medicated

and

normality

persistence wins where a lot of other things fail

now you being an apologist, i’ve seen all the tricks, you by your own actions see yourself at the bottom of whatever totem pole you are promoting

no matter what you say, you can’t escape the pattern you are subject to

you do something

and everyone notices

this is not the way to go

you make a change

and nobody notices

this is the way to go

a grook for my birthday

past my heyday

hooray !

“ no multiplicity beyond necessity ”

i would rephrase as

inner coherence has its own voice

how pathetic

to make one’s role in life

to be a missionizer

for pretenders

and idiots

the nonsensical

how pathetic

to make one’s role in life

to be a missionizer

for pretenders

and idiots

and the nonsensical

in your face and aggressive

deceitful and self-deceived

the warning signs flash loud

having no understanding themselves

they promote nonsense

thinking it sense

these "readers" who never sort anything out for themselves

and just accumulate

tomes of other’s mistakes

these readers who never sort anything out for themselves

and just accumulate

tomes of others mistakes

the fools pursue explanations

only to find

the explanations pursue them

within the whole

is something that is more than the whole

hard to explain

what is not inside or outside

any notion of "substrate" is a form of monotheism which is what western zen is and monotheism is "multiplicity without necessity"

william of ockham  developed this principle as a way to handle the turgid mess of late medievel/early renaissance theology, not appreciated by the church of course, in actual fact the moment you apply the principle to any religion, the religion "disappears"

so you have to work out how fundamental the principle is

i think its so powerful because a repetition itself adds nothing useful since it is just a repeat, but however in addition it adds a layer of interaction its impossible to see past, that is, its necessarily obfuscating

rules

the idiots follow and make

nonsense

that works or doesn’t

that’s a conundrum

you can’t persuade

a dishonest person to be honest

at best

or is it worst ?

they will adopt a mask

to fool you

these people who read nonsense

believe nonsense

take goethe’s advice

one look into a book

three into life

so many people on message boards give you the usual "borderline personality" runaround, concealing, personal attacks, avoiding any real content, deflection

these people advertise themselves as lacking personal honesty

a "grook" by piet hein

T    T    T

put up in a place

where its easy to see

the cryptic admonishment

T    T    T

when you feel how depressingly

slowly you climb

its well to remember that

Things Take Time

the more you know about jane austen’s life, the more its apparent that her writings are a sort of remediating dream of hers

jane’s dream

imo joko beck was developing dementia from about 1986 on, the book you "recommend"  (ed. "nothing special") was published well within the later stages in 1993, i spoke by phone to her about 1992 and she was having "difficulty" then

her zen is a sort of "dead craziness", not saying any of the other zen teachers were better, if you have any real life experience of zen, you know its just thick with "mental  illness"

to be fair to her she was addressing the problem of people going wrongly theoretical, but the answer wasn’t right

if something is well written, you can’t really analyse it or break it apart

it is what it is

for instance this sentence by william blake

I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity

wheels of return

back and back again

our brain

people with tattoos don’t realise they are an intrusion on others, we are hardwired by evolution to be alert for skin diseases so a tattoo is an in your face disruption of attention

similarly obesity is interpreted as a disease which in fact recent science has shown it is

a  new mechanism  for obesity, ie its what and not how much you eat

circularity

cycles

the essence of being

circular lives

across the generations

this species

god must roll his/her eyes

at the

peregrinations in reification

of humans

“ The trick is to remain open minded when approaching ancient spiritual texts ”

you claim to be open minded, but actually you are giving credit where the opposite is due, they are just all rubbish with a few exceptions, "people are crazy"

another way of looking at it is "wisdom" itself is a "fraud"

koans aren’t just wrong, but they are "evil" and "toxic" and actually so is "zen" or any other religion

this may seem extreme to you, but is the result of many years of consideration and dealing with supposedly "enlightenened" and wise people

insanity masquerading as sanity is the norm

actually there’s valid zen koan describing the situation

"don’t be fooled by others"

so there are exceptions, for instance i particularly like works by the sufi mysitc sa’di, but by and large these "ancient texts" are the usual deceiving rubbish by the usual rubbish deceivers

yeah, its a hostile extreme world when you scrap the appearances off, charles bukowski was right there

the wisdom in the mistakes of others is not really wisdom per se, but the correction of our mistakes which is pragmatism and penal but that’s life, the "treacle of being"

the future is so uncertain

we need to wait to see what it is

we call this "waiting"

living

the future is so uncertain

we need to wait to see what it is

piet hein

a grook

writing

grooks

ed.  interestingly he claims to be the direct descendant  of the man  who pulled off what may be the greatest heist in history, the capture of the silver and other valuables of half the spanish treasure fleet

piet hein

a grook

writing

a

grook

there is such a thing as being right, but out of phase

its a bit different than being wrong, though to all practical purposes it is

questions they ask

comments they make

anything but engage in real activity

the bald heads studying koans

turning them in their minds

projecting sense on nonsense

thus they pass their lives

the world

concerned with perpetuating itself

it will end one day

just not today

the curve of the earth

matches that of the moon

the oceans curl

unstably

you can’t  lose weight  by eating less, rather by reducing consumption of processed, rapidly digestible carbohydrates

these foods cause hormonal responses that fundamentally change our metabolism, driving fat storage, weight gain, and obesity

this is not going to be a popular message for sure

“ high  glycemic load  foods foods include processed grains, potato products, and foods with a high free sugar content ”

i think the "free sugar" is an absolute killer since it is in everything from fuit juices to just about every processed food

interestingly the increased insulin secretion from eating these foods will also damage the pancreas, hence the association of diabetes with excess weight

much as we wish for things to be different

they continue as they have already done

small changes

accreting to larger ones

are permitted

“ how would you change the world to make it a better place ? ”

i wouldn’t change the world, just to think about it is already too much

in the land of possibility

the walls

maze like

enforce a tortuous route

a sense of grief about this and that

to be displaced by

a new this and that

yet the grief

is constant

a sense of grief about this and that

to be displaced by

a new this and that

yet the sense of grief

is constant

what can and can’t be done

to look across the gap of limitation

is mortifying

everyone

looks out at the world

from their own point of security

money, family, social status

those they know

none asks

what other views are there ?

the answers can intrude

abruptly

to everyone’s

consternation

“ reality versus our ideas about it ”

well "reality" is itself an idea, its not solid

the superiority of the web as a publishing medium is illustrated by this

half an hour to write up and edit

upload to my account

up for the remainder of my life for a cost of fractions of a  cent

the deep joy of doing one’s own editing and not have to conform to another’s ideas just to be printed

limitless space so material never has to be trimmed

the advantage of not having to go through the problems of editions and being in and out of print are llttle understood

semantics

the level of meaning in language

but there’s another level

higher

that sound and sense

together create

semantics

the level of meaning in language

but there’s another level

higher

that sound and sense create

going sideways

you go sideways

but that may contain

a necessary

detour

the "moralists"

prescribe the other’s morality

their own

never having been stressed

they have no question about

i think entertainment depends on a "not too close look"

if it survives a "not too close look"

then its more than entertainment

there is no "spiritual path" ,  so many are tangled in the usual delusions

there is no "spiritual path" , you are tangled in the usual delusions

sylvia plath is a salutary lesson

a different order of writing

one of the greats

up there with milton and dante

cut down in her prime

an unfriendly world

only too happy to suck her blood

after she is dead

grace slick’s song  white rabbit  is great, but is also an explanation of her "damaged" later life, drugs are not harmless

joko beck in her later years was rubbished by some of her "disciples" as being literally ;"demented"

i never ended up visiting her, but i might have, she never really made sense to me, she was struggling with dementia in the later stages of her life, but there’s more than a touch of schizophrenia in the earlier stages

i don’t want to be misunderstood here, exactly what i don’t want to be misunderstood about i am not sure, but i have to be honest and say she didn’t make a lot of sense to me, the "meditation till you drop" is crazy

the problem with being "a teacher" ,  is its really traumatic and i think the better quality souls get adversely affected, i saw it in toni packer and would guess joko had problems as well, its so severe its not sane to do

i think "dementia" is uneven, really she sounds quite "compos mentis" in  this documentary , but i disagree with a lot of what she says, yet agree with some of it

so many notes to myself

incomprehensible

the writing

at the back of my mind

something to do

i dredge it up

before it escapes

do it

and hit it

when you write the script

like l. ron. hubbard

there are always people

who will treat it as real

even to their own detriment

following

the toxic

will-o’-the-wisp

when i write

its not like a novelist

its like a crossword puzzle that i continually solve

of course its upside down

given the answer

what are the clues ?

zen drove joko beck and makes others mad, be involved in real life zen for a while and you will know what i mean

reality

different moods

our different moods

different realities

disorder

order

well we think the disorder is order

but its not

reading the writing of others palls

doing your own writing never palls

though you may be

appalled

so many years of falling into other people

they go their own way in the end

its not my way

you always get called back to yourself

because there's

nobody

else

unrequited love

unrequited

u

n

r

e

quit

e

d

the best sort

unrequited love

unrequited

u

n

r

e

q

u

i

t

e

d

the best sort

meditation is not an end in itself, so if its not an end in itself it must have a context and in that case what is the context ?

i know the conventional view of soto is that meditation is an end in itself, but actually eihei dogen spent most of his life writing, there you are, message boards are the new soto

with both toni packer and joko beck, i feel their personal lives and development suffered, that they would have had been happier with no involvement in zen

heaps of money gone  into everything  except paying for decent scriptwriters, absolutely no zing

the core of any film is the script, but of course the various managements are in denial about this, a not unusual state of affairs in the film industry

i guess i have just written a review

its very hard to get descriptions of moderate/mild covid on the web, but interestingly ellen degeneres  (aged  62)  who is blood type O gives  a description ,  she hadn’t had a vaccine, i think there is something to type A getting more affected, ceratis paribus

she’s not much shakes as a stand up comic and in my observation women rarely are, no wonder she shifted to being a talk host

i did have a phone conversation with joko beck years ago, she really was quite old and tired and sounded like it and probably starting to lose some of her mental faculties, i was young enough not to appreciate the problems of aging

its like toni packer, i don’t think zen was necessarily a good idea for her

my own view is that "meditation" is a beginning stage and at some point you have to walk away from it into a more general "contemplative mode", i’m not sure what her view was in that respect

however, unlike most zen teachers she did have a genuine enlightenment experience which she described as like being at a train station and all the trains whizzing past, then ,  one day unexpectedly, one stops and you get on

i have an ongoing problem with being a magnet for people with mental health problems on the web, its so bad i would be concerned for my safety if i lived in the usa

so i’ve got yet another

this is from my reply to him

“ i can’t do anything about your mental health problems, just suggest you attempt to "dialogue" which means treating the person you are replying to with respect and not personal abuse ”

i don’t want to be too negative on "mental health", i have known quite nice people with issues and probably if the truth be known is i am not so far away myself, but the way i get focused on by some aggressive/stupid types is disturbing and i can see in real life, it suits me to keep a low profile, the moment you get into the public domain, you can become a focus of very disturbed people totally unknown to you, which i guess is what happened to john lennon and interestingly toni packer had an attempt on her life who you would think would be the last person for this to happen to

when you have to force some words

time to pack up and go away

falling down interminable stairs

becomes falling down interminably

ed.  i had a migraine and was nodding off to sleep when this this "vision" occurred of continually falling down some stairs that stretched down interminably and i was really getting knocked about by the continual falls, it seemed significant so i dashed out to write it down as otherwise i would forget

i know some of the theory of migraine

cortical spreading depression, excess brain chemicals, prodrome

that sort of thing

but what does it feel like ?

"death" seems too abstract and not quite there

purgatory might be close

because it ends

what happens in purgatory ?

migraine

i'm expiating the sin of life

“  I’ve brought  a link  that’s likely useless but possibly isn’t

Maybe one might have use. I have bunches of art apps but only two get use. But, could not use them until I found them ”

my reply

" But, could not use them until I found them"

there you are, you have a theme for a poem

let’s have a go

what we don’t know

we can’t utilise

we need to find it first

let’s hope we know what we are looking for

manic pixie dream girl

it starts with manic

and really you should just stop at this point

any further is a form of death

but let’s go on

your dream or hers or the writer’s ?

usually the writers and you know what fakes they are

yours or hers means you are already in the wrong alternate reality

so, next "pixie"

well the step mother clipped the pointed ears

do you really want to deal with that ?

now, finally "girl"

leave the world to be in its own way

do you want to perpetuate it and your troubles ?

if in life you strike any of those terms

beware

one will call in the others

like a hunter calls in birds

ed.  my reply to olivia gatwood's reading of  her poem ,  i researched the term and it turns out to be a recognizable film trope

time stitched so it looks continuous

but is it ?

cats have nine lives

but no more than nine

ed.  in memory of the "old cat" who didn’t make it past nine

so, an afterlife

magical thinking

or any sort of life but this life ?

men hide behind beards

women hide behind make-up

there are two worlds

heaven and earth

leaving one world

and another

let them sing

their nonsense

well i got a reply

let us sing a song

to hungry ghosts

and rising incense smoke

to Nagarjuna and Picasso

and everything in between

my  reply

you can, me i don’t proxy but do things myself

a song of hungry ghosts

coarsened by smoke and mirrors

nagarjuna and picasso puke

the talentless will never understand

asking him to think seems to have caused the bird to fly

the mimics

say the words

with no understanding

the problem with age is we look more and more in terms of what we can do

rather than what we should do

there’s the negative and the positive

its the nature of religion and the world

to jump into the positive

but all i am saying is the negative

our own experience is everything

but the world being the way it is

we overwrite it with the nonsense of others

life

so many pivot points

but when the vectors are in the wrong direction

we get hurt

life

so many pivot points

but when the vectors are in the wrong direction

it hurts

what writing is

the sound of something

mice scurrying

across the page

you can’t sum people

in any meaningful way

if you could that would imply

god or a "ground of being"

and there is none

commonality is a believable illusion

but there is something that is not an illusion

what it is

i cannot explain

the journey of life

and it is a journey

it has a beginning and end

how little we cognize it

the journey of life

and it is a journey

it has a beginning and it has an end

how little we cognize it

the last paragraphs from sylvia plath’s  story  "johnny panic and the bible of dreams" basically describing her experience with electro-convulsive therapy

at the moment when i think i am most lost the face of johnny panic appears in a nimbus of arc lights on the ceiling overhead

i am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory

his beard is lightning

lightning is in his eye

his word charges and illumes the universe

the air crackles with the blue-tongued, lightning-haloed angels

his love is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart

he forgets not his own

ed.  one motive behind her later suicide was a fear of her likely committal to a public asylum in london

a doomed star

the writers lot

it pays generations later

the flare as it falls

“ and he knew it wasn’t going to be ok and he told me it wasn’t going to be ok ”

the above is a quote by richard silken, don’t know why it appealed to me, but it does

take a leaf out of my book, i have never met you and don’t know anything about you and neither hate nor like you and have no opinion on whether you should post a comment or not

ed.  my reply to an aggressive young commenter on reddit, what i have noticed is the moment you start to force them to interact with you in a realistic way, they disappear

when the young are brittle

and the aged flexible

its not such an inversion

as it appears

ex alcoholics

may be reformed

but they can’t reform how the alcohol has left them

curmudgeons

the hours tick like seconds

the years pass like days

this panorama of time

is called aging

a little beauty eases our days

rocked in the dream of life

the imprints of drug culture are low reading age, gaslighting and evasion, its right through the "normative" world now, the new "low trust" environment, alcoholics were far easier to pick and you knew pretty well what you were getting

where do you draw the line ?

some-one is half sincere, half gaslighting

the sincerity is actually a mask, a very convincing cover for the gaslighting

run

run

run

gerard manley hopkins would unequivocally have been better to steer clear of catholicism, the tangle of theology didn’t suit his poetry nor the living conditions his health

i’m coming up with a new phrase which addresses a problem not covered in the english language

"chronic compromises"

this is when the compromise is maladaptive, evil even and you are better to walk away, often very hard to do and actually the perception of the "chronic nature" is difficult

i’m a great fan of watching  dash cam videos  to keep me on my toes, anticipating and avoiding problems when driving

i really think it is an important part of driver education since in real life you may hardly ever see what the cams show

also i have to say from watching these videos that some people don’t understand looking ahead, defensive driving and keeping speed down in areas of higher risk and the wet and night

also you can see the outstanding advantages cams offer for insurance claims and police prosecutions

its very difficult to get good criticism

everyone criticises, but no-one hits the nail on the head

love is something seen in hindsight

the look back says it all

the present is no guarantor

druggie lowlife’s are everywhere on reddit, thinking a few words changes anything

the desperate search for validation by these people always surprises me

not something alcoholics suffer from so much for sure

other people

are other worlds

we may be surprised by similarity

but that is like seeing hills on a horizon

what else is there we cannot guess

where there is dissimilarity

our projections are agape

we cannot see or feel

the voidness

the hours tick like seconds

the days like years

this contradiction confusion

leaves me in a daze

the hours tick like seconds

the years like days

this panorama of time

is called aging

“  Would you agree that silence itself is far better a teacher then any religion or teachings ? ”

there’s something else entirely going on that its all about, i don’t talk about it because people just mimic and essentially you have to discover what it is by yourself anyway

discovery

things change from beginning to end

and when you get to the end

you are swallowed up

emily dickinson and more subtly lewis carroll are really better than just about anything else you can read in the "spiritual context" particularly that you can read them without translation so you don’t get mired in translator’s bias/ hubris/ missionizing

they are "pre-eminent"

you cannot avoid the pre-eminent in any subject without going way off track, there’s something fundamentally wrong underneath and religion is that because its literature is restricted to its own works

blinkered in other words

you cannot claim to see "everything" without taking the blinkers off, but of course those making the claims are not even aware of the blinkers

in remedied religious terms "practice" could be the removal of blinkers, the usual nonsense of "teachings", teachers, ceremonies etc is to just widen the blinkers and consequently narrow the field of view

its helpful to develop an awareness of the  uncertainties  of living that can only come from the endless experience of things not turning out right and hopefully making you open to necessary changes

there is a modern disease of not reading what was written, but picking out a few words and then constructing their own take on what was said

when pulled up in this, they still refuse to read the actual text

“ do you have a spiritual practice and if so, what does it look like ? ”;

i have many decades of involvement in this sort of thing which gives a perspective quite apart from all the claims  (and bovine dung!) ,  christian, new age, flavours of buddhism, zen, you name it, there’s varying levels of sincerity, outright lying and disaster

anyway the notion of "spiritual practice" is quite wrong in whatever religious or otherwise vocabulary its couched in

its hard to explain the basic problem but its that there is a very wide world of this sort of interest, in particular literature, if you are not familiar to the level of "close reading" with emily dickinson, sa,'di, lewis carroll, cao xueqin and others then you are involved in something perverse, not just wrong, but really screwed up in the head

what is called religion is in fact just "the literary" made concrete, the outstanding example of this is religions like seventh day adventists, mornons and jehovah’s witnesses which are heavily indebted to milton’s poems

even on his vlog, brad is not so much a zen master since by and large conventional zen rejects him, but a writer looking for an income from zen having had the misfortune to write in a time when the print publishing industry collapsed

i was involved with "buddha at the gas pump" early on but was eventually banned, so i have had a cursory interest for years and it has surprised me how consistently the people interviewed are so clueless and lacking any integrity in what they say

if there is such a thing as practice it is not in the worship of god, buddha, nature spirits whatever but semi random observations made about life, that is all

i have certainly been through various religious mills so can be said to be "looking for something" but in the end nothing made sense except my own observations worked out over quite a while and that's where it stops, not in monotheism and its various guises like the buddhist "absolute nature" but what is in effect a patchwork quilt of badly matching fabric pieces of one’s own observations

"buddha at the gas pump" is selective for mental illness

huh, how the term "knot" for the speed of a ship  was derived

patchwork

in the end

does make a quilt

and is not that dissonant

and has a life of its own

patchwork

in the end

does make a quilt

and needn’t be that dissonant

and have a life of its own

out there somewhere

something more

something less

the conundrum of wanting

old light

old sight

nothing fades

like it should

going in circles

the man with no memory

i don’t think i am going in circles

and neither does he

when conversing with some-one, do them the courtesy of listening to what they say, dialoguing is a skill we all need to build and its an insult to the person you are talking/writing to not to attempt to understand their point of view and what they are saying

leave personal criticism for the one or two occasions in life it has some point

“ You Created a Universe in Which You Didn’t Create the Universe ”

what i create i create and what i create that excludes me i don’t have much interest in

as i get older, i ditch theoretical ideas about life more and more, its not interesting and go with observations on what’s happening

the odd thing about writing is if you do a lot of it, the skill slowly builds even though you pay no attention to this

two paintings by the canadian painter lawren harris i like are "pic island" and "ice house, coldwell, lake superior" ,  both linked near the bottom  of this page

  the rattling bog ,  irish folk song

sir walter raleigh’s words on the scaffold

i approach that great mystery

now i am, soon i will not be

“ if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work on his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style ”

quote by virginia woolf in her 1919 essay, "modern fiction"

not the way i would put it, but to earn a satisfactory income from writing requires donning the straightjacket of being entertaining and comprehensible

perceived incomprehensibility can excite violent responses by readers who struggle to grasp that something can be written in what seems like plain english that could be understandable but they can’t

everyday

a little rush to build coherence

that dissolves and falls apart again

everyday

a little rush to build coherence

that dissolves and falls apart

the complete inanity of "getty images" and its ilk and the inability of journalists to have pictures that are informative about the article are a constant trauma to this reader

the interesting thing about archaeology and its ability to bring the past back to life, is how much has occurred and how isolated we are from what has occurred

its a basic principle of injury, that there is instability in the repair and/or there is a continuation of the underlying structural issues that gave rise to the problem in the first place

in other words, there is always a long term vulnerability that comes with the injury even in its repaired state

it was a trope in days gone by

to imagine oneself in a grave looking at the sky

the centuries pass held in infinities palm

but how so now when ashes lie

cooped in an urn or scattered wide

being burnt in a furnace is modernity’s farewell

it was a trope in days gone by

to imagine oneself in a grave looking at the sky

the centuries pass held in infinities palm

but how so now when ashes lie

cooped in an urn or scattered wide

being burnt in a furnace is modernity’s goodbye

the bitter

wasting their lives

look back

poison drips

from their fangs

striking

at anything

that shows them up

ed.  try reading this poem in an abstract way rather than taking it personally, its a comment on life, some will fit the shoe quite well and others not, but everyone will relate to it

some of what i write can be hard to take

even i find it hard to take

without the net i don’t think i would have ever published it

an interesting thought

i do think you need at least one other reader

apart from yourself

to keep the interest up

a lot of proverbs are covered by this one sentence

people are intractable

almost like charles bukowski

minus the booze and radio

sitting down

writing

only i publish everything i write

pessoa’s trunk in my case

is digital

you can only do what is possible

possibility can be stretched

impossibility can't

a few words

light into a sentence

then extinguishes

no joy

nothing to prime

discarded

the nothingness of no god

only yourself everywhere

all you see is yourself

a pebble on the beach

beaten by the surf

submission is an empty question

death is not

i find the question of lyrics versus poetry quite interesting, in the end they are somewhat exclusionary of each other which  this song  by bob dylan shows, he is using a literary trope, but its not internally coherent enough to work

it doesn’t even work as a song, but it actually can’t work, because the moment you make it semantically coherent it can no longer be put to music, the music can’t track the sense in the way necessary

words like scrabble

going nowhere

shifting them back and forth

writing without inspiration

when you jump to the end

rather than going there by stages

it can be a disaster

demigod

because it sounds better than "semi-god"

its actually a sort of inversion, the glass being half full rather than "half empty"

present use beats future potential

religious "practices" are ways of wasting your time

travelling in remote areas gave me a better feeling for aboriginal art, tied to landscape, its an experiential thing, a sense of the timeless so to speak, particularly the voices of those who lived there a long time ago which grows on you

childhood’s hour and day and months and years

becomes

the adult’s

the patterns are subtle

but there

the lady of shalott

slain by love

the bier was beautiful

the illusion vanishes

death of a different sort

overtook her

loreena mckennit  sings  tennyson’s famous poem, the full poem is in the introduction (SHOW MORE)

one of the interesting things about foreign policy is its binary nature, its usually done very wrong or very right

when its done right there is a huge amplification of positive consequences, but when done wrong  (vietnam, iraq, afghanistan)  its very destructive

in recent years it has amazed me the number of times the west has ended up fighting what in geopolitical terms were its true friends  (which would include saddam hussein)

international politics is brutal and not necessarily rational, sentimentality has no place in it

if you don’t think china’s territorial aggression is a problem, the reason the US and allies are vacating afghanistan is to focus on china, though of course it was just crazy them being there in the first place, just how crazy the next couple of years will show when they become buddies with the taliban since that’s where the geopolitical interest lies

politics is so imperfect a beast, it can never be got right

“ i alone am the world honored one ”

no world, no honour, no i

checkmate you old fraud

the unenlightened

meander all their lives

in a swamp

thinking it the sea

they neither listen

nor

can

be

told

conventional life

though it has its own illumination

is surrounded

by a very deep

dark

a singularity is like a stop sign

you can ignore and move on past it of course

and the millions backed up behind it

thinking they can go no further

the net

immersive realities

fatal

to life

the net

immersive realities

fatal

exodus 32 27-29

its hard to come to any conclusion about moses, except that he was a psychopath

god’s justice is a basic problem in any theology, that the world doesn’t work by the "morality" of the religion, that "the good" can come to a sticky fate, stickier even than "the bad" so you have the necessity of an afterlife where the good are rewarded and the bad punished

this passage from exodus is interesting because it completely abandons any recourse to a remediating afterlife, but implements a slaughter/civil war to enforce a doctrine, you see barely how it really works, a lesson islam was not slow to pick up on

a lot of the old testament is this problem that judaism has only vague notions of an afterlife, that since "god’s justice" has to be visited in real time, then you have a literal holocaust of plagues, infectious diseases, battle and war defeats, massacres, you name it supposedly enforcing god's view of how things should be

in terms of the "tanakh" there would be only one way to view the twentieth century holocaust, but there seems to be a total absence of jewish theologians willing to address this, instead the mantle seems to have fallen to hannah arendt to explain it, even the unrepentant nazi martin heidegger  (and astoundingly an ex lover of the jewish arendt)  with his "it was a pogrom that got amplified by modern technology" gets an oar in where rabbis’ fear to tread

a way of looking at judaism is in religious terms its archaic and overly tribal and didn’t suit empire or large central governments or any sort of government given their tribulations with the romans and you can even argue christianity and islam are "patches" to solve this theological deficit of no reward or punishment in the afterlife

a meme that was doomed

if you look at videos of the untouched countryside in modern israel, you realise the crusaders must have been asking themselves what they were doing there, no loot, just dirt, rock and death

is death a singularity ?

that is, an inaccessible closed point with infinite sums within ?

or is it something else that can be known in life and walked through without the meaningless infinite sums ?

you do better with your own words

an  interesting article  about the origins of the universe, basically that the origins are not a singularity which means that in a sense there is still something there and you can in effect "walk around in it" and it changes

unfortunately notions of "singularity" bedevil the current philosophical landscape, it is in effect "a bottom turtle" that is closed off to the observer

this is the whole point of "spiritual investigation", that reality has no bottom turtle and you can literally walk around in it in both a philosophical and personal sense

this was a big discovery for me because the conventional wisdom/theology is all singularities

so not only are the results of our models of reality error prone, but the models themselves are in error and particularly what they model, ie reality is also in error, and you really have to ask yourself, where do you stand ?

its a big deal to be able to stop looking for bottom turtles because there are none, as contradictory as that sounds

brad ,  (ed. address to brad warner)  buddhism, buddha nature and dogen are non-existent "bottom turtles" its beyond wide out there, why we need blinkers is hard to understand

i get a reply from eli lopez

Words and phrases, etched with gold filigree,

fashioned into hollow barbs.

Alas, at the stroke of midnight turn back into pumpkins;

mice scurry back into the shadows.

my reply

he claims midnight

a singularity

i know better

and dance with the mice

and pumpkin

the inflexion point

never to be seen

the prison walls of life

things have a certain shape

it can’t be otherwise

conclusions matter

don’t matter

the misunderstood

understood

claims

regress

infinitely

exegesis

too dry

even for the dry

exegesis

too dry

for the dry

the problem is you don’t reply to content, but do the usual "arguing on the person"

ed.  its so tiresome on message boards, the hostile commenters who being unable to respond to your content, immediately descend to argumentum ad hominem

the old cat is dead

i don’t know she is dead for sure

but infer it

she wasn’t holding her food down

and wasn’t able to chew properly

her body will be lying lifeless somewhere

gone except for her memory in the form of her kittens, grandkittens and great grandkittens

and me

distance creeps up on us

if we let it

move us

away from where we are

to different centuries

from those

we know

to say what the world is

and god is

requires traversing

an escherian landscape

that may be truer

than this world

ed.  go suck eggs gerald manley hopkins

in the beginning was the logos

john 1:1

my retranslation

in the beginning was text

over the top praise

like too severe criticsm

is

offensive

brad has his cap out for money

they pay in praise

so syrupy

its offensive

ed.  i just donated $30 to brad warner, i think people treat his vlog as a public forum for their own benefit or even opportunity to missionize whatever bizarrity they specialize in, but actually its private and done for income and if you post there, you need to be responsive to that, over the top "praise" is not payment and is actually offensive

the modern disease

various forms of meaninglessness

presented as meaningful

an art form

really

the handling of knowledge

knowledge handles us

the power of unpacking the misinformation in our life

stretching way back

but so rare

the inclination or opportunity

when you get somewhere

and the view’s not what you expect

an empty feeling

disorienting and discomforting

i don’t know what the future holds

the slow approach

like a ship inching to its berth

only it moves faster than you think

but the miracle is

after a sea voyage of many thousand miles

that it has arrived at all

things don’t add up

sums with no rational answer

my day to day existence

the book of revelations is a political story/fable, if you think about it, its obvious given the background of who would have written it and the politics of the time which were fatal to direct criticism

its carefully crafted fiction given the semantic coherence, detail and length

its not a vision

ezekiel next

i’m not finding any answers in terms of people

people promote the "mahayana" but no-one dares quote from it

because, umm   .   .   .

it looks bad

folks, the the nature of "psychiatric medications" is to have bad long term side effects, you can’t be that differentiated when you mess with brain function

its very easy to get caught in failed circles of inquiry

the solipsists

solecisms

solipsist

below is my retranslation of a poem by seo jeong ju from south korea, see the poem and explanation  here

a leper’s life is grim

by night a child is eaten

the blood from tears

splashes everywhere

the problem is zen is a literary device, like buddhism, they are stories

they are novels

awakening, being enlightened, a great master, all the work of fiction

a sticky trap for the dull and self-deluded

they don’t disagree

but they don’t agree

and so it doesn’t go any further

packing up

going away

the unfinished

left behind

gnostic atheism

agnostic atheism

so many rabbit holes

alice came back

to

nothing

what i have noticed is that when people get into too idiosyncratic and semantically inconsistent a definition of a word away from common usage you are entering the area of the brain not being "well arranged"

ed.  i posted this on r|zen which deletes any words associated with "mental-illness" so i have to use words with a degree of "indirection", you can take not "well arranged" as being "deranged"

i think its to some extent permissible if there’s a logical "coherence" to the new definition, or it says something worthwhile, however i don’t feel the r|zen definition is coherent, you can’t really divide off the sense of the word from from "soto" as soto apart from the general sense of the word as "serene", is the most commonly understood meaning of it

this question of "not well arranged" is to discount the social world overmuch and indicative of what i can’t say here (ed. r|zen) without being deleted

to me the strength of soto is its emphasis on meditation, i’m not saying its not highly flawed in some respects, but at least its not so tangled in zen being a philosophy as one see so much of on the net

without a substantial background of meditative or contemplative experience you are just going to in philosophical  —  literary  —  theological circles forever

well, history does  repeat itself

foreign policy advisers never seem to bone up on a countries’ history before going to war do they ?

china’s 9 dash line and designs on taiwan make a lot of sense if you can see it has re-entered one of its many imperial phases and has only ever been stopped by defeat in battle, though the "battles" may have a different character today, a more subtle use of force like conscripting reefs as military bases and cyberwarfare

the nature of censorship is this

an argument without a counterargument can/usually appears convincing

i wish

after probing the well of explanation

that it went somewhere

and didn’t go on forever in the same way

to break through into some promised land

but alas

its just falling forever

actually my experience of real life zen is soviet russia is not such a bad comparison with the degree of misinformation, structural poverty, doctrinal adherence and "top down control"

virginia woolf and sylvia plath are of course famous, but for a reader its hard to handle what happened to them

what you read or listen to is that person, and then you know the fate

you can see in the second half of  to the lighthouse ,  what reformed would become "the waves"

but its extremely depressing to know this physically very strong woman and swimmer had to fill her coat pockets with stones before she jumped in the river, this same woman who was writing the words of her book as you listen to them

the poem  lesbos  by sylvia plath and  the story  behind it

guy williams  in takaka

hilarious

its mocking, yet there is a sympathetic air to it

words

by the million

by the dozen

ideas

clichés

they can’t think or write

but are happy with themselves

and their puling

there’s quite a big jump from the common use of the term "enlightenment" as in "i found his explanation of how to read virginia woolf enlightening" to the idea of some substrate of existence being exposed to the "enlightened' as opposed to the "unenlightened" person not having this "superpower" which is common in zen, new age, advaita and other spiritual nonsense

so the whole idea of "enlightenment" in the "spiritual context" is premised on some "ultimate bottom turtle" really being there, which is not the case and i’ve looked at this problem for many years

no buddha, no god, no "enlightened masters"

the recidivists wallow in the trash heap

singing its virtues

to

themselves

to write something

without imagery

is to work

without skills

to write something

without imagery

is to work

without skill

the moon controls the tides

the sun the orbits of the planets

wars the spectre of death

what do we move around ?

boundary conditions of reality

a good poem

also contains an unwritten one

not all glimpsed

but all the same

startling when you see it

the moonstruck magpies

warbling

what is it they say ?

“ it seems like day, but its not ”

“ the creative spirit ”

the dreams of the purblind

the limits of creativity don’t compel

there’s something else

what is it ?

is ariel a demon

or benign spirit ?

what you can’t control

have no opinion about

the writing of semantic meta

a shape defining what ?

or really

a transport

into what it is about ?

the slow unwrapping

of everything in your life

that has occurred before

revealing

their true

aspect

discovery that fades

and doesn’t

the hagia sophia

the blue mosque

rivals

in

a

tired  dream

the hagia sophia

the blue mosque

rivals

in

an

empty dream

well, you are being an apologist

the problem with being an apologist is there is something to apologise for that can’t be changed, otherwise you would just make the needed changes

its out of your power to change, we most commonly encounter it as people defending doctrinal problems in christianity

its not exactly being free or truthful is it ?

there’s no answers in terms of "collective ideologies", whether its communism, buddhism, christianity, neo-liberalism, fascism or whatever

anything of this nature viewed historically turns out to be very messy and often bloody

the flowers of time

brilliant in forms and colours

is there some sacred garden

where they grow and are tended ?

or cast to appear

startling

 in alien ground ?

because duelling has been banned for a few centuries now, we don’t understand what a menace it was, the best and brightest killed

pushkin and lermantov are egregious examples, there are many others

sometimes to sit in an abyss of nothingness

for a little while

its not so unfamiliar

rather

its what’s there

the familiar

moods

we swing with them

their different realities

define us

so much in life

second hand

one’s own experience

is missing

i have learnt to wander

too far and wide

with just one step

i lose my bearings

i have learnt to wander

too far and wide

with just one step

i have lost my bearings

starless, fatherless

sylvia’s dark water

submerged her

the world views its loss

tearless

its not soundless

as the dolorous hooves

galloped off

ed.  i wrote this after  reading  "sheep in the fog"

the world hopefully becomes narrower as i grasp more of it

only

the grasping

always expands it

beyond my comprehension

unhappy

words wind in the wrong direction

people are clowns laughing

when they should be crying

come and go

come and gone

only in absence

do we feel depth

apparently  this  is what russians watch on new year’s eve which is their big holiday, not christmas

"the irony of fate, or enjoy your bath" ,  what we would call a rom-com

the link is what we wouldn’t get in the west, a very famous poem, by  bella akhmadulina ,  the "settings  -  subtitles" translation is ok

there is a surprising intellectual sophistication to later soviet popular cinema, i suppose a reflection of the underground dissent that became more permissible after stalin’s death

if life doesn’t seem to have enough dimensions, there’s always poems like bella akhmadulina’s  your house

there is no closure

just one thing

supplanting another

one of the main plays i have seen on message boards is the losing side in an argument trying to force moderator intervention in their favour which is not difficult since a lot moderators can’t handle any thing that makes them think

i have seen so many subs taken over by the people least suited to run them

our death

leads to the collapse

of unsolved sums

they seemed important

at the time

so many lives

your own life is the one that matters

don’t be fooled

into sacrificing yourself

for any form of "collective"

mimic worlds

however well crafted

lack

these paintings are interesting, the art of the insane, they don’t look insane to me

august klett

der würgengel [the exterminating angel]  by franz karl bühler, prescient of the holocaust and his own being gassed in 1940 as a "mental defective" by the nazis

i never lose any sleep over the adequacy of any re-translations, translations or "interpretations" i make because there’s severe limits on one’s ability to capture the thought of another in another language

that there’s some limit to universality, there’s no complete objectivity underlying all things as common to all things

i would say this is a fundamental philosophical truth, any "theory of everything" is naturally deficient

reflection can break a returning circle

sometimes

across two and a half thousand years

a few voices speak to me

that is all

i don’t say it should be that way

but it is

illness can place people in strangeness

you may not recognise the world

when and if you come back

illness can place people in strange places

you may not recognise the world

when and if you come back

clumner bluff

where the magic flowers grow

i can hardly remember it

except some condensation

in the telescope of time

clumner bluff

where the magic flowers grow

i can hardly remember it

a red haired sylph

smooth cheeked

oblivious to her own biological agenda

which will reach up and strike

a different person

a different perspective

sometimes

a different

country

its been a wet winter and early spring

the cattle yards are covered in the light green of new growth nettles

they like the shade of the macrocarpas

with gloves on i pick them

3 minutes boiling for dinner

i eat well

i think its a reasonable inference that the  siege of troy  actually happened, with even the possibility of helen as a mycenaean princess or queen

people always sell vehicles for a reason

and the reason is hardly ever in the favour of the buyer

being in favour is so rare its almost mythological, but i have come across first hand accounts

ellipsis

says

more

what is correct

and what is incorrect

those who pooh-pooh the distinction

are trouble

for

you

if you want to know what madness is

sit by yourself not doing anything

for quarter of an hour

the vacuity of our own thoughts

is astounding

the ending goes back to the beginning

the hills crowd the valleys

the valleys tear down the hills

the sky blinks clouds and tears

the mists shroud all

my retranslation of  wang wei’s  "written on crossing the yellow river to quinghe"

my boat

sweeping downstream

the river end met by sky

a settlement intrudes

the banks lined with houses

i can see a teeming market

looking back whence i came

clouds and mist

a loneliness descends

there’s something about a long look, 20 to 30 years

that delineates

everything in perspective

the dead who burn us

i can’t say why

the slow combustion

that never ends

the dead who burn us

i can’t say why

the slow burning combustion

that never ends

did text create the world ?

sometimes i wonder

the three stooges and the marx brothers are a satire? on immigrant life ?

there’s so much "flakiness" and unreality in the "supposed spiritual"

so attractive to people whose purpose in life is to try and put one over you

call them on it and see the fires ignite

first rule of life

never try to "straighten out" a woman

other lives

so many lives

stick to your own

time shows you all the dodged bullets

and the ones

not dodged

something tries to form

but can’t

the step ahead is too statistical

to form

without guidance

the maison de santé

at the table

the masks come off

the barely suppressed

illusion

explodes

into danger

true horror

seeing where we are

no

redress

ruminating

engraving the useless deeper

ruminating

engraving the useless

deeper

emotional intensity

turns out to be not so intense

cardboard cutouts

play punch and judy

elvis presley impersonators

one wonders why

until you realise

this is how the world is

the clouds drift

the sea rolls

the mist shifts

the clouds roll

the sea shifts

the mist drifts

the clouds shift

the sea drifting

the mist rolling

the clouds drift

the sea rolls

the mist shifts

the clouds roll

the sea shifts

the mist drifts

the clouds shift

the sea drifts

the mist rolls

new horizons

new thoughts

wandering across the landscape of being

yet what changes ?

nothing

still wandering

and one day

it will end

i can’t say forever has an end

or a beginning

but surely there is a "not forever"

where does that fit ?

ted hughes recounting  a dream of a fox

sylvia plath

she’s dead

gone

the pain of absence of being

hurt spread across the generations

what you can and can’t do

don’t ignore the wisdom of this

journalists these days

bossy dunning kruger stereotypes

beating up

whatever nonsense they can

the hubris so thick

you can cut it

they would close down the net

in a wink of an eye

if they could

if you look  at the stems  they are very neatly cut ,  scissor cut  i’d say

for all the noise of the lives of the famous

poets, generals, kings, artists, political leaders, mathematicans, scientists

they were mostly concerned

with the everyday

glimpses of which

are revealing

this plagiaristic world

before an idea is even born

it is copied

what exists

what doesn’t exist

our dreams

bleed

our longings

what exists

what doesn’t

our dreams

bleed

our longings

neither ted nor their children had that spark or flare of genius sylvia had

how transient the non-persistent

the world is sad for a reason

media manufactures the world for us

a fat purse

full of goodies

that burn

and

twist

and

spit poison

when handled

the gas of illusion

flooding out

making for a new undead

stuck in unreality

i have never written a poem before

syllable

cadences

rhyme

all don’t mean anything

to me

“ can any creed, philosophy, system, or culture endure the test and remain unmolten in this fierce focus of human life ? ”

he’s asking if any philosophies or creeds remain unchanged, well its a bit of a nonsense question

it doesn’t go anywhere, its circular and returns to itself pointlessly and interestingly that addresses his question/statement, a recursive loop that doesn’t escape itself

well we disagree and neither of us is granting any validity to what the other says so it stops at this point

its hard to define nonsense, but basically no matter how impressive it sounds, it just doesn’t go anywhere

its circular and returns to itself pointlessly

a recursive loop that doesn’t escape itself

english, you can make yourself understood from namibia to india to detroit to norway to kenya

this unappreciated miracle of life

i think you must be a writer

when people want to kill you

for message board posts

to read a book or poem crosses you into the writer

a lot of trouble comes of this

there’s no answers

“ what does that mean ? ”

that you spend your life dragging through everything looking for answers and finding none

that is "no answers"

its does not mean there are no answers, but that a process is void and the process has to be lived

death is open ended, you never cope with the loss of a person close to you

its as simple as that

a commenter on brad warner’s "haredcore zen" vlog writes

I wish I could meet up with you irl   .   .   .   and give you a big hug  : o )

my  reply

yeah, look this is the net, we are all strangers, look at the other side like i don’t want to meet you in real life, let alone hug

brad’s vlog should be called "the interpersonal boundary problem" blog

people here get offended simply by encountering what they disagree with, surely "the zen way" is to look at that disagreement and see what needs modifying instead of getting intensely tangled in personal conflict

you need help

lol, you are an activist for something ,  passionate writing  indeed !

why shouldn’t the shift to the net be permanent and there is movement away from real life institutions to skilled individuals based on the net

educational institutions used to have control over "publishing" ,  but not any more

all that is happening is covid is forcing rapid social change based on improvements in communications technology

fiction blended into true

you can’t peel them apart

to get the past and a story about it

fiction blended into true

in the past

you can’t separate them

trying to contain the world by knowledge

but the world

always

outgrows knowledge

the shulamite maiden

pursuing or being pursued by who ?

in the end

distance palls

the disrupted cycle

leaves messiness everywhere

yet strangely

the dissonant beauty

is

understood

ed.  the song of solomon has several  interpretations ,  there are likely textual problems with it, but one way to take it is lovers who must part, perhaps for class differences or the woman is an unloved concubine, who knows ?

the strangest thing is it being the only lyrical poetry in the bible/tanakh

a heart of stone

works better

than one

that

beats

roads we can’t see

that others have travelled on

not many

but true

they take us

along

with

them

roads we can’t see

that others have travelled on

not many

but true

they take us

along

them

the universes of me

are many and varied

makes me wonder though

what it is all about

all the fake condolences, no-one gives a shit, how can they? the web is full of this nonsense

pretend involvement in the lives of others you do not know in real life at all

condolences to strangers are a completely inappropriate social form

the big deals today for the usa and allies are protecting taiwan from china and the usa needs to drastically upgrade its cybersecurity, it should be a huge deal that the russians penetrated the usa's nuclear missile control as they did a little while back

the major powers are already in a sort of cyberwar and business is being dragged into it, the usa needs to import more programmers and fund a major defense software effort

this is  a good video explaining what went wrong in vietnam and actually its also what went wrong in afghanistan

julius caesar should never have invaded spain, but should have let his enemies  (the optimates)  remain there out in the open, rather than get stabbed to death by them a year later

the battle of thapsus

5000 years of mother’s  with sons at war