pending poems 179

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

"wisdom literature" can help give the perspective needed to build "social skills" for children on "autistic spectrum"

for instance i came across this "silence is a sign of approval"

i have wondered about that over the years in the response of others and myself, particularly if my nose has been put out of joint, but looking rationally i agree with what is proposed or said

not saying its always applicable, but sometimes it is

anyway there’s a lot of this on youtube

adult life is hazardous and full of traps that coming to too quick a judgement and opinion can land us in hot water and since teenagers are necessarily naive, its a difficult but necessary transition being proactive about sorting life skills out rather than being passive, though of course passivity has its place, i wish i had picked up on this earlier

food

the universal common denominator

and look how different the preferences are

can we take that lesson ?

there’s the law of "attraction"

there’s the law of "repulsions"

there’s the law of "attraction and repulsions"

in some universe academic philosophers argue endlessly on the difference

between the law of attractions and repulsion and the law of repulsion and attraction

what i find interesting

is the weight of meaningless words

writing a poem

is like taking a thought

and shaping it

and letting it

shape you

tragedy

like a harpy sitting on his headboard

john keats

nursing his brother and catching the TB

that killed him

ed. i have seen an opinion that the problem was compounded by his dosing himself with mercury as a remedy — an immune stimulant and actually somewhat effective as such

john’s last days were off the scale horrific

things that come into being

and things that don’t

be sure they have internal consistency

they often don’t

the repeated approach

to a dead end

means we haven’t learnt something

a lot of inconsistencies are not inconsistent

we only imagine them to be so

because of the way we look at things

yoda yogas yoda

yoda yogas yoga

yoga yodas yoda

yoga yoda yoga

meaning is a fluid

time flows backwards

impossible !

yet it does

i wish

some-one else

would do the work

of thinking directly

just discursing nowhere

to a nowhere else

traversing

for what is endless

songs begin

but don’t finish

its only through problems and dissonances

we can exist

the comfort

of the returning familiar

can’t exist

coming to a dead end

is a death of sorts

the way forward

ceases to exist

ends we trip over again and again

paths we follow

familiar to nowhere

not quite minus enough

to die

suspended in time

it suspends in time

so maybe there’s a purpose

things that come to an end

essential to understanding

things that don’t

there’s con and self-con, its hard to separate the two

things that go nowhere

many things

some things

a few things

don’t

it occurred to me that the reason behind the catholic church’s strenuous promotion of mother teresa was the opportunity for senior members of the church hierarchy to extract their own "tithe" from donations to her cause, it was certainly when you look back on it a highly polished operation and given the lack of up to date equipment and the impoverished working conditions of the "missionaries of charity" compared to the resplendent and beautifully tailored regalia of catholic dignitaries and vatican officials one doesn’t have to wonder where the money went

the stupid media fall a sucker for this sort of thing doing a lot of the promotion for free like with the dalai-lama, no probing facilitating what are highly professional hustles

its sorta farcical, what more ideal organisation to raise money for/from than one sworn to "obedience" and poverty, even the name rings duplicitous sanctimony and ambiguity

the current problems the vatican has with graft and cardinal becciu and pope francis is not the graft since it has always been there, but the mother teresa years are well gone and the kitty is bare and the graft is showing, and if you wonder where pope francis stands, remember that the cardinal is his friend and the likely undercover funding of the prosecution of cardinal pell in australia must have been known about and approved by francis who, adroit politician he is seems to have avoided the appearance of any involvement and is now painted as some sort of avenging angel

i’ve always had a question about the vatican, there was something about it that didn’t make sense, but looked at in terms of a sophisticated hustle it does make sense

it hasn’t always been like this modern incarnation, other modes have been oppressive dictatorship, warlord, semi ruler of europe, arts and architecture patron, its actually a very interesting history and its form today is certainly the most vapid

study finds progressive declines in vision in aging patients with diffractive multifocal IOLs

“ Thanks for your perspective ! ”

its not a "perspective", its observation and experience

agency you accept

agency you reject

downvotes on reddit in a way are quite positive, people have read you and react so the writing is effective

honestly i think at least 50% of reddit are discomforted by a high reading and writing age, if you are intellectually above them expect a negative response

“ what’s wrong with zen ? ”

there’s the statuary, crazy chants, incense, knee wrecking lotus, stupid services, culty leaders, cult uniforms, incompetent "interviews" and so on

chogyam trungpa is just a more intelligent con artist, brains are so short in that area he stands out

"chants are brainwashing"

"chants" are "brainwashing"

chants are brainwashing

chants are "brainwashing"

"chants" are brainwashing

trying to save the world

surprised

when it clearly doesn’t want to be "saved"

it was just your idea

time passing slowly

infills your understanding

with depth

stars

pinpricks of light really

cold hard hearts

rotating

with the universe

they take their meaning

from this

cycles don’t bother them

they are small

ray bradbury said

to become a writer

you have to write a lot

well i have written a lot

but i still don’t feel i am a writer

long sentences

and complex thoughts

are not my cup of tea

to write a thought down

and work it through

then exhaust it

and finish

and surprisingly

the next thing

comes along

my neighbour leaving

i didn’t know i cared

its like when a woman leaves you

you can feel the distance build up

you are already strangers

before you part

this to and fro

is one of life’s mysteries

its why i prefer my own company

the mysteries of landscape are always familiar

even the strange seems like home

and i have never left

language

a limited window between minds

its opacity

saves us from the horror

of seeing the other clearly

wrapping

needs unwrapping

the trap of

living

is the incompleteness of this process

impeding

clarity

chasing answers/ solutions when all the pieces are not in place

risky

wait when its called for

comedy

a whole genre

of the vicarious enjoyment

of the incompetence of others

the trauma

without ourselves being bitten

wisdom literature

its knitted fragments

an "in your face"

ontology

islam

its slashing sword

of censorship

ed. see, i can write a criticism and no-one raises a word

i can even say muhammad is fictional and no one cares but if i say muhammad was a paedophile then the walls come crashing in

actually it was a different culture, different times, if it was felt to be abnormal his marriage to ayesha wouldn’t have been included in the koran

prophecy

the light of the future

can’t be grasped directly

but only through

abstract reasoning

a woman’s uniform

necklace and earrings

a combination

of information

and

disinformation

how wide is the world ?

wide wide

how wide ourselves ?

not so wide

how wide is the world ?

wide wide

how wide are we ?

not so wide

the outstanding military weakness of china is the very high population density of its eastern seaboard

a few nuclear bombs would cause untold destruction, this the leadership of north korea have realised to their credit and have already created an effective deterrent, limited as it is

it seem the western world has forgotten what it worked out in the cold war, that its only "mutually assured destruction" that stops wars like the ukraine

australasia has about five or six years to get a nuclear deterrent in place, let’s see how uncomfortable things have to get before that’s done

if china takes taiwan it gives it an unparalleled degree of geopolitical and economic hegemony

questions of no questions

answers of no answers

this

philosophy

“ there were no mute inglorious Miltons out there, because the only criterion of having a beautifully complex thought was the ability to write in a beautiful and complex way ”

that’s an interesting viewpoint, that the sort of skill and ability milton showed in his writing is as much a "development" as inborn skill and the writing itself is eventually some distance from his natural ability

so since the writing is a distance via development and he would only write to be published, then the notion of "mute" or unpublished and unknown miltons is mistaken

you can never understand something unless you see the rough edges

if it just looks glossy and wonderful

beware

walter rosenberg/ rudolph vbra recounts

One night there came a transport from the concentration-camp-cum-ghetto of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. One of those disembarking was a well-dressed Czech mother, holding the hands of her two small children, and she was clearly relieved to have arrived at last. She said as much to a German officer : “Thank God we’re here.” She was one of those deportees who believed that the nation of Goethe and Kant would at last bring a measure of sanity to proceedings. That proved too much for one of Walter’s young comrades who, as he ran past her, hissed words meant both to scold and warn : “ You’ll soon be dead ”

The woman looked not so much scared as affronted by this intrusion from a ghoulish man in pyjama stripes, his breath foul, his head shaved, a prisoner who was surely therefore some kind of criminal. Instantly, she approached a German officer as if she were the aggrieved patron of a Prague department store, demanding to see the manager. “Officer, one of the gangsters has told me that I and my children are to be killed,” she complained, in perfect German

The SS man, gloved, his uniform creased in all the right places, gave her his most benign and trustworthy smile and said: “My dear lady, we are civilised people. Which gangster said this to you ? If you would be so kind as to point him out”. She did as she was asked, and the officer took out his notebook and quietly wrote down the number of the prisoner, visible on the man’s tunic. Afterwards, when everything was finished and all the people had gone, the officer sought out that prisoner and had him taken behind the wagons and shot. Walter was among those who carried his corpse back to the camp. At around the same time, the woman who had complained was gassed, along with her two young children

the weird thing about russian war films is the casualness with which the film treats russian lives

there’s definitely a different mentality there, their disposability

"cannon fodder" is a well understood concept amongst russians

i don’t think "mini or micro-monovision" versus full monovision is understood well

ed. a visual outcome option with cataract surgery

full monovision is quite a high magnification add, about 1 to 2.5D. the advantage is being able to close read, but the disadvantages are a loss of distance judgement and eyestrain

micro monovision is about .25 add, which if you get the eyes done separately and the dominant done first, is often done anyway, even for distance vision. I have .75 add with the vivity EDOF’s which seems to be a good balance, i don’t need glasses for most reading, but for sustained close work i will use readers

with the iols i have about 19/20, no glasses, one of the eyes is plano astigmatism, and the other eye is almost plano which is a huge advantage

i have to say if you can get plano astigmatism, or preferably about .15 "with the rule" the results are mindblowing, but i think the accuracy to a target is about plus or minus .25

mike, you can’t be a "practicing catholic" because your views are well known as "religious pluralism/ omnism" and not accepted by the church theologically, i would suggest you talk to a priest and come back to the real world about what catholicism is, the web is full of "made-up" religious views with no real life contact

“Pope Francis, in "Crossing the Threshold of Hope" writes that nirvana, considered by Buddhists to be a condition of ideal detachment and perfect blessedness, is really “a state of perfect indifference with regard to the world

Buddhism is in large measure an ‘atheistic’ system,’ we do not free ourselves from evil with the good that comes from God; we liberate ourselves only through detachment from the world, which is bad ”

the weakness of religious pluralism/ omnism is that if two religions were equally valid, then any distinction between them is meaningless which is certainly not the view taken by the respective adherents or theologians

and then he said there is no god

sleeping saint joseph

for a good death

saint dympha

for insomnia and mental illness

the panoply

of catholic

remedy

i think its stretching it to imply that a religion has "philosophical views" when in reality they take some philosophical ideas and murder them

recursive nightmares

spinning wheels

lacerating entanglements

the monsters of logic

far from escape

drive you into

recursive nightmares

spinning wheels

lacerating entanglements

the monsters of logic

far from escape

drive you into

complete certainty

that fixed point we all strive for

the illusion

of our

progress towards it

pathways going everywhere

the anywhere

pathways going everywhere

the anywhere

zen itself is a story, so its an "illusion"

you are sort of in an ontological bloodbath with questions like "what is the final reality" or is there none, or is the question an illusion

mysticism takes the position there is an experiential answer to this, whether that’s so you have to work out for yourself

pierre bonard

the open window

with trademark cat

to get the full effect experiment with the zoom to see it on different scales

i think its a mistake to call brad warner a monk, even though in japan "zen" monks can marry, the correct translation in english is priest imo

i’d go further and saying its a sort of "marketing deceit" to claim "monk" in the western celibate understanding

pre meiji zen/chan was celibate, there is a world of difference between celibacy and matrimony and chan/zen only makes sense in terms of celibacy which is why zen is now just a half-arsed flaky jumble full of pretenders

its the way its understood in english, monks in the christian tradition are celibate, priests can be celibate or married depending on the denomination and also carry a level of authority which monks don’t necessarily have

the egyptian dead

living an image

of their painted reality

what i have always wondered is that the public performances of the top ranking piano recitalists seem to want to play from memory and not sheet music

whether they give an extra intensity to the playing, that say the composer would not have ?

from the article “ The big idea: could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered ? ” by Laura Spinney

“ When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work ”

30 million is a big number, when it comes to libraries of verbal diarrhoea its hard to beat buddhism

more evidence sir henry neville wrote the supposed works of "shakespeare"

sir henry neville educated at oxford would have known latin and greek, there’s no way shakespeare could have and actually there’s no reason to suppose he could read at all

the author of that link is british, they seem to have a political hangup on the authorship question since shakespeare was plebian and sir henry neville upper class

now i think about it, the author may have been engaging in "guerrilla warfare" since he wouldn’t get published naming sir henry neville, but by saying shakespeare and its obvious that his thesis fits sir henry neville much better, he subtly gets the message across

the ezine publishing the article has an interesting "rationale" in the section "a note on our name" towards the bottom of this page

"reincarnation" is not only untrue, its "anti-true", there’s only this one life passing quickly and gone forever

what’s called "apologism" is trying to create a more rational explanation for some crazy literal belief held by the vast majority of adherents of a religion

amber heard

a good-looking woman

but a little bit insane

appearances can be deceptive

if there’s a phrase to describe the poet lord byron, its "away with the fairies"

ruminations

comic strips of existence

depressing

ruminations

comic strips of existance

depressing

condensation

the essence of writing

a vast panorama

compressed

into a few

tiny words

a rather fascinating look at the way world war 2 was fought in europe , the movements of controlled territory

the tide of the war clearly turned in the allies favour by december 1942 and if hitler had the slightest sense should have attempted to consolidate their russian position into something defensible and sue for peace, but war has its own inertia as the russians are finding out now in the ukraine

snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

the battle of keresztes

i would question the notion of "teacher"

agency rearing its ugly head

whereas the world

is flat

there’s several things disturbing about new zealand at the moment beyond the imminent alpine fault cracking with wellington experimentally about to be a testimony to building code effectiveness

the most important one is the failure of the education system to create employment skills from a very young age, in medieval england, boys aged eleven used to leave home and go and live with a craft master to develop their trade, children mature much earlier now so really the ball has to be set rolling much younger, the current education system only develops skills for academia

there is a very limited time window for children to take on the necessary employment skills for life and 15 is way too late to start, the academic world is different, but most people are not academically inclined nor is it useful for anything except a tiny minority to be so

a more abstract concern is a governmental /political attempt to alter the use of the english language, historically this has been associated with periods of outright political and social insanity

the words of buddha

drivel

buddha "theyself"

drivel

taking fiction as reality

schizophrenia

the words of buddha

drivel

buddha himself

drivel

taking fiction as reality

schizophrenia

i really like mervyn peake’s paintings from his time in sark, more than hints of a bygone era

i really liked mervyn peake’s paintings from his time in sark, more than hints of a bygone era

one day one opinion

another the next

the puzzle is

how each seems right at the time

interestingly stalin was well aware that sergei eisenstein’s film ivan the terrible was a direct criticism of him, but in a way it also glorified him, he did respect eisenstein’s ability as a director and did intervene to protect some writers like bulgakov, sholokov and pasternak, even osip mandelstham

you just have to read about ivan’s life to see the russian thinking behind their invasion of the ukraine and putin in fact has scripted a surprising amount of things from ivan and joseph, but the soviet world with its complete control of information and the bloody mailed fist of the secret police isn’t there to the same extent any more and i think basically he has lost control of the situation

a good youtube on ivan

dima fedotof

last day of the war

disturbingly prescient of russian cluster and thermobaric bombing in the ukraine

the bomber used in the animation is very russian, with the contrarotating propellers and pseudo ground effect wings

taking the real as real

and fantasy as real

the human condition

bad narratives

the world

about the world

sanity insanity

of necessity

both

the world must be

either or

neither nor

distanced

nor up close

so the awful events

meander on

unwinding the past

the tangle of who we are

is never-ending

which if you think about it

is as it must be

unfinished

one way or another

infinity is a perspective

of itself

as itself

psychotropic medications always have a troubled history of long term side effects

when you deal with the "mental health system" their primary concern is you are not a danger to others or yourself

the health of those medicated is lower on the list of priorities

a pattern

i can’t stick

or grasp

flies elusively

out of my hands

wherein lies the power

of the as yet unoccurred future ?

in our navigation of it

wherein lies the power

of the as yet unoccurred future ?

our navigation of it

infinity expresses itself

by being infinite

and traversing it

is the activity

the vanity of normality

replete in its own sufficiency

not seeing

it is cuckolded

all the time

what i think about

what i write

comes out differently

than what i think about

the unintentional cruelty of aging

if it were intentional

then ’twere cruel

if not

still is

thoughts rattle around in my brain

coalesce

and come apart again

a landscape

of words laid out

unremitting

foreverness

the traveller

picks his way through

the need to search

the empty space of imagination

for an intensity

more than reality

writing

starts

what follows the start

leads to the end

the dying sun

knows not what its death will cause

the straight and narrow

i always wander off

there is no path really

but my own

i saw this film quite young, maybe twenty or so, it had a big impact to the extent every now and then over the years, i thought about it, was never able to remember its name, but today it turned up just like that in the youtube recommendations

dersu uzala

a film with an intelligent plot ?

adapted from the book "the djinn in the nightingale’s eye" by a. s. byatt

she’s certainly a bit different

the wallace stevens poem she quotes at the end of the interview goes

from this the poem springs : that we live in a place

that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

and hard it is in spite of blazoned days

interestingly her sister is also a novelist and talks well

apparently the sisters don’t get along, but you can certainly see the similarities

neither is "photogenic", its interesting to compare their interviews with the usual brainless airheads the media loves

the problem with russia is the way it sets on its own

i have a theory that when you redefine a meaning away from common usage, its a sign of "mental illness"

like redefining "war" as "special operation"

of course that would make soviet-era russia, nothing but a hotbed of mental illness which proved to be the case

a correspondent from new york writes (29/5/22)

Everyone is getting covid here again. Vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. Actually a woman I know who is 75 had a 102 degree fever yesterday and tested positive for covid today

my reply

i think you need five or six months at least between shots for maximum effect, at least until a "broad coverage" vaccine comes out

and of course no-one takes vitamin D or MK7/K2

a touch of germanium sesquioxide etc when ill, there’s heaps that can be done, but i learnt years ago people prefer to die than think outside the box

everything unfolds continually

and at no point do you get consistent pattern

and you can sit back and say

well that’s it

some live more lives than others

and stretched too thin

they break

a flower

is not a face

a truth

or a lie

for a short while

it is the mystery of beauty

that is all

nothing

something

something more

than nothing

so the argument

goes

the problem with the texas shooting of 19 children and the tardy action by the police is that the police are not trained militarily, they are a right to be cautious about their own lives, the use by the shooter of a military grade assault rifle means you are basically faced with needing a response by militarily trained troops or equivalent

machine guns are banned as an obvious problem, but it doesn’t seem to be understood that semi-automatic assault rifles are in school shooting situations more lethal because they don’t require belts of ammunition to be carried by the shooter

interestingly, its possible to understanding the cultural reluctance of texas to ban assault rifles because of its historical indian and mexican wars where the citizenry needed guns

however this is politics, things have to go through extremes before anything is done, australia and new zealand are the hidden beneficiaries of the ukraine war, it now being obvious the direction china’s expansionism is heading and in my view nothing short of australasia having a nuclear deterrent will stop china, the ukraine’s fatal mistake was giving up the nuclear missiles it inherited when the soviet union broke up, russia kept its missiles and the ukraine didn’t, its that simple

a moving rendition of schubert’s ave maria , (ellen’s dritter gesang/ellen’s third song in fact) i think the natural reverb adds something, though the recording is not high quality

no idea who the singer is and can’t find anything on her

the lyrics are as catholic as you can get

russia, where its foreign policy is run by a female tv presenter

she’s a murderous bitch in make-up

you can bet your bottom rouble that no children of the "elite" are fighting in the ukraine

last night i put several drops of colloidal/ionic silver in an infected eye of a kitten and it pretty well cleared up the next morning, not quite perfect so the next day i did the antibiotic drops (chloraphenicol .5%) given for my cataract operation and 12 hours later its almost 100% better

i used the antibotic once myself once after my second cataract operation and then the colliodal silver once and never needed to use either again

conventional medicine has its place, but there’s this other dimension of very well targeted "supplementation" that really lifts you above the crowd health-wise, for example i think i have had mild covid possibly three times, once for sure since it first appeared, not really ill at all in terms of covid because in addition to two 5 month spaced pfizer vaccines, i take 3000iu of vitamin D and 90 mcg of K2/MK-7 a day which modulates the immune system the right way

when i look at the billions spent on covid and they don’t get this basic supplementation right, one can only shake one’s head

a couple of weeks ago i sent my my ex neighbour who was becoming crippled from knee arthritis with her shift to a colder damper climate this same vitamin D vitamin K combination and she is now hugely improved

one of the weirder things i have noticed is that when people have taken some health advice i have given and got considerably better, they then do something really stupid not understanding they are still and will always have a certain health fragility

oddly materialism and idealism (philosophically speaking) are both true, its not either or, they mesh !

rob parson’s pack raft’s down the franklin and gordon rivers in tasmania’s south-west

as always the mute key is judicious with a lot of the music

against agency

is random potential

a better explanation

of life

and

its

vicissitudes

the cupboards of memory

accumulated junk

with the odd flash

of a jewel tumbling out

so unusual

one asks

how did it get there ?

“ the bowl of night ”

fitzgerald’s line

resonates

but better

to see

a clear night sky

at 4am

hanging there

with its stars

ed. the reference is to the first verse of the first edition of edward fitzgerald’s translation/reinterpretation of "the rubaiyat of omar khayyam"

awake ! for morning in the bowl of night

has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight

and lo ! the hunter of the east has caught

the sultan’s turret in a noose of light

instruction

advice

teaching

one life intruding on another

infinity is a democracy

we each tread it

to our demise

what i open my door to

the seasons change

and pass

what i open my door to

the seasons change and pass

the finial goes nowhere

except itself

in and outside the boundary

the final point

is an illusion

yet there is something unconstructed

that is not

biphasic sleep

sleeping in one shift is an modern habit and probably relates to interior lighting disrupting the circadian rhythm between "shifts"

what about the ukraine ? what about syria ? what about rwanda, its not a good world, look around

ed. response to a hardcore zen vlog comment about being traumatised by the may 24th 2022 shooting of 19 elementary school children in texas

that’s just the human, what about elephants, whales and dolphins being killed ? they are just as much intelligent conscious beings as humans !

for most of human history, if you were a town that failed to successfully resist a siege , there was good possibility of every living soul in it being massacred

“ Former inmates of Reddit, what are some things about prison that people outside wouldn’t understand ? ”

On the one off chance the cell block takes part in killing a pedophile, unless you got lucky the week before and ended up in the infirmary (like I did), you’re expected to take part in the killing even if it adds time or even life to your sentence. If you don’t take part, you’ll be seen as sympathetic to said pedophile which means you’ll end up getting killed next

My cell mate made it clear to the rest of the cell block I was injured and in infirmary when all this went down so when I returned, no one came after me

my comment

this is the usa which is pretty extreme (at least to australasian eyes) , but i find the sheer conventionality of criminals attitudes amazing, there’s not an unconventional bone in their bodies in that sense, no spirit of rebellion against the system at all, no political interest, just murderous stupidity

faces i know

imposed on faces i don’t know

older

descriptions

chase

mirages

what is not a mirage

doesn’t need to be chased

but enters unannounced

like an ever welcome guest

who goes all too quickly

you can actually tell a lot about a person by their writing and even more if they paint

cycling at 4800 meters in southern peru

at some point you have to go on a week’s silent retreat to get what meditation is about, there is a shift in perspective with the increased skill level that comes from better familiarity with yourself

my reply (below) to a comment on brad warner’s vlog replying to the above and claiming no necessity for attending long silent retreats

i think what is interesting in your reply, is you are projecting a certain state of affairs without the experience of it and seem to be reasonably confident in that projection !

i would criticise your reply, except for the doubt expressed about the utility of a long retreat which is a reasonable doubt, as being meaninglessly wordy, that is you are not "getting it right" and that’s typical of what happens on this vlog because people lack the experience of long retreats and that just end up stuck in various word bogs in the dunning-kruger landscape

if you can say there is a "spiritual journey" , the analogy would be travelling on a long road that you have to get to the end of and it has to be continuous, if its interrupted, you get set back and have to start again, though this is only partially the case

there is an end goal, i don’t say there aren’t further roads it opens up, the reality is the newly opened roads are too life changing for most people and this is likely the case for you

i have never seen anyone come to any sort of understanding with lsd or other psychedelics, i think there is a heft of significant brain damage with these despite the claims to the contrary

your post is sorta "babble" , this an area you want to work on, i’m not being offensive but know you can handle a useful criticism

there is something to figure out and as i wrote, it opens up new avenues, that are rarely embarked upon, so its more a beginning than an end

some-one else’s experience is besides the point

a good talk on niccolò machiavelli , he’s really quite interesting and not the oversimplified view we have of him at all

his argument is you can’t be good in a bad world, but "virtues" are appropriate when appropriate

our past

scattered pieces of the jigsaw

that need to be fitted

to make sense

food and sleep

broad categories

the devil is in the detail

dried flowers

a waterless vase

reminders of summer

dried flowers

a waterless vase

reminder of summer

the signposts in a strange loop

telling us the way out

don’t ignore

marriage

the bond of partnership

even if they don’t like each other

hard liquor

its colour

is not benign

what is restful to look at

is not necessarily

restful to be

on the threshold of old age

i have my teeth

i have my eyes

i have my health

i have my brain

well they are here today

war and death

bereavement

a fun fact

we ignore

the blossoms don’t fade

quick as the scent

living many years in the same spot

known faces

all around

imponderable questions

without answers

you can’t say they go anywhere

nowhere

life

a game of menko

some play better than others

the abandoned child

the pathos of existence

ingrained in its features

the catholic church is killing itself with its "geriatric" popes

the farce with cardinal pell’s prosecution being financed by cardinal angelo becciu is beyond fiction and a testimony to the incompetence of the present incumbent

i do remember a comment by the complainant in the pell case after the appeal court freed pell which was a tacit admission the supposed crime never occurred, which actually, if you look at the evidence was obvious

ideas

pasted together

not checked

for

fit

relevance

consistency

validity

in short

the usual

human

nonsense

the net

publisher of so many idiosyncratic schizophrenic theologies

each man or woman adding to the existing trash heap

why get something so wrong to no point ?

"consciousness" is a self-perception that "magically" emerges from the broadcast operational mode of the brain

the only way you can make sense of it , is, i think, some sort of "ontological" "likeness of god"

the thing about zen/mysticism is it proposes a "likeness" so complete it is an "identity" of god and its basically "experiential" though there’s plenty of ambiguities in this respect

so basically there’s this "experiential aspect" which continually unfolds and that’s where the work is and not the bankruptcy of the "strange loops" of various theologies

the theory of everything

everything is not the end of the road

what do you do then ?

like walking up and down stairs

to get somewhere

problem solving

life’s autumn

turns out to be

surprisingly

uneven

life’s autumn

turns out to be

uneven

we travel

the past is sucked behind us

or is it ?

by myself

there are others

but i am by myself

early hours

a falling moon

i fall with it

roads that don’t go anywhere

this life

the lives of others

the illusion persists

— somewhere —

roads that don’t go anywhere

this life

the lives of others

the illusion persists

of going somewhere

fundamental

we look for

does it look

for us ?

the net is such a different publishing medium, not the least because it has so fundamentally changed the "content landscape" and escapes writers from the conformity, mediocrity and dishonesty of the publishing world enabling them to publish "truer" to themselves

i don’t think rupi kaur is given credit for a "sometimes" very original viewpoint which is the real poetry, not saying a lot of it isn’t "girly trash", but all the same there is a "different mind" at work

the second rate intellects

in the critical literary world

is depressing

ed. poetry is different from prose, in this case you might suppose "is" in the last line should be "are", but in the interest of "density" the use of "is" fuses several versions of the poem together as you switch between possible singular, plural, demonstratives, prepositions etc in the first two lines, also the use of a "dissonant" grammar syncopates the attention in a way that makes you think

a poem comes with a cloud of associated alternatives which in part gives it, its effect and makes effective translation almost impossible

second rate intellects

in the critical literary world

are depressing

see, it has a slightly different meaning, there’s probably about 10 or twenty versions there making some sort of "semantic cluster" only a few of which will translate into a "writeable" poem

the second rate intellects

of the literary critical world

are depressing

a woman’s love

slow to turn

but when it goes

it leaves

generally i find if you can do a task "competently" people are only too happy to let you do it, you will need to observe and skill build more if they are turning you away or being discouraging

at one extreme

and then another

people

life

give me the non-existent

median

the peace of dullness

bring it on

“ Can anyone recommend any further reading on this topic ? I’m looking for a book that delves into the topics of quantum physics, consciousness, universal consciousness etc ”

lol, youtube will give you "the span"

what drugs and alcohol do to the brain

johnny depp is making an idiot of himself in front of the entire world at his own cost

when i was a child at boarding school in auckland, you could see across the valley sir edmund hillary’s house (which was perked up on a hill sorta "overhanging" as befits a mountaineer) and at the time he was held in considerable "reverence" in new zealand, sort like a "saint" actually, a modern version of one so i always have had an interest as to whether he and tenzing norgay were actually the first, especially since he said, well you have to get to the top and return, he did say there was no evidence left by mallory or irving of being there, but there seems a reasonable chance they made it to the top with the last sighting of them being so close

in hillary’s shoes i think i would have lied if i had found evidence and his statement about having to return is ambiguous, their being first was a huge deal at the time and quite political , not much to compare it to today in yesteryear’s british "monoculture"

remnance

propitious change

still has

the meaning of life

ultimate reality

uncaused cause

seagulls squawking

flying at night

magpies

ultra-intelligent

only thinking to make a pain of themselves

early in the morning

spinning around

spinning on our past/s

spinning around

spinning on our pasts

spinning around

spinning on our past

the edict of misfortune

follows the fortunate

this life

the edict of misfortune

follows the fortunate

those that supposedly live outside this world

the mad

you have to have lived amongst

to understand the world

those that supposedly live outside this world

the mad

you have to have lived amongst

to understand it

our addiction to agency

consciousness without being

we cannot conceive

the world is too large for me

yet i contain it

one way is simpler than the other

the world is too large for me

yet i contain it

one way

is simpler than the other

every time you are telling some-one something they don’t want to hear and this happens on message boards a lot

you are faced with two problems

keeping your end of the argument up and keeping things on an amicable plane

no wonder people keep their real views to themselves

ed. keeping silent is a lot less trauma, but a lack of interaction with the world and its opinions will lead to "kickback" at some point

portraits of henry the eight

your conventional thug

wikipedia has a good page on the "frankenstein authorship question" , percy shelly’s contributions were substantial which would seem only reasonable

nowhere is home

a temporary light

creates an illusion

that is all

what is a question ?

recursion bedevils any rational explanation of "life"

doesn’t seem to stop

the idiots

chasing their tails

writers

fantasists

outside

therapy

agency

an unseen hand

behind everything

drawing

but not as we want it

illusory stability

everything moves

and ourselves with it

there’s not much of a line between writing and schizophrenia

however with schizophrenia the created worlds are the result of inwoven mistaken perception that clashes with "normative reality"

and actually a lot of writing is not too far from that, though the better quality enables an ambiguous "fit" and "not fit" giving valuable insight

there’s more worlds than the world we call "reality"

snoring

coming from a box of paper rubbish

on the veranda

a cat

asleep

snoring

coming from a box of paper rubbish

on the veranda

a cat asleep

writing programs

university english courses

creating

toxic generations

unable

to think

for

themselves

the absent sadness

of absence

of what might

have

been

a golden oldie

ghost riders in the sky

“ then, cowboy, change your ways today

or with us you will ride

trying to catch the devil’s herd

across these endless skies ”

the song was written by stanley jones and was based on a story told to him when young by an old indian man from arizona

“ when someone dies, their spirit goes up in the sky to become a ghost rider ”

you can see the influence of the song on the western genre

will any universe that exists necessarily have the potential to generate life in which case you can argue this is the only universe or is this universe with its ability to support life a very small statistical slice of a vast array of existing universes/multiverse that cannot support life ?

i think the notion of a "fine tuned" universe, ie, certain values of various physical parameters enabling life favours the latter

one can go even further, that there are "not quite" existent universes, where do they come from and where do they go to ? what’s in the darkest recesses of platos’s cave ?

where does the abstract meet actual physical existence ? is ambiguity about existence the solution to "the problem of universals" ? can this solution ever exist in such a concrete form ?

i don’t think you can reason about that ambiguity, you can only be that ambiguity, which is actually what the "hunting of the snark" is

if you "understand" this, you are doing better than me !

harold godwinson’s loss at the battle of hastings had its origins in his recent success at the battle of stamford bridge three weeks earlier, the victory turned out to be pyrrhic, those norsemen under harald hardrada extracted a very high price

william got lucky to a certain extent, but harold made a fundamental strategic mistake, his aim should have been an alliance with one (most likely the norse) of the invading parties against the other and given his brother was in alliance with harald hardrada, he had the opportunity

william blake

auguries of innocence

a long list

of guilt

what it means

i don’t know

except its fantasy

a dream

where the sums of god’s justice

add up

“ what are you afraid of ? ”

being alive or dead

somewhat in-between

“ isn’t that overly comprehensive ? ”

i am not afraid of being comprehensive

“ what are you afraid of ? ”

being alive or dead

inbetween

“ isn’t that somewhat comprehensive ? ”

i am not afraid of being comprehensive

“ Started noticing this a few weeks ago if I look at the moon I see like 6-7 moons around it, close to it not far away kind of overlapping it ”

one moon is a fiction, there’s seven or eight stacked up behind each other, sounds to me like you are missing two

something

nothing

underlying

yet things

appear

and disappear

where do they come from ?

all religion is necessarily ontological, if you didn’t have the ontology, you wouldn’t have the religion

however, being axiomatic, ontology is necessarily flawed

“ how can we help others if we don’t "perfect" ourselves first, or at least sort ourselves out a bit ? ”

"sorting" just seems to create new frontiers of "unsorted", involutes even

is and isn’t

the idiots blather

like one

is more important

than the other

zen and buddhism are basically "monotheist" , just substitute "absolute nature" for "god", this is why they have both slotted in so well to western culture, they are cut from the same theological cloth

if something is "better" in terms of the religous values, then that is "more god-like" which by various ontologies necessarily implies "god"

so buddhism which on first glance is "godless" actually is "god-ed" , just "disguised" in the way it goes about it

“ Considering God is everything and everything is God — including you ”

interestingly from an ontological point of view, god can’t be everything, rather , is a culmination of attributes that are "god-like", so you have to have room for attributes that are not "god-like"

the absence of god is "not god"

i think its intrinsic to "being" that he/she can’t be everything, yet since this is the case, there is a necessary limitation in god, that very beingness is not that different from our own constraints in existing

is this ambiguity a circle

i think so !

nothing

no-thing

doesn’t exist

in existence

but existence

exists

how

sensible !

god bleeds into the context

ontological being

that you

can’t

separate

from

existence

a very interesting interview with henry kissinger, who i know from the failure of the vietnam war which was always a lost cause, however he talks a lot of sense and in particular raises the question about russia’s inability as a nuclear power to walk away from defeat by the non-nuclear ukraine, actually as the usa did in vietman and afghanistan

we could yet see a low megatonnage bomb dropped in the ukraine which would effectively end the war in russia’s favour, which would create a huge "earthquake" in the modern geopolitical landscape

international politics is pretty brutal, it always has been, you can’t have fluffy ideas about making the world "a better place", the best you can do is look after your own security and get some degree of "win-win" interaction with your adversaries, which actually is, i think, kissinger’s viewpoint

new zealand thinks it is well away from any potential conflict, but i would pick australia as being able to deliver nuclear warheads within ten years, new zealand’s problem is if china attempted to annex new zealand, would australia be prepared to risk its own annihilation in the defence of new zealand ?

if this seems far fetched, please understand china’s strategic interest has always been to pick off "islands" first, easy to see actually with current events, however i feel kissinger’s advice about keeping up with various forms of economic and cultural engagement with the "adversary" while increasing defence and offensive capability moderates more extreme dangers

the australasian/pacific security situation is necessarily "a mixed bag" , don’t expect it to be any other, oversimplified views go down the traumatic path of "correction"

the west, intent on demonising north korea has completely overlooked what it has right, which is, limited though its nuclear capability is, its enough to keep china from annexing it, which given the preoccupation of russia and the west in the ukraine has created an opportune window for china

to convey something so it can be easily understood is a whole higher level of skill, sadly so missing in most pedagogues, well i understood frank wilczek

charles dicken’s people

the victorian developmental crisis

short of vitamin D

another interesting video by stasha gominak

symmetry is recursion

the special case of mapping onto itself

means the recursion can be "handled"

ontological

god goes to the many

and the many goes to god

beyond that circle

who can say ?

the failure of apologists

is the infinite need for response

don’t get caught

19th century russia as conveyed through the eyes of its artists

konstantin savitsky

taras shevchenko

if you have ever read vladimir nabakov’s book "ada or ardor" he paints a picture of this other world where the decemberists won and the revolution never happened and this marvellous vision of a relatively benign russia persisted

you narcissists have no sense of shame, pretending is what you do, keep it to yourself in your illusions

ed. the net has opened up the flood gates of the "crazy" , incompetent musicians, writers and the like full of themselves and their hubris, yet delivering discordant rubbish that offends the ears and eyes

any supposed end result is just a stage in an endless process, there, that is "clear mind"

any supposed end result is just a stage in endless involuting processes, there, that is "clear mind"

"meditation" for something that is supposed to be "beneficial" , in my observation just makes people idiots, dogmatic and stuck in "faux"

they don’t read widely or with discrimination, so just engrain the brain "default circuitry", not a fate i would wish on anyone

eternity

is serenity

to drift with the mists

of moonlight

forever

one god

is two

or three

or four

why bother

with any god

i started reading emily dickinson when i was about 20 years old

i can’t say all these years later i am any the wiser though i am now well past the age she died

moonlight

tree shadows

yet

clumped grass cuttings

have shadows too

lyric lands

fairy isles

silver streams

live the dream

unlikely

when you look at the "creamy treats"

and think of buying them

you are getting too dopey

about the cats

the joy of no editor

the sunrise in the morning

sunset in the evening

and in between

everything as

should

the nay-sayers go quiet

i don’t like your poems, i don’t like you

where are they

vanish like the mist

i don’t miss them

circles of knowledge

incite more circles of knowledge

its not enough that things can simply be ?

we need to know more

the crocodiles of incorrectness

snap distressingly close

tick tock

the chock drops

another turn

understanding

glimmers more

one can say anything

but does it actually mean something ?

drivel or dribble

who can say ?

war seems to have this characteristic

old men make decisions the young die for

ontology "strives" for truth, i don’t think it is a "measure of truth" since in effect it is "apologetic"

ontology strives for truth, i don’t think it is a "measure of truth" since in effect it is "apologetic"

mervyn peake , another to add to my list of geniuses crimped by electroconvulsive "therapy"

the others are janet frame and sylvia plath

sad

a good selection of peake’s paintings, i particularly like his ones of sark

my only criteria as to whether some music is good or not, is will i listen to it all the way through the video ?

this i listened to though i wouldn’t say i liked it particularly

gabriella quevedo plays her cover arrangement of dire straits "sultan of swing"

in the beginning

present and future

go before

ask

roger penrose

my old age

still trying to work out

how to use

a mobile phone

they float through life

those who know what they are doing

as well as those who don’t know what they are doing

the only difference is

over time we know one

and not the other

this is a very interesting paper " a simplified variant of gödel’s ontological argument" by christoph benzmüller which effectively states that the absence of god is not god which fits theologies having hells or similar

so in an ontological context you have things which are not god, which has always been a theological conundrum, since god is "perfection" or unsurpassably great, how can there be where he is not

the beauty of the "ontological context" is it is extreme and makes things clear, but unfortunately that extreme is not consistent with the ambiguity of the reality we know so breaks down, so it has this sense of being "is" and "isn’t"

religions all seem to beat around the "ontological bush" being a combination of synchronicities and flagrant violations

unbelievably computers seem to be necessary for working this variant out and brought to mind "deep thought" in "the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy" who, in giving the answer "42" expressed a contempt for ontological arguments, but since in fact 42 did turn out to have a solution , that contempt was wrong

ed. 42 was assumed not to have a solvable three cubes solution when the book was written

“ what is your advice ? ”

i have no advice

well i should have advice for you

90% of the world is imbeciles

don’t exclude yourself or others from the 10 or 90%

at the end of a long day

no wine

not even moonlight

but the light of the stars

spills

false problem

more like nonsense framed

as though it means something

day dreaming

maladaptive daydreaming

meditation

where

the

lines

fall ?

half a look

can be worse then none

richer pastures we cannot visit

because of time

the irony of the new testament with its 180,000 words is the most profound were uttered by pontius pilate, a real historical person as it happens, but his character is not like portrayed, more a horse racing political toady with a streak of brutality

“ what is truth ? ”

eponymous has been a word i have had difficulty remembering the meaning of, but an easy way is that romulus was the eponymous founder of rome

i didn’t know he murdered his brother remus

air new zealand’s new safety video is actually an attempt at religious indoctrination, a literal belief in various "spirits" who provide a morality and seems to bear more similarity to asian animism than anything else

trust an advertising agency to create some monstrous hybrid so insane it beggars belief

air new zealand with its long history of "robbing" shareholders is again majority owned by the new zealand government so this ad is some sort of subtle implementation of a political "meme" that is currently pervasive in new zealand

inside the boundaries

the animal noises

disgust me

outside

they fade

what "science" is appears to be the subject of endless rambling philosophical discursions but i favour karl popper’s view, that its an activity that is occupied with generating "falsifiable" hypotheses which nicely separates it from mathematics which of course now famously can generate "unprovably true theorems"

string theory is an interesting borderland child of this divison, having its origins in mathematical elegance rather than experimental physics it seems wrecked on the reefs of falsifiability, yet has a mathematical life of its own, sailing free of any constraints of plausibility

the imagery in ezekiel’s most famous vision is quite babylonian and is an ontological representation of god in the form of an emperor on a throne/chariot that is separate and above all and the lower aspects of the "vision" with the wheels and angels is the expression of god’s "manifestation" in reality which is and isn’t "of god", something very difficult to convey

its not drugs but babylonian imagery and like the book of revelations, is not a vision at all but a constructed work of fiction (a political document in revelations case)

in my view its really an ontological argument asking if god exists and if he does, how or in what form does he exist ?

education in general

is a lurching of semi-competence

worse

pay attention to your own road

if you travel any other

there’s trouble

cathedrals

they are besides the point

a testimony to ingenuity, effort and architecture

still

they are beside the point

more nothingness

in a desert of nothingness

the futility of ontology

trying to mimic

what its not

once we get a feel for the extremes of life

uninsulated what can happen

we would curl up in fright

but of necessity

must move on

decompressing another’s bullshit

compresses your own

sanity

a man arrived in hell and as he was being tortured and beaten up he asked

“ how can you do this to me ”

the demons stopped, looked in him in wonderment and replied

we’re demons, its what we want to do, your problem is in giving us power over you

and went back to to torturing and beating him

the sums never added

stretch out before us and behind us

we need their conclusions

maybe

the best poem ever written never made the light of day

probably its still out here

waiting to be seen

jurassic world is an interestingly disguised horror movie, that is its genre, its antecedent is h. g. wells’ "the island of dr. moreau"

52 factorial or the number of different combinations of a pack of cards is staggeringly large

more abstract views

come slowly

or quickly

in their problem solving way

there’s an interesting case for emily dickinson as a female irish poet because of the household employment of her irish friend, maggie maher

you can see there is a shift away from the flamboyant of her earliest poems in "an irish direction"

ireland’s working class sophisticated literary culture is a bit of an eye opener

afterlives

run the gamut

from the greek semi-sensible to the muslim bizarre

even the nihilist atheist nothing

anything except to admit

we cannot see

the sleeping beauty never wakes

without the prince the story dissolves

yet the enchantment is powerful

the limbo of existence

extending forever

in a story that never completes

ed. this poem was inspired by what i think is some of walter de la mare’s best writing , chapter 6 of henry brocken

there’s a lot of research around now saying "being seated" is a health hazard, what i find is i have a sense of sitting too long and naturally get up and walk around when on the computer, plus some chores during the day spread out keeps me active

i’m not in favour of exercise per se because of the negative effect it has on the joints

of course the "elephant in the room" these days is being "overweight", we are a culture in denial about the problem

it took a lot of research and sorting out the best surgeon for my cataract operations, medical shit is full of minefields

i saw two other surgeons before the last one i settled on, one of the others was extremely well regarded but i got a feeling of "not quite right", still, i learnt from each one

in a way it took the four years i spent avoiding the operation to sort out what i actually wanted visually as i used mini-monovision to chase my declining visual acuity, and then this new alcon EDOF called "vivity" turned up and then i waited a year for them to improve the production process as it was new

in what universe is ignorance a good thing ?

so many "netizens" seem to be operating under this assumption

a few hours work with google can remedy so much !

miscarriage

the toughness of women

an area men don’t compare

going on forever

people mistake this forward motion

for progress

“ what does your writing mean ? ”

it means what you interpret it as

“ surely you jest ! ”

no, it can never mean more than what the reader ascribes to it

i’ll say this for johnny depp, for some-one who was a "sex symbol" in his time, he doesn’t have any clues about women, maybe that was part of the attraction ?

the problem with opinions on suicide is when you take a moralistic stance, you are trivializing some-one’s death, in fact its a topic best kept well clear of

stretching out far before us

stretching out far behind us

time

tears

what could be

less

transferable ?

the oddness

post cataract operation

of having the "visual aids"

requirement removed

on my driver’s licence

would other features of aging

were so reversible

the road behind

and the road ahead

look startlingly similar

walking the escher staircase

they go up and down in same measure

arriving at the beginning before the ending

they go around and around forever

infinity

because it walks by itself

does nothing

except

be itself

infinity

because it walks by itself

does nothing

except

be itself

systems of reason

go nowhere

because we die

and can’t take them with us

walking a road

the gravel seen with clarity

crunch crunch crunch

walking a road

the gravel seen with clarity

each footstep crunches

this autumnal day

sleet

not quite transiting to hailstones

a disappointment

the fugue of being

we go deeper

without recovering

the fugue of being

we go deeper

without recovery

more taneda santōka "retranslations"

a crow flies

in the direction i am travelling

the stream

one moment sounds so close

the next so far away

seeing my reflection

in the stream i am crossing

that makes me

a traveller

the final view

of some mountains

i loved

struggling through the brush

weaving

ducking under

pushing aside

the loneliness of age

the unrecoverable

loss of yourself

poor little shopkeeper

his nose put out of joint

writing

ed. attitudinally some of these people leave something to be desired when confronted with anything of literary or artistic sophistication

on the other hand their election to town councils explains a lot about the crucifyingly bad "jungle gym" sculpture infesting public places now

explaining to the uncomprehending

they remain

uncomprehending

taneda santoka

his writing is somewhat flat

why

saké has the responsibility

my "retranslations"

sitting outside as the sun sets

eating my meal

memories rise like the tides

on the ferry to my childhood home

butterflies fly

an entangling path

the emptiness

of a stormy

beach

on the beach

my only pillow

driftwood

atop a sand dune

the vista

doesn’t include

civilization

from atop a sand dune

the vista

doesn’t include

civilization

sometimes

the wind

feels sad

the flowing water

calms me

nothing more wrathful

than a mediocre talent

outshone

“ fool yourself, don’t fool me, i won’t be the only one telling you, you are stupid ”

people can claim anything about themselves, but how others regard them is the acid test, don’t take strangers or people you don’t know well on their own cognizance

people treat existence as something solid

that can be knocked

that’s there

but its not

it has shades of grey

tints of colours even

transparencies

nonexistence

the world

male hubris

female hubris

that insists

on learning

the hard way

these idiots who charge in when they’re not up to speed in a discussion in any serious philosophical depth

their only aim

is to wear you out

on a journey

discarding

ontological necessity

religion is necessarily ontological, whereas art is not

basically religion deals in the tangible while art is at its core the abstract intangible

to accept uncritically is a form of worship

beware

monotheism is a paradigm which says there is a more ultimate reality, it is an ontological position that is in the area of "the proof of god/absolute"

dreams occur

they have no bedrock

underneath

we disagree, you make your "claims" , i make mine

troll

or troll-less

authenticity

disturbs

the inauthentic

3.37am

saturn, mars, venus

in a line

something special

to see

ed. i did know about this rare "alignment" which last occurred in 947 A.D. , but still was surprised to see it when outside early in the morning, literally all those palnets in a straight line in the sky, in fact there is a fourth, jupiter, but that wouldn’t show until 4.30am so i missed that

actually before i sorted out what planet was what i had written

3.37am mars, jupiter, venus

in a line

something special

to see

which is a more semantically coherent rendering of what i was trying to convey with their symbolism, but the real world doesn’t necessarily correspond to what "poetic license" needs

the passion of addicts

missionaries for their bizzarity

always

amazes me

alcohol and drugs are "embodied mind"

crimping it

i never met anyone

who was

the larger

for them

loneliness

the need for human company

never was with me

the sun of infinity

always

warmed

back

death creeps slowly

go to where

the forsythia grows

the net is rife with "transference" where people have boundary problems and over-identify with a (to their eyes) more glamorous, wealthy, intelligent, famous etc. person

they literally imagine they are that person and speak for them, get defensive on their behalf, are unable to address their own problems and surprisingly constitute more of a danger to the person they are fixated on than anyone else

schizophrenia onsetting in middle age is surprisingly prevalent and can be very subtle

“ if you are saying monotheism is wrong , then polytheism is right ? ”

i’m not saying polytheism is right, however its more honest

in the end you can only argue to a certain point and it just comes off as different viewpoints

on the one hand there’s the russo-ukraine war, on the other johnny depp is suing amber heard in a case that if they weren’t celebrities would have been tossed out of court

neither is long on brains or short on drugs, the commonality of the "acting profession"

yup

life

zen and buddhism, despite their claims to be otherwise are essentially forms of montheism and therefore "necessarily wrong"

you are "collective referencing"

ed. my response to a criticism of my views not conforming to current "spiritual stereotypes"

well the problem is "collective views" in terms of "the spiritual search" are always necessarily wrong

you have to sort it out for yourself, when you do that and have the courage of your own views then things look very different

side by side in the supermarket magazine rack was the "new scientist" with "how big is infinity" on the cover

next to national geographic with "the story of jesus"

the new scientist article was somewhat obscure and i couldn’t work out whether there was another level of infinity between "countable" and "continuum" or not, ie, does or doesn’t cantor’s continuum hypothesis hold ?

the only interesting thing in the story of jesus was "the story of john the baptist", however its likely entirely a story without any historical reality, the reference in josephus is an interpolation and if you think about it, the story itself is like something out of the arabian nights, it has that level of unreality, kings and their families are usually thugs with a very limited imagination

well for some reason national geographic has migrated its content into deceptive apologetics and i doubt either of these magazines will have a printed version within five years

“ why i gave up the search for a historical john the baptist ”

the beauty of a poem compared to painting

is you can cover a lot more ground

a lot more quickly

with a lot less effort

mental vs physical is just the wrong way of looking at seated meditation and its "rules"

the right way is in terms of the "free energy principle" and "embodied cognition" , that cognition is not separate from various embodiments

for example in terms of dogen you would look at his travels themselves as part of his cognition and embodiment, it gives a far broader view and actually places zazen in the realm of psychosis which it is and all my observation of real life zazen, except for a beginning stage of possibly several years of utility is it degenerates into some problematic condition, being a frozen embodiment that outputs stupidity and narrow mindedness which is every zen teacher i have ever met

zen is really no different from ontological christianity with its assumption of redemption (enlightenment) through death of the self in meditation (compared to the death of christ to "save us") and bring us back into the presence of the ontological being of whom there can be no greater (god or absolute reality in this case)

you can actually ask if there is any greater being than dogen or buddha and i think the practical treatment by their respective religions is that the answer is no and the nature of the religion is to censor any erosion of this view

in the case of buddhism/buddha its nonsensical since it posits an historical person that is clearly fictitious just like jesus whereas dogen is an actual historical person, but you can put him up against say the mystical poet emily dickinson and ask which is greater and imo emily is greater, though dogen has his strengths, in fact with the comparison of any historically real people you going to get a mixed picture

in terms of any "search" i think "meditation" has an initial benefit possibly extending several years, but beyond that it becomes toxic

whatever people claim about dogen, i think after his sojourn with rujing he did very little meditation as evidenced by the time his voluminous writings must have taken so soto itself is like a disease of dogen that dogen never adhered to in his own life

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

unlike most people here (on the hardcore zen blog) i have quite a bit of real world zen experience under my belt including zazen and sesshins

what i found is what i stated in my earlier comment, that its useful for several years, then you outgrow it

it teaches some skills, self awareness, your habitual patterns of thought, the way the brain default circuit looks if it runs riot

i would say about three years after starting zen it became apparent to me zazen had nothing more to offer and indeed like anything persisted with that needs to be dropped, becomes toxic and that’s the point at which i started to part ways with zen and eventually ended up at toni packer’s springwater center which gives the option for zazen, but doesn't insist on it, being more aligned to krishnamurti in that respect

also in that previous post i stated there are theoretical neurological reasons to do with "embodied cognition" for zazen to be limiting, which is also my observation, so i have got more hostile to it

in actual fact the "teachers" i have seen in my travels, never meditated beyond any procedural requirements and actually even soto zen is like that, once you get enlightened and do the post enlightenment training and then move on to teaching the meditation is pretty well dropped

brad warner and nishjima were/are unusual for zen teachers in their emphasis on it being ongoing for the so called "masters", meditation for soto is really something you do until you get "enlightened" and then it becomes unnecessary

how long have you thought you were this other person ?

and actually you seem to think you are me too !

why not come back to the real world and just be you

you can beat yourself to a pulp trying to "fix" the mentally ill

they are a load that breaks the camel’s back

beware

schizophrenia or "quazi-schizophrenia" onsetting in middle age is surprisingly prevalent, you have to watch out for it, trust can get very misplaced

janet frame’s "owls do cry"

alienation

and

familiarity

the strangeness

other

being

ed. these words came to mind listening to a boo-book/morepork last night, a waning moon created a surreal and in some way dissonant landscape that i did not feel at home in

why putin stopped the inevitable massacre of the ukranian defenders trapped in the underground tunnels of the azovstal steel plant

the publicity couldn’t get any worse, its what the nazis did to the soviets in adzhimushkay in 1942

a ray of light must be getting through to him

surprisingly listenable "heavy metal", at least for a while

adunbee covering "blacken the cursed sun", better than the original imo

players like this on youtube and the net, some of whom are "off the planet" good have totally upgraded the standard listeners expect and calibrate on, there’s no place for the mediocre any more

enter sandman

one of the problems with cataract is the worse it gets, the more rapidly it can worsen

if it gets to a certain point the lenses can be too dense and you are at risk of the "capsular bag" being damaged in the operation which is not good

poor blood sugar control and overweight are factors, too much oxidative stress and inflammation around

one thing i notice about pieter bruegel the elder’s paintings is how immaculately dressed everyone is, clothes were a big deal in those times and represented a significant portion of personal wealth

if you look closely at the gallows in that painting you can see an "escher-like" distortion of its topography

he was a "thinker" , pieter , look carefully at the peasant and nestrobber , we all know that one !

it took me a while to get used to charles bukowski, but really, he’s one of the great poets

he was honest about himself and the way he lived was so fraught he got to see things most never see (sensibly!)

its a pity about the drinking, if he hadn’t he would be known today as a genius, there was that sort of latent ability

the stupid can be more dangerous to you than the the ill or marginally intentioned because you trust them whereas you don’t trust the others (hopefully, we can be naive about strangers or people we don’t know well, projecting our universe onto them whereas they can be very strange/different in terms of what we know)

the other thing is people are very uneven, a smorgasbord of abilities, intentions and weaknesses, even those who intend you ill can do you good in the final analysis

the cylindrical knot , an interesting visual puzzle by rinus roelofs

prior to escher

were giovanni piranesi

and

oscar reutersvärd

writing

the way i do

there’s a huge tightness

in words

from the start

the end

only

somethings

can

error

confusion

saved by christ

valentinus got in early

but

i don’t

think

he was

wiser

some most people are traumatised by real creative thinking and yet oddly they are not traumatised by the endless repetitive regurgitation of hackneyed memes and clichés

what’s inside closed boxes with remain a mystery until they are opened

a big mistake people make with people like krishnamurti and dogen is they assume "fixed views" over the lifetime, but in fact views evolve which you would expect from genuine inquiry

but this is not what people do in general, like you (ed. the person this is addressed to) they attempt to create formal synthetic systems of whatever which are just a self-contradictory mess

the real work is to take things down to the level of deep structure, get that consistent and not worry about "systems" and just work on sorting things out as they arise or are needed, that is your knowledge and not the usual cut and paste of other people

btw read up on j. krishnamurti’s life and look at some u.g. krishnamurti videos to get a more rounded view

what could be more hypocritical than martin heidegger , an out and out unrepentant nazi complaining in 1957 of modern language trends “ sweeping away our age to we know not where ”

the below is addressed to brad warner criticising his fixation on posture in meditation

from an ontological point of view you have to ask yourself if a meditation "posture" is necessary or essential, and of course , observationally its not, you can even argue its contrary, which for the sake of argument i will assume its not

however from an ontological point of view since its neither necessary or essential (as your own "bridge" experience shows) , then since from an ontological viewpoint what is not essential or necessary can’t be the sort of "positivity" we require, then in ontological terms its not "positive"

i would encourage you at this point to look at this "aggrandisement" of meditation posture as "contrary" and a hindrance to ontological "positivity"

ed. for what on the surface seems simple, the "ontological rabbithole" seems to go on forever, here are some useful links

daniel bonevac curtis anderson benzmüller/computer

egypt, the police state you have when you’re not having a police state

“ How corrupt is egypt ? The country does not get good publicity ”

“ Very corrupt. The police are basically a large government sized gang ”

i have seen these knee and hip injuries to long term meditators, what put me wise was in my "zen travels" was i noticed "teachers" hardly ever sat in a meditation posture if they could avoid it

if the road is empty

and doesn’t yield anything

then its likely

the initial direction was wrong

you can’t go any further

as much as you wish to go further

its the limit

of your personal ontology

all these "methods" of meditating are meaningless, just people filling the time any which way

you can tell they don’t know what they are doing and do not even have any interest in what it might really be about

because they just get dumber

“ If the Buddha did zazen in a chair . . . there wouldn’t be any Buddhism ”

in whatever grove, surrounded by however many disciples, sycophants, nuns, monks and riff-raff, the buddha shifted his arse on his chair, farted, then intoned whatever

then he aftertoned : "meditation" is an illusion, waste your time, i am not going to stop you, please give at the door (there wasn’t a door it being a grove)

the reader blinked and it was all gone

the arabian dance from tchaikovsky’s "the nutcracker" performed by elena petrichenko and sergey chumakov

basically the ontological proof of god boils down to this

it is better to exist than not

and there is something to that

however

like everything else

its not the whole story by a long way

homeostatic loops

without adaptation

makes the world

what it is

homeostatic loops

no adaptation

makes the world

what it is

apart

we endure

the depression

of something missing

forever

if heaven

makes a sign

it would be worth it

but it doesn’t

the above is my "reworking" of a 1946 poem by anna akhmatova titled "in a dream"

Чёрную и прочную разлуку

Я несу с тобою наравне.

Что ж ты плачешь ?

Дай мне лучше руку,

Обещай опять прийти во сне.

Мне с тобою как горе с горою . . .

Мне с тобой на свете встречи нет.

Только б ты полночною порою

Через звезды мне прислал привет

its not enough for them

not to do the necessary

so they do the contrary

and consequently

they

don’t

get

ahead

venus rising

tells me the earth rotates

not so slow as to be imperceptible

not so fast as to be obvious

but

slyly

the rising star

tells me the earth rotates

not so slow as to be imperceptible

not so fast as to be obvious

it moves

about right

meditation

take away the name

sit in a chair

the mists spread over the paddocks

lit by the moon

that is all

its 10 weeks since my second cataract operation, the eyes have settled enough for me to say where i am with them and the vivity IOL’s, basically 98% glasses free with vision comparable to when i was much younger with glasses, but now without glasses and 20/20

i can read very fine print up up to about 38cm which does for practically everything, i will use +1 to +3 readers for sustained close work, the non dominant eye has about .65D add for "mini-monovision" which in this case has worked better than multifocals would on balance

i do get a dark shadow occasionally on the temporal side of vision where light hits the edge of the IOL and creates a gap in vision, but this is normal and should reduce over a year, its liveable, i don’t think it will ever go away entirely, but is a price to pay for PCO reducing sharp edged IOL’s

i did insist the surgeon drop a step back (.5D) into "with the rule astigmatism" rather than go into "against the rule" to be closer to plano which i think was the right decision as the male cornea does flatten with age to a marked degree, this was for the second eye which had significant astigmatism (1.5D?)

more contentiously i stopped steroid treatment very early (but the vitamin D i take is a steroid) and did an eyewash with colloidal silver and stopped the antibiotics almost immediately and never had any problem

it really makes sense to get only one eye done at a time because you are guaranteed a good eye that way, i did have problem with the cornea clouding about two weeks out, maybe that wouldn’t have happened if i had been using the steroid eyes drops (btw you should not blink for a minute after placing the drop/s) but i think the long term results are better since steroids interfere with the quality of the healing and perhaps the right genetics (which not every one will have) has something to do with the successful migration of the endothelial stem cells back to the damaged area of the cornea

a good test of having a cataract is seeing a fine white mist in a place with a lot of fluorescents like a supermarket

the above is not advice or even suggestions, just what has happened to me and my reasonings and there’s a lot of "behind the scenes" research i have not gone into in the interests of brevity

i had my second pfizer dose, it has affected me for a week, sorta like a mild something which is a good sign of the immune system responding from memory, this is five and a half months after the first dose which is getting near optimal for the long term immunity memory against covid

people don’t understand the antibody function of current covid vaccines are useless against omicron, and to get the benefit of the long term T-cell protection you need about six months between shots

so for five and a half months i have been swimming is a sea of covid on one pfizer shot (also taking 3000iu of vit D and 90mcg of MK7-K2) and if i have had covid i couldn’t tell

results speak, except to the morons, public health advice has lost the plot post delta

covid, now while endemic will not really beaten until the third generation vaccines since only a few will take vitamin D and K2

stupidity so thick you can cut it

lasik is not a safe operation, despite what they say, you thin your cornea at your peril

waiting at the end of time

they meander in

the unnecessary

the nonessential

pretending to an understanding

they don’t

have

how

despicable

polished arseholes

not the worst

but the least remorseful

god, these desperate missionaries promoting any nonsense under the sun and for what reason ?

their own turpitude and stupidity ?

people who talk complete rubbish

since they can’t see it

they have problems

and not mild

either

psychosis of a sort

really

daoism, zen, christianity

all ontologies of god

when the ontologies fail

they don’t ask

below references the translation of the tao te ching by adiss and lambardo

chapter 25

humans follow earth / earth follows heaven / heaven follows tao

my reply

tao follows heaven / heavens follow earth / earth follows human

chapter 47

my reply

outside or inside

knowing the world is beyond us

when the walls corrode we start to see

travel forces unwanted insight

"sages" are frauds

ontological proofs of god

run into conflicts between

the priority of god

versus existence

the wise walk away

a generation is like a time machine

each twenty years difference

each of us

encapsulated a certain time of living and place

born with us

and dies with us

sign posts saying

necessary

essential

its hard to choose

don’t choose

but travel

the glinting sea

whatever ocean you are in

the familiar

and unfamiliar

the glinting sea

whatever ocean you are in

i’ve seen this happen a lot, you get a popular, intelligently moderated sub with a reasonable degree of freedom of expression, but this upsets some people who want to control the content to suit their opinions so they weasel their way into becoming mods and so the sub goes downhill into partial madness

you get a lot of things you wouldn’t read about, like i had a convo with the owner/mod of r/poetry and it turns out he hates poetry and can’t understand it

there was a health board with a particular protocol that they all knew was wrong and didn’t work, but they never said it publicly, surprisingly it took years to die

the bottom line is set up your own board if you want one run fairly, there’s a disproportionate amount of "the insane" on the web, you need to be careful

the other side of "poor moderation" is the resultant censorship having a very distorting effect on your and the other participants sense of reality

ghosts

tangible intangible

another road

to nowhere

goethe’s role in the execution of johanna höhn must have bugged him

i don’t think he was ever really able to get a handle on it

of course it was all so highly ironic, he being the father of four children who did not survive to adulthood

there’s an interesting line between art and entertainment

art will tell you what you don’t want to know

entertainment will tell you what you want to know, or perhaps, rather, what you want to be

prayer wheels

ciphers we cannot read

except the spinning

we know

meditation is a double edged sword, it can maintain you in strange loops for unhealthily long periods and even worse amplify conformance to the "escherian staircase"

another extreme is amplifying mental illnesses like schizophrenia and psychosis, an ambivalence that the staircase going both ways can give, ie its not necessarily all negative though in this context it is

that’s a good photo , thematic with sense, not the usual religious nonsense, i never had the antipathy to religion (including zen !) that toni packer had, its taken me a long time to get there

into the night , a painting by grant haffner

ed. the painting is in fact wider, if anyone can find a better link, let me know, this version hits a spot the others don’t

helena bonham carter reading a supposed rumi poem

my reply

its not by rumi, but a very distanced "reinterpretation" by coleman barks

this being human

is a whore house

ideas and being for sale and stolen

the mirror is distorted

alice knew

interestingly her grandfather helped a lot of jews fleeing the nazis to transit spain to portugal

the truth

the holy grail

of nothing

"the truth"

the holy grail

of nothing

looking for rules

there are none

except what works

and what doesn’t

sticking with stages we have passed through

coming back

when there is no need

and is counterproductive

making sense of your life

you might as well

climb to the moon

making sense of the world

you might as well

flick the universe into a bucket

where the answers lie

is not where the questions live

the strange world of education

an aboutness

that is toxic

to the doing

cleaning the stove

the white so white

post cataract operation

i am blinded

by my own efforts

ed. they don’t make modern stoves like this anymore, this is an old "frigidaire" with a white enamel coating, for a little work you can get it looking quite good

art and music is in a sense "psychosis" so a strong interest in "quality" thereof of which the net gives incredible access to is a great help in dealing with "cognitive" or "mental health" problems

sort of opposite to religion with its piled high bullshit

by quality art, literature and music i mean it has an outstanding level of cognitive complexity and insight, beware of being caught in contemporary "washing machines" which just bruise and degrade

large changes

late in life

are not impossible

but slow

very slow

to happen

a day trip

somewhere

anywhere

away from here

a day trip

somewhere

anywhere

not here

its not loneliness

but a feeling of fragility in isolation

the demanding world and its caprices

are beyond

the 18th century version of allegri’s miserere beautifully sung by the marian consort

selenium is important for down regulating the inflammation that is responsible for most dry eye, a subject worth researching

i take 100mcg (1/2 a capsule) of the thorne selenomethionine a day which seem to help enough that its ok not to need anything else, and oddly things have improved considerably since having cataract operations

“ the japanese research , published in the latest issue of "cornea", found that found that selenoprotein P, a known selenium-transfer plasma glycoprotein, secretes into the tear fluid to supply the corneal epithelium with selenium. they’re hoping to parlay this finding into a selenium compound that can treat corneal disorders caused by various diseases, such as keratoconjunctivitis sicca, superficial punctate keratopathy and dry eye disease ”

there are some next generation dry eye medications in development

signs of later middle age

taking an interest in the road code so you will be able to pass the tests

ed. tasmania has dropped its requirements for medical and other tests post age 75 because the statistics show that this age group has less crashes than younger age groups and that relevant medical conditions are becoming increasingly distributed across the younger groups as well

if you are around

they fight you

if you are not around

they fight amongst themselves

quite an amusing poem

siren song by margaret atwood

we are our own theory of existence

search no further

“ Vitamin K2 can be proposed to be a promising approach to attenuate age-related disorders and preserve cognitive functions in aging individuals ”

i’ve been taking it for years (carusoes K2/MK7)

proof one way or another of the pudding ?

being fixated on by strangers is very disturbing, i know, its happened to me several times

up the river

a still pool of water

reflecting sunlight

it drew me

writing

that other fold of reality

that reveals

something interesting

ed. this is what happens if you watch margaret atwood and alice munro youtube videos

if you want to understand a woman

look at the what she wears, the way she wears it

and

her jewellery

this is her presentation to the world

and what she is comfortable with

explore the limits

when you get cut

you know you have done something right

the strange loopians

not searching

just travelling

from one room to another

in the library

of babel

douglas hofstadter on what he means by strange loops

he seems to meander off the point, but its all relevant, took me a while to understand what he was getting at and you start to see how life is really this "matting" of strange loops

people get in their little escher staircases and so the whole business of life goes on forever in this way

what i have observed with meditation is people get caught in strange loops

bascially they are unskilled which becomes part of the strange loop, not simply taking them back to where they started from, but walks them down innumerable malign "dark alleys"

the nature of the loop is they can’t even perceive the lack of skill and will never do the necessary "quality reading" to break out of it, but restrict their view to the parameters of what is required to maintain the loop

their response can be quite violent if they are inadvertently forced out of it

“ this statement is not true ”

you can take the statement as a whole is not true, that is truth is a limitation

its not something everybody wonders about, but over the years the title of proust’s "remembrances of things past" has puzzled me

there’s something very fundamental about it, its like memory is more than an ontological quality, but in a way our essence of being

that essential ontology exists in a way we know and can recognise and we don’t need a theory about existence because we exist, that is the only theory, our existence itself

an interesting research study on how zinc is essential to the maturation of T-cells and regenerates the thymus, a shrinking thymus is one of the problems of aging

if you are supplementing zinc, i would suggest occasional use is best and be cautious, too much is poisonous, but i think its a useful antiviral in today’s context, i do take it occasionally and prefer the "monomethionine" form

when i go to town, i usually buy a 400ml bottle of "nudie" orange juice as i guess a pick me up, but its basically got eight level teaspoons of sugar in it, a fact i have just now worked out, that’s a lot and wants thinking about

i remember elaine gottschall saying buying commercially made drinks was a lost cause, well the least i can do is read the labels more carefully

one level teaspoon of sugar is four grams, however on the plus side of the "nudie" it will contain protective anti-oxidants and flavonoids effectively being squeezed oranges and is not "reconstituted"

i think also the size of the full amount of squeezed oranges which is 4 and 2/3, way more than we would ever eat in real life is also problematic

there’s two aspects to vaccine induced immunity, the first is antibody, but the problem is that the current vaccines are targeted for alpha not omicron, i know of someone who got quite ill with omicron by catching it to soon after getting the booster, because the immune system was preoccupied with making useless antibodies for the wrong variant as programmed by the vaccine and of course, omicron escaped them

however the long term t-cell immunity continues to improve up to 6 to 9 to 15 months after the shot, that’s the real value of the current generation of vaccines

i have had one pfizer shot and i have been taking 3000iu of vitamin D a day along with 90mcg of vitamin MK-7/K2 and have blood type O which means less lung involvement if you get covid and honestly i can’t tell whether i have had covid or not despite a lot of exposure

i would be more worried if i had blood type A or AB

to me i would be cautious about endless booster shots targeted at obsolete variants, there are second gen vaccines in the works, i may get a booster of the old type in the six to nine month range, but basically 2nd and third gen vaccines are where its at vaccine wise

but people are happy to get ill rather than do basic supplementation or even think a bit

well, my "rave", this is what comes of reading quite a bit of the research, one forms an "informed" opinion

what has happened to covid is what happened to syphilis, it initially was fatal then evolved into a less virulent form, so imo we are now stuck with omicron and its variants being continually in circulation until broad action 2nd and third generation vaccines become available

you can look at omicron as a natural vaccine

______________

so, the basic point is this two pronged approach to immunity the body has, antibodies versus the long term T-cell response

so here’s something on T-cells

omicron antibody escape

basically there’s heaps of research around, well funded for obvious reasons, what is interesting is the way "public health advice" has lost "synchronization" with it, there are considerable lags between what the research shows and what advice should be given

if you are interested in the history of syphilis and not everyone is, there has been a surprising amount of recent academic research on sorting out where it came form and what actually happened

historically syphilis is of huge interest because you really have a "syphilitic era" from 1494 to the introduction of antibiotics that blighted humanity, at some points 50% of the population was infected with this scourge, from a literature point of view, so many writers were infected

i had the thought writing this that the ability to read research papers is something that could be taught in english courses and is a very useful life and employment skill

__________________

i think blood type is a factor in covid severity

“ patients with low vitamin D levels present an increased risk of "acute respiratory distress syndrome" requiring admission to an intensive care unit or mortality due to covid and a higher susceptibility to covid and related hospitalization ”

there is no "unitary" medical advice, its obvious with covid where it varies with the country and updates

its a process of discovery, new research comes out, perspectives get shifted and so on, any opinion in the end is a synthesis and as such flawed

one’s own observations and experience are not invalid either and need to be taken account of

occupations that consume us

completely

want looking at

closely

the wrong road

never yields

its wrongness

there is obviously a high degree of dissidence in russia about its war with ukraine

i think for the first time in hundreds of years russia's autocratic mould has been broken by the free exchange of information the internet gives

i mean just look at this, putin being told to commit suicide by a popular russian internet cartoon character

youtube 2/3 down this page

what i have found interesting is commenters on brad warner’s vlog, despite doing a bit of meditation have no clues about it, i think there is a necessity for "retreats" of about a week which are essential to develop a more useful understanding

meditation is a type of "cognitive approach", an open and inquisitive look at life and an acceptance of being wrong which is not what one sees in the vlog comments section

the mirror splits

but doesn’t

we have no image

that isn’t ourselves

if they write a thread

i can’t for the world of me

fathom what it says

the words jar

and are without sense

the sonorous stitching

is absent

this is

the norm

so-called meditation

when people just play mind games

with themselves

proselytizing

nonsense

having seen the specious nonsense commenters on the hardcore zen blog regard as "meditation" a week’s silent retreat imo is essential to get what it is about, you need to "unpack" things to a certain point to get what is below it all is about, those simple patterns of thought that constitute ourselves

having seen what commenters here regard as "meditation" a weeks silent retreat imo is essential to get what it is about, you need to "unpack" things to a certain point to get what is below it all is about, those simple patterns of thought that constitute ourselves

the reality of monastic life is a fair degree of homosexuality, convents included, you do pick up traces of it in zen, of course christianity is full of it going right back to the disciple "jesus loved" and some lovely stories about early convents

thought has no edge

try as we might

it cannot be jumped outside

on the other hand

it reaches everywhere

if we travel

a quote from cross & nishijima’s translation of eihei dogen’s fukanzazengi

cast aside all involvements, give the myriad things a rest

do not think of good and bad, do not consider right and wrong

stop the driving movement of mind, will, consciousness

cease intellectual consideration through images, thoughts, and reflections

my reply

shake hands with the good

give a nod to the bad

right and wrong have a symmetry

consciousness is bounded by the unconscious

none of this ceases

if you notice

these people who claim to "meditate" but just become more rabid and stupid

they are missing the "discovery" of the "patterns" of their thought, that’s what dogen means by "reflecting back"

if you don’t "get this" , then its meditation in name only

people claim they have meditated for years and they still miss this, i don’t know how they do it, its not like "missing the elephant in the room" , but being trampled by it and in denial that anything has happened

i will say that "shikantaza" needs to be fleshed out with "quality wide ranging reading" so you are not having to reinvent the wheel, our lives are way not long enough for that

also i think it takes a week long retreat to get the hang of it

capacity falls into the trap

of correcting

because

that is what it has capacity

for

its assumed that translations of eihei dogen bear some relation to what he meant, but what is the philology of the words used by this medieval japanese writer ?

there’s no research on this at all

by that i mean is how was the language used in dogen’s time and place ?

as far as i can see its just the characters transcribed into modern japanese and semantically its just "junk" and soto zen is just some crazy worship of idiocy

wingsuit flying at the eiger and along its ridges

I II

riveting

blue herons

on the roof again

they scratch and make their throaty noises

we meet in vision occasionally

where i am peripheral

to their existence

ed. the roof is corrugated iron and their feet make a scratching sound on it

we just have to look out a window

to see the different spaces

we inhabit

conception

the crowds go aw and ah

and melt away

as the wheel slows down

and stops

leaving only

one

no-one questions

the lottery

existence

the almost and very different me’s

that could have occurred

result

the jigsaw

each piece you put in

grows the full picture

by a piece

its never ending

is there anything more loathsome than getty images ?

the stupid journalists that use them ?

the uncomplaining readers ?

shikantaza is an illusion, touch it and it disappears

i remember watching pier pasolini’s "the canterbury tales" many decades ago, i am sure it affected me and watching this clip (the cook’s tale) i can see what he was saying, a very caustic look at how life works

the way to handle theology

is not to need it

synthetic worlds

traps

leading nowhere

parallel processes

a hall of mirrors

both go through

one is real

and one is not

parallel processes

a hall of mirrors

both go through

one is real

one is not

what have i to do with this person ?

some-one else’s experiences

some-one else’s life

that somehow

shadows my own

the ontological proof of god

is the end of the road to the unnecessary

the ontological proof of god

is the end of a road to the unecessary

they take

the wrong road

in dreams

wonder

life

they

find themselves

infested

backwaters

beware

highly original

i think some adults must have had a hand in the plot, but all the same . . .

a wonderful soprano (theresa krügl) singing "when the day falls into darkness"

the o’neills are an odd sort of a cluster

eugene, his parents , daughter oona

long day’s journey into night

charlie chaplin attached on the periphery

learning is different from exploring

the latter

is in a class of its own

compared to the former

angels

effete in their white robes

the original trans

since we can’t create the positive

negating the negation

is more effective

which brings us

into the positive

the galling young

so casual with their seeing

so careless

with what

erodes

the russo-ukraine war

most of human history

this rip you apart

trauma

it hits home

unattached men

are viewed as potential female property

well this one

is more

slyly avoidant

than most

the eyes

two little orbs

spheres

marble like

they can crack

like glass

three trees

shadows on the lawn

cut grass

trees

three shadows on the lawn

cut grass

these conclusions

we don’t want to come to

you know

A + B =

then it hits us

migraine

pain

well "just because"

well, you know

mypain

in one mood i can write something one way

in another mood i can write it another way

which is the right way ?

my new vision

sometimes i just go for a walk to see things clearly

distant views

a fairy tale dream

ed. 7 weeks after my second cataract operation, glasses-less, vivity IOL, plano in one eye, mini-monovision in the other, its probably as good as its going to get

the weirdness of existing in that tiny sliver of human time that cataract can be corrected otherwise i would be going blind

even in the last four or five years the lenses and operation have improved significantly

why can’t it all be just a fiction ?

when the fiction’s true

the truth is fiction

why can’t it all be just a fiction ?

when the fictions true

the truth is fiction

i would say putin is finished, his whole gamble depended on annexing the entire ukraine

the problem for russia is now it can’t be part of the international economic system since it will be constantly sued for war damage reparations by what remains under ukrainian control

he’s a cornered rat and things could get unstable for everyone

there’s a famous bismark quote

“ caution is worth more than a cavalry charge ”

if you write quite a bit, you realise after a while that a lot of what we take as real is simply fiction and often follows a script

cultural ideas, religion, political ideas and some of our ideas about ourselves

just what i need

a lecture

a brain of cut and paste

wanting

replicate itself

another way of looking at people who are "intellectually dishonest", is they are too careless in sticking things together semantically, they add, so to speak giving wrong answers

unfortunately this is the norm

heavy in pathos

non-existence

to ourselves

the silent voice of what is not there

it wanted to exist

but can’t

you never know what happens until it actually happens

sometimes

you do know

you can view mathematics as a branch of philosophy and it is imbued with philosophical notions like similarity and difference

these people who end their comments on web message boards with any amount of specious nonsense like "i hope you find peace", "be with the ones you love", "may you learn to smile at life" to imply they are in some super wise and serene space and you are not

not just contemptible, but dishonest

spread too thin

the substrate shows

called

pain

congratulations btw on actually reading my reply (ed. hardcore zen comment) and addressing what it said in your own reply, it seems a lost skill these days in the ADHD world where reading the first two words triggers some total projection in response. most people who reply to me fit this category, unreal, these self-called "practitioners" of "crazy-stupid"

all the translators of eihei dogen are idiots, there is a complete absence of "philology" so important in the translation of historical texts so we get some watered-down western philosophical ontological ramble

“ meaning is a fluid ”

crux

the thing itself

itself

meaning is a fluid

crux

the thing itself

itself

jesus buddha muhammad moses dogen

proxies of infinity

you can already see the mental laziness

and the heavy fist of brutality

the false southern cross

and pointers

pointing nowhere

meaningful

a guide

for some

the monochrome of moonlight

makes things simpler, more revealed

yet

without colour

one god

is revealed in fragments

that don’t

make

one god

i looked far and wide

and i could not see

a philosopher

as acute as me

AD versus CE

archaeology would be a classic example of the crux of the contemporary issue which is that AD would be offensive to muslims, what i found interesting is that CE goes back so far (1615?) , AD of course goes back to the initial system created by Dionysius Exiguus in 525 but the introduction of CE also corresponds to the period when christianity was losing its dominant role, so its not a casual shift, but reflects profound societal changes over many centuries

eihei dogen is a cult figure and soto zen is a cult stemming from the way it treats him ie infallible. once you start to say he is wrong about certain things then the cult breaks up because there are schisms based on disagreement as to what he was wrong about

what he really is, is he is one of a number of interesting mystical writers and because of differences in historical culture, not very accessible to modern readers, a problem compounded by inadequate/misguided translation

the deliberate blindness of his present day cult followers is shown by their compete ignorance of one of the most famous works of world literature (the Tsurezuregusa) written by a monk 80 years after dogen’s death who lived in dogen’s home town, kyoto

its a fascinating work and also gives insight into the manic japanese religious culture

soto is, in large part, just crazy and stupid and necessarily so, because only psychosis could be so wilfully ignorant about the large panoply of mystics, philosophers and literary writers available to us

this is why the commenters here (ed. hardcore zen blog) and brad only go backwards, the only areas they put work into are the non-essential/contrary and never venture into the essential, i used to wonder about this, but don’t now, its tempting to think involvement in the "non-essential" is harmless, but the fact is its at the expense of the essential, so what one sees here in the comments section with its incompetent and childish aggression when contradicted is to be expected

if you are going to reply to this, do something "essential" and read it carefully and then if you write something, ask yourself, does what i write address of the post or is it just the usual intellectually lazy personal attack ? what is the point of being involved in zen if your interpersonal and cognitive skills just get worse ?

the ontology of buddhism, which is actually the ontology of the existence of the absolute or "god" depends on "essential" and "necessary" and the "likeness" of the absolute and in actual fact there is the identity of the absolute

the whole thing about a pursued "path", practice and meditation is they are neither essential or necessary and therefore don’t relate to the ontology, ie, in terms of ontology are in error

however i do think there is a place for contemplative or reflective work as necessary and you cannot entirely say that meditation does not cover that ground to some extent

so the basic problem and solution is we are all stuck with work in necessary and essential attributes of likeness to the absolute/god and occasionally we trip into identity and that’s about all there is to it

my observation of 99% of what goes on in zen is in terms of ontological "positivity" is what is done, all those stupid ceremonies, costumes, hierarchies, beliefs etc are negations of the positivity and therefore so far from being essential or necessary, are obstructive

ed gepixel replies

So how would your version of Zen function like ? What would people do ? What would they practice ?

my reply

if you actually read what i wrote, it answers your question

it goes further and say what you are talking about is actually "obstruction", the opposite of genuine "inquiry" , rather its just a formulaic "filling of time"

in other words there’s no "likeness", but "anti-likeness" of "god"

gödel’s "existence of god" proof rests, to a large extent on the coherent semantic characteristics of "god-like"

the problem is that if you examine "god-like" and what those charcteristics might be is you get conflicting features like "all powerful" and "powerless" both being characteristics

you can argue that "ugly" is just as much god as beauty

and so on

in terms of gödel the very notion of positivity lacks the clean-ness necessary for the proof to hold

on the other hand there is something to positivity and its negation not being "positive" , its a way of dealing with the world

an interesting revision by c. a. anderson for whom “ a property is positive if and only if it is necessary for, and compatible with, perfection ” , which is more open-ended, but somewhat recursive in how does "god-like" fit into "god" with the confusion of disimilarity with identity ?

ontological arguments for "god" have been around for a while

why are the insane so cunning ?

they have to be

they live in a strange world

that doesn’t work the way they think it should

why are the insane so cunning ?

they have to be

they are in a strange world

that doesn’t work the way they think it should

mirrors reflect

invert

translate

you can’t step through them

like alice

into a more interesting world

more like blanks

that don’t

fire

they go nowhere

regression

is finite

the circling absence of important things

felt that they should be there but

like the hub of a centrifugal force

controlling but unseen

the facts of existence

adverse flows of time and space

you can’t reverse

the

destruction

rest in unpeace

every broke artist

whose work decades and centuries later

sells for millions

roxanne shante rapping

she was 14 years old when this was recorded

pompous asses

throw philosophical terms around

after the throw

the silence

is deafening

words

don’t fill

the larder

men build machines

that outlast them

the bleating sheep

only have good things to say about their shepherd

do they question their own confinement ?

pantheism is a wrong turn

theism is a wrong turn

two wrong turns make a right

not

if script quality is any guide, the world is getting more stupid by each newly released film

formulaic and internally inconsistent is just the beginning of the problems

dream worlds can bring back what is gone

what floats on tears

dream worlds can bring back what is gone

with tears

or without

back and forth the philosophers argue

what do they argue ?

back and forth . . .

i find i do better on milk from goats, sheep and even buffaloes rather than milk from dairy cows, i presume also there’s something to A2 milk being beneficial

interestingly, antibodies against cow’s casein also targets a molecule used to make myelin which sheathes nerves

this study is saying it can be a factor in multiple sclerosis

my view of any war is entirely solipsist, if you get killed, you lost, regardless of whether your side wins or not, this is the basic human feeling and its the work of religion and military training to change to the more irrational mindset of dying for your country or "god"

i have noticed people, unless the odds overwhelmingly favour them, are as a rule timid and cautious

there are exceptions but they are due more often than not to a miscalculation of the odds

philosophy, which is the termination in truth as the final end is limited by this

unterminated, true and false is more like how things are

systems within systems

exploded by the without

this has totally changed the nature of war, remote, highly accurate ballistic or cruise missiles carrying very large explosive warheads , russia’s second front. it doesn’t need to win the ground war, it only needs to beat the civilian population into submission

the ukriane-russia war has some uncanny parallels with WW2, the V2 rockets, the buildup of russia on the border of the ukraine and the ukrainian denial of the possibility of an invasion, even the "Z" symbol with its echoes of the nazi swastika

consciousness is intrinsically different from semiconductor computation

abel and victoria tramping to diamond and other lakes in the kahurangi national park

i mute most of the music

the mad

beat their drum

calling it meaning

when

the

mad

beating

their

drum

nothing quite beats

the psychedelic drug takers

for absurd

meaningless

fantasy

nothing

quite reaches

the level

repulsive

ugliness

of media gossip

about

celebrities

death

the artefact of living

a surprising thing

because we are not there

i’ve never been a good speller, but have learnt that spelling mistakes are very off-putting to readers

gödel’s axiomatic proof of the existence of god

the first axiom

“ if a property is positive, then its negation is not positive ”

my comment

i think the first axiom is interesting, it sorta implies a discreteness that’s not there in real life, which is of course the difference between logic and reality, the world the axiom creates is not our world, though it is an interpretation of it, lol "god" in a nutshell

its very recursive, why can’t god be a property ?

why can’t god be negative and positive ?

i can see what gödel is getting at, but i don’t think it works, or rather, the extent to which it does work is inane and not even mathematical, more its impaired philosophic

in summary, the axioms are in a restricted semantic space not characteristic of what we regard as this world at all

to me, notions of god are like building a statue that self-deconstructs, at the end of the day there is nothing, though you have done something

the horizon

what we cannot see beyond

except by going beyond

a story

can be a shortcut to understanding reality

not

the surprising beneficiaries of the russia-ukraine war are new zealand, australia, taiwan, japan and south korea because the war shows that against a nuclear hegemonic power, if you don’t have nuclear weapons you can deliver yourself, its no show

and actually you don’t need a lot in the way of nuclear weapons and a delivery system which is what north korea shows

the populations of new zealand and australia have to get their heads around this, though of course new zealand sneaks by under the protection of australia

the ukraine’s mistake was made after the break-up of the soviet union when it let the usa and russia remove the nuclear weapons it inherited and its paying a terrible price

some topics i keep clear of

for good reason

not to keep clear of them

is a form of suicide

men don’t understand fashion shows

women don’t understand "mateship"

neither really exists

a relative was complaining of me being boring with talking about my cataract operations, but with one eye at about 6/5 there is something to crow about, but in a way it was just luck, they can’t get the prescription aspects intentionally as accurate as happened, normally its up to plus and minus half a dioptre, but i am almost exactly plano in sphere and cylinder, it gives almost a dream like clarity, the other eye is shaping up to be more normal, i think its the ideal astigmatism in the first eye that is giving the very good result, long may it last, the eye does change further into "against the rule" over the years

what happened is sorta like that rare "bullseye"

i have just come out of having omicron, not quite like or as bad as the flu, several days of being very fatigued and needing to lie down for a fair portion of the day, but literally it was only hours from still feeling nauseous to being very well, so surprising

i was reasonably fit going (not over or athletically fit which is always problematic) into the illness which really helps with the cardiovascular side apparently, there were occasions when the heart was beating quite fast, a lot of the long term problems people have relate to cardiovascular injury from my reading of studies

basically a day or so later from having recovered i am feeling very well, rather like after the vaccine, one is feeling better in general, there may be an anti-senescent effect particularly in the liver due to this unusual virus and its focus on the ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) receptor

how nietzschean, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger

because i have been taking 3000iu a day of blackmore’s vitamin D (a natural steroid) and 90mcg of the carusoes K2/MK-7 for years and having one pfizer jab, i was always quite confident of weathering the infection quite well

the vitamin D has also worked a miracle on my back, spent half a day chainsawing waste pine for firewood in the recently harvested pine plantation next to where i live with no problems, couldn’t have done that five years ago

but you know , these "natural" approaches are an anathema to the medical bureaucratic establishment and the vast slough of intellectually lazy people out there with their endless drugs and denial of chronic side effects

i don’t want to be misunderstood, i am a pragmatist in my approach, but there are often more effective ways "to skin a cat" than conforming to societal norms that really seem built around low intelligence

russia is creating a reparations nightmare for itself with the destruction of ukrainian infrastructure and housing that will drag on its economy for years

even if it won, it would still have to rebuild the ukraine, but outright victory is no longer in its grasp

the world has changed with improved communications dramatically improving the speed and depth of NATO’s response, what is happening in days took six months or longer in WW2

historically, democracy, notably the ancient greeks (a farce of political infighting with military competence in the generals taking a backseat) has not been very effective militarily compared to autocracy, but modern communications have obviously dramatically changed that picture

putin’s problem now is avoiding ending up on trial, but he’s so far from thinking that he’s not made the necessary strategic changes needed to what russia is doing in the ukraine

the nearest russian leader in style to putin is stalin, but the economic and communications context is now so different he has become a fish out of water

interestingly stalin was quite war adverse, the struggle between the reds and whites had left an indelible mark

oddly i had a dream like yours (a friend complaining of disturbing dreams) last night, i was on a ledge or scaffolding outside an apartment in a high old building and kicking at what i couldn’t see, but thought it was a person trying to push me off, the dream which was quite vivid in visual detail got blacker and blacker which i think was me starting to wake up and still stuck in "sleep paralysis" of the eyes, that is my visual system was not yet reconnected to the conscious brain, apparently waking up is a "booting process" like computers.

anyway when i fully woke up i was a bit like a stunned mullet for a while in the middle of my bed having kicked the bedding away

i have had this happen before with different dreams, basically too much bedding making me too hot asleep, sometimes i would also fall or climb out of bed with a crash to the floor

no need for joseph, but all the same the underlying themes are interesting

skills in themselves have no use, they need a context, i think as you get older, most become more awake to that

its helpful to look at web message boards in terms of the various bots that people can be, its not just the commercially or cyber-warfare motivated

agreebots, praisebots, can’t dialogue bots, can’t handle disagreement bots, no donation bots, oppressive moderator bots, put down everybody that looks better than me bots, stupid avoid issues reply bots, pay by praise bots, i have secret psychotic beliefs i don’t tell you about bots

the mental horizons

of these "gamers"

crimped

understatement

the avenues of childhood

so many doors open

we only go through a few

scattered drops and an ocean

the same or different ?

we wander on

before death and after life

wondering

what it is all about

william shanks

the acme of pointlessness

or is there an alternate reality

where each of his computations pops through

and is essential there

hitler and stalin never understood the value of defensive positions though the russian army certainly did with their "defense in depth" approach and the german armies consistently superb defensive deployments during the latter stages of the war

tears that fall onto paper

wash the penned ink away

tears that fall onto paper

wash penned ink away

tears that fall onto paper

wash the ink away

the weirdness

of seeing things repeat

you have been there before

again and again

brains formed variably in space and time

not a lot of homogeneity

between them

i think i’ve got omicron

that wayward letter of the greek alphabet

better than a bad flu

worse than a cold

yet another infectious insult

to plague life

all these university "arts clones" who have never done any real creative work in their life

and think they know something

the hypocrisy of "anti-artistic" conformity in a supposed artist or writer is "spellbinding"

the russia-ukraine civil war

the russians doing what they do best

killing their own

beria and stalin

smile

in their sleep

i’m always stepping forwards

outwards in every direction

too equally spread

to ever amount to anything

brad warner posts about having to call the police on an aggressive neighbour

my reply

people "target" me too because they read my relaxed attitude or something about me as making me an "easy mark" for bluster and aggression, get that a lot on this in various web comments sections

i have had some weird stuff happen to me over the years, among the worst being the ex of a neighbour trying to trick me into giving him a loaded rifle with which to at least threaten his ex and i think, possibly kill her after she had gone into her bedroom with her new lover and obviously had sex (we were all in her house, the rifle was in my house)

life sure has some rocky shoals

history intrudes in surprising ways on international events

modern russia’s nuclear capacity is something it inherited from soviet russia, its such a cut down form of the soviet union i doubt it could have developed to the same extent that capacity today which given the soviet penchant for very oversized nuclear bombs to compensate for poor missile accuracy is still at the "doomsday level"

the west had forgotten that the old soviet nuclear strike capacity was still intact and its been a wake-up call all around and i think its now well understood its only the possibility of nuclear retaliation by the countries directly affected that will ever keep the new expansionist empire of china contained

people seem to totally misunderstand north korea and what even the most rudimentary nuclear capability will do, its developing that capacity to keep china out, china with its highly dense eastern seaboard population is very vulnerable to almost any sort of nuclear attack

we are now being treated to the ghastly spectacle of the ukraine being squashed like a worm by conventional military superiority and the west being kept out from direct on the ground "boots" support by this relic of the soviet times which putin certainly knows how to play

the other interesting thing is the dominant role long range missiles are now playing in conventional warfare, how long could you keep an aircraft carrier afloat ?

not long

pat answers aren’t so pat

look further

and you will see

this world

everything is leaving

as fast

as it approaches

the broken

take my time

to tell me how complete they are

i ask them not to take my time

they don’t listen

because they are broken

the broken

take my time

to tell me how complete they are

i ask them not to take my time

they don’t listen

ourselves

folds in a fabric of being

that has no reverse

our mournful fate

is not to be remembered

and be as if

we never were

stalin at least wasn’t killing his own people, he was georgian, putin is, there will be repercussions

the unusual aspect of the current conflict is it is less like the implementation of foreign policy and more like a civil war, putin’s mother nearly starved to death and his brother died during the siege of st. petersburg, you would think he would be more sensitive to what is happening in the ukraine

the uselessness of novels

lacking density

they trade off profundity

for profuseness

christianity is imagined in the west not to have been in china and japan, but in fact at various points in their histories were so successful in these countries the various powers that be ruthlessly stamped it out, successfully in china and not so successfully in japan, it took the accidental retargeting of the nagasaki atomic bomb to japan’s densest christian population to do that

“ I have a hard time understanding how ideas can be cultural appropriation ”

“ Transculturation posits culture as a relational phenomenon constituted by acts of appropriation, not an entity that merely participates in appropriation ”

in other words culture is a process of appropriation rather than being an object that appropriates

so you can’t criticise, rather appropriation is the very being of what culture is, a vast patchwork of "cut and paste"

"social learning" as per albert bandura’s theory is very tied to our use of language, basically its "effective copying" without invention which is really taking the benefit of the use of the invention which ranges from cultural to practical

the problem with actually "inventing" is from an "energetic" viewpoint, it does not pay, yet the use pays hugely

its a foundation of any human society so when you see some of its more bizarre aspects like malformed cultural appropriation or woke "ideology" just remember you can’t beat it, all you can do is look at this in-wired genetic facility and not be fooled by the maladroits, but pick up on the useful

religion is just full of this sort of "cut and paste" , highly unoriginal but obviously effective, sometimes travelling huge distances in difficult circumstances like the silk road between the middle east and china, or jumping from the seemingly disparate like the story of mary and the virgin birth coming from ancient egyptian religious myths

i notice that i do it all the time with garnering ideas for my writing, like this post incorporating "social learning theory", thanx albert, regrettably i am not going to send your estate a cent for this

an egregious contemporary example of maladroit cultural appropriation is the attempt to fix a very limited vocabulary of maori words into new zealand english in a totally english way, sorta like the borg english language swallowing maori, maori unfortunately is dying as a language. i can remember fluent maori speakers taught it by their parents, but what the horizon is showing is that all that will be left is this trendy english-maori "borg speak"

an interesting analysis of an episode in the book of ruth

jean-françois millet’s painting

interestingly his famous painting angelus , when x-rayed had a line drawing which could have become a small coffin which fits the mourning aspect of the "parents" more

salvador dali was a big fan of this painting and painted I II (2/3 down page) several based on it

uncharted territory

no-one has been there before you

and no-one will come after you

it seems amazing or unlikely

but its the way it is

there’s a lot of people here (ed. the hardcore zen blog) "developmentally impaired" just about everything, early dementia, personality disorders, cognitive impairment, semantic-pragmatic difficulties

i was thinking this is like your days when you were "caregiving" to the developmentally disabled as a young man, it may have been a more formative experience than you realise

and then i thought further and this is actually the cross section you had in zen, buddhism and any religion historically, monasteries were in effect asylums of a sort hence all the rules

a face

yet we can’t say what is behind it

emily brontë for instance

unremarkable

dissolving what was about her

to create

anew

two william blake quotes

a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees

if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise

my "reworking"

a fool sees the same tree as the wise

if the wise persist in their folly they will become wiser, yet more foolish

“ a little caution outflanks a large calavary ”

i really like bismark , his quotes show a lot of insight

however he built up a system where those who followed him were idiots , enabled by a political entity bismark’s competence and efforts had created

the fools imagine

they can cease to exist

while existing

with their stupid rules

what defines

cannot be defined

byzantium

echoes through the ages

its mellow hues

infiltrate

the living poetry

of being

the world

a maze to be steered

by disinformation

not easy

“ buddha left a wide open gate of compassion so that all living beings could enter the state of truth ”

dogen’s ramblings are in effect "monotheism" , just a crazy belief system

he is schizophrenic, you can’t get around it !

crazies following a crazy man, it beggars belief !

on the other hand i think there is a truth to craziness, but mostly the craziness here (the hardcore zen blog) is not that truth, just maudlin stupids loving an echo chamber and the sound of their own voices

before i get the usual ADHD replies from blitzkrieg "non-thinkers" look at the full quote and my ambiguous position on schizophrenia as prerequisite to "the enlightened state"

mimi choi video instagram

mind-bending makeup illusions

if the future were a person

it would be like a mugger down a dark back street

taking everything

each time you meet

my basic complaints (ed. to brad warner on his vlog) are

1. you are not paying me to watch

2. you are not acknowledging i am the real owner of this vlog and you should be doing much more to police (ed. eliminate) the people who don't agree with my inane musings on here

3. you don’t seem to missionize the gurus etc who i really like and think do a much better job than you, this is blind hubris on your part, so buck up and change your ways

that’s the negative side

on the plus side what i do like is you throw away your time for free and i get a real kick out of discouraging people from donating, its much better you don’t get donations because i deserve them way more than you, even though i don’t get or need them, and you get sucked in by my flowery praise as worth something, or at least you appear to, again buck up here, give some flowery praise back, i deserve it

you do provide a platform for me to "missionize" my own inane theological ramblings, you have an A+ "doormat" rating

i like how the general tone of the place keeps women away, at least the sane ones, that’s a double plus because most women (not the ones actually commenting here though, kudos for that !) donate "better" and are more loyal than men and the general character of the vlog is sure to keep anybody not borderline or not so borderline insane well away

i feel you can do more to encourage the flowery meaninglessness that most of commenters really want, and perhaps you should take some sort of job to fund the "wealth of wisdom" constantly being emitted from the hardcore zen vlog comments section ?

j.m. barrie’s life in a way was as strange and sad as mary rose

the play makes a lot more sense in the light of his biography

being and non being

the disruption of memory

is where the secrets

lie

being and non being

the disruption of time

is where the secrets

lie

on my desk

companion for so many years

now forlorn

old glasses

no longer any

use

ed. replaced some fanbelts on the 4WD this afternoon, didn’t need any visual aids at all, glasses free, .65D mini-monovision and 5 weeks post the 2nd cataract operation

china must be royally pissed with russia invading the ukraine because now everybody knows what their invasion of taiwan would look like and china has only to raise their nuclear weapons alert status to sideline any help in the form of troops

nobody seem to notice what north korea does well and that is prevent an invasion by china with very limited, but actual nuclear weapons capability

japan, taiwan and australia must necessarily have their own nuclear capability with 5 years or there will be trouble like being on the losing end of a war, if the usa has any sense it will facilitate this transfer

new zealand of course drifts along under australian protection

putin has done everyone except the ukraine and possibly china a big favour by his precipitate action, i think the world had forgotten how nuclear weapons are fundamental to the relative "warlessness" of recent decades

you only have to read medieval history to see how bad things can be, i think its in our genes and its all to do with territorial competition between groups within a species at the top of the food chain, lions are a good example, their major enemies are other prides and they kill each other regularly, females and cubs are not excluded from this

writing a joy up

is like

double dosing

of course , writing it up is like double dosing isn’t it ?

shane warne likely killed himself by his 2 week extreme and unbalanced fasting diet just before the heart attack, you have to be very careful with diets if you have cardiovascular problems

he fell into the trap of very poor eating habits and not understanding his health issues that a lot of single men fall prey to

you should have stayed married shane, you were too much in "the boys club" i am afraid

my view is dogen alternates in and out of schizophrenia and a lot of what is quoted of him is actually schizophrenic nonsense and there’s a strong streak of schizophrenia through real life soto zen

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

judith butler’s theory of performativity is typical of the "intellectual trash" that passes for "philosophy" these days

shane warne

a man of uneven abilities

some exceptional

others

not so

“ word ”

one word or more

they break

too

searching for rules for life

they break

when tested

but

some

hold

perhaps the ones

we have least confidence