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

breaking into a suitcase with  a ballpoint pen

what a joke the padlocks are

the content of soaps

understanding

misunderstanding

laced

with the full gamut

of traumatic emotion

then

all

this

again

washed up in reasoning

yet reasoning suffices

to pilot a course

as erroneous as can be

remembering

like something coming from nothing

doesn’t work like that

rather

an uncovering

of what was once covered

forgetting

like going to nothing

doesn’t work like that

rather

a covering again

of what was once uncovered

the only freedom in life

comes from seeing its patterns

repeating

endlessly

not some objective distant look

but being tossed in them

endlessly

tension

the undiscovered

continually regurgitated

to give the illusion

of

the potential

of new discovery

if its a fact why is the missionizing necessary ?

lotus eating

the echo chambers

of our own idiocy

the shards

of the unnecessary

unproductive

waste of our lives

i find very few people can go more than a round or two with me on reddit, usually they run at the first contradiction, just reading me seems to upset them, i bend their brains in a way that they find difficult to cope with

public execution has historically always been part of our social conditioning, modern society with its abolition of this is missing a fundamental aspect necessary for adequate social control and establishing behavioural norms

how the christchurch mosque  murderer  can remain alive to enjoy a somewhat comfortable if restricted life beggars the imagination

attention is heroin to women and the ones with poor judgment don’t care about the quality

blossoms hold onto themselves

to no avail

winds turned by the cliffs

disperse them

yet in their absence

the phoenix arises

life’s burning goes on

faces

the lifeblood of humanity

i don’t know

how the blind cope

with

the

absence

the female mind likes to be occupied

it will occupy itself regardless

be wary of the content

positive change also brings new traps to be stepped around

positive change always brings new traps to be stepped around

a quote of william faulkner, he has a philo-existential cast of thought in an extent that is unusual, even for a novelist

The dead air shapes the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth

my less pessimistic rework

is seeing the limit ?

further than we can see

what we don’t know

more than we are

statues

crying tears of blood

you would think the faithful take their lesson

its their blood

empty space

so hard not to run from

in the void of nothingness

arises

fecundity

if you have ever watched a chinese historical "soap" some of the imperial intrigue in the plots seems way over the top

but when you  read this ,  it wasn’t

the battle of talas

facile theory

mapping nonsense to nonsense

victimized by incorrect ideas

talk doesn’t cut the ice

life shakes us out

dead wood

sprouts in spring

again

nanoparticles from heated plastic containers is an emerging  health problem

i must be the only "writer" who doesn’t feel threatened by AI because i don’t write like anyone else

i guess there will be others

the nature of "large scale language models" is its "averaging" of style and content, if you are an outlier then it will pass you by

evolution has crippled women by not allowing them to think straight

evolution cripples men by not allowing them to think straight about women

only a fool would ask why the world is the way it is

reading the book

that tells us everything

the first page

overwhelms us

and we close

the covers

to gather dust

we dare not

know

its existence

addiction

the slow removal from the problem

what it offers

has to be explored

isolation

we are created with the illusion

that we are closer than we are

to the low reading age

incomprehension

is someone else’s stupidity

errors accumulate

and rightness

washes away

the puzzles

we have the wrong answers for

and think them the right

the young have a vigour

age can do nothing about

except

wait

hypertextuality, intertextuality

words about

english literature PHD’s

wasting their time

immersion

it all seems true

yet some worlds

need

leaving

the dummkopf

traumatised by genuine inquiry

attempts

to

censor

absurdity judges

non-absurdity as absurd

how correct ?

yet the no-path

of path

is

true

the teachings are an illusion

therefore

the teacher is an illusion

self taught

or one’s own understanding

is

the

only

way

a new low in religious  advertising

its actually chimeric, zen/pop psychology with a catholic icon

blue eyes with european features and eastern mediterranean colouring

getting drunk is self-injury, alcohol is a systemic poison, i don’t know why people don’t understand this

self-injury is a dangerous area that broadens into wanting to injure others, which of course alcohol is notorious for on all sorts of different time scales

another form of socially misunderstood self-injury is tattooing

the children of my home village are puzzled

we speak the same accent yet neither they nor their parents know me

seven decades have past since i left

ed.  my reworking of he zhizhang’s   famous poem

the evening star

hung like a lantern

in the western sky

all the golden moments

condensed

into

a drop

of

light

searching for answers

there never was any question to

our condition

armless

cut off at the knees

did it hurt

or having no head

you are as good as dead ?

a stone dream

of something unknown

caught in an existential half life ?

ed.  the  belvedere  and   milet  torsos

a painting  by joan fear of matakotuko swamp near ruapuke beach in raglan, new zealand

don’t tell because it doesn’t need to be told

unnecessary grief

always washes the world

the poem "hermitage" by fushan fayuan, translated by suru

in a hidden retreat, a rocky spring flows clear like my heart

birds spontaneously sing  —  blossoms freely bloom

i sight the mountains and rivers, the land’s native character

what thing is not the tathāgata before my eyes ?

幽棲

幽棲泉石暢心懷鳥自啼兮花自開看見山河國土性眼前何物不如來

my  reply

i see

not one thing

but many

i see

fragile beauty

spring blossom

plucked by the wind

when the book

becomes you

watch out

recursion squared

is uncontrollable

women and pride

some would rather die

than back down

the gods who punish

and are not punished in turn

bloated with their own righteousness

they harm and hurt

calling it justice

the misery of gods who punish

and call justice

the horror of their inflicted vision

it occurred to me

i say dead

no longer with us

but what has happened

is we have

parted forever

dementia

that slow sad drinking

of the cup of lethe

to go back to what we were before

nothing

dementia

that slow sad drinking

of the cup of lethe

to go back to what we were before

no thing

re-incarnation

retreading

 the rubber of being ?

even though  its a soap ,  its quite an effective exposition of reincarnation, the essential principle being that memories of the previous life are lost

the movie in our heads

about the real world

is a varying match

the ordinary versus the extraordinary

one kills the other

and its not the extraordinary

wow,   the real reason  john key  (ed. new zealand prime minister 2008-2016 )  resigned

china has a long history of beautiful women being involved in politics, the higher ranking concubines of emperors were effectively agents for their respective clans and you can actually argue that henry the eight’s wives were part of a similar system

china like russia has slipped back into its imperial mode pretty damn quick

lei gives a fascinating insight into how chinese politics really works, it sounds like there is some internal division within the CCP over the anti-western direction that xi jinping is taking

according to roland barthes, greta garbo’s face gives "a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature"

ed.  from  his book "mythologies"  (1957)

i think that’s where its at, she takes people into a more religio-philosophic space about humanity and reality with a "spiritual charisma"

bodhidharma came from the east

cypress trees fall to the ground

chasing views

retardation gains

lame amongst the living

joys equalize

but they don’t

even better places fade

but they’re not too bad when they’re there

the interesting thing about the hollywood writers/actors strike is the industry has been subsidised by "talent" overcapacity and as such they are being paid beneath what justifies their time, free carrying to some extent corporate profitability

so there’s some changes coming to the world of the cringingly bad

of course people who die now live on in facebook

a catchy chinese?  tune

the young actor the clip is focused on is a "heartthrob" in the  strange violent  world of chinese soaps

writing they write

however without the recursive reflection of contemplation/meditation

the words fall into the empty bucket of no meaning

that holds

bottomless waste

billie eillish has  existential angst

she’s pretty autistic in my view

a history of a lack of resolution

we call it suspense

the continual new forming of the unresolved

“ I’m married but if I wasn’t there is absolutely no way I would date someone with a neck or face tattoo  —  they are massive red flags

I can’t think of a single man I know with a neck or face tattoo who isn’t a massive douchebag/ abusive type of person and I can’t think of a single woman I know with a neck or face tattoo who isn’t an extremely damaged person or mentally ill ”

lives

can bifurcate

holes in the script

inconsistency

too much deus ex machina

windswept time

the memories erode

also

eroding

us

love

that eternal star

does not wait

but rushes on

unilateral disarmament

proves one thing

the effectiveness

of the other’s armament

my time is immobile

the world rushes past

i am reluctant to emerge

into its buffeting sway

i can’t forgive

or won’t

or don’t

the injury

smarts

forever

the themes of chinese soap operas appear to be

deceit

violence

unreasonable and harsh punishment

all validated

by a unhappy happy ending

that then breaks up

into more

manufactured

disaster

live for 50,000 years

and life still won’t make sense

how can it ?

the brief glimpse we get

is all there can be

of

understanding

“ It raised one of the problems with the development of American Zen. People read Dogen, or some famous teacher, from one translator’s work and assume that’s what Dogen, Bodhidharma, whomever meant.  Very frustrating ”

for sure, people do not understand that translations are 'interpretations", especially with religious texts so you get a lot of blatant idiocy lapped up apparently, by blatant idiots

“ I’ve recently decided that the right action for me right now is to be a Christian ”

a "right action" can’t be proved in advance, rather it has to be shown as a result in the long term.  i don’t get the right vibe from the way you express yourself, too full of your own certainty when in fact you are very uncertain

the secret of fiction is the way it can go on forever

the next phrase might be a deus ex machina that changes everything

the only consistency is the writer’s mind

funerals are not for the now gone person, but a communal marking of absence

of course you could just look at the absence

"seeing off a monk returning to nanquan mountain" by fushan fayuan and translated by suru

returning to the mountain thinking clearly and proud

the key to this life is not to disgrace the former sages

look to that ancient buddha the venerable nanquan

no less than thirty years in the empty mountains

my  reply

thirty years of solitude

are

enough

to see the truth

that

there

is

no

truth

only

thirty

years

of

solitude

noh theater is very "zen"

we are in the second incarnation of western zen and its built on the first which was hume via jesuit missionaries

zen and buddhism as imports from japan and asia have been part of the western philosophical tradition for 250 years, so in the second incarnation post ww2 it just slotted naturally into a religio-philosophical hybrid which basically has all the japanese folk beliefs stripped out and this also fitted in quite well to christianity which has been missing its mystical arms for centuries meeting a need there

interestingly i have read that shinto was originally part of buddhism and the separation today was the result of meiji and imperial era governments attempting to create a more "nationalistic" and aggressive religion than buddhism

reading yoshida kenko’s "essays in idleness" which is set in 14th century kyoto gives a wonderful picture of medieval japanese culture

asian cultures have a highly intertwined mix of superstition and beliefs in daily and ceremonial life, imo, historically a order of magnitude greater than the west

"friends" are an illusion !

functional relationships are not

the worlds of better than can be

turn out

to not to be

melodramas and soap operas are righted worlds

where the women are boss

overtly

the gifted

run through universes

yet there are still more universes

to explore

you are getting into the tricky area of visionary experiences if you are talking about transmission  (ed. zen)  with historical gaps or discontinuity

for fushan fayuan to be taking  the approach  he did, he must have had some awareness of the validity of this

i like him ,  he’s poetic, comes from the school of hard knocks, travelled extensively and is straightforward

i don’t put so much weight on the visionary myself now, maybe because that river has run dry so to speak, but it is an essential stage to go through and i think its necessary to break the mould of our culturally ingrained conventional view of how things are

unfortunately these days people think drugs are an adequate substitute, but they are not and screw up the brain to boot

things pass quickly and we don’t understand them

however

when we look a second or third time and more

we

start

to

sepehr sent an email with some interesting questions

You said   :

“ there may be some truth to "god created the universe", something came into existence bootstrapping itself in an adaptive way and god would be the only thing that cover that, straddling non-existence and existence ”

You also said:

“ There is a mysterious irradiance that permeates the universe ”

This sounds like a panentheism

However, is this god alive ? Does this god possess any experiential content ?

What about hylozoism or panpsychism ?

That is: all complex adaptive systems exhibit some degree of being alive or experiential content, and their more complex forms arise  (such as sapience)  from a greater coalescing of processes ?

my  reply

my current thinking about "god" is its an ontological notion, so there is a degree of truth to it and its difficult or even impossible to define truth outside ontology so there has to be another road and this is the timeless mystical discovery

subtle traps

and not so subtle

are

still traps

subtle traps

and not so subtle

are

still

traps

there is more than tiresomeness in medieval theological literature with its continual jumping through the hoops of feudal constraints and their mythology of hierarchies and necessity of abasement which is really just propaganda for the social order

once you have grasped the theory

that only leaves the fact

the circles of life

remain circles

until resolution

wang wei

 where is he now ?

sailing down

the river in

peach tree valley

sometimes

within the moil

the ticket for the road out

is there for the taking

equanimity

is occasional

if it is never that

you are doing something wrong

being careful will allow you to sail a boat for a thousand years

a chinese saying

  julian of norwich  had a vision in which "a little thing" as round as a ball and the size of a hazelnut was in the palm of her hand and she wondered what it was, and the answer was, it is everything

sages pontificate

theologians rationalise

a billion volumes

spew their excrement

julian’s vision cannot be touched

there is no other truth

one of the more honest and endearing features of polytheistic pantheons like the ancient greek and chinese is the gods don’t know everything, are constantly making mistakes and acting on insufficient information, always scheming, fighting and jockeying for position, less immortal than mortal i’d say

one god who knows everything and is always right is depressing in comparison, very depressing, a brain disease in fact

why is don quoxite such a profound book ?

his misperception of reality and his "better than can be" world

we all suffer from

truly universal

i don’t hold that addiction is a "no-fault" condition, though in a sense it obviously is, however practical ways of defeating it involve the recognition of choice, that in effect addiction is an allocation of time with certain known results and you don’t have to allocate time that way, ie the cost of addiction is not simply the problems from addiction itself, but the lost opportunities contingent

another of the problems of addiction is the lack of complete recovery, for instance ex-alcoholics in my experience are total arseholes which you might expect, they are very damaged and lack adaptability and of course have entrained behaviours developed before and during the alcoholism

other drugs like psychotropic really scramble the brains, its life long

this is the total weirdness of war in today’s world, a fifth of the population is caught in the world of addiction to varying degrees ,  yet you are killing those not caught, those caught of course never go near the front line which actually must be an educational aspect of addiction, especially with non alcohol drugs, it does broaden the experience in certain ways, that’s another perspective, that addiction does have certain positive teachings that the more "straight and narrow" miss out on

entertainment

schizophrenia

in

the

wrong direction

the need for shifting perspectives

to shift us with them

suru’s translation of a poem by fushan

blossoms fall on a silver bed in brightly-blooming spring

the sinking moon behind the canopy distant in the night

the empty hall is silent and there’s no one around

i simply pick up sandalwood, burning it as i please

ed.  sandalwood is a mosquito repellent and expensive

夜坐

花落銀床春爛熳月沉斗帳夜迢遙虛堂寂寞無人共只把旃檀任意燒

my reply

the ground is silver white

yet lacks

the wealth of day

yet is more

the infinity of solipsism

needs to be crafted

to survive in commonality

locality

non-locality

universality

in

the particular

itchy boots  stuck  in a traffic jam on the outskirts of monrovia, liberia

why do i feel she is safer there than a similar situation in some american cities ?

what meister eckhart said  (the real one, not that fraud tolle)  was god is not god because if you say god is only god then that is a limitation which conflicts with god as being without limitation

this actually caused him some problems with the church authorities in a time when "heretical" positions were physically dangerous

however, the difference of opinion is fundamental now i think about it, eckhart was pointing out deficiencies in the ontological proofs of god whereas the validity of the church was dependent on constraints of ontology and its axioms

addiction

you have to pick up

on the road out

what was discarded on the road in

the danger is

that its now gone

and you are permanently damaged

an interesting medieval concern as exemplified by pieter bruegel the elder in his  painting  "the fight between carnival and lent"

i think we would know the conundrum today as the question "why don’t the righteous prevail" ?

“ What is the Buddha ? "   "It is a shit-wiping stick" replied Ummon ”

"What is the Buddha ? "   "Why talk bullshit" replied Ummon

idiots argue

the intelligent

contest

to straighten out

their own thoughts

it was the combination of high velocity  (compound bows)  and accurate archery  from horseback that made the mongols an undefeatable force before gunpowder and then as the use of gunpowder became more common they switched to using the skills of subject nations with gunpowder to be able to implement fast effective sieges

abandoning belief

if i scratch the surface of the sky

there is nothing underneath

abandoning belief

if i scratch the surface of the sky

there is nothing

underneath

how weird

to accidently come across a relative’s instagram page and in the photos you see a lot of people and places you know/knew

like a different life

the net of fiction

dragged through historicity

catches us by surprise

and we are fooled

china’s history is a soap opera/melodrama

the problem with these is the level of trauma

over the years i have pondered definitions of what a religion is without resolution, but the USA internal revenue service has done a better job than i could

a distinct legal existence and religious history

a recognized creed and form of worship

established places of worship

a regular congregation and regular religious services

an organization of ordained ministers

bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor  played  on a harp by ashkhen gevorkian

its a very visual rendering of the music and in a way more informative than the organ

i had never thought much about music for films, but really they are more than half, hans zimmer gives  good insight

my re-translation of a poem by fushan

fresh snow

the wind forms  snow rollers

stuck here in an unheated temple

clothed i lie on a bench

its only warm enough to sleep later in the day

age

infirmity of mind

sticking too much to what it knows

because it cannot accommodate

what it doesn’t

when they reply, not to what you say but what are in effect "voices in their head"

be careful of your own head

reflections  I  and  II  by fushan translated by suru

I

walking a thousand mile road on wingéd steed

every grave mountain hides a solemn person

altogether equally bewildered, what about the past ?

days and nights in succession, mired in the six realms

其二

世事紛紛日日新利名誰肯出紅塵人人都有休休意真個休休有幾人

my reworking with a less literal re-translation, but hopefully capturing the sense

long the journey of life

some moments condense

and glitter

but as for the rest

mud and dust

II

worldly affairs ever-changing in a succession of days

who is willing to abandon mundane fame and gain ?

everyone longs for moments of blessed respite

but truly carefree and content ?   how many people achieve that ?

其二

世事紛紛日日新利名誰肯出紅塵人人都有休休意真個休休有幾人

its a semantic-pragmatic world

lurching between modes

respite gleams in the distance

but is never arrived at

looking for signs of fraud

small inconsistencies

signal bigger

beware

ed.  the more consistent something is, the more you are seeing the thing or person as they are, fragments can be arranged to create appearances but a unified whole cannot

every story is incomplete

complete stories

are

fool’s

gold 

there’s nothing like a melodrama to distort your sense of reality

but i wonder

 how unreal are they ?

the sign says stop

i go on

the sign says go on

i stop

the trap of life is its nature as an unceasingly unsolved problem, there is always something new around the corner

huh, the interrobang/interabang  ( ‽ )  which is a question mark combined with an exclamation mark indicating a question expressed in an exclamatory manner fulfils an unique need in punctuation

i don’t think they got the 2023 barbie film look right, there is a needed step away from being too close to the mien of the commercial tableaux, some "re-invention" is necessary, but i guess they have to deal with what mattel finds acceptable

the straight replication doesn’t translate well to film

also the script is weak, too "idea" driven so the human interest got lost

margot robbie  is interesting ,  clever

religions

are plural

they can’t all be right

and it turns out

not even one is right

the power

of putting something aside

to be resolved later

in the meantime

resolving

itself

not of this world

or any world

who can say anything ?

not of this world

or any world

who can then say

anything ?

all i can say is the world is more open to you than you think

if one avenue is closed, there are other avenues open and they are not the lesser for not being your preferred option

china must have always been a hazardous place to live because so much of its "wisdom literature" assumes everyone around you is a danger to you

i think there’s this huge confusion between what philosophy does and science does, science is so good these days that its assumed to be a universal constructor of explanations and that philosophical problems are within the realm of science to explain, but oddly ,  in the last twenty years its becoming more and more apparent that science itself has intrinsic limits in terms of its scope and the "theory of everything" is an impossible pipedream

the first  (and greatest imo philosopher)  heraclitus had the traditional greek views of physics, astro-physics and biology that are outright looney by our standards, but these erroneous understandings in no way impacted on the validity of his philosophical musings

“ There always a confusion between philosophy and science, but the fact is vast swathes of what used to be philosophy is now uncontroversial solved physics ”

the reason i put that example of heraclitus is to decouple philosophy from science in a way that philosophy addresses problems that cannot be solved by science

in essence i think philosophy is an attempt to untangle certain recursions as regards "being" or "meaning" at the most abstract level and you can compare this to einstein’s theories on light and its role in carrying information which also de-recursify but are at an inherently different level of abstraction  (bit of a clumsy way of putting it)

philosophy properly understood has no need of accurate theories and conceptions of matter, astrophysics and biology, though of course historically and even today these matters have been and are entangled

i am wary of defining words away from the commonly understood meaning as a "schizophrenic" trait, but like the word, say "god" the meaning in the public domain is such a mishmash of nonsense that to discuss it one must step into the schizophrenic territory of redefining the word somewhat in one’s own terms which i think you are also doing

making for

a tidy world

tidier

than

can be

the problem with "meditation" is it will amplify schizophrenia

this is not entirely negative but in some people make them a danger to themselves and others

this is compounded by the theological swill they also imbibe as well as the malign so-called "techniques"

i have

and then i had not

did i ever have ?

i had

and then

had not

you can only write for yourself

if others get something out of it

well and good

if not

too bad

complexity is a barrier

beyond which

we can no longer see

cause and effect

loss

is always

hard

to take

yet

from its depths

shines the beauty

of non-being

loss

is always

hard

to take

yet

in its depths

lies

salvation

exiting

may be

the only way

to leave

and in the end

it happens anyway

hard to start

i don’t want to do it

one little step

and the process begins

bitter my life

loss in the living

loss in my death

the concubines lot

in the fire of life

ed.  the chinese emperors really did have their concubines killed and buried with them

the river of absurdity

flows over cataracts

its sound resounds

and mixes with that of the feeding brooks

impressive as it is

it doesn’t mean anything

only

its hard to take it that way

absurdity

unlocks many a puzzle

it takes absurdity

to unlock

some puzzles

the compacted world of fiction

coming from one brain

can’t be reality

perhaps the most salient way of looking at "addiction" in whatever form is awareness of the implicit price of what the addiction necessarily excludes

is it acceptable to pay that price ?

it never is

a blink we are

in the mystery of life

to

disperse again

immortality

eternal life

we already have

immortality

eternal life

why

chase

 perspectives ?

the miraculous mixing of parental genes

something unique comes out

that is and isn’t

of either parent

"the monk chooses to live at fushan" by fushan fayuan translated by suru

a thousand days at the zen gate, time to choose a place to live

the autumn wind blows causing the purple eggplants to sway

white clouds drift on and on across the golden valley

the water flows burbling over the rocky creek

the monk’s staff at last ends its flight north of tianzhu

the bowl and sack struggle their way out of western shimen

the conditions of meeting and parting comes from where you left

alone, i live in the shadows of the trees on hanshan

浮山解制

千日禪關解制時秋風吹動紫伽黎白雲片片橫金谷流水潺潺下石溪錫杖竟飛天柱北缽囊爭出石門西因緣聚散由他去獨向寒山樹影棲

my reworking of the above

so long travelling

now in the autumn of my life

past the need to go further

i part and come together

where i am

it is necessary to follow something to the end

to emerge in a new beginning

the world

outside normality

painful

inside normality

the appearance

of comfort

north of the future

that probability space

from whence

all comes into being

past heat death

an emergent effect

from complexity

past the limit

sweeps back

i’ve been watching a few chinese "soaps" and there’s a subtle propaganda teaching of an unquestioning obedience to a cruel and irrational authority, that is, i think, deliberate

an individual succeeds, not by challenging the authority, but by moving up in it

anyone who attempts to change the system meets with eventual disaster and the status quo triumphs

the "forbidden palace" in which some of the soaps are set has an interesting if bizarre history

a story once told

loses its power

a story once told

loses its power

what doesn’t lose its power ?

a story never told

what is the basic issue with addiction ?

i think its that the brain interprets being in whatever problematic activity  (ie not just drugs or alcohol)  as beneficial to it, this is its intuitive estimate and the only way to avoid this is construct an understanding of the negative effects and that these are real and its necessary to observe the way the brain is being "blinded"

seeing off the monk jizu by fushan fayuan translated by suru

alone i wander three thousand miles

a staff resounding through a thousand peaks

treading the meaning of caoxi everywhere i go

i’ve been through every last hall of shaoshi

heart blossoms bloom petal by petal

the prajna suns dawning one after another

as the rituals of these directions conclude

i return home to drink from the 10 peck cup

送僧歸雞足

孤身遊萬里一錫振千峰踏遍曹溪旨參窮少室宗心花開片片慧日現重重禮罷諸方後歸家扣石鍾

ed. i reinterpret below the above poem in terms of leo susskin’s  conjecture  that complexity has its own momentum that carries on beyond the heat death of a black hole

its sorta a bit freaky to think that fayuan was thinking in ways that are similar to the most advanced astro-quantum physics treading the roads of complexity

past heat death

living long i come to the death of complexity

yet i arrived there first

and came across complexity later

neat

tidy

everything works as planned

messy

incoherent

the very intention

falls apart

reddit maxims

a downvote is an upvote

one upvote is better than ten

shadow bans are badges of honour

better than can be

why can’t i live there

death goes nowhere

it doesn’t add up

within resolution

another difficulty

has

already

crystallised

the realm of poets and mystics

things can be

even when it seems they are not

and not be

even when it seems they are

a primitive female  ritual  no-one has any idea the meaning of

if you travel down a dead end road, at least learn what it looks like

if you want to understand how women think, don’t worry about what the psychology research says, just watch a soap

the amount of trauma that a woman seems to find necessary would make a general blink

imo, having closely followed the research literature, the myocardial fallout from the mrna covid vaccines would have been a lot less if those overpaid idiots in the CDC and other health bodies had also read the literature and spaced the vaccines at four months minimum, preferably six months

it was negligence so gross it amounts to involuntary manslaughter, the problem was not with the science but the bureaucracy and the intellectually lazy people who inhabit it

the benefits of vitamin D and the importance of blood type O  (being less susceptible)  vs AB were also ignored

something so badly done its farcical can shed a sceptical light on what supposedly is not farcical

i wish my writing were more accessible, you have to be in the right mood to read it or it just goes past you

i know this because when i read what i wrote and its been a while since i wrote it, i have to sorta mode into it to see what it is about, its quite a different space from normal and often i can’t get there

all a bit weird actually, just reading it freaks some people out, i must be the most shadowbanned person on the web

well at least they get the gist of some of what i write for their insufficient brains to be offended

parallel universes

a similar existence but the same

a fleeting glimpse

tells us there must be more

fancy words

spun on the frame

of a simple idea

fools many

my reworking of "sitting in mulian pavilion" by fushan fayuan

my little hermitage

high in the cliffs

away from the disease of men

a spring for water

and the moon for a lantern

questions about reality have no place here

the answer is everywhere

the night sky’s lantern

not fixed

yet always returning

there is a lesson

in this

“ When people say humanities and arts degrees aren’t real degrees and that those people don’t deserve a living wage from those degrees ”

when people come out of a degree course more narrow minded and intolerant of criticism than they go in, i’d say there is a problem

99% of artists and writers are on the poverty line, why should arts graduates who are when all is said and done, just spectators of originality fare better ?

not everyone ages well, its also the process of dying

to say something worthwhile

it must be consistent from beginning to end

real literature does this

entertainment doesn’t

women live a mystery of themselves and their children that men have no part of

memories

both bind and create us

what starts as a plain

turns into a road

we cannot get off

a story is meaning

malign

useful

fun

instructive

indifferent

take your choice

a stop on a long journey

also turns out to be

a long journey

eternity

our footsteps along it

the pain comes and goes

loss, love

held for a while

then

gone

when you can’t say what you think

then you can’t think what you think

when you can’t say what you think

then you can’t see what you think

men and women are a commodity to each other

but, like everything else

there’s good and bad

when you are talking to one person then another

you are literally dropping from one universe to another

its very different with different rules

and exhausting

theodicy

makes sense of the world of evil

but it needs a context

without the context

everything is neutral

wars for instance

just occur

and the human consequences

are the dynamic in action

when you look at history

and the way power cliques used to murder each other

its something else

martin heidegger is turning out to be much more of a nazi than anyone thought and totally unrepentant in his postwar life

the question is, does this affect the value of his philosophical writings ?

he’s a mixed bag with his waffle about the importance of where we come to be yet ignoring where he was

you can’t separate the sound from the meaning in a good poem so translation of poetry is inherently limited, unlike prose

i have noticed translating poetry that you never get it right and its better to "rework" another’s writing into your own expression and views if you want a "quality" product

faery worlds beyond our ken

somnolescent mysteries

beauties fade in and out

the sharp thorns of the past

abate

ed.  this poem is an attempt to capture the mood  of this dance  by lady fuca ,  (an   historical  empress)  as the goddess of the river luo and and the sense of the subtitled lyrics

faery worlds beyond our ken

somnolescent mysteries

beauties fade in and out

the sharp thorns of the past

abide

an unusual  dance interpretation  of bolero by the female japanese troupe "avantgardey"

one of the more subtle but highly significant features of the modern age is people living longer and a significant portion of those remaining in good intellectual shape at a more advanced age which has greatly modified the "power" landscape, old people being able to remain in control of whatever and this has strong negatives and positives

a positive is retaining and getting functional value from very experienced people longer, a negative is men who have clearly lost the plot, but still have the skills to retain their position to the detriment of whatever they are managing

the problem with inflation is that it destroys the principal function of price which is to provide information about the relative value of a service or goods

“ henry miller versus charles bukowski ”

they’re different, you can’t really compare them and you have to understand them differently

anaïs nin and henry had strong mutual influences on each other

the problem with charles bukowski is he is one of the great geniuses in the area of milton and goethe, but he crippled himself with drink and other stupidities

all the same you can’t deny his genius, henry miller while good, is not in the same class

sometimes writers do unforgivable things to their characters that put you off them

cs lewis when he kills the "visitors to narnia" in a train crash and has them travel through some ridiculous notion of an afterlife  (aslan’s country)

the chinese soap "the story of  yanxi palace " where the maid servant mingyu is given a slow death from the insertion of silver needles in her body by the imperial concubine chun

btw, this series is really literary quality, i suspect because the strict censorship in china doesn’t allow many outlets for this level of writing and production and if you have read anything of chinese history, what is portrayed is not totally unrealistic

AI is going to make machine language translation increasingly accurate, if you are looking for future employment in the area of translating, please be aware that human translation within ten to twenty years will likely become redundant

any language studies now should be combined with computer programming and theory skills

anything to do with english lit from the universities is only educating you to be stupid

its effectiveness in this is painfully observable in real life graduates who are amongst the most narrow minded incompetents i have ever come across

the passage of things

is its own passage

reasoning

fails

cosmology is in a surprising state of flux, there are a lot of things not adding up and  this paper  by reformulating in minkowski space says allowing the so called fundamental constants to evolve and vary does add things up and does away with the cosmological constant

remember einstein said the cosmological constant was the result of some sort of mistake !

could this new approach resolve that and other problems like "dark matter" ?

$13,000 for  a lost arm

the fat cats of the russian elite

sleek with their ten fingers

stories

one page is inconsistent with the next

yet this is our lives

stories

one page is inconsistent with the next

yet this is how we live

“ the consumption of foods prepared at high temperatures has been associated with numerous health risks

to date, the chief identified source of risk has been small molecules produced in trace levels by cooking and reacting with healthy DNA upon consumption, but this study considered whether the DNA in food itself also presents a hazard

we hypothesize that high-temperature cooking may cause significant damage to the DNA in food, and this damage might find its way into cellular DNA by metabolic salvage ” 

ed.  this in fact is a highly significant finding that has implications for the way we cook food, namely that fried and charred foods are problematic from this viewpoint, though this varies  table 1

tell the truth but don’t tell it square

go by circuity

its a road more fair

rules are an attempt to govern emergent phenomena

given that, then its not surprising that just about  (but not)  all are extremely unsatisfactory

vitamin D deficiency impacts a number of significant areas of eye health

“ lower levels of vitamin D may cause thinning in the macula and the retinal nerve fiber layer ”

study

arsenic in australian rice is a problem, its in the soil and gets concentrated in the husk so brown rice isn’t healthy like it is made out to be

lying in bed half asleep, i suddenly saw a long poem, but all i could decipher were these verses

when the petals lie waiting

on the ground to decay

this must mean

autumn is not far away

sense and nonsense

our propensity for the latter

and avoidance of the former

astounds me

the emotional fixed points

is it only loss

 that brings meaning ?

the writer’s strike

the world

saved

from

so much stupidity

immersive worlds

breaking free is not so easy

what is so different about the russo-ukraine war is the immediacy and sophistication of communication,   here you are ,  the position on the front being told to you and discussed on youtube in almost real time

and then  (viewer discretion advised, soldiers are killed before your eyes)  there is this , the 73rd maritime special operations center suprising the russians in their trenches, clearly the russians lack experience in this sort of warfare, most likely conscripts with no experience at all up against battle hardened ukrainian troops

russia was notorious for using its men as "cannon fodder" or "meat" during WW2, apparently leadership attitudes and public acceptance of them haven’t changed since

better than can be worlds

i have one or two

its is greedy to want more

but we all do i guess

that was sylvia plath’s problem

replete with mystic infinity

she reached too far into what would destroy her

normality

an insightful poem by maggie smith  from this page

after the divorce, i think of something my daughter said about mars

once you go, you can never come back

if you returned to earth

the gravity would turn your bones

to noodles. i mean your skeleton

would sort of melt.  so if you go

you have to stay gone

this is so chinese ,  a tolerance of dictatorial arrogance and the role and duty of the commoners to support it despite being ill-treated by those in power

warning, its a soap and surprisingly addictive, but the life as portrayed in the forbidden city has some historical veracity

unfortunately a lot of the archaeological evidence of ch’an in the form of temples, their records, statuary, steles etc has been destroyed not by the communists, but property development

one feature of modern life that cannot replicate "dynasty" zen is the travel they did, you can see it all through the records, another is celibacy, modern zen is just some toxic wall papering of asininity and inattention

philosophical systems

that claim to be more than they are

empty verbiage

consume

a billion trillion hours

of nonsense

what comes together to create a sort of intensity

as it occurs

it is already falling apart

the ragged edges

give it all away

cogitating space

answers are illusions

forever presides and never ends

the moon goddess dances

let’s remain mesmerised

cogitating space

answers are an illusion

forever presides and never ends

the moon goddess dances

let’s remain mesmerised

when looking

obscures what is seen

what do you do then ?

slight pokings

reveal more

than hewing with an axe

sayings of joshu №  415

joshu and the young novice bunon played a verbal game

the aim was never to get the upper hand, and it was agreed that the winner should buy the loser a rice cake

joshu said   :   i am a donkey

bunon replied   :   i am the donkey’s arse

joshu replied   :   i am the donkey’s dung

bunon replied   :   i am the worm in the dung

joshu said   :   what’s the good of being there ?

bunon replied   :   i spent the summer there

joshu said   :   go buy a rice cake !

my  comment

buon may have spent the summer with joshu as monks customarily did so joshu flips what buon says in a checkmate

this is so joshu and makes me think he was a real person, there’s nothing else like him in zen, miles ahead in verbal adroitness and poor enough for the food to matter

“ one day, in a mood of sublime emptiness, subhuti was resting underneath a tree when flowers began to fall about him

"we are praising you for your discourse on emptiness" the gods whispered to subhuti

"but i have not spoken of emptiness" replied subhuti

"you have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness" responded the gods

"this is the true emptiness." the blossoms showered upon subhuti as rain ”

not talking

not thinking

not talking or thinking

a strange space

falling flowers

and non-being

neither there or not there

this

is

true

enlightenment

some

words

about

birds

and their flight

don’t

solve

the

problems

of

the universe

some

words

about

birds

and their flight

don’t

solve

the

problems

of

life

isn’t  can’t  won’t

be

is  can  will

be

everything

sails

between

these

the ends we tie

and the ends we don’t

concatenate

the ends we tie up

and the ends we leave loose

determine our life

the theologies of christian churches are becoming obscenely anti-factual, to me its a puzzle as to whether they could relax their insistence on "anti-factualism" and so accommodate a potentially larger and younger congregation, or is the very essence of their being the anti-factualism, without which they cannot exist ?

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely/  the world offers itself to your imagination/  calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting  —  /  over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.”

the above quote from a poem by mary oliver, my comment below

the world

replete with occupation

has a vacancy

where

the only sanity lies

its interesting to see how easily the BBC has slipped into its wartime role  as a propagandist  and being very effective at it

if you are in any doubts as to whether we are in a war this should be the evidence

meanwhile radio new zealand doctors reuters’ news to favour russia and the australian media is obsessed with what parliamentarian squeezed which parliamentarian’s bottom

i can’t stop what you are or should i want to !

i can’t stop what you are nor should i want to !

that’s just so christian, the quoted scripture followed by some pompous nonsensical exegesis !

why do you do it ?

its the total middle of nowhere

“ well its our middle of somewhere ”

i see

“ Our findings  suggest this is because HSF-1 and DAF-16 together activate expression of specific genes, including genes  encoding small heat-shock proteins, which in turn promote longevity

The small heat-shock proteins also delay the onset of polyglutamine-expansion protein aggregation, suggesting that these proteins couple the normal aging process to this type of age-related disease  ”

its unusual to find a translator who translates to the real sense and not to preconceived ideas

“ Why are you telling me this ? ”

well firstly i don’t "tell" you, i write to myself

i put it out there to make me think a bit more and people may or may not pick up on it

the song of the  precious mirror samadhi  by dongshan is very daoist which imo is a good indication that zen and daoism were "entwined" though doctrinally it fits well into "the silent illumination" zen camp

quoting a line from suru’s translation

You are not it, It is you

in my view, a better way of putting it is

what you are

is not known

pineapples should be stored on their side and rotated every day or so to move the internal juice around and stop it settling

“ a ripe pineapple should be a little soft when you touch it and not totally firm

when pineapple is ripe it will be more brown or yellow in color then green.  i usually look at the bottom of it too

the heavier, the riper because that means more juices are flowing in there

smell the bottom.  does it smell fruity  ?  !  !  it’s ready for ya then ! ”

failing the fifth

the lesson of the 6th is ignored

so

the third is never arrived at

ed.  the numbers refer to the i ching hexagrams, my poem is a criticism and inversion of the passage from dongshan’s poem "song of the precious mirror samadhi"

“ in both sections of the sixth hexagram,

the relative and impartial interchange  —

repeat both, they become three

transforming completely into the fifth ”

wilhelm liebniz was hardly known to me, maybe because of his historical censorship by the anglophone world as per the dispute with newton over the who originated calculus, but he is certainly extraordinary, one of the  great polymaths

it is not necessary to hope in order to act

nor succeed in order to persevere

the above quote from william of orange

i wonder whether the medieval aristocratic and kingly "caste system" with its in-group marriage of "peers" created the talent on a breeding basis for the skills to maintain the patchwork of wars and kingdom building

that is , it bred individuals with the capacity and inclination to do this and so was self perpetuating

a consequence if this theory is true, is that the women of this caste would have also been like this and there are certainly a lot of examples

small versus large

we step from one to another

not noticing

the difference

history

simmering beneath the surface

occasionally to break through

an uncontained monster

my brush with fame

a google maps car went past

emblazoned with the logo on the side

and cameras atop a pole on the roof

i was 30 meters down in the paddock

adzing thistles

will i make the map photos ?

boxes

so we can’t see the dead

but actually

its death we can’t see

only

their

absence

the

impenetrable shroud

of

nonbeing

a dramatization of al purdy’s poem  at the quinte hotel

angel’s wings are designed all wrong, rather than coming out of the back they should be between the arms and the sides like pterodactyls or bats

so embarrassing to be an angel, i’m sorry, i can’t really fly, these are just for show, yes we have to walk everywhere and hop a bit at the end, it makes delivering the lord’s word tedious and the design department say they can’t fix it, the specifications were "look like they can fly", not "actually fly"

marriage

that disjoint union

the fusion that results

is not them

when they claim they can

but can’t

they

dance

to

a discordant

tune

when they claim they can

and can’t

they

dance

to

a discordant

tune

i’ve been taking say four fifths of a level teaspoon a day of taurine for years as the only thing that helps with migraine, but  reading here ,  it has other beneficial effects among which is delaying aging

as to causes, i find exposure to viruses to be the main one so its a sort of immune response

sucralose  (splenda)  is   significantly genotoxic

it also negatively impacts intestinal tissue amongst other inducted problems

study

taking a story

he makes it more than a story

the world

is

not

short

of

fools

“ Don’t share your dream with a fool ”

share your dream with a fool

from a fool to a fool

there is no other way

"the way" while it sounds nonsense does have some form of validity in that a sort of path can be perceived in hindsight

oddly, what lies ahead is always opaque to us

its existence is not definite which is why it is so hard to talk about, its an abstraction of the past, which as we all know is changeable, existing as they do, in the indefinite

your reply is just bad writing and malign thinking

of course you have no interest in rectifying that

you have the "dunning-kruger" seal of approval, with your hubric dissing of valid criticism

if you have suffered or caused irreversible loss

what can be changed

nothing

you can say it once

you can say it a hundred times

its slowly becomes uninteresting

and you ask yourself

why am i here ?

in my view what bankei is saying is you can talk about things in plain english that makes sense, not hide a disguised stupidity and ignorance behind the meaningless and confused phrases of the thoughts of pretension

he lived four centuries ago, but nothing has changed for sure

“ what’s an important lesson you learnt the hard way ? ”

do things in small bites, not all at once

gwen john’s  portrait  of chloë boughton-leigh

real life zen was plagued for many years from health problems from excessive soy consumption, soy was then viewed as some sort of wonder food, cheap and vegetarian which it was, but also had endocrine disruptors and anti-digestive factors that were never fully denatured by cooking

the fact is, if you are of european descent anyway, you need the high nutritional density of meat/offal and "meatless" substitutes do not supply this, in fact, given the modern adversion to offal, there are deficiencies in the general population

the fundamental "woke" idea that everything is culture and learned and not biological is in fact marxism and an important part of the doctrine, that people and the culture have to be re-educated  (eventually, they have some realism here !)  into selfless communal effort and in fact some modern western values like anti-nuclear and lowering the carbon footprint are fundamentally marxist because they totally ignore the problem of "the tragedy of the commons"

in the case of the anti-nuclear stance you are effectively unilaterally disarming and the russo-ukraine war is showing how well that works and the efforts by some countries to reduce the carbon footprint is way more than matched by massively increasing coal use and carbon emission in others like china, most of asia and of course africa

marxism basically says that selfless communal benefit should be the underlying social and political condition, and as such is a complete denial of the individual nature of consciousness, evolution in the sense of heritable genetic variation and even the neuro-biological principle of "free energy"

functionally , politics has to work to some extent in the marxist area, however its a delicate balance with very deep and uncomfortable potholes when the balance is lost

george orwell lampooned the notion of selflessness in 1984 with "boxer" the draught horse and interestingly there is this quote from an egyptian "desert father" which goes

“ an elder said to another elder who had great love and who fraternised with both monks and worldlings   :   a lamp sheds light on many, but it burns its own mouth ”

what stonehenge actually  looked like  about 4000 years ago !

(ed.  2:06 of 5:55 of the video half way down the page)

it was build over a period of 700 to 800 years

i don’t think it was constructed by our ancestors, the builders were "replaced" by  them, the "beaker people"

sometimes i write

and i can’t tell what i’m thinking when i write

its disturbing

like another being is a me that i don’t have access to

memory

the rock upon which we stand

can wobble a bit

topple

disappear

and like jesus

resurrect

where we stand in all this is a bit of a puzzle

what comes first and which and when

outside is in

the insideout

time shrinks away and doesn’t answer when called

being’s firmness is waving

when looked at like this

as if the seaweed turns the tide

rather than the other way around

when buying a kettle, you want to get one with the minimum exposure of the boiling water and steam to plastic as there are problems with leeching of unwanted chemicals and also the shedding of  microplastics

i have been unable to find anything with zero plastic, something in the lid appears to be a minimum

the coptic  desert fathers  have quite a "zen flavour" as does eastern orthodox

zen has to be understood as being influenced by these forms of christianity via merchants using the silk road and of course the nestorian christianity already in china

_________________

abba theophilus, the archbishop, came to scetis one day

the brethren who were assembled there said to abba pambo   :   say something to the archbishop, so that he may be edified

the old man said to them   :   if he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech

_________________

abba sisoes said   :   seek god, and do not seek where he dwells

_________________

abba anthony said   :   a time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, "you are mad, you are not like us"

_________________

abba bessarion, at the point of death, said   :   the monk ought to be as the cherubim and the seraphim  —  all eye

quotes

marie antoinette’s  death mask  (halfway down the page)  is very high quality because it was done in wax by marie tussaud  (likely on friendly terms with her if not a friend)  and of course she was relatively young  (38)  and in good health when executed, its so good you can sorta see the person, unlike most death masks which are more or less husks

marie antionette’s death was not an artefact of the change of power, she was a key player in the opposition to the revolution, moreso than the king who was by nature, ineffective

to exist is to win a lottery with odds so against you, it can’t be described mathematically

a breast in each hand he stared at the nipples

the net has  the most toxic  religious bullshit i have ever seen

a poem by langston hughes i like

when you turn the corner

and run into  yourself

then you know that you have turned

all the corners that are left

when you constrain the world

ontologically

god exists

by virtue of there being things

"that are like god"

but if you say

"there are things that are god"

then the ontological bounds are burst

and there is no god

in summary

god is not the "last stop"

no god is

things that are god is the last stop

there is nothing deeper

time gives perspective

you just can’t get it without having lived a while

objects have a distance relation to each other that can be seen

another way of looking at a cathedral

is it is simply a frame

for the stained glass

everything you intend

is

un-intended

at some point

addiction

a chemical parasitism

on the brain

it sucks it dry

recovery

is

limited

did you ever think

you had another life, quite different from this one

that never occurred ?

the ambiguity of hypocrisy

you can’t say

something is entirely wrong

buddhists bowing to toilets

chrisitians staring at candles

muhammadans crowding around the kaaba

jews and rosh hashanah

god opens the book of life and death so differently

yet the same writing shows

a million lives not your own

do they intrude ?

yes and no

we seek them out

chimeras

two parents in one child

perfectly fused

or

 not ?

i don’t feel zen places any emphasis on the "irrational", that is a daoist inclination, and the whole western buzz with zen being "irrational" is a consequence of philological loss from the chinese medieval period, hakuin may have fallen into this trap as well, so you also get this mistake in modern japanese zen

 more craziness !

zen is air

that can’t support itself

a fiction

painted by madmen

exist exists

preparatory to it not existing

this conundrum

has no answer

our life

looked at like a ghost passing

not seen but felt

distance

and removal

not there

but there

the emptiness of looking for another with understanding

there is only you

don’t waste your time

given any opportunity

others will

rather than try to parse a question like "what is the totality of existence", ask the neverending "what is existence", the process itself is more of an answer than any semantics arrived at

the education system does what it does best, crucifying the young

helena blavatsky was a con artist who got caught out one too many times so she switched to what she couldn’t get caught out on, "spiritual nonsense" and surprisingly it was successful beyond her wildest dreams

well, the eventual defection of her "messiah" would have to be a flaw

for insight into the gaining and loss of independence of tibet, look at the wikipedia   entry  for the 13th dalai lama, there was an awful lot going on

games are very like life, ontological simplifications that make sense within the simplification

but not outside

armies

their officers and commanders

insulated

into

semi-competence

don’t hurry to change to windows 11 from 10, windows 11 looks a bit of a failure and most likely the best upgrade path is direct to windows 12 when it comes out, allowing for a year to get the usual bugs sorted out

entertainment

land of chimeras

 meaning what ?

incongruities heaped together

passing the time

in absurdity

avoidance

of the facts

mozart’s laudate dominum sung by the boy saprano  aksel rykkvin  (norwegian)

mozart’s laudate dominum sung by the boy saprano  cai thomas  (welsh)

good boy sapranos are so transitory  (three or four years of their peak ?)  that modern recording has placed us in the unique position of being able to listen to the best

laura croft

chimera

male in female form

multiplicity

a viable world

singularity

non viable

in the many

not one but two

figure this out

genius !

slavs killing slavs, its just mind blowing what putin is doing, writing a blank cheque for china !

a good 80% of people infer that because they say something, it necessarily becomes true

africa is a  multilingual world

to get a whole that works, you have to put together the pieces without flaws

one never gets used to talking to the mad

by definition they can’t help themselves and its disturbing

the light of dawn

and the light of dusk

realms with their own

and different

magic

quite a clever use of "prexisting sets" by an amateur to make an effective  short film

zen is a plagiarization of tang dynasty poetry, using its themes for the construction of a religion

you can be fooled or you can read tang poems

wordpress      robert eno

there’s not behind or after

nor before or in front

the backwards goes forwards

a round world turns asquare

and the square around

free of ontological scars

emergence abounds

i’m not a man who hates, but "getty images" incites bad feelings in me

all that wasted bandwidth polluted to its core with inanity

a testimony to the mental laziness of journalists i guess

i had always thought of  cocaine  as one of the milder ones in terms of harm, but its not

i’ll never forget a neighbour who was having a party and being invited inside and seeing the white powder in lines across the table

catholics obviously have a big problem with belief  (or disbelief)  because they are constantly looking for evidence, corpses that don’t decay, bleeding stgimata, lights from the eucharist, visions of mary, this list is endless because the process is endless

never finding confirmation, looking for confirmation is the panacea

joshu is, imo the most uniquely "zen" of all the zen masters, except perhaps for the 6th patriarch who we dont know much about and may not have even been anything except what the one possible contemporary reference to him says , a "meditation master"

the busy-ness of dreams

for a night

to be forgotten

everynight

for a lifetime

that’s it

a frosty night

the native hens

shriller than usual

ideas have no substance in recursive space

but patterns of ideas do

hence a fluidity of meaning flows from this

you are avoiding the recursive space

people do of course

its dangerous

the sands of time

unending

go forwards and backwards

to find where we are

is impossible

andrew llyod weber’s  pie jesu ,  sung by phoebe and molly gault

when the reply denigrates

you have to ask

what in the question

elicits this ?

what i write

compression

enabled by

an involuted topography

combined with

locality and non-locality

not

the usual

by

any

means

if all you have is a bad fit

rather than use it

try something else

if all you have is a bad fit

rather than use it

try something different

"free will"

game plan

on a playing field

designed by evolution

slavoj žižek is much better keeping off politics

"chastity,   poverty  and obedience"

like a monty python skit with the big ring on the finger, more gild than you can throw a stick at, the "choir boy" in the background and a rig flamboyant enough for the most extreme "queen"

caught in a crossword puzzle of non-existence

they think they are saying something

but they aren’t

sotheby’s is  on a tear

for storing archival information, hard drives fired up once a year are best, the rest of the time they can stay on a shelf !

a trick with flash memory/ssd’s is to make the back-up when they are warm, this improves the noise margin and for long term off-line storage they should be in a cold or cool place

the foreverness of hell

10 and a half hours

a foretaste

not to be confused with heaven

because

it could be

confused with heaven

another

forever

land

what the eye sees

knows before the feet move

a world defined

is a world unwound

time is wasted

or not wasted

we can’t say

accidently tripping into utility

we can’t plan that

either

mistake is the fragment

its the consequences that become the whole thing

why write making sense ?

there’s no shortage of it

nonsense making sense is so rare

it

needs

to

be

cherished

in sequence linear

but

superposition

is

larger

all pervading soul

and cedar trees

just call cedar trees

and you won’t worry

about

“ all pervading ”

coercion

the threat to hurt

underlain

by

the need to hurt

coercion

the threat to hurt

underlying

the need to hurt

something can be known as

not a wonderful shining theory

but

the best you can do

anything anywhere

can affect

anything anyhow

non-locality

the ultimate subversive

oversimplified worlds

where things happen as they ought

turn our heads around

from things as they are

oversimplified worlds

where things happen as they ought

turn our heads around

to look backwards instead of forwards

the cycle of the days

and years

the permanence of intransigence

what seems forever goes

this is the nature of things

idle talk is weighing nonsense

i don’t know how these nuns can  waste their lives  as being what are obviously "slaveys" for an institution, a blast to before vatican II

they are  sedevacantists ,  an understandable position given the senile dodards that get elected, the papal vacancy of dementia

the theological hoops thomas aquinas jumps through are mind bending, the stuff those medieval theologians argued over is unbelievable, totally insane, i feel damaged reading them

oddly, several months before he died he seems to have had some sort of authentic revelation saying  “ all that i have written seems like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me ”

a simple question to ask with any drug use, medical or recreational, is do they do permanent damage ?

research can reveal surprises !

the thought  of mao se tung which xi jin ping is so keen to emulate

i wouldn’t say its all rubbish, but it has the lethality of some-one who is sure he is right and will brook no compromise

“ the correct handling  of contradictions  among the people ”

interestingly, there is no theoretical basis for the forcible conscription of taiwan into mainland china

russia is what happens after a 35 year period of selectively killing its best people (1920 to 1955 ?)

if you read about the mongol invasions, they were horrific, but there was a rationality to their slaughter which certainly was on a scale equivalent to the holocaust and WW2 losses in general, however what is unique about the holocaust is its stupidity, how could germany ever win a war preoccupied as it was with annihilating the most productive portion of its middle class ?

the jews made a huge contribution to the stamina of germany in WW1 which hitler knew of course because he served under a jewish officer whom he respected

its always interesting to see unconnected dots, something internal politics and international "relations" have in abundance, though its encouraging to see the positive effect modern communications have had in creating a united front from the west in terms of russia and china, the war is being anticipated, it doesn’t have to occur before everyone wakes up like in WW1 and 2

noh theater ,  unique if you have not experienced it before and the stories give a great insight into pre-meiji japan and its off the wall level of superstition

curiously addictive

reason fails

until reason fails

what is yours only

you can see

others have trouble

handling this

the past is past

whatever opinions one has

doesn’t change it one bit

the "hunting of the snark" has similarities to farid ud-din attar’s "the conference of the birds" ,  so much so i am suspicious that somehow lewis carroll read it or at least knew an outline of the plot

for the snark was a simorg you see

simply stunning  shots of around and above everest with the MAVIC 3 drone

the source long looked for

isn’t there

what is there ?

that’s for you to work out !

its not there in the words of others

its a private knowledge that cannot be conveyed

“ the world is wide and spacious ”

and

includes

error

a key concept of translations of historical literary and religious works is in fact they are "interpretations", often heavily biased to how the interpreter views things and with problematic philology, and maybe never can be translated accurately

taoism is actually a religion with their own temples in china, or at least historically that was the case

in the west, like zen, its really just taken as a philosophy, even more heavily nonsensicated than zen !

when looking at zen or any religion the word hagiography goes along way to understanding what you read

what you look for

is

already

in

your

own

experience

in childhood

we are packed with so much nonsense

we never live long enough to unpack it

casey neistat on  procrastination

i do think there is a hidden advantage to procrastination which is to gather more information before committing to action

phishing emails always have "give-aways" if you look carefully, especially take a close look at the source code, i have just received one, its an account query from a company i don’t have an account with, but the source shows it comes from a marketing email platform, ("tradeboss" in this case)  whereas a genuine account query would come from the account website

you can’t be suspicious enough and its only going to get worse

you can read about it

its not you

you can write about it

its you

chanting is for people with nothing upstairs to fill the vacancy

the problem the screen writers strike faces is margins in the industry are being compressed with competing content like youtube

the strike itself may force a shift in public viewing habits  (that has already occurred in generation Z)  onto informal net content, it is a structural shift into something that is a different : more fractured, specialized and intellectual paradigm that would normally take a very extended period to happen

my feeling is good riddance to their rubbish, however writers have been subsidizing the industry for quite a while so there are going to be some big changes, similar to what has happened in the music industry

bad explanations are easy to vary, good explanations are not

sorts out excuses and projections doesn’t it !

huh, fixed a zipper for the first time ever

easy peasy

saved a cheap jacket i liked

the wall of being

turns out to be transparency into non-being

objectivity

makes this so

scary

the brain is nobbled

by what i’m not sure

a virus ?

incapacity

aging’s worse

symptom

you just have to look at "twelfth night" and its familiarity with upper class/ aristocratic life to realise shakespeare never wrote it

a very lithe ana luísa negrão in a superb performance of   les ombres du temps  (luca branca) for the prix de lausanne 2023 prize finals

blueberries lower the firmicutes/bacteroidetes ratio of the intestinal microbiota which supposedly is beneficial

“  the study  found that blueberry dosage significantly impacted the firmicutes to bacteroidota ratio, which decreased as the dosage increased.  the ratios were highest in samples without blueberry diets and gradually fell in samples with increasing blueberry concentrations

additionally, comparisons of diversity in the gut microbiome in each sample exhibited a considerably greater variety among samples having higher blueberry treatments ”

they can have relatively high pesticide levels which putting in a jar and sprinkling some baking soda on and then pouring hot water over helps with  (denatures the pesticide)

meditative thinking

the flux of the indefinite

can crystallize out

indifferent

to

the reality it forms in

simulated attack  on the kerch bridge, its all about delivering and dodging missiles

it really does give a feel of what it would like to be a pilot making such a flight

waterbrain  (2002)  by aboriginal artist rusty peters

for an explanation, check out "about"

rusty is a very abstract thinker, a bit like andy warhol

the chinaman’s garden massacre (2000)  painting  is based on stories from his uncle ,  the only survivor of a massacre in the western australian kimberley region

determined

versus non-determined

our life

is a

fluctuation of these

just be honest about the flaws, going to an extreme of total rejection doesn’t work for a lot of things and won’t work for you

there’s a toxicity in chanting, you can see it in religions, i think its problematic from its hypnotic/ mind numbing effect and the total bullshit of the meaning, why would you willingly engage in that sort of nonsense ?

“ I’m sure plenty of people feel the same way about meditation of all kinds   .   .   . ”

yeah, there are meditations that are crazy too, counting, visualization etc, however shikantaza has something to offer, but that also has limits as it tends to engrave

even in zen the chanting is absolute brainwashing nonsense, really off putting except i quite liked the korean chanting, i didn’t understand a word of it

chanting is a religious art form, just a vehicle for propaganda and reality disinformation

words

bound together like furniture

looked under

there’s nothing there

the filter of others

always a distortion

words wrapped into a snare

the same wherever you go

what fixed point is there in a net ?

the uncorrectable world

correct it and you’re sunk

through

your

own

efforts

a sense  of distance and space, FPV drone on a swiss mountain

the himalayan mountains  in moonlight

i feel like i’ve been there

the dark blue sky fading to black

snow and rock

speaking of agency

elsewhere

and

here

a "1420"   interview

"i’m glad how our guys act"/ would you go there ? /"i would but i’m not healthy enough" !

i think WW2 and the stalin era left a permanent cultural imprint in russia where they were forced to watch everyone around them be killed or imprisoned, self-preservation became paramount

i remember reading an account of a english "tanker" in an attack on the germans at tobruk and a tank next to him was hit by an 88 shell and he said his only thought was, thank god its not us

the problem with translating medieval chinese zen texts is you have to go back and examine source documents to get the provenance sorted out and also do a lot of statistical analysis of the sort involved in "AI/chatbots" of similar regional and dated texts to see all the subtle and not so subtle shadings of what was meant

in the case of the title of the mumonkan i’m sticking with "open the door" as a better translation which is also what the koans/stories are supposed to do

actually the  wikipedia entry  is not bad for "provenance"

in this case its nothing like as confused as it can be e.g. 300 years ago a certain monk heard another monk say another two hundred years earlier so and so said a zen master said   .   .

fortuitous benefit

solving one problem

solves more than one problem

and opens

up

the

maw

of

new

problems

yusef komunyakaa’s poem  facing it  about his visit to the veteran’s vietnam war memorial in washington d.c.

its interesting because i had to read it several times with some spacing of another activity in between to, i won’t say "get what it is about" because i don’t think it is 100% understandable, but read it so i could make sense of it in the same way i might read a prose paragraph

he uses language in a masterful way, its sorta like seeing something become clear and move into focus !

this of course is the "problem" with poetry, its demands on the reader, unlike entertainment which just carries into intellectually trivial escapist fantasies

if china were a person, its diagnosis would be "borderline personality disorder"

a good video  on john singer sargent, its interesting how steeped he was in the "old masters" despite his "radical" modernism

my favourite painting by him,   carnation, lily, lily, rose

what i have read of the zen "records" is 99% bitching about the monks not listening to them

nonconformity is conformity

the true art

is

neither

conformity

nor

nonconformity

safety in non appearance

is better

than danger in

appearance

they claim a fundamental truth

but the fundamental truth

is their being in error

theologies illusions

like other illusions

imbibed as a child

hung onto until death

ed.  "theologies" is a stand-in to cover singular and plural, possessive and non-possessive for which english doesn’t have a grammatical construction

getting older

its eternal winter

somewhere there is eternal sunshine

its not here

drunk from myself

i get up

and sit down

my head spinning

from

thinking and reading

i’m not sure

this

is

a good way

to be

they claim not to be going in circles

他们声称不会兜圈子

each time they come back to the starting point

每次他们回到起点

i think you have to be careful of trying to change the world or people

the energy you can expend on something so totally fruitless is of a level to harm your life

when you make mutual eye contact for more than a second or two, then you have to give a friendly sign, like make a comment, give a little wave etc

flattery goes along way in social situations

there are those who become upset when it is pointed out there are often alternatives to medication, some people think like that and get angsted and aggressive with considering the possibility that they could be healthier  (sometimes very much so)  than just popping pills with difficult side effects

“ The view may or may not change, however the viewer never changes ”

lol, well a lot of people for sure

they think, speak and write the same stuff

as ten years ago

i don’t

“ The view may or may not change, however the viewer never changes ”

lol, well on r|zen for sure

they write the same stuff

as ten years ago

i don’t

so much mumbo jumbo

incomprehensible fake

sense

is sense

and can be understood

there is no mystery

plain as day

it stands before us

you can’t separate life from evolution

evolution is the only way to design functional systems of such mind boggling complexity

this has a number of implications ,  one being that not only does god  (at least as conventionally understood)  not exist, he/she cannot exist

the answer to the question "why do i exist" is that you are a realised possibility of evolution

as a side note i think you can infer that evolution is the parsing tool creating the machinery essential for implementing "the free energy principle" to walk back reality from continual decoherence

within the vast universe of random fluctuations of necessity islands of coherence arise

“ quantum theory has  two compatible  information states where the union of the two is not a set of informational states because they can’t be reliably distinguished by any physical process ”

what i have noticed is that the best writing has more than one informational state and at its peak like emily dickinson’s poetry there is something conveyed that has nothing to do with the words, literally transcendent

from a hill

the blue of a distant headland

seen across the sea

impassable

to

me

a substantial portion of zen quotes from the old "masters" is simply advice to the effect of not getting caught up in theology, however what do people do, but entangle themselves in what is essentially theology

for instance "koans" are treated as scriptural bedrocks and the game is to "exegesize" them, but its just a game and mostly doesn’t go anywhere

my own experience is people act like there is some semantic puzzle underneath all the verbiage to be decoded, but in fact, there is none

the million monkeys, typing for a million years are still not going to generate anything meaningful

click click clack click clack, you can see and hear it for yourself

prattlers

thinking without work

is just thinking

the koreans and japanese have a long history of highly advanced naval conflict, so the japanese defeat of the russian navy in the battle of tsushima shouldn’t have been any surprise

what is surprising is the misdirection of their naval ship building program, prior to and during world war 2

sotherbys

the auctioneer

buyers agents

they all know  each other

the game of extortion

for bad art

goes on

ed.  got to say i love the art world, for suave sophisticated "smoothies" it can’t be beat, there’s a strong predatory element to auctions, its all set up to "squeeze you", especially in highly informed sellers markets like southerbys and christie’s

winter

going for a sleep in the late afternoon

and waking up in the dark

the child’s view

one answer

one thing

emergence says

views themselves shift

so how can that be ?

the child’s view

one answer

one thing

maturity says

views themselves shift

so how can that be ?

cast into the day

adrift as usual

ah, i should focus on that

as it blurs and drifts away

cleopatra’s life makes  a lot more sense  if you understand she was 100% greek and the last member of the ptolemaic dynasty, founded by alexander’s general who became the satrap of egypt upon alexander’s death ,  the combination of racial similarity and power making her attractive to her roman lovers

one of the very well known books of children’s poetry in what is now the forgotten generation of the turn into the twentieth century was eugene field’s  poems of childhood  illustrated by maxfield parrish

a btw, eugene was the author of wynken, blinken and nod

jack london’s  photos  of london’s east end in 1902 when he lived there for several weeks gathering material for his1903 book

"The People of the Abyss"

you can see the strong influence on george orwell

the moon is not so distant

nor the stars

these can be seen

what is so distant

that it yawns at our lives

why time of course

seen and unseen

it goes on forever

religions

plunder

poetry

murder it

and

walk

away

with

the corpse

what young people need to know and often get a contrary cultural message on, is drugs and alcohol irreversibly damage the brain and cause reverse development

talkers talk, but what to do ?

that is also part of the problem

but it can be solved

“ Heaven and earth shine together in the brilliance of this cool, glowing jewel ”

ed.  the above quote from Baiyun Duan 73

one jewel

or two

or three

or four ?

not a jewel

not anything

3 out of 4 boats lost, all those young men  dead  !

while japan had the most advanced torpedoes, their submarines were very below par, the country just wasn’t large enough to support the design and manufacturing effort necessary, like their war effort in general

if they don’t want to be a chinese colony, they need to take a leaf out of north korea’s book and to get nuclear missiles and the subs capable of launching them

as a side note, when you look at what goes into building  a nuclear submarine , no wonder the usa has decided the future has to be a multinational effort

likewise the mismatch between the economic power of nato and its allies so outweighs that of russia, the ukraine war has to end badly for it

what is time ?

a simple question that doesn’t seem to have an answer

“ What book do you think every person should read at least once ? ”

"to the lighthouse" by virginia woolf

deeply mystical

you have to keep moving forward, i don’t think you are doing that, your ideas are looking dated

"dokusan" in zen is overweighted, the "senseis" are the usual harried busy individuals and 99% of interviews i have had have been a waste of time, except in forming the opinion dokusan is a flawed vehicle and actually an unreasonable imposition on both parties

the "medical use" of marijuana is quite different from "lotus eating", you are looking at tangible objective benefits outweighing the costs of side effects, its that ratio that needs monitoring, there are definite downsides and risks, i think that’s going to vary individual to individual, but includes suicidal ideation, psychosis, confused thinking and brain trauma

there’s even a case for alcoholism, charles bukowski said it kept him from suicide, on the other hand it kept him a crippled genius, when really he could have been another goethe without the alcohol, unfortunately his upbringing was really messed and i don’t think a transition in first languages between german and english helped either

"lotus eating" fails the objective benefits to side effect problems test

a good talk  on "ergodicity" which is the idea that things don’t necessarily continue, that some mistakes irreversibly cut you off from future benefits, which of course is why we shouldn’t "put all our eggs in one basket"

its interesting there’s a strong mathematical basis to it that further informs our common sense understanding

i also think it teaches the value of "equivocation", a metastable state between taking action and holding back, which further ties in with "quantum processing" in patterns of adding and subtracting to come to a more viable conclusion

there is the illusion that things are settled

they never are

looking at things

the way others view them

not really instructive

but

destructive

ed.  this may seem counter-intuitive, but there’s a cost to empathy which some people can play on

vasily vereshchagin ,  russian painter 1842 to 1904, worth a search on google images

wikipedia

too much of a "realist" for many of his contemporaries apparently, he led an interesting life, full of adventure that could not be replicated these days

words of wisdom

or stupidity

i’d say stupidity

the waning gibbous

rises later

and the night is darker

but discerns

the edge of the sky

where do our memories go

you just can’t make meaning of it

can you ?

one thing i agree with martin heidegger on is we are a species uniquely integrated with and driven by technology, going back to flint knives and spear heads, its inescapable

ed.  my response to some proposed reordering/abolition of the industrial world by sepehr likening industrialization to cancer

by inescapable i mean its beyond remedy

how many remedies for whatever subject obsessed you have you been through ?

what does "futility" mean ?

marina ferretti gives a good  explanation  of "ballet rehearsal on stage" by edgar degas

“ there’s more than meets the eye ”

i have always associated edgar degas with ballet paintings but in fact he ranged widely  in subject

an interesting concept   :   men to women are "emotional labour"

i can see how the need for constant correction would get you down

there is some safety in being thought an idiot, its not all bad

people make allowances

also there’s always a context in which some-one is an idiot, just like there’s a context in which they are not

paul cézanne   mont sainte-victoire  seen from the bibemus quarry, c.1897

another mont sainte-victoire  (1895)  painting

an interesting  account  of beverly graham  (famous sculptress)  and her daughter jorie  (writer)  and their lives

you can do a search to look at betty’s sculpture, i quite liked it

words

phrases

paragraphs

this core

infinitely repeating

a sense

of horror

overcomes

one

what is possible

and what is not

we build the possible

and discard the impossible

yet not seeing

how one bleeds into the other

iceland like you’ve  never seen it

this is FPV  (first person view)  droning

the problem with the education system is it is too geared to the needs of the universities and this hold they have has to be broken for progress to be made

the internet has turned what is optimal to be taught on its head, what the internet enables is a higher , more "meta" skill level, that of self-skilling based on the ability to search and use information on the net

its a toxic, deceiving world, education should be part of the solution of navigating it, not amplifying the problem itself

the "xin xin ming" is an abridged version of a longer poem "mind inscription", the author/s are unknown and likely literati similar to the new testament authorship actually

religions are fundamentally reified literature, several modern christian variants are lifted to a recognisable extent from milton

you are too tied up in words brad warner; dogen, nisargadatta, endless the nonsense these people speak

meditation or non-meditation

the dreamers dream

without asking what they dream

i think we have patterns of cultural differentiation ingrained from childhood that form an active process for the rest of our lives or as long as we are capable of them

the link with identity politics, trans whatever, social justice, intersectionalism, woke and marxism is they place category above individual worth, one has no existence as an individual except as a place holder for categories which are assumed to be entitled to some form of repair, that the native condition of the category is disrepair and the more intersections of the categories, the greater the intrinsic entitlement

its most easily seen in marxism where communal ownership of the means of production repairs income inequality

the flaw is it is all "ceteris paribus" ie "all things being equal" so you just take one variable out, change it and assume all the other variables are unchanged, again easy to see with marxism in that it assumes that productive efficiency is unchanged with the control and ownership change, but history shows that in fact the productive efficiency and target alignment fail chronically with states that implement marxism in its various forms

i think the crux of the problem of woke is its transfer of concerns about communal benefit from the state to specific signals an individual has or may acquire, however in fact individuals have a very limited concern for communal benefit or even communal identity acting only to maximise their own gain and the various woke ideologies are simply smoke screens or decoys within which to operate in a deceptive manner

so to me "woke" and its similars are in fact anarchist and in conflict with the state and its always this way even if they become the state, there is a perpetual undercurrent of anarchy, repression and brutal social and economic misalignment

the problem with monastic life is it supresses the individual and since "god" is more related to solipsism, you get a rather nasty contradiction which ends up showing in various guises

“ smashes ”

“ snapped up ”

“ it has every potential to become the most  iconic house  in australia ”

the real estate media and press

more insincerity and clichés

than you can throw a stick at

my "reworking" of Liu Zongyuan’s famous poem

the mountain sides

raucous with birds in summer

now silent beneath the snow

not even the tracks of hunters

yet on the lake

an old man fishing from his boat

funny how things change, i’m just not into a certain interest anymore the way i was

before i couldn’t force myself to be uninterested

and now

i can’t force myself to be interested

roads end

or peter out

or one gains perspective

groups are social control hierarchies

of course, a lot of effort goes into "varnishing" this fact, all of human history is like this

you’re very aggressive to what point ?

being able to handle a different viewpoint is more than a social skill, its a life skill we all need to work on and not rationalise being stuck at a problematic level that gives and causes grief

music is like writing, knowing the background of the composer or writer is important

surprisingly, while useful, its less essential for art

voces8  sing  gregorio allegri’s "miserere"

declamations are ten a penny

you are just giving the usual sophistical tropes, declamation and denigration underlain by expectant entitlement

what can i say ?

huh, the correct translation has eve being formed from  adam’s side  and not rib

stephen kotkin on china   :    unpacking  the ccp, communism, and us-chinese relations !

he gives an understanding of how the CCP works which is alien to western democracies, you can’t look at the ccp through western eyes to form projections about what it will do

peddlers of words

pushing them harder than any drug addict

how useless !

there’s quite a few "wisdom literature" type quotes about the eyes

where words are restrained

the eyes often talk a great deal

its less what the eye sees

and more what the soul feels

the eyes are a mirror of the soul

is a claim

my comment

from a practical point of view most systemic diseases can be picked up early with an eye examination, the eye is the first casualty in a lot of conditions

some russian women seem only too happy to toss men to  the wolves of war

olive’s last expedition to  the cairngorms

i have been sick twice this year from eating  (still in the pink gill stage) "field mushrooms" plucked from a nearby paddock

previous years from a different paddock there has been no problem and i am 99% sure they are field mushrooms so i think it takes easy low stress growing conditions for field mushrooms not to have significant levels of toxins/ phenols/ octenol in, i know recent research has exposed a lot more varieties than previously thought so maybe there is a variety issue here ?

anyway most unpleasant, maybe the amounts were too large ?

interestingly the "button mushrooms" you get in the supermarket are a different variety to the field mushrooms  here ; agaricus bisporus versus agaricus campestris

sotheby’s earning their 30%? commission

for the sums involved you can expect the advertising  to be slick

me, its enough to look so i am free carried by the buyer, thanks !

mary oliver’s poem "praying"

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak

my  response

mary oliver says

a poem is a door, a prayer

being a woman she lived in trouble

me

i don’t know what a poem is

that feeling

when you just sat or lay down

and how you have to get up again very soon

to do something that won’t wait

take a leaf out of north korea’s book, half a nuclear missile keeps china at bay, don’t be fooled by their anti-western paranoia, china is their problem and they know it

the blue sky winks

and folds over us

the joy

of a summer’s day

no dharma, no truth, no practice, no falsity

the empty air tells us what we don’t want to know

we are nothing

absence is sufficient

that is all

young and dumb , they have no idea how far their lives get permanently changed once they fight on the front line, injuries, psychological damage/ PTSD, severely disrupted personal relationships; they won’t fit in "normal society" when and if they come back

now i think about it, price harry has an unrecognised PTSD problem from his service in afghanistan, he killed a huge number of men even by historical standards, basically due to a mismatch in technology between the taliban and british military helicopters, a lack of self-reflection there, it doesn’t take much thinking about it not to do that, he had plenty of options, and i think if his mother had been alive he would have got the feedback not to have done it

the western involvement in afghanistan always seemed extraordinary to me, they can’t have read a single thing on the history of the area

bet this opinion doesn’t make the gossip columns

a political system has to allow extremes to occur, be perceived and corrected, i think australia and new zealand are going through something like this with the explosion of underage criminality

that is, the system itself has no dogma except in the long term, the experiential, unlike beliefs like marxism-leninism which in their own terms are "right" and therefore do not allow anything except what in its view is correct

i think that’s because politics is an emergent outcome and there’s just no way the effect of anything can be predicted reliably

kafka

and his magical realism

nothing prepares

for the obscenity

of his sister’s deaths

political clichés

the very substance of the business

of saying nothing

hubris rules

until

it is broken

it is enough

to see yourself

like in a mirror

this view

limited as the glances are

is the only remedy

available

to

the

disease

of

life

it is enough

to see yourself

like in a mirror

this view

limited as the glances are

are the only remedy

available

to

the

disease

of

life

heavy cannabis use linked  to schizophrenia  especially among young men

you can see how toxic the media are, so selective in what they publicize, this study of course doesn’t get mentioned

the process of discovery in mathematics is an endless, limitless pursuit

the above quote by edward frenkel

why is anything else different ?

treasure hunting ,  the real thing ?

there are comments to the effect its staged, the find is so valuable it has to be, very well done though, to be honest, it had me totally fooled, however there are giveaways !

all the new research is showing continuous sitting creates health problems, we are designed by evolution to be pretty much always in motion

you want to extend your intellectual horizons, an area of technical interest, health, literature, arts, poetry etc

computer games have decoyed you into a time wasting trap

“ Do you have to rely on someone else ? ”

not relying on others and sorting things out for yourself

wasted breath in today’s cultural ethos of over the top entitlement with its serial plagiarism of nonsense

the stories go on

as stories

a mixed bag

of truth and falsity

there is no sense of moving on

but one goes forward

yet there is doubt

against what does one compare ?

so much "translation" of historical works is really just a "reinterpretation" by the translator who thinks in terms of various westernized cultural ideologies

they are not translations but purblind farces

“ is zen a "practice" ? ”

as zen is a multi-valent word, you can argue endlessly as to what it actually is

to me the real question is, are "religious practices" a waste of time,  (uselessfull !)  or contrary   —   take people in the wrong direction   —   or are they useful ?

again you run into the contexts of religion, genuine inquiry, communal insanities etc

to me with many years of observation from the viewpoint of genuine inquiry it is not just useless, but going in the wrong direction, a time filler that wastes a life, but hey, not my problem !

“ But then you have the problem of what makes a practice religious ?  Just being something people do in organized religions ?  Or something deeper ? ”

if you accept my notion that in terms of any genuine inquiry that "practice " is contrary then basically its crazy, its the fake and time wasting serving other goals like engraving a religious belief system, i wouldn’t call that deeper and it certainly is a characteristic of religions, you can see elements of it in other contexts like politics, education and certain cultural commonalities however i think its pretty much a defining characteristic of religions

over the decades one starts to see one’s own personality, its the weaknesses that we are so slow to see

the more subtle and difficult aspects, are i think, necessarily obscure to us

declination

inclination

one way of looking at it

is

another’s

inverse

they seek out every blind alley

go down them

and return

proclaiming

they have found a new world

  some humour  by shel silverstein

大道無形

The avenue is invisible  (google translate)

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

what is invisible

is yet visible

receding images

in a mirror

the toxins in  green tea  damage the liver

i have had a few sips once or twice and didn’t like it, there’s a reason for "black" tea though actually i don’t drink tea or coffee

there are no absolutes

death

birth

god

gender

being

non-being

toss these around

pretending they mean something

and so

the babbling masses

babble in their blindness

worlds of stories

unreality

fantasies

even the realities

are unreal

each step

raises nonsense

like dust

the world

is many worlds

the navigating of which

is impossible

ideologies

ideas in the air

froth of nothingness

zen koans are just nonsense

last word

first word

reference

non-reference

the master knows

the monk doesn't

all mired

in

shit

the necessity of repeating mistakes

is

because

we are unable to pick up on the mistake

unless things unfold in a way we can see

all of knowledge is less than a grain of rice

yet what is revealed

when the universe falls apart ?

to understand is helpful

but not essential

walk the stepping stones

on the road of contradiction

late afternoon sun

on a distant bank of cumulus

looks like a range

of snow covered

mountains

late afternoon sun

on a distant bank of cumulus

looks like a range

of snowy mountains

these days you can publish and publicize yourself on the internet

prior you needed an organization to do that

that’s a huge change affecting many areas of life

i can see the face

but i can’t see you

interesting

to perceive a pattern

where there was none before

and the apprehension

of it not continuing to conform

fundamental to our existence

dreamers abound

at least they can dream

in religion

they can’t even do that

universities are the new madrasas

the abeyance of reasoning

for senseless

political

indoctrination

in the midst of complexity

simple themes

laws even

inadequately expressed

neither emerging

or

inhering

its

difficult

the monarchy is a key part of the parliamentary system and the only proven insurance against dictatorship, when you have something that works, don’t touch it

there’s nothing worse than politics when it goes wrong because of the pointless destruction in what inevitably ensues

poetry

pictographic

writing in images

to stretch across time

to the elgin marbles, sappho and enheduanna

seems easy

yet an hour ahead

we

have

difficulty

with

there is no king

only counsellors

no men of slanted shadows these

no images of reflected glory these

they are the glory

look no further

though many do

you just keep writing and it develops as a skill over the decades, its a long term process

venus and cupid ,  painted by felicien rops

the committee are putting their own subjective judgement of style above hard facts

i bet some of the members thought  it was authentic , but you know, guild jealousy, the committee acts as an entity in what it judges to be its own best interest which is to discredit competition

interestingly giorgio de chirico’s themes are essentially solipsist, his worlds are about meaning without agency

a pearl is round

you can follow the curvature

but not the lustre

“ Is this curve/lustre anything like finger/moon ? ”

curvature is more like seen and lustre is more like unseen or unable to be followed

the lustre is really what it is about, you can liken "curvature" to what is covered in "wisdom literature" and this combination is really what "zen" is about

the criticism the masters make of the problem with r|zen and obviously medieval chinese monks is overweighting or making too solid "curvature" and never getting to grips with what lustre is

its actually worse than that, the monks/r|zennists create malign distorted curvature, not even getting to first base they run amok in sewers saying what a lovely garden they are in

over the years i have come to the conclusion they have no interest in doing anything except wallowing in their own stupid shit, why, i can’t say

sexual innuendo

in religion

sometimes thrust in your face

jesus loved a disciple

creepy koans in zen

what goes on behind the scenes and not so behind the scenes

institutionalized prostitution, paedophilia, broken vows, infidelity

the drive

to reproduce

governs

all

if i don’t have an idea of how something should be

but observe how it is

and take it from there

life is simpler

what would it mean to know everything ?

there is nothing i would not know

except

what everything was

would puzzle me

face it, you are just creating fantasy versions of "whatever"

hard to find your way out of however

russia is getting angsted by the increasing level of illegal immigrant workers

this gets to the core of the problem with wars, you lose your best men, a fair portion permanently and illegal immigrants flood in to fill the gaps in industry and service

also men who have been on the front line get permanently traumatized and dysfunctional and never can go back to "normal life"

the best argument against modern wars is they "suicide" their own populations to the advantage of outside, uninvolved populations, the immigrant "problem" europe faces today is the inevitable consequence of population loss in WW1 and WW2

the finite implies infinity

infinity implies the finite

stepping between these two

goes nowhere

communism is a generic term and while marxism can be communist, communism is not necessarily marxist

interestingly karl marx disagreed with popular contemporary ideas as to what marxism was, stating "i am not a marxist"

perhaps he foresaw the blood baths that would follow ?

mirrors are mirrors

who owns the image ?

real life zen is very buddhist, yet differs in that it regards the buddhist aspect as more of a convention than reality though there is a lot of variation in degree in this

however most "zennists" i have met put a lot of weight in that convention and i don’t think any religion can survive without a lot of ceremony and liturgical formality

the current western fashion of a highly abstracted "zen" and daoism divorced from the liturgical is much more akin to academic study/theology and as much as their adherents claim this version is "the true authentic" it is too distanced from the ceremonial side to be anything except the usual schizophrenic jabber

of course the ceremonial/liturgical side is also a form of "crazy" but in a lot of historical contexts is functional from a number of view points

not having thought about the  peter pan story  for many years, my having now seen his play  mary rose  gave me a much better insight into the man and his best known story

another play by him that goes into the fantastical is  dear brutus

an interesting lecture  on the function of a monarch today

that the monarch as in the UK today is in fact a neutered or faux dictator and if you don’t have one then you run the risk or even likelyhood of a real dictator, historically oliver cromwell in this case, but you can see in even america without this protection of an institutionalised declawed monarch that with trump's attempt to usurp congress you have the potential for a putin style dictatorship and there is a definite political undercurrent for that supported by all the thugs who would fill the various petty official positions for enforcing the dictatorship

it would be a big mistake for australia or new zealand to become republics, the currrent implementation of the monarchy is an essential base of the present parlimentary system, an propitious effigy to the dictatorship potentially around the corner

putin is an egregious example of what goes wrong with real dictatorships, they don’t step down when they start to lose the plot and you can only remove them with assassination or civil war and the russo-ukraine war is a civil war

the russian invasion of the ukraine

its the old story

what was supposed to make them richer has made them poorer

there is a view that war is really about countries gathering information about each other and if they act rationally they will conclude a treaty of sorts according to that information when things become clear enough

the russo-ukriane war still has many unknowns so i suspect a treaty is a long ways off

actually its a bit weird when you think about, commodore matthew perry’s forcing of the opening up of japan in 1853 back-fired in spades with the russo-japansese war and WW2, they would have been far better to let japan find its own pace, the significance of this misjudgement is hugely underrated

the number of people posting on whatever subreddit with "health anxieties" who can never be bothered to do some detailed research on the condition and symptoms of what they are anxious about

they also stare down and again never research sensible advice offered

generation Z reaches new heights of entitlement

direction fades

yet

without it

there is

no

direction

“ Quite literally the opposite is true ”

the opposite of what ?

direction doesn’t fade

and

with it

there is still

no

direction

the problem with gaming is its limited intellectual horizons

the question would be "how to give it greater horizons ?"

one of the more interesting "memes" on the web is the notion that some ancient stone constructions have tolerances so fine they have to have been made by "alien technology" and actually if you look at some of them they are remarkable

life is simpler if we don’t try to change people

the dalai lama was a political appointment and the wrong person for the job given tibet’s abysmal military performance against the chinese invaders, the tibetans were in with a good chance had they done any sort of the necessary preparatory work

the whole religion is just a crazy house of cards with various hidden sexual agendas

my view is its all so stupid because of the low iodine levels on the tibetan plateau

my criticism stands, you are just "collaging" words creating paragraphs that don’t mean anything

their bland featurelessness is symptomatic of the pastiche nature of your inanities, sorta flat "AI" in fact, "generative churn", no "semantic depth"

you are totally unable to engage with what i say

all my replies to you are targeting specific things you say and i don’t think you have picked up on one

adding a sum

it doesn’t add

claiming numeracy

he can’t count

stupidity squared

that sum adds

viewing things through the prism of their need

they

only

have

one

view

despite

the

dispersion

viewing things through the prism of his need

he

only

has

one

view

despite

the

dispersion

goodwill

that evanescent property

of

substance

“ Wishing you well on your journey ”

he said

not wishing me well

they read

"a vast ocean of words"

not understanding

what they regurgitate

is sewage

i like  this trick

even i

can do it

some

spin

false words

to gain

others

can’t tell the difference

between

false

and

true

how

pitiful

a long road

you look back

no idea where you have travelled from

or are going to

but

the clicking clock

will

stop

at

some point

flowery language

hides

a fraudulent

heart

the ratbags

effuse

sentiment

that

means

nothing

fishing to impress

who ?

i make some, what in my observation are well founded criticisms

you burble on in some horrific admixture of imitation and what i criticize

this is the point at which i doubt your sanity

an inversion

  giovanni giacometti

is

  underrated 

while his son

alberto

is

not

only those who have  been here  will understand

words chocked together

dunning and kruger can’t turn in their graves

because

they have seen

it

all before

thought fails

failure succeeds

take the price

already paid

many the years i have sought finality

only to find

there is no finality

seeing where we come from

and go to

we are bemused

for there

we neither come from

nor go to

solving the conundrum

perplexity vanishes

aiming for the end

you stop halfway through

picking it up later

you start further back

later you understand

even getting to the end

you are back

at another beginning

cheese melted in the pan fried back fat of a female wallaby in very good condition

a meal at masa

pales

in comparison

inconsistencies

rub each other the wrong way

creating

fusion

buddhist theology

a "constructor" theory

fanciful

misfitting

like the people

it

is

crafted

for

ed. "constructor" references the theory by david deutsch which basically replaces "emergent" by "laws" which is actually what i think wisdom literature attempts to do, bit of a moving target of course

propaganda is so simple in concept, though of course its implementation requires a very substantial state or communal effort

its the creation of a consensus illusion backing the state’s or whatever ideology’s policies

interestingly i think "woke" falls into this category with certain subcultures in western society pushing it and its the irrationality of the doctrine that makes for the necessity of it being "propaganda" since otherwise it would never stick

"downvotes are upvotes"

well they  (the downvoter)  have read the comment or post, that is the writing has drawn them to read and they have understood enough to object and are fearful enough of not looking good if they actually reply so they don’t reply and just leave a downvote, i would say that’s a success in terms of what has been written

in fact since a downvote means that i/you usually don’t have to deal with arguing a negative reply, that’s another benefit

views generally, especially in a sub like r|zen are so far apart and the lives and experience so different that discussion is futile and actually there can be a degree of menace which i have happen to me as people pursue me because what i write has somehow traumatised them

its more than diverse, there’s some really disturbed people and i have been on r|zen long enough to have seen a few suicides which doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem now, but the sub is much more constricted from what it was before "the management change"

universe

one verse

they say it means something

i’m not so sure

i knew someone whose parents had been friends of barry humphries when she was a child, she claimed to have been sexually abused by him, i can’t comment on the veracity of the accusation, it may not be true at all, but he certainly was in with a very rum and autistic lot

well, they are all dead now

the health revolution enhancing functional life span has huge positives with great thinkers like  roger penrose  getting a longer lease on life and literally being able to further develop radical new thinking

the negative side is very experienced but paradigmatically dated politicians like vladimir putin and xi jinping also getting a new lease of life to their neighbours and own countrymen’s detriment, their skills keeping them in power and preventing the needed change in outlook

there is a science fiction meme about people living forever and what happens, well this is not living forever, but certainly has unforeseen consequences

infinity has a limit !

where ?

find out

my reddit zen saying

“ downvotes are upvotes ”

travellers in the land

of

ideas and life

you can’t

be thin

skinned

yet

so

many

are

poetry

what you say

and what you don’t say

combine

to

transcend

conventional

meaning

the lottery of existence

that gave rise to you

emergent from extreme complexity

very abstract agency

can be perceived

that is all

we have met before

in some other life

you don’t seem changed

the memories are not that pleasant

i don’t want anything to do with you

can’t read

can’t write

flings out a few words expecting them to pierce

they don’t

“ With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past ”

quoting virginia woolf from her book "to the lighthouse"

david deutsch, an arch "everettian" takes us for  an interesting drive  through philosophy

this is not for everyone, he makes some good points and is well read and covers a lot of ground, however i feel that not everything is "on target"

the interviewer also has a somewhat unconventional take

the idea of us being a simulation in a simulation world is flawed because its begs the question "a simulation of what ?"

the world of ideas

a literal "many worlds"

not more ideas than you can count

but rates of generation beyond powers of conceptualization

if you  read this , you will see why the CCP is dangerous, any institution concerned to mimic "marxism–leninism and mao zedong thought" is off its head

like that "stalin-lite"   —  vladimir putin, you might hope it just fades, but they don’t seem to

the egyptian pharaonic tradition of incestual marriage is a puzzle given its known negative consequences, however i think the answer is that it is a deliberate attempt to breed the skills necessary in the next generation of rulers, these skills being so short on the ground in the general population that constant communal violence of power shifts as various wannabe rulers get seated and unseated is the norm

the natural genetic selective process does not deliver the required abilities

the evidence is in the long lasting nature and relative stability of pharaonic rule and the egyptian empire

definitions

so much unreality

endless talk

that can

only

be

nonsense

its

the dynamic

of

use

that

defines

things

what is indestructible

can and cannot be destroyed

i don’t know

whether it is destroyed or not

because

i

do

not

know

scott aaronson explains how quantum computing  really works

i guess, in effect, its a "surfing" of the cancelling and amplifying magnitudes of the right and wrong takes on what is unknown, a totally new mode of computation now available to physics

i say "totally new" but in fact imo the human brain has always run on it and in fact it is native function to us and human culture

religious ideas, political ideology, cultural mores

how do these ideas have such a significant impact ?

well the free energy principle states that we move to minimise the dissonance between these conceptual modules and reality

we don’t simply observe how things are, but we attempt to control them to fit the model and history is full of egregious examples of chronic mismatch

this is why we die and kill for ideas

What is God ?

an argument for god

the  strangeness  of africa

elephants in the sand river at the mala mala game reserve

there is no thing as a "correct translation", they are all, in effect, opinions of the translators, when you go back to the source document and make a literal translation, you get an appreciation of how wide the variances are !

shifts in perspective

render the object

more fully rounded

as i die

memory deconstructs

filaments of thought

wave in the breeze of nonbeing

what else is there to say ?

nothing

madness

is not a big deal

its a misinterpretation of a misinterpretation

of the world

it is not a condition of difference

but

likeness

and kind

the mystery of mysteries

so we are told

is a mystery

maybe its not

its just we can’t believe it

what can’t we believe ?

that the unknowable

is

knowable

existence is simple

there cannot be nothing

on the horns of this dilemma

we came into being

defining being

when we go

it goes

mastery is mastery

sufficient unto itself

don’t bother with others

they can never learn

idle away your declining years

there is nothing else to do

WW1 plus assault rifles, which they didn’t have then

its an  eye opener  as to how effective they are in single shot mode since you don’t have to take a huge amount of ammunition with you

they are lucky the russian artillery is not accurate

vigilance

no frost tonight

the tomatoes

don’t have to be covered

a bumper crop actually

but half are still green

however

the bright red

is comforting

the aging brain

ruminating on what is long gone

the new

just doesn’t sink in

the aging brain

ruminating on what is long gone

the new

doesn’t sink in

“ An endless spring breeze roasts the world

Where the mist and clouds veil the mountains  —

If you can’t find the actual person of no rank

Observe the falling petals drift in the current once more ”

the above is suru’s translation of the comment poem in Baiyun Duan 46, i objected to the clash in imagery and change in pace between "spring breeze" and "roasts", too disjunctive going from the lyrical to the harsh, there may be an intentional ambiguity that the source text doesn’t capture ?

i think another line and a rephrasing could do it, the line we read could be a maladroit condensation, who knows what the editorial/ translation/ philological /transcription history of this stuff is ?

my reworking to fit suru's "roast"

an endless aroma wafts from the roast

fragrant mists from the cooking veil the oven

persons of rank get to tuck in first

observe the meat fall away from the bones

“ The spring breeze warms the world.  It is in the mist hidden in the mountains.  No real person can be found.  Falling flowers follow the flowing water ”

the above is from the google translate of the commentary poem in Baiyun Duan 46, surprisingly readable

looking for what can’t be found

they make what can be found

beauty

turned to ugliness

falling petals

are all there is

the art world doing  what it does best

plagiarizing

faking the provenence

i don’t hold that europeans are somehow "spiritually crippled" compared to indigenous australians and skye o’meara may well have a very good commercial and artistic sense of what will sell but the more authentic indigenous art is in effect highly tribal in the sense of coming from experience in living in the landscape with the tribal lore and mythology being represented and may not be as saleable

authentic indigenous australian art works are in effect "maps", and in fact some of the more recent work  (relatively speaking)  moves away from that incorporating a more european semantic perspective, still a bit "mappy" , but also enters a strikingly original zone which at its best i like very much, art is by its nature universal and all artists have thier influences regardless of race and culture, contemporary and historical influences

in the end you have to evaluate a work on its merits regardless of origin, though knowing its provenance is necessary to give a deeper insight

a lot of renaissance art was in effect "factory production" which in fact the world’s most expensive painting is  (Salvator Mundi)

i found the last video on the above linked page with an interview of makiniti minutjukur quite interesting in that you get a clear sense of her meaning through the subtitles, her language may be totally obscure to me but she makes sense in the way any native english speaker would ,  its not all some hidden mystery the way woke pretends

“ How Could God Know the Future ?”

i disagree with the model that the future already exists !

the nature of the future is that it doesn’t already exist and hence is truly unknowable and if you try and bring "god" into this you are really raising questions about the nature of existence versus nonexistence

"zen" is a "multivalent word", is has several meanings dependent on context, rather like christian or christianity

the most commonly understood meaning is tranquil or calm

the next most is a buddhist sect

lastly and not really a definition since it lacks consensual approval, you get a heap of highly idiosyncratic claims on the web, from a justification for druggie culture to the not so bright chasing self esteem with endless realms of posted meaningless garbage

ruminate

epithet

epitaph

cause and effect

down the drain

ruminate

epithet

epitaph

cause and effect

down

the

drain

teenage girls have the mentality of psychopathic murderers

god

so simple and so far

the futility of what we are

doesn’t occur

there are a number of biochemical pathways that steroids cause problems in the eye with and imo ophthalmologists in general are too casual about their use

people assume medical personnel are infallible, but they are not and given the nature of life, how can they be ?

i have seen so many shirk taking some responsibility for their own conditions by not researching basics like the side effects of medicines or trying gain some depth of understanding to any diagnosis by failing to follow up with an internet "investigation"

we have a duty of care to ourselves which is to recognize things are rarely cut and dried with health problems and proxying the entire responsibility onto another has negative consequences

i am going

whence i came i never knew

where i’m going to

i will never know

just let things shape, you don’t have to chase them, the future is always unknown