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

alexander dugin  (a russian ideologue)

“ russia is redefining its place in the world, our country has only one path, either for it to be great or not to exist ”

his daughter was mistakenly  (he was their target)  killed by ukrainian intelligence, i wonder if he has noticed that she has ceased to exist ?

russia is run  by pyschopaths

what is different about the net is you do get material that "commercial entertainment" won’t touch

" the place where  nothing bad  happens" being a "good" example, actually, a step in the direction of the surreal

contempt for a partner’s genes

the female driver

for infidelity

enlightenment is a fiction

holy is a fiction

righteous is a fiction

doesn’t leave much does it ?

enlightenment is a fiction

holy is a fiction

righteousness is a fiction

doesn’t leave much does it ?

creativity is at the core of existential understanding, and this is why religion with its dogma and untouchable scripture is so poisonous in this respect since its just repetition without difference and as such "anti-creative"

the layman pang stories of zen are suspiciously daoist and confucian

why can’t they just be made up and have no historically real basis at all ?

when the fiction’s true

and the true is fiction

history is political

and propaganda dominates

creativity

the old folded into the new

the old refolded as the old

how trivial

appearance

hiding

a different

reality

the heavens split

god is revealed

it all seals up

and returns to normal

yet

something

is

always

different

and

it

shows

time flows

supposedly

but its just a word

that doesn’t flow

a patchwork quilt

this master, this saint, this prophet

squares stitched together

in

bizarre

contrast

my choices for the 2024  archibald prize  winner, runner up and honorable mention

i do think that the judges favour the conventional over the more original and steer clear of the more sophisticated conceptually

Not not a mother by holly anderson

You can’t hurt me anymore by paul de zubicaray; sitter  :   jaguar jonze

  sean and claire  and sharon and debbie by danny morse; sitters  :   sean cordeiro and claire healy

god has one eye

and we have two

it makes sense then that god

has

no perspective

when you look at magazines in the supermarket intended for the female audience and online like with the "daily mail" you have to wonder if the journalists are retarded or is it that the audience is retarded ?

endless circles

one day

you will get tired of travelling this way

and step out where you started

no wiser than before

because you were never prepared to go

where you didn’t want to

a paper wick

needs to discover

the location

of

its

oil

read and research from a lot of different sources

one source is unreliable

many sources

hone

to

a confluence

slavoj žižek teaches how to  handle  wisdom literature

just stick in some strategic inversions and see what it does to the sense

fan fiction

they take as real

is unreality a criticism ?

no

what is a criticism ?

just the nonsense they spew

the endlessness of nothing

so hard to open our minds to it

one road for the human

another for the not

they turn out to be opposite

travel your own way

there is peril in both

there’s no right religion

how can there be ?

they all claim to be right

bryan charnley

fish schizophrene   1986

i had an email exchange with  alan cole , he’s intelligent and sincere

one of his basic points is that ch’an is made-over daoism with the whole "wise zen master" authority tableau which you can see because buddhism is not that way

the basic issue is this need for an authority to certify the validity of what are "literary texts" so this image of a daoist type knowing all spiritual master is used for that  (99% of posts on r|zen do this), which is why i like joshu, he never recourses as to being an authority

buddhism is different, it relies on the corpus of stories about the fictional character of buddha as being doctrinal

the constant sexual and financial scandals that have plagued western zen have been enabled by zen's dogma being placed almost entirely in the hands of the contemporary "zen masters" who of course then go on the path of the usual human pursuits

in fairness , every religion has this problem, its just that in zen it was like 50%, though what has gone on in the catholic and orthodox churches makes you blink

an intelligent husband

cathedrals and pyramids

social control

continuities

will always

be

with us

cathedrals and pyramids

insanity can be simple or complex

but its still insanity

can i write

like this

endlessly

faust-like

mean something

but convey nothing

futility

and

perseverance

not chat gpt

version forever

jack kerouac

in the never

but writing on

i feel now

the end of ever

book ends folding

closure

relapsing tether

what binds the pages

falls apart

nymphs dissolve

and mephistopheles farts

the phoenix consumes

inglorious smoke

the brilliant fire

is a joke

more lines to go

but when they come

and whence they go

who dares talk about the rivers flow

skies and ravines

what we cannot fathom

these lines

shed

no light

on the dragons

of sense and being

thus unheard

i take my leave

this all written

not by chatgpt

wow, a treasure, geothe’s faust   part 2  in a good online translation by a. s. kline

tiktok

this other world

not quite insanity

but close

ed.  now i think about it, it has a sort of dream like quality and that high degree of trauma

the bottom turtle sees itself

is this a mirror

or not ?

ed.  a reference to the zen/ch’an notion of "ancient mirror"

kendrick lamar is into the  literary quality  area of rap

a quote by nanyang huizong in his comments on the heart sutra

“ To understand that the mind is fundamentally pure and numinous, with no need for recourse to cultivating realization, is called the "truth of suffering" ”

that’s very "silent illumination", i hadn’t thought of bankei being of that view, but he is

reddit moderation/ censorship in general has the problem of being ideologically driven and takes no account of interest and quality leading to ingrained biases and low reading age material

i was thinking that this writing i am doing is so even and continuous that it is in the area of performance art, there’s a sort of 3D effect that something done continually over time gives

its also a way you can look at joan didion’s career that elevated her out of journalism into literature

the teachers’ mindset

pedants

imposing

their rigidity

on

you

words

the storyline carries everything

don’t ignore them

the blankness of actors and actresses

other people

are coats they wear

and hats

and shoes

the time spent doing one thing instead of another

our lives spin around

these decisions

are not casual

why are songs so effective ?

there’s the mood of the music

the semantics of the lyrics

and the extra dimension of the singing which is its own music as well as melding with the instrumental and the cadences of the singing illuminating the meaning

hard to compete with

“ i was surprised to see how little alcohol it takes to  reduce  brain volume ”

imo social drinking impacts the ability to retain cognitive integrity beyond 50, with normative life spans extending to about 90, its a problem that warrants thinking about

dementia is an abstract condition residing in platonic space, so, being abstract must necessarily apply to the childhood and teenage years in direct contradiction to the freshness and vigour of these years  and it does

there are also more subtle occurrences of this like the natural neural pruning that befalls these age groups

every zen center i have seen runs into contested control of the institution at some point with vicious insider fighting

this, imo, is a general characteristic of religious institutions and what you might expect given the usual emphasis on social control

life’s blind points

we learn and unlearn

what’s found is lost

to return

to back where we started

again and again

one sees a lot of "experts" giving youtube interviews on the russo-ukraine war, experienced people with the right credentials, but they are all skew of the targets, its just the way things go, however the historian  yuri felshtinsky  is an exception, right on the nail and a coherent overall view

lt. general ben hodges  criticises  the lack of a clear aim of winning the war by the west and its tardy and restricted support

history lesson

what is true is unreal

what is unreal is not true

where the real fits into fantasy

is hard to say

“ What is the meaning of life in Zen ?

I often feel empty of a reason or meaning for living.  I don’t mean that in a suicidal sense, but rather, I feel that there isn’t much aspiration or purpose to why I bear all this suffering   .   .   .  and for what ? ” 

my  reply

your question is inside out

inside out questions

wrong at the start

so how can it finish ?

two things from town today

a man of about thirty in an electric wheelchair with an open wallet full of cards, each neatly tucked in to its own pouch having difficulty paying for his purchase at the chemist

a mother of about the same age at buttons beach trying to photograph her solo daughter  (aged about one and a half years?)  sitting on some driftwood who would not lift her head up to face the phone despite the maternal coaxing and eventually standing up

and i guess the third thing is me seeing these things and recording them for all time

half sight

some insight

whole sight

beyond insight

half seeing something

means getting it wrong

i wish i could say more

is there even a full seeing ?

alcohol, sleep and flying  do not mix

if you look at a song lyric without the music, they are basically pretty bland

mental candy floss so to speak

love is infinity for poodles

i warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage

quotes by louis-ferdinand céline who lead  an interesting  life and was a formative influence on charles bukowski

answers don’t come from above

life draws out what we don’t want to know

blindness changes to sight

and back again

this turmoil is called living

beliefs

thoughtless icons

pivots

around

which

our

lives

can spin

“ How do we judge the reliability of the old ch’an texts and the modern translations ? ”

its basically a full time area of study called "philology" and its hardly ever done because its so labour intensive and financially unrewarding

its not a new problem which is why you see a lot of the "masters" say "sort it out yourself"

you see so many OP’s here (on r|zen) quoting a master who says this, then go on for pages "using the words of others" and when you point out the contradiction, can’t see it !

i don’t like dahui or huangpo and there’s only a few authentic "zen masters" in the whole history of ch’an, two being fushan and joshu

“ Now that I’m treated  and sober , I still constantly deal with dissociative symptoms, but its more so the general vague feeling of nothing being real, having doubts and confusion regarding consciousness and existence, but nothing that I find to be out of hand ”

my  comment

dissociation is a valid viewpoint, bodily entrained philosophy so to speak

i have eaten eyeballs, but not fermented, which some cultures do, i guess the fermenting is to break down the collagen in the lens which can be very hard and as a rule the whole eyeball is very "tough"

its scary how vulnerable they are, some sort of insult and then you have permanent low vision or blindness and when you see how many people  have problems ,  just be grateful and respectful to your own sight

in my view lasik or similar is way too risky for the general acceptance they get, the surgeons’ old saying "one operation begets another" is telling you something

well actually its thomas cleary’s translation of some sort of manuscript that purports to be a transcription of something foyan said

ed. posters on r|zen seem not to understand that their quoting of the supposed "masters" (ed. foyan in this case) creates no authority because the quotes are in fact often just "literary reinventions"

this is a general problem with religious texts, its all about establishing an authority beyond the literary nature of the text, islam and christianity especially, but its all just stories !

you’re another who thinks foyan spoke into a dictaphone

the usual claim in OP’s here  (ed. r|zen)  is an indirect authority/mantle based on a supposed direct quote of whatever zen master/guru

but its never an authentically direct quote but with strong question about whether the "master" ever said anything like it, or if he existed or was ever chronicled at all

in addition you have the errors of transcription, repeated copying and the huge distance of translation which is, in effect reinterpretation

hence

my

sarcastic

reference

to

dictaphone

nothing is quite strange enough

until

you hit

old chinese

poetry

then you look

at the world through different

eyes

i quite like the ming dynasty poet tu mu/  du mu ,  here’s  a poem  of his, you can work out what it means  (hint  :   yangzhou road would be what we would call a "red light" district)

she is slim and supple and not yet fourteen

the young spring-tip of a cardamom-spray

on the yangzhou road for three miles in the breeze

every pearl-screen is open

but there’s no one like her

chinese history can’t be separated from the problem of eunuchs, a political class, that was in theory supposed to be loyal to the emperor but turned out to be as self-interested as any other clique

a particularly messy  rebellion  against them

as a matter of interest, they also had the penis as well as the testicles removed giving rise to urinary tract problems that were highly unpleasant and even so, the imperial concubines usually took eunuchs as lovers

i think on balance they probably did facilitate many centuries of highly centralised rule, a role today filled by communications and surveillance technology

the bottom line of any addiction is what is it excluding ?

what is the opportunity cost ?

usually its so high because you have recognised it as an addiction

human beauty

i have none of

its not sadness that leads one to grasp it

too fragile to be held

but a deep melancholy

death is too close

to

beauty

the female world

sorta isolated

its own bubble

sorta tangential

to reality

propaganda and dictatorships work by controlling information and hence beliefs and opinions and it is amazing how easily we driven by these into various insanities

from the control point of view, any creativity is a threat or poison and is dealt with by the force of suppression or aversion

in delusian terms  "creativity is an act of resistance"

when on reddit and you get downvoted, just repeat to yourself "a downvote is an upvote" which it really is since you have distressed an idiot !

the freedom

of good health

in old age

there

is

no

other

women

the burden of ovaries

undercuts

an entire life

seeker and sought

the religious parlance

meaning

nothing

"zen" is a wrapped up box with some writing on it saying "i promise the answer’s inside" and when you open it up, its empty

i would guess the royal family has been boosted to the gills for covid and king charles and princess catherine both getting cancer makes me wonder

the precipice’s edge

unstable

dangerous to be there

walking

back

takes

time

on the other hand

stability

is an illusion

st. isaac the syrian

quotes I            quotes II

“ for it is more expedient to be bruised than dead ”

he’s very underappreciated

the

female

need

for

faces

deep

genetic

programming

han china

umpteen million

one

grain of sand

amongst many

must alter your perspective

the

system

can

do

without

you

existential angst

when tears roll from a baby’s eyes

its a bit early to be thinking about these matters

pillars of salt

we are always looking behind

but at least we can see

what has gone behind

what we can’t see

is

what is behind

other pillars

of

salt

plucked from life

unto death

another state of being

the former from the latter

distinctive is

but how the latter

views the former

we can never know

ed.  a poem i wrote on looking at  a photo of emily dickinson’s nephew, gilbert dickinson who died of typhoid aged eight, the rhythms and semantics of the poem make it seem like it could have been written by emily ?

a non traumatic demonstration of how  a caesarean delivery  is done

its not a trivial procedure, i’ll say that

something i had never thought about

not surviving an operation

it happens

even

with

the

routine

the unwanted

stalks

us

everywhere

something i had never thought about

surviving an operation

it happens

even

with

the

routine

the unwanted

stalks

us

everywhere

feeling

the travesty

of how ill it fits

with the way this world works

the thought of nothing squared

halve it

then triple it again

is still nothing squared

travelling and living in a new place you like for a while and then leaving again

its like falling in love and then breaking up, what can you do ?

continuities

dreams

stitching together

what is discontinuous

interior stresses rend

apart

what is held together

for a while

all rivers run

as coleridge said

to oblivion

ed.  these lines below from coleridge’s most famous poem have always puzzled me, now i think about it, my poem is an alternative, more abstract version of his full poem which has always puzzled me and now it has sort of solved itself, i can’t believe it has sat in my brain for thirty or forty years as a puzzle looking for a solution

where alph, the sacred river, ran

through caverns measureless to man

down to a sunless sea

i give credit to coleridge claiming the poem is unfinished, but i am not sure that level of intense creativity can be sustained and even in terms of  the existing poem  it was starting to fall apart by the end

this is such a zen/religious thing, taking other’s words and paintings, not a single thing is their own

this is because the moment they say something or draw something of their own its laughable

you can’t tell ’em, diet and exercise are extremely important in keeping good mental health

“ recent research  published in the journal clinical nutrition reveals a significant link between high consumption of ultra-processed foods and an increased risk of developing depression

this study, conducted in brazil, indicates that individuals adhering to diets rich in ultra-processed foods are more likely to experience depressive symptoms over time

these findings underscore the potential mental health risks associated with dietary patterns characterized by processed and convenience foods ”

i nearly ran into a cyclist a week ago on a windy back road because neither of us was keeping far enough to the left, then a little later nearly hit a car because, again i was not keeping far enough to the left

hopefully i have learnt, i think i was driving like i drive at night when you can assume you will see any oncoming traffic well ahead because of their headlights

daylight gives no such clues and cutting blind corners seems to be a local habit

“ taken together, our data highlight the profound impact of exercise  in rejuvenating  aged microglia (ed.  reverting their gene expression signature to that of young microglia), associated pro-neurogenic effects and on peripheral immune cell presence in the ageing female mouse brain ”

julliard

clone factory

squashes

creativity

assembly line

performance

when OP’s bleed

their writers

in denial

about their injury

but

a portion

of

their

brain

cries

ed.  certified GPT-free

the double edged sword

cuts

its holder

as one brought up on a very patriarchal version of english history its interesting to see that william the conquerer’s success was in part due to having a very politically competent  wife

ed.  video has 3 parts

also interesting is that due to harold godwinson having been captured in normandy and kept there for a while, he knew both mitilda  (possibly even having an affair with her)  and william very well and should have been more au fait with norman battle tactics and strengths

i have a theory that the middle ages and somewhat later had in effect a breeding program through intermarriage within the nobility/aristocracy creating a politically competent class, because politics is not a natural skill to the species, same thing for ancient egypt, in fact today’s international politics suffers a lot from people lacking any sort of the rationality and largeness of mind required

the wonder of words

people can say anything

lies or meaningless

but

never

sense

the wonder of words

people can say anything

meaningless

the valeriepieris circle

part of  the melancholy  of chopin is the impact of cystic fibrosis

male and female

cleaving to each other

the transient

in the forever

tattooed individuals have  a 20% increase  in lymphoma, even a small tattoo

there’s a lot of lymphoma coming on !

the problem is similar to that of covid mrna boosters, the immune system gets overfocused in certain areas leaving other areas vulnerable, a bit like the russo-ukrainian front line, what is new i think is that science is showing the immune system displays a high degree of vigilance against cancer in its normal operation

TL:DR

sort things out for yourself

something simple

made complex

but what you want

is something complex

made simple

a good account  of the fighting from the russian side, a chinese mercenary actually

the tolerance of the russian soldiers being used as "cannon fodder" seems amazing to me

rita dove’s poem  mirror ,  very cleverly done how the two poems work differently though slightly changed word positions

rita  interviews  well, unlike most literary types

the whole "mu" thing is understandable if you read joshu and get a feel for his style, treating it as a koan is nonsense, its just pure joshu

mariage d’amour

ed.  translated means "wedding in the dream" and was composed by paul de senneville in1978 and has two versions, so lyricism is not yet dead

finneas and billie o’conner

blue

passacaglia  (handel/halvorsen)  has a similar hypnotic effect to mariage  d’amour

my mother says i have  irish eyes

what shall we do with  the drunken sailor ,  about the only song i remember from primary school

the weird wonderful world of "deepfake" where the real and unreal are intertwined, of course, entertainment has always been like this

one of world’s best soprano’s becomes a merely good baritone

aled jones

not everything can be caught

some things can be picked up

on dusk

the pink lit clouds

trees steeped in autumn’s mist

and so my memory of you

thus highlighted

fades

the bible and koran are probably the most printed books ever ?

why ?

because they are instruments of social control

its not because of literary quality

my drug

rosehips

make me feel benign

must

be

the

antioxidants

a russian victory in the ukraine will make certain a chinese attempt on taiwan and entrain the rule of the CCP, a complete russian defeat will have the opposite effect

australasia has a lot riding on the outcome, it is not an observer but an indirect participant

left

bereft

all things

no comfort

in

being

mood

fugue

strange spaces

we don’t recognise

but

love

“ data from 32 billion miles of battery-powered car travel and 3 trillion miles of petrol and diesel car trips showed that  mile-for-mile  electric and hybrid cars were  twice  as likely to hit pedestrians than fossil fuel-powered cars, and  three times  more likely to do so in urban areas ”

these are huge increases, being in court for manslaughter hasn’t been factored in as a cost of an electric vehicle

unabashedly and  offputtingly  female

one day

you might use your own words

one day

recorded sayings #74 translated by james green

a monk asked joshu :  the solitary moon is in the sky, from where does its light emanate ?

the master replied :  from where does the moon emanate ?

my  reply

joshu is unique as about the only "zen master" to get it right

christian monotheism looks for a source, its not there so you just get the usual endless fantasy

mark ronson and dua lipa discuss  making  "dance the night" for "barbie"

the software is interesting, i used something similar in editing voice recordings, but its the same for a symphony orchestra, just a lot of different tracks locked into synchrony

it has totally opened up music production to independents and "depowered" the music corporates

alcohol abuse, mafia, chaebols, lowest fertility rate, maniacal regime next door, patriarchy, maybe korean dramas are a bit tame compared to the real ?

myself

of this and another world

when will we meet ?

that is unknown

the usual garbled and biased translation taken as meaningful by the usual narcissistic idiot

the problem with judith butler and her views on the social plasticity of gender is that it is a pre modern biology viewpoint where the very significant functional differences between male and female brains have now been delineated by science eg mri scans and are not plastic at all, though in terms of gender blurring may not be clear cut, that is, you can have genders mixed, but its of limited social plasticity, the imposition of social plasticity into current "woke" doctrines is an essentially marxist idea (another "prebiological" theology)

marxism requires social plasticity to work, but of course the biology overrides and so it doesn’t

why universities are a hotbed of marxism and neo marxism is that they are in the business of social/intellectual plasticity !

things going on and on

is one of the surprises of getting older

nothing resolves and new problems constantly appear

only age

dims the perception of them

ed.  weirdly, i think this "poem" can be sung to the music of billie and finneas o’connell’s barbie song, i have always wondered how lyrics were written to match the tune, but i think one just becomes familiar with the music and it happens 

for sheer mass and density of people per square foot, the only thing that can rival a modern "super stadium" for a pop concert or big name sports match must have historically been the close quarters stage of large battles like the battle of vienna

i wonder if the psychology is similar ?

the trouble with philosophers is there are so many of them and each can absorb a lifetime’s study

“ When you said that word  daymare  and as soon as you said that it just made sense, it’s like not necessarily scary, it’s just like you’ve had a dream and yet you’re sitting awake in the garden   .   .   .   I see different things, it’s like I come out of it and it’s like when you wake up and you can’t remember your dream and you’re there but you’re not there   .   .   .   it’s like feeling really disorientated, the nearest thing I can think of is that I feel like I’m Alice in Wonderland ”

a lupus symptom  apparently

female tattoos

the poisoning

of

flawless skin

ed.  its an uglification, i can’t understand the mindset behind it except there must be a crippled or inverted aesthetic sense

the pro tattoo lobby on the net is unbelievable, any criticism i make in a post is met by some idiot coming out of the woodwork in unpleasant contradiction

beauty

which i have now

fades so quick

i can’t even grasp it

actors and actresses

statues looking at you

only the garb changes

one of the strongest emerging social trends that arise as a consequence of increased longevity is a necessity to think about slowing cognitive decline in the over 50’s which means attention to diet and supplements,   exercise ,  general fitness and "wear and tear", alcohol and drug consumption

my feeling is we are going to see sharp divides between subcultures in this respect and a lot of individual variation

also, a lot of the public health advice and cultural opinions are wrong minded or ill-informed, you have to do your own research and experimentation

a way of looking at the covid public health debacle  (which continues despite the cardiovascular and cancer risks of boosters)  was to trade off a reduced death rate in the elderly for an increased vaccine injury problem for the young

a verse by touzi on #3 of master fushan’s sixteen themes translated by suru

the death within life

birds clench the falling blossoms before the emerald cliffs, every word responds to conditions, spreading throughout  —  they ask of coming west, pointing to the cypress in the yard, but how could the passage through the lush mountain peaks be shut ?

活中死。鳥銜華落碧嵓前。對境皆言到處傳。人問西來指庭柏。豈關蒼翠嶺頭穿。

my  reply

what cannot be shut

is always open

but to avoid the common herd

it is disguised

why write things people understand ?

they just make your life a misery with their missionizing of a contrary view

to confuse them is better

they can’t target you

no "master"

except the claim

fantasies about reality

seek a center

its doesn’t exist

non-existence

or otherwise

ed.  zen is full of fake claims to authority by the appellation of "zen master", same with any religion and its "pooh-bahs"

that’s the trouble with writing

its lasts forever

so

necessarily

you are writing forever

i am appreciating the philosopher  gilles deleuze  more

the untranslated portion at the end goes

so you understand, when you have such an idea, the important is not to know whether it is true or false

the question is to know if it is important, if it is interesting, and if it is beautiful

and it is the same in science, it is the same in philosophy, you know

waterslipt

a furball

widening ripples on

the smooth surface

of a reflective river

a platypus

ed.  i was having lunch at a clearing on the bank of the mersey river/stream near the eastern end of bridle track road, the day was amazingly clear and windless and the river smooth and i noticed a platypus working its way feeding on the bottom to surface occasionally for breath then go back down again

this morning i serendipidously put on a shirt and trousers that "matched", i have always been sceptical of the concept, but since there are clothes that don’t match, there must be those that do match, though what constitutes the female sense of this, i still cannot fathom

the abdication of the duke of windsor was in fact a surface effect of a deeper political struggle, would britain become a client state of germany or would it resist ?

the outcome was not as obvious as you might think

taking actors as real

and a set as reality

is it any wonder

the dissembling mess

collapses ?

the circle of the contemporary

rubbish generating more rubbish

stay there at your own risk

sharing the same road for a while

but later

looking at the forks and branches

i realise

we are apart

inscribed on the tower at veneration monastery

in cold spring, a hundred-foot tower

i climb up alone, and then back down alone

who can manage such distances of the heart ?

david hinton

classical chinese  poetry

the poet is tu mu  (803 to 853 a.d.)  with a bio on page 378 of the "classical chinese poetry" pdf link

definitely medieval with the mention of a functional tower

an interesting thing about frieda hughes is she did not have her mother’s talent, of course neither did ted

there is just a remarkable depth to sylvia plath’s work and this was despite all the obstacles, what genetic quirk created her or would ,  if her parents had more children, they have a similar talent ?

this prosaic world

because its written in prose of course

its not a poetic world

because its not written in poetry

if you take away the "zen master" or saint or prophet as an authority figure, what do you then have ?

Regulus  replies

People acceptant of the existent reality

my  reply

the monk asked zen master regulus "what is required to be enlightened" ?

zen master regulus replied "be accepting of existing reality"

the monk was left speechless

lee smolin  doesn’t like  jonathon oppemheim’s stochastic gravity approach

its interesting to watch lee talk with the constant gesticulatory body movements, almost tourette’s, but he is using them to think, they are part of his cognition process

how simple is the world ?

its not that simple

and certainly not as simple as the way we view it to be

insight

takes you back

and obviates

some future lives

the brain

is

a

quantum

machine

words in a story

believable or unbelievable ?

don’t

be

fooled

words in a story

believable or unbelievable ?

don’t be fooled

so much knowledge

everywhere

each branch opens up exponentially

drowning in detail

its pursuer

i guess i have got so interested  in hearts  because of hunting and looking at them, in one animal, it beat for minutes cut out from the body; never seen any that had human like aging diseases

i think as a society we have lost touch with our own raw "viscerality", i hunt for my own meat; the killing, butchering and eating does bring one back in touch with that, the commonality with our homonin history

heart and lungs  animation

the number of people who have no understanding of what even moderate levels of drinking does to their lives and long term health

you have won the existential lottery where the odds are so small of winning, no number covers it and to chip away at brain function with drugs and alcohol like that   .   .   .

you want to experiment with doing some translation yourself with google and you will realise how its possible to construct almost any sense out of the chinese, its actually not meaningful to do any commentary without going back to the chinese, the variance is so large, translators follow their own biases to create a narrative that suits them

“ continuous as the stars that shine

and twinkle on the milky way ”

wordsworth’s famous poem  which he wrote based on notes by his sister dorothy was in effect  co-authored  by her

strangers to me

thirty years of no contact

exile speaks

of unwanted distance

.

strangers to me

thirty years of no contact

exile speaks

unwanted distance

ed.  looking at a photo of my sister, niece and brother in law who are all very much changed since i last saw them

notions of exile are not common in western literature, but are certainly there in the chinese

lost roads

can’t be recovered

what we have travelled

always

takes us

to

a different place

i love a  sotherby’s auction ,  vast sums spent for my entertainment, all free, it don’t get slicker, a living made from networking skills and being personable

i was about to go negative on the painting by lucy bull, but on looking further i quite like  her work

you have to be careful, auctioneers  like these  can talk the money out of your wallet

xu qiyao’s  advice  to his son on being successful in CCP politics

“ the path of understanding requires objectivity and experience ”

ed.  the above is my reworking of the first lines of the xinxin ming which, amongst its more "normal" translations is

“ the great way is not difficult, just avoid picking and choosing ”

the xinxin ming is an abridged version of the  mind inscription

心性不生何須知見

“ reality is either itself or not.  is there any point to understanding this ? ”

ed.  my translation of the first line of the "mind inscription"

"don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake"  —  napoleon

i think in the context  of divorce ,  what people find difficult is the necessity of switching to the extreme mindset of being at war and all that entails because that is what is immediately required

billie and finneas o’connell  discuss  how they created the "what am i made for" song for the film "barbie"

billie in her own words  describes  the process

“ Dr. Raszek  provides insights  from his participation in a comprehensive review concerning the utilization of synthetic uridines in mRNA vaccines  (ed. covid)  and their potential implications for cancer development

The discussion delves into the intricate mechanisms that could be at play, exploring how these synthetic components might inadvertently suppress the body's innate immune system, induce frameshifting phenomena, and contribute to the production of IgG4 antibodies, all of which could potentially influence cancer growth ”

my  comment

i think we can expect an upsurge in cancers, especially amongst the elderly as a result of the misguidedly intensive "booster" campaign, though it may take a while to show

the forward momentum

of habituation

leading

to

habits

that

become

unbreakable

the fallacy of "negation"

its not this, its not that

but its what its not

negation is a stylised buddhist rhetorical technique, nāgārjuna of course and you get it in dogen, they’ll say something then walk it back through its negation

but having walked it forwards, there is a sense in which it can’t be walked back or it could not be walked forwards

another way of putting it is there is no ontological unity, everything is constantly splitting apart

zen masters and the authority they carry are literary constructs

buddha is a literary construct

jesus, muhammad and moses are literary constructs

the egyptian book of the dead is a literary construct

does it bother you that your advice is so bad ?

no

the blindness of narcissism

the suicidal

step out

into death

who am i to judge ?

for what eternity holds

no-one knows

the low reading aged

if you write something they can’t understand

then according to them

its your fault

so they reject

this is the path of mediocrity

and cretinism

all religions schism, narratives of homogeneity require force to maintain  (which can be extremely brutal historically)

Knock Out Asinine Nits

photos

staring out from a smooth granite block

if not quizzical

then should be

stuck in eternity

like that

somewhere

there must be a couple that mesh

and get along with each other

somewhere

i’m gone

the world rolls on

i disappear

and appear

the pages of a book that flick through

some words rest

and others don’t

skimming stones

eventually

stop

and sink

rhoticity  explained  to me, i now understand it, but otherwise i wouldn’t have had a clue except for the joking use of irish, scottish, canadian or usa accents

i think the zen term "seamless monument" is a metaphor for reality, you can’t penetrate it, there’s no artefact of manufacture since it has no seam, it can only be traversed, which btw is the basic philosophical problem of existence, there is no "inner" reality that subsumes "the detail of being"

“ I m currently 16 years old and a "child prodigy".  I started university at 14.  I have thus far only received one grade which was not an A+.  It was an A-.  I have memorized 100 digits of pi, the periodic table, and most of the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks.  I am learning Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Sahidic Coptic, Spanish, and Italian.  I just like old languages. I don’t have to study long  —  I have a nearly photographic memory.  When I do study, I just write things out over and over.  I am a very visual thinker, so I remember pictures.  Ask me anything ! ”

ed.  she also has ehlers-danlos syndrome and is ADHD

in my view, the languages are a big mistake, they interfere with each other

“ Why do you think that ? ”

the languages you list are particularly disjunctive

its a heavy learning burden with heaps of "opportunity costs" and the skill is becoming increasingly redundant with AI translators

also my experience of polyglots is they get damaged in some way

the brain is not infinitely capable, beware of burning it in waste of time activities, which to be honest a lot of so called education is

dr. alan cole  argues  that zen masters are in fact "made-over" daoist sages

i would go further and say that the koan system involves the same sort of "puzzling process" as the tao te ching

when you hear this sort  of crap  from the policy making elites, no wonder china is a problem !

the real impact of the one child policy may be the scarcity of anyone at the higher levels of government or policy being able to think straight

of course, this is to the advantage of the west and is the same problem japan had in WW2, idiots determining their strategic direction

boundaries crossing

abatement of being

from this perspective

everything looks crazy

really ?

do you ever listen to anything outside your own echo chamber ?

sad souls

in the twilight of their lives

mumbling gibberish

the words of others

are not your own

if you actually understood

why wouldn’t you use your own words ?

time separates

that childhood intensity

fades

as the branches grow apart

what was not seen at the time

is now seen

you are not well read and have an "anti-creative" mindset !

i’m getting on in years and just can’t be bothered to deal with your hubris

good-bye

ed.  the net is full of these entitled gen Z’ers with a deeply entrenched intellectual inertia created by a malfunctioning education system

valves, muscle, connective tissue, timing

easy to see how it can go wrong as we get older

this dynamic core of existence in the center of our chests where   every beat  needs to be followed by another

i think religion can be regarded as a hallucination, the hallucination being that a literary work is real, perhaps most easily seen in the beliefs of ancient egypt, what are the pyramids and all those smaller tombs about ?

the reification of stories

these people

who

rather than bringing something to the table

only

take

and

are

impertinent

with

it

the puzzle of the poetry of others

seems to need the conversion

into something

i understand

"the girl on a bulldozer" (2022), a good tightly written  kdrama

caodong poetry 23; verses on master fushan’s sixteen themes #4; touzi; translated by suru

1.   not falling into life or death

on the day when the golden rooster heralds the coming spring

the jade hare conceives, entering the purple palace

reeds bloom on both shores, shadowing egrets

an old fisherman lifts his oar, dispersing mist, returning home

不落死活。 金雞日裏報春時。 玉兔懷胎入紫微。 兩岸蘆華映白鷺。 漁翁舉棹撥煙歸。

my  reply

one day

the distance travelled

catches up with you

and you have arrived

one day

the distance travelled

catches up with you

you

have

arrived

ed.  the terms in suru’s translation are very chinese and have a historical perspective, so i have "reworked" it into something modern that people will understand

“ ChatGPT-4 scored higher than 100% of psychologists on a test of social intelligence ”

hilarious

a tui calls

stunning the silence

my day is filled

with melody

ed.  the tui is a new zealand native songbird

if you have ever attempted to count the number words in a book or whatever, which i have, count the number in a couple of paragraphs, then multiply by the inverse of whatever proportion of a page it is then multiply by the number of pages and i figure you get within 10% which is close enough

i’ve written millions of words, its like an exclusive club and its interesting to know who else is in it

giacomo casanova’s  autobiography

the book comprises 12 volumes and approximately 3,500 pages  (1.2 million words)  covering casanova’s life from his birth to 1774

i have read most of it, people misunderstand him as a legendary lothario, but he is much more interesting than that

the problem gets solved

slowly because you allow it to get solved

but even patience

needs hurrying along

sometimes

new heights of  catholic bizarreness  with a touch of paedophilia

i’ve seen a lot of things on the web, in its class this has to be the most extreme, rather amusing in its way

years ago in auckland ,  new zealand, i remember reading about this murder, no idea that he was a well known poet or  the backstory

hai zi’s sonnet  night moon

i don’t think you can be a good poet without a sense of injury

my  rewrite

the setting sun

striking through the trees

from a blood red lamp

everything is illuminated

in this ambiguous light

of suffering, joy, life and death

schooling cretinizes

starting with the teachers

there is nothing to be learned

not even process

all history teaches

poetry and politics don’t mix

ed.  i was reading about li bai siding with the losing side in the an lushan rebellion, it was only his reputation that saved him from being executed

intersex

growing breasts

growing genitals

today’s obsession

lacks nuances

of being

intersex

growing breasts

growing genitals

today’s obsession

lacks nuance

about

being

the dead sea scrolls

so much fuss

about a lot of bad writing

intelligence is like everything else in having "opportunity cost", abilities in one area necessarily imply deficits in another

that is, in even high IQ’s you are also measuring disability

IQ only measures one type of intelligence and in fact i don’t think intelligence can be reduced to a score

i couldn’t even do an intelligence test now, my brain rebels at that sort of computation

in twenty years we are going to be nothing but a society shredded by the weight of side-effects from drugs; medical, psychiatric and otherwise

“ Use of amphetamines and atomoxetine had  a higher risk  for angle closure glaucoma, while use of methylphenidate was associated with a higher risk for open angle glaucoma

Given the prevalence of ADHD medication use (medically and recreationally), our current data on their associated risk of glaucoma have profound public health implications ”

good fiction ties itself to the way reality works even if its "magical realism"

poor quality fiction is utterly decoupled in this respect, egregious examples have to be propaganda and "dramas"

it was unstoppable, like herpes on a lithuanian prostitute

a finnish saying, apparently the trope for a woman from an ex-soviet country is a prostitute

if you look at their history you can see why they don’t like the russians

ninja

asian fantasy

the individual victorious against

coercive group think

death

is beyond

remedy

thinking

rearranges priorities

slowly

philosophers are crazy

mind games

word games

the vagaries of definition

simple cogency is not looked for

rather deemed inadequate

not finding what they are looking for

they waste their lives uselessly

waves of the sea lapping on the shore

has more meaning

creeps

make jokes

about

dead

mothers

saying something about nothing

the problem is

they interpenetrate

up on the hill

working on the water tank

voices carried in the wind

in the distance

two women on horses

ed.  its really just to capture that hearing something and not understanding the source, then a bit later seeing where the voices come from

its very minimal which i think is "zen"

up on the hill

working on the water tank

voices carried in the wind

in the distance

two women on horseback

"decoherence" and "emergence" are relatively new concepts in physics and basically on one side you have things being very simple and on the other you have the complexity and uncertainty of the real world and in between you have a mixing of things up so the simplicity is lost/decohered and replaced by opacity/emergence as to what is happening

i was looking at some quotes from emily dickinson’s letters to susan gilbert  (her one time lover and sister-in-law)  and they are  conventional  in the main, but one poem sticks out as indicating she really had a different head on her shoulders

show me eternity and i will show you

memory  —

both in one package lain

and lifted back again  —

be sue  —   while i am emily  —

be next  —   what you have ever been  —

infinity

love

separated

doesn’t last

we don’t take the lesson

look further and farther appears

when

it wasn’t there before

look further and further appears

when

it wasn’t there before

mRNA vaccines can alter our DNA

dr. julian fidge

i must use my keyboard a lot because i wear out letters, but rather than replacing the keyboard  (microsoft)  i now overwrite them with pink nail polish using relatively thick strokes taking up the whole pad and sometimes even over the edges

robots of flesh

humans

perhaps something else intervenes

it does

charlatans

take two

the deceiver

and deceived

one at least has the benefit of honest gain

the other broken shards of a dream

who is who ?

ed.  giacomo casanova who was a hustler of timeless stature said  :  to deceive a fool is to revenge intelligence and in my view he is right because the nature of the injury to the victim is non-repairable so the focus has to be not being fooled rather than some falsely benign view of the universe where wrongs are supposedly righted

today’s cultural glorification of victimhood is itself a form of con artistry giving permission to that endemic dissembling, now so normal, especially in gen X, you can’t talk to a young person without being awash in highly skilled manipulation and targeted deceit

carlo rovelli gives a much better explanation of nagarjuna than the usual religious obfuscation  (translators usually try to fit him to every paradigm going)

“ what is useful in nagarjuna is the idea that its better to think of the world not as entities or substance or matter that has its own properties, but only through the interdependence of things

everything is empty in the sense of not having an intrinsic reality, this emptiness is the foundation of everything  —  but that’s a view which is itself empty in a sense ”

i would put it a bit differently, that there is always some context that can’t be escaped and this is the background for existence, that non-existence is a type of existence as well as existence being a type of non-existence

gen Z, missionaries for their churches of one, not even a quorum to be formed to schism

synthesizing nonsense to make more nonsense

i have long since ceased to think the world is sane

lyrics

without music

are shallow

and need the depths the emotional traverse of music provides

which is why good poetry is rare

with its need

to

provide

its

own

traverse

lyrics

without music

are shallow

and need the depth of the emotional traverse music provides

which is why good poetry is rare

with its need

to

provide

its

own

traverse

you know russia has a bullshit violence culture when you see this  sort of nonsense

its really the promotion of intimidation by a state protected class

words jumbled together

obscure

incomprehensible

because

obscure

incomprehensible

too many miles away

to

ever write well

i am afraid

i wouldn't say they try

spew might be more like it

whimsical writing

outreaches

and outlasts

philosophy

where we are

and where we're not

can lead to confusion

because we are

where we're not

so many ideas in politics and the public arena are full of contradictions, childish/ low reading age in fact

for most of china’s history they had a highly sophisticated in literary terms administrative class, zen in effect is a literary invention to cater to this class  (powerful and wealthy)  and as part of this process, draws heavily on  daoist tropes  like the reclusive sage

“ Chan authors borrowed a set of well-established tropes from Daoism  —  and several from Confucianism too  —  in order to present more captivating fantasies that detailed the manner in which certain contemporaneous men had supposedly inherited final Buddhist authority ”

some lines from a letter of emily dickenson to a friend, written as a comment on a funeral her mother had attended and described to emily

life is death we’re lengthy at,

death the hinge to life.

my  reply

if death’s a hinge

 what does it swing ?

or some window open

 or cupboard interior expose ?

a gilles deleuze quote

“ creativity is an act of resistance ”

“  he states  that political and social control is exercised through various forms of communication whereas art is  (or should be)  alien to this blinding; it should be a creative act with no or differently sourced information (or, at least, with counter-information), an act of resistance in which words  (or shapes)  rise into the air while their subject matter goes underground; a shape-shifting act that eludes control, an irrepressible gesture ”

this rings so many bells, the openness to embrace the new is so rare and the oppression of the nazis of mediocrity is not

ludwig wittgenstein’s most famous quote

whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent

my  reply

of what we cannot speak, we can learn to speak

its not just a male world and neither is it just a female world

yet

each half

of the world

acts like it is

what slips between the gaps

is

something

else

ice flows not

but cracks

the adaption of water

trickles, rivulets, streams, rivers

and

the

sea

instants fall

but

the more sustained

is necessary

a rather intense harpist

j. s. bach  —  toccata and fugue in d minor

look at the fingers

today’s world

a multitude of ills

addressable by medicine

how unlike the past

when people just plain out died

or were invalid

for years

the emptiness of a still night

moonlight like frost and its shadows

the sky and earth

so vast

neither nothing or something

life

same actors

different roles

life

different actors

same roles

talk

without doing

without experience

without skill

we all know the problems with this

don’t we ?

the problems with the covid mRNA vaccines are not going away, sherif sultan, professor of vascular & endovascular surgery national university of ireland  discusses  the many issues

the professor is not so clear in his speech, you can stop the video to freeze the frame at various points to read about what he is discussing

basically a healthy population was sacrificed for a benefit for the medically frail, the fallout is going to roll on for decades, an increased cancer rate from the boosters is something to show on longer time scales, cardiovascular problems are much more immediate

more  discussion by sherif, this stuff is really quite scary, i recommend watching the entire videos

traces

things that have happened

encountered again

much later

traces

things that have happened

encountered again

later

his coat so thin

"right" and "wrong" can only be judged by "consequences", that is harm and benefit and the alienating or empathizing of different viewpoints

that is you end up with a bunch of ontological conditions to create any meaningful tableaux

then you can toss in the inversion of intention and effect whereby what happens as a result of an action is opposite to what was thought would happen

so i would say "right and wrong" are not absolutes but the usual ontologies dependent on context and in the sphere of religion constructive as to their being whereas a more philosophical examination would deconstruct

i think "zen" here is ambiguous here because it sorta straddles being between a religion and philosophy and this is reflected in the constant discussions in zen about right and wrong whereas other religions are much more black and white in this area, well certainly christianity and islam, buddhism is more cryptic

these  coincidences  actually reflect the physics of a "fine tuned universe", that is, a universe stable enough and yet with enough gradients to enable life to develop and so we can observe our and the universe’s existence

the interesting thing is that clearly other universes must necessarily exist as our universe is in a sense a choice and the nature of choosing involves objects to choose from

philosophically speaking the quiescent state is being rather than non-being, so john 1:1 got that right, "in the beginning was the word"

unattached women

get caught

in the circular trap

of seeking attachment

forever

the "five ranks"

a religious ontology

as fantastical as the trinity

not even a bus stop

on a long journey

my computer system is about eight years old and one of the reasons i attribute to it lasting so well is a noctua cpu cooler, however recently i replaced the fan and changed the bios fan speed temperature profile to in effect constantly moving the speed which also unfortunately seemed to hit some vibration resonance spots

what surprised me is that with this new configuration that i got a couple of crashes which i can only attribute to the fan vibration modulating pin resistance on the cpu, i changed the profile back to a mostly constant speed and no more problems as well as being quieter

another reason it has lasted so well is samsung ssds with policies enabling write caching and turning off the windows write cache buffer flushing  (you need a UPS to do this)

repeating nonsense

they flatter themselves

that

somehow

they

are

not

nonsense

a poem by fushan 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 reworking of it

my hermitage

a clear creek flows nearby

getting water is easy

and one loses oneself

in the distant views

the world is more open than we think

a superb  study/paper ,  that clarifies how zen works and has worked, he is right on the nail imo, on the nail enough for the "zen establishment" to try to sweep it under the carpet

interestingly the new testament has the same sort of origin in literary sophisticates and we actually see it today in "fan fiction"

zen and christianity have this in common, very sophisticated literary skills used in a rather cunning and malevolent way (the intention is to deceive)  creating the primary texts

you can argue the same for buddhism and islam and to an extent, judaism

a fascinating  insight  as to why "stalinism" worked and the gerontocracy under brezhnev led to the later collapse of the soviet union

a road is created with every step

cat genes

spread everywhere

they look pretty much the same

virginia woolf  didn’t like  james joyce’s book "ulysses"

personally i have never bothered to read more than several pages, i don’t know why it is held up as such an icon of writing

there’s a road forwards

you don’t have to take it

stalin

versus

charlie and eddie richardson, the kray brothers

violence

in scale that dwarfs

yet josef

personally was not a violent man

the cool edge of intellectual reasoning

more murderous than any tumult

of emotion

superyachts

you have to be wealthy

to bleed money

that

way

maintenance

running costs

lawsuits

accidents

big bickies

all

the

time

what arises

decays

and

so

on

without end

stand

outside this

if you can

too much concern and attention can lead to bad decisions

chinese saying

this is so weird, a very conventional  soap opera  along western lines when japan was at war in china and on the eve of its involvement in WW2

they even re-released a shortened version in 1947 like nothing had happened before

more than most countries i think japan brushed the imperial disaster under the cultural carpet and the generational memory has been lost

the notion of "robot", is, i think generalizable to cover a difficult aspect of reality, a sort of being "carried" in an unreal way with ,  however a lack of clarifying interaction whereby we start to see things in a false sense, this  short video story  illustrates the concept well

another good japanese film  the widow

broken brains

the sadness

and danger

and

sanity

of the return

of

the balance

of reality

one of the anomalies of the holocaust was  africans in germany  were not discriminated against at all, i have read several accounts of this, one from a woman who did get a visit from the gestapo, but that was because of her association with a rudolph steiner school, her brother worked for all the war in the german merchant marine as a cook

hitler himself had a very strong friendship with a young half jewish girl which he was forced to give up by his nazi associates that he complained bitterly about

actors, actresses  and alcoholism

i was thinking its a fundamentally depressed occupation, they are in effect robots for the directors and scriptwriters

unbelievable !

anterograde

amnesia

our condition

as human

unfortunately

words

can mean anything

but beware

of moving too far

from the common public understanding

who says aging can’t be reversed ?

when moon-light is white

and not yellow

ed.  before my cataract operations the moon was a yellow colour, but after the operation it became white, interestingly, lens replacement is supposed to help considerably slow age related cognitive decline

“   researchers  found that participants who underwent cataract removal surgery had nearly 30% lower risk of developing dementia compared with participants without surgery, even after controlling for numerous additional demographic and health risks ”

robots

not us

not of our species

constrained

not to match

our projections

nobody dies

they leave

this unlikely co-incidence

of

us

being

together

development beyond

our termination

this world of dreams

we cannot enter

the landscape of trial and error

we wander over

eventually getting

where we want to be

putting the pieces in place

to get a useful picture

life’s prestos, staccatos, andantes and adagios

“ During the Cold War when there was no hot war in Eastern Europe the proportion of defence spending was 4% of GDP I think

ed.  the uk is increasing its defence spending to 2.5% by 2030

It seems to me that the 1930s taught us a clear lesson that an aggressor is only deterred if he thinks the risk is not worth taking

In these days of hi-tech industrial warfare it would seem that there is a strong case for increased deterrence

I am sure no one needs reminding that the first duty of any government is the defence of the Realm ”

what makes a poem "zen" ?

interior reflection ?

insight ?

religiosity ?

natural beauty ?

calm ?

you

tell

 me ?

the faces of those we love

are different

how ?

they take us further

into themselves

title   :   the merchant bankers lament

i

want

to

write

a

poem

but

only

dollars

come

to

mind

my favourite short stories are

"an occurrence at  owl creek bridge " by ambrose bierce

an article  on farquhars "hallucination" occurring in the fifteen minutes between his neck being broken and death

"the old folks" in the  short story  collection of "letters from my windmill" by alphonse daudet, all the stories are superb

the hunter gracchus  by franz kafka in audio

a vision of

endless rows of graves

and a voice said to me

the infinity of death

goes nowhere

just this

other roads

other perspectives

obviate

the past

and break

the monotony

you can hear  erik satie  everywhere used as  background music   for whatever on the web, but he’s not known as a name to the general public at all

a question posted on r|zen

I read zen poems, like the masters of old I find peace in nature and in the simple things of life.  Lately I’ve been missing work, walking along the beach spending time on the things I enjoy doing.  But I have bills due, and I have debts to pay, but genuinely I don’t care anymore.  I have a good job by all means.  But I can’t show up.  I don’t know why.  Part of me wants to give up on the city life and live in harmony with nature.  But part of me thinks I’m being foolish.  Part of me can’t differentiate if I’m being lazy or if I’m being whom I’ve always been deep down.  This brings me anxiety.

My boss is calling me, soon the bank will be too. I don’t know what I’m doing.

I guess I’m searching for advice.

my reply

health costs mean money is essential these days

they died very young back in the tang dynasty

i went through a phase like you and quit work because i got a small inheritance enabling me to travel for several years, visited a lot of zen centers etc which opened my eyes to the normality of nonsense taken as real

but in actual fact the most important thing was to improve  my diet  which i could with the info on the net

you made a good OP btw

"lucy" plays debussy’s  arabesque

other times

other spaces

music

transcends

normality

seeking but not finding the master

this is a slightly modified transcription  from

under the pines i asked the boy

who says his master’s gone to pick herbs

he’s up in those hills

covered in cloud

where, i don’t know

if you are interested in poetry you want to start writing your own, what is the point of only reading others ?

a solipsist extract from "morning song" written by sylvia plath

i’m no more your mother

than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

effacement at the wind’s hand

poems are a web of meaning and good poems will move subtly in sense everytime you read them and are able to take up your changed experience filling them in differently

one of the things i find hilarious about "trans" is if a man had to go through the trauma of actually being pregnant, he would never become pregnant again !

i notice in terms of "trans" that the question of "sexual identity" is restricted to bodily sexual characteristics, but to me what distinguishes men from women is the degree of interest in children and men "identifying as women" do not have this nor do women "identifying as men" lose this

thinking along these lines makes me wonder if in fact, paedophilia is a true form of gender blurring or "trans" combining a predatory male sexual instinct with the female interest in children

the degree of interest in the whole area of sexual identity, must imo be due to population wide endocrine disruption in the developing foetus as a subtle side effect of the many known endocrine disruptors in circulation

in sorting out whether an email is a scam or not, i read its source code and relay history, 95% are so inept its laughable and i have puzzled as to what is really going on, why are these people so ignorant  (of course there may be more ignorant victims)

it turns out there are places on the web that teach "how to be a scammer" and what we see are mostly the results of students using templates provided by these teaching websites

in all my years on the web i have only ever come across one scam email that nearly fooled me and that was because a financial website i use had some hard to differentiate from scam web addresses or at least did have

love knows no truth

how could it ?

deception and decoy

are essential elements

of

beauty

love knows no truth

how could it ?

deception and decoy

essential elements

of

beauty

stories educate us

stories blind us

this world

of a graduated blurring of good and bad

yanxi palace

more trauma per viewing than any other series i know, now banned in china because i think of the political/ societal overtones, subtle as they are

roads

worn by countless others

not my road

which

begins and ends

with

me

patterns

that emerge after a while

are the true seeing

of

reality

denied

before

a short story  by my mother, its a really good bit of writing

when death smiles at me

how will i react ?

like marcus aurelius

make a forced smile back

or like a rejected lover

weep

at the loss

of

beauty

the latter

i

am

afraid

of

tipping

into the nullity of the precipice

getting lost in other people’s lives

can you find your own ?

where is it ?

being yourself

is a process

of

some

difficulty

always

there is another level

beyond

our

current

understanding

plato’s cave

is misunderstood

as being inside

plato’s cave

misunderstood

as being inside

women live in a random universe

the reality of how their spouse/partner turns out

i suppose men do too

and

let’s add

children

into

the

mix

of

success

and

failure

women live in a random universe

the reality of how their spouse/partner turns out

i suppose men do too

and

let’s add

children

into

the

mix

these  simu-realities  are taken to some extent as real and must be having a  huge influence on cultural attitudes, i suspect good and bad, catharsis has its place and some can be educational to an extent

600,000 views in 6 hours !

is god single or multiplicity ?

single affirms itself while multiplicity denies even itself

what can be grasped and what can’t be grasped

and so this troubled world wends its usual way

atheism being humanism in disguise is wracked with contradictions, humanism being a poisonous tableau

religion is just wisdom literature embedded in a fictional tableau

there is no money in wisdom literature itself since it is freely available so the tableau is necessarily tuned to provide an income for priests or their equivalents

title : meditation

stepping back from the computer

endless scrolling, reading, thinking

into a sort of nothingness

the brain can’t quite make sense of what it sees

a good introduction  to the thinking of jacques derrida

close ricky, but not quite right, or actually, you are right in terms of  god’s answer  !

the ontological conditions for the existence of god spring from it being a necessary conclusion of there being attributes with a likeness to god

if you have things "like to god" then you have a spectrum of likenesses which must necessarily include things not like god

so god can’t kill satan without killing himself, ie. walk out of the ontological frame into non-existence

ed.  saying this might have got me killed in the middle ages, today of course i can say jesus is a fictional character, like muhammad, buddha and moses and nobody blinks

theological spindrift, of course is always within the cage of ontology

that’s because god can exist in appropriate ontological worlds and actually these can map in part to real ones

dramas

friction

constrained to spheres of action

how

unlike

life

where

it

bleeds

everywhere

drama

friction

constrained to spheres of action

how

unlike

life

where

it

bleeds

everywhere

guess what ?

the romans used "roman numerals"

that’s why they are called "roman"

ed.  i was looking at a photo  of markings  on a roman ship plank and it sorta clicked in a way numerals on roman buildings never did

when you see false beliefs

don’t wonder

why they hit a ceiling

of

incompetence

over the hill

the moon going down

last seen through the branches

the night is not the same

without it

ed.  sorta fushan, this is my own poem, but i think its one that fushan could have written

precocity

lame by adulthood

too early

the development

competence

sets

blinkers

precocity

lame by adulthood

too early

the development

competence

sets blinkers

i think one of the problems with being a stand-up comic is the sharp reactivity needed in/for a performance must always be there latent in their ordinary life and in that context must be wearing and destructive

this  discussion  of the japanese study linked below shows the risk of cancer rises with the third, fourth and fifth mRNA boosters

“ keep doing the boosters and you keep increasing the cancer rate ”

the quote below is from the  japanese study  titled "Increased Age-Adjusted Cancer Mortality After the Third mRNA-Lipid Nanoparticle Vaccine Dose During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan"

“ Statistically significant increases in age-adjusted mortality rates of all cancer and some specific types of cancer, namely, ovarian cancer, leukemia, prostate, lip/oral/pharyngeal, pancreatic, and breast cancers, were observed in 2022 after two-thirds of the Japanese population had received the third or later dose of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-LNP vaccine

These particularly marked increases in mortality rates of these ERα-sensitive cancers may be attributable to several mechanisms of the mRNA-LNP vaccination rather than COVID-19 infection itself or reduced cancer care due to the lockdown ”

angus dalgleish  explains the biology

the novavax is NOT an mRNA vaccine, rather is protein based like the flu vaccines, so much safer in this respect, but still has some issues because the spike protein itself is a problem, however if you feel you must have a booster it is a much better choice than the mRNA’s, however my understanding is while it has lower risk of cancer it is not zero

ed.  dr. dalgleish is very well qualified being a fellow of the royal college of physicians, fellow of the royal college of pathologists and fellow of medical science

beautiful faces

belie

the emptiness

behind

them

scripts begin and end

then return

 what are our scripts ?

teppanyaki  is crazy labour intensive, a tiny amount and too fatty

the problem with zen is the soto/dogen sect believes that seated meditation is some sort of final answer to be done forever which is not my view, however also in my view is that some substantial experience of it is necessary to create the habit of reflection which is all "shikantaza" really is

its a world of war where people get killed and maimed, children losing their parents and parents losing their children, its happening right now

the coddled argue about gender and other frivolities

paul cézanne   :   le lac d’annecy  (1896)

its the next lower after the picasso near the top of the page, i really liked the colouration

wikipedia is a good example of the new media, that is, donations are the most essential part of financial survival

alternatives

a choice made

fold back

a road taken

wrought changes

in the instant

of an eye

a quite understandable  explanation  of how pendulums in skyscrapers reduce swaying in high winds or a collapse in an earthquake, its called a tuned mass damper system

i am at an age

when a good portion of those

i remember from my young childhood

must necessarily be dead

zen

is nez backwards

does one mean more than the other ?

no

ed.  its a sort of a satire on "god is dog backwards", the meaning of nez in french is serendipitous

a japanese  film  directed by naoki hashimoto and based on a novel by shizuka ijûin

“ show me the way to the station ”

ending

stops

we move on

returns from the stop

become asynchronous

loss of memory

is the only way

to

handle it

the dead

can only accumulate

in nowhere

ending

stops

we move on

returns from the stop

become asynchronous

loss of memory

is the only way

to

handle it

the dead

can only accumulate

nowhere

body modification is a term that clusters together a number of areas, some socially acceptable, some not; facial surgery, buttock lift, tummy tuck, mammoplasty, amputee identity disorder, tattooing, extreme body modification, piercings and others

it spans from outright social transgression to raising social value and an egregious example that is somewhat mindbending is facial surgery by chinese and korean actors and actresses to look more western, they all have it done and its actually an artform since they can have successive operations with a time series of different "looks", but the result has to be surreal, unnatural though often highly effective in terms of increasing  social value

"constructive interference"

adds

"destructive interference"

contracts

in the bow of this

lies

discovery

emotional span

runs its course

for its needs

anyway

beware

both sides

are

trouble

purity

means

innocence

 or naivety ?

a lack

of

agenda

perhaps

so

rare

the way  those men run  that’s the original human hunting style, chasing an animal until it collapses from exhaustion

from the same video, i quite liked  this scene ,  seems to cross the centuries

i noticed during a recent hospital stay how they are always trying to push painkillers on you

pain has a purpose, its to show you where there’s a problem and when you take a painkiller, you lose the sense of that as well as introducing unwanted effects from the medication itself

the system appears to be geared towards the "medically fragile" and this can be far from optimal for yourself, or even a bit destructive

constant strident yammerings

but reality is not altered

how can it be

by these avoidant slobs ?

the louder they are

signs

the less they know

fiction and reality

neither is entire

take the part that suits

and observe the rest

a constant source of wonderment for me, amazement even is the utterly nonsensical religious texts that have been curated and passed down the centuries and even millennia presented today as though they mean something

to be fair its not all nonsense, i suppose that’s the rationale for it, the 1% that is sane can’t come without the 99% insane

this ratio is like so much in life

an eagle

the busy-ness of flapping its wings

then

gliding

in

the

clear

dusk

sky

this  makes a lot of sense, that gravity is inherently classical and stochastic and thus emergent rather than some underlying quantum reality

"stochastic emergence" lines up all the ducks so to speak and fits "layers" of reality together in a way that doesn’t require some theory of universal basic mechanisms that a "theory of everything" needs, more like a never ending zoom fractal which is actually what the process of scientific investigation shows

lol, follow that if you can !

something can be said to be true and if its really on the nail, its opposite will also be true

uncertainty

i cannot

even

guarantee

i

will

die

youtube is being filled with puff pieces for some of the world’s worst dicators, kim jong un, putin, xi jin ping/ the ccp

this the "continental geo-political paradigm", they do have an edge here because of the depth of experience of using misinformation to control their own populations, however i would have to say their current efforts are not facing the reality of an audience that is used to disputation and can think for themselves, though i have to wonder about the younger generations

magical thinking

in

a

magical world

but the world is not magical

only

the

thinking

is

only in dramas

do women

give the money back

the rabble talk

endless arguments and opinions

air filled with froth

those who do

do

without being conscious of it

and their talk is weighty and sparse

apparently this is not just made up, the chinese really do fight  like this  amongst themselves

i guess these days one has to make a disclaimer in terms of any "hate" legislation around, this is a relaxed/ comedic look at a different cultural style, hopefully humour and satire are not yet illegal

these soaps are in fact highly political reflecting life under the CCP, constant misinformation and misunderstanding as well as an implicit message of accepting adversity and powerlessness with the lead characters often in what is functionally a chronically depressed state

i’ve always taken it for granted, but seeing how other parts of the world can work, have grown to appreciate the relative freedom of saying what i think, writing of course is naturally transgressive and always a thorn in the side of repressive regimes

i do take an interest in defamation law and cases, but they are not hard to not get entangled in, just keep away from personal criticism having a substantive effect on reputation, regardless of the rights or wrongs of the matter

looking forwards

looking backwards

just stop looking

is

the

only

sanity

people

castles unto themselves

you can’t cross the moat

and who wants to engage

the unruly mob inside ?

china

where they say "sorry"

and don’t mean it

and that’s

just

the

start

of

ingrained

cultural

and political

deception

chinese drama

a woman falls  and miscarries ,  complete with blood

a different culture for sure

where forced abortions used to be state policy, i don’t think you are going to see much sentiment about a miscarriage !

large families are politically destabilizing with their need for resources and anarchical mindset and in addition communist regimes are so economically inefficient that women are needed in the workforce

as an interesting sidenote, stalin’s mistress never carried her pregnancies, always having an abortion

ghost riders in the sky

another version

its not just wars that make for "post traumatic stress disorder", long periods in any emotionally toxic environment will do it

the energy of the young

the older world spins on it

what can’t be changed

age

your

slow

wasting

away

flutter-byes

do

flutter-by

shimmering iridescence

metastable reality

permutes the world

as it appears and disappears

flutter-byes

do

flutter-by

a strong asynchronicity

looping around

an invariant world

you don’t need friends

family you are stuck with

no wife or children

is not

the most

unfortunate life

what do jane austen and marie curie have in common ?

as young women the men they would have married couldn’t get their families permission to marry them because they  (jane and marie)  were too poor

in later years marie curie’s lover used to go to where a statue of the now famous marie was and just sit and look at it for hours, i would guess his actual marriage wasn’t happy

i don’t think either of the women really recovered

the tigress

sleek in her beautiful coat

wants it repeated

mood spaces

euphoria

sadness

bleak

fecund

palettes of emotionality

random colouring

is what i have grown to expect

trans

the farce of male-female separation

all is one

if you believe that

you’ll believe anything

i notice that "land acknowledgements" are in vogue as a sort of meaningless "catechism" and they have the singular property of being offensive to all parties involved, the speaker for so lacking discrimination as to voice such tripe, the listener for being forced to hear it and the supposedly "acknowledged" for its hypocritical patronising tone, with its quasi-legal promise of nothing and unsolicited "assignments"

in summary i’d say its a bad bit of rhetoric with several well known sophistical flaws more to do with ancient greek oratory than anything else

over several years, using the net to research unknowns, you start to build a knowledge of what previously appeared arbitrary having quite  mechanistic causes

there’s a reason for everything

you can’t get a lower budget  film  than this, yet is one of the best i have seen

the director and writer is eiki taminato, he seems to speak english quite well so i had some communication via facebook, he agreed with my not liking his other film "garden" saying he wasn’t allowed to write it the way he wanted, but has another film called "clover" coming out soon with english subtitles that he was happy with

its extraordinary to be able to communicate like this and he was easy to "talk to" and on the same "wavelength", one hardly ever finds this in normal life

the divide between "entertainment" and quality art is an interesting one, they have a limited compatibility

sometimes/ oftentimes mistakes are not our own, we simply are repeating what we have picked up from others

dr. sarah paine on the notion of being put on  death ground  in war to explain the russian resilience in WW2

the ukraine is currently in this situation and i think nuclear weapons and the general destructiveness of modern warfare make any sustained war enter this territory and is forcing western rearmament

even very maritime nations like australia and new zealand are no longer protected as they once were by the "moats" of their surrounding seas, obliterative first strike missile attacks have now become a risk with the improvements in drone and missile technology

this is also why israel is being so persistent in trying to eliminate hamas, they see a situation in several years where improved missile guidance and avoidance technology has placed them on "death ground" and certainly hamas ideology is completely unambiguous is what it wants done

so much of middle eastern and asian politics is driven by cultural expectations of "death ground" that sustained peace becomes difficult, if the threat is not external, its internal, xi jin ping and the CCP for example are currently perceiving themselves to be in this situation

an ex with dementia

too scared to make contact again

in hindsight

the signs were there

a keen intelligence

faltering

school

where they burden with useless knowledge and skills

and ignore the apposite

the declawing of the young

by the aged

and who’s to say it doesn’t work ?

they won’t come back

because they can’t come back

those

who

lethe

has

swallowed

the artistic scene in japan is so intelligent

that its hard to see how such a country could enter the crazy and futile brutality of WW2

but it did

well there’s nutcases like mishima of course

dr. sarah paine gives an interesting take on the  japanese invasion  of manchuria

one thing

displacing another

modern life

no empty space

no wonder

everything is so confused

beliefs need to be updated according to new information

this what bayes says

and is hardly ever listened to

because

the neurological capacity for change

is just not there

the world won’t amend itself for you

because it can’t

themes

rotated

one disappears as another arises

this shadow play

like the seasons

new and old

can’t be separated

time scales

at one end

so long

the universe doesn’t cope

at the other

a blink of the eye

is

too

large

memories

the crushing weight of the past

squeezes ourself so small

as to be vanishing

cumulative life

the bits start adding

giving sums

then start subtracting

giving weird answers

that no arithmetic

can solve

cumulative life

the bits start adding

giving sums

then start subtracting

giving weird answers

that no arithmetic

helps with

a poem by fushan, translated by suru

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

blossoms fall on silver beds in brightly-blooming spring

the moon sinks behind the canopy, distant in the night

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

i simply pick up sandalwood, burning it as i please

my reply

one thousand years have passed

but immediate as today

a benign night

to

be enjoyed

in

solitude

i do think religions are highly performative, in effect plays on a recurring script

the eichstätt  garden book

a newly discovered copy was auctioned in 2016 through  christie’s  for £1,930,500, worth every cent imo

breaking probability

occurrences become inwrapt

and the world makes sense

what a joke

these facsimiles

claims

of

ultimate

reality

injury

illness

disability

that trifecta

with its loaded odds

unwanted winnings

a race we want to be last in

cruelty

my own

i can’t deny it

intentional

unintentional

usually

just

i

don’t

care

the voice

tells

more

than

the

look

resonances

with

being

we can’t be together forever

the distant hills seem to say

sobered i look more

and then turn away

we can’t be together forever

the distant hills seem to say

sobered i look more

then turn away

ed.  writing is very statistical, most of what you write is within 1.5 standard deviations in terms of quality, the bottom .5% i don’t put up and there’s the top .25% like this poem that comes along, just out of the blue, but you can see that it is in a different class to the rest

the seed for the above poem is some lines of an old? chinese poem, an elliptical version first, followed by a longer

mountain without edge and heaven and earth

not dare to break with the king

i want to know you

longevity

mountain without edge

the river is exhausted

winter thunder shakes summer rain and snow

heaven and earth together

not dare to break with the king

i thought i might re-translate it, but my own poem turned into something totally different, oppositional even

a fushan poem

括地風輪輥雪毬禪關無火冷颼颼困來就榻和衣倒日出三竿未豁眸

outside the wheels of wind turn rolling snowballs

no fire in the rectory, and a whistling, billowing chill  —  

as weariness sets in, i lie on a low bench still clothed,

the sun has risen high, and i have yet to open my eyes

so we know all about the climate conditions of this poem

“  snow rollers  require a temperature roughly three to four degrees celsius, wind of about forty-eight kph, and fresh snow that doesn’t stick where it lands ”

i think its too cold for him to sleep at night so he sleeps when its warmer ie "the sun is high"

my reply to the poem is below :

the wind curls snowballs

too cold to sleep at night

today’s sybarites

don’t know this

at all

alcohol and pubs

nightclubs

drugs

boring people

in

denial

of

their

dullness

this excellent talk  by dr. sarah paine of the hudson institute explains the present conundrum of how russia and china are reacting to maritime vs continental geo-political paradigms, there’s an inevitableness to it that seems unreasonable to our very maritime outlook

the talk was made six years ago and is quite prophetic in terms of present day events

china is caught in a contradiction by trying to apply continental psychology to becoming a great maritime power, their taking of taiwan would enable them to sustain the illusion, but would compound the economic problems

the mentally disturbed

the way they eat

drugs

medical

and

otherwise

the way they think

societies outcasts

feeling their insufficiency

entraining victimhood

immolated by self harm and suicide

the futility

of remedy

is

existential

babies

in

dramas

no facelifts

yet

but

already

lipstick

and make-up

simu-reality

void

the matrix personified

this is an interesting  conversion experience ,  maybe the brain got frightened it was going to be done away with and gave away the secret and flipped into some sort of quantum reality which may be memoryless and then what emerged was something she fitted various labels to and hasn’t moved past them unfortunately

the netherlands is quite a religious country, lots of small christian sects, a cultural vibe of "spiritual" dissonance

names

we look for

to cover answers

to substitute for answers

to deny process

and

the

unknown

bayesian

quantum

saying

the impression of context

is important

ed.  there’s sophisticated maths and physics that when you translate into english turn out to be pretty straightforward familiar concepts

my brain

and memory

things that happen

fade too quick

it feels like

stranded in being

a maze ahead

with no behind

fictional

myths

cultural

ideas

in

general

decisions

made

on

nonsense

happy endings don’t teach much

it

takes

lifelong sadness

to

see

arrangement

cannot

circumvent

quality

ed.  all these youtubes with pretty five star meals that don’t come in a cooee of what i eat for quality, coarse and simple as it is

lazy script writers, dramatists and novelists replace plot action with "information" dialogues and monologues

a crime sir henry neville is guilty of, but i think more forgivable in dramatists given their limited resources

the female emotional palette

the immediacy of reaction

colours of feeling that need expression

no wonder the male trembles

yet desires

marketing and content or product creation don’t mix

marketing and content creation don’t mix

my translation of two short poems by fushan

千里路行千里馬一重山隱一重人都然迷卻從前底日夜紛紛泥六塵

a long journey requires a suitable horse

so much lies beyond what we can see

day and night are filled with mud and dust

how can we not be confused ?

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

year to year and day to day

change is the only constant

striving has its price

 death is respite, but who wants that ?

meditation, i think, is misunderstood by religions as something to be done, but its more like a vacancy of thought or activity, a different, more relaxed mode of being, if you want to know what its about, its easy to put several hours in ,  you can just sit in a chair or walk around or stand, that’s all there is to it, going for a walk across country or by the sea by myself is one of my favourite things to do

recent research is showing that sitting for long periods like say data entry for work is very unhealthy, the body has two systems that depend on physical movement to work, that is, venous return and lymph so you can see how physical stillness can contribute to disease

prophecies

in the main

can’t

be true

because

it

would

imply

that

the future

has

already

occurred

prophecies

can’t

in the main

be true

because

it

would

imply

that

the future

has

already

occurred

solitary

the world’s contrarian

to go against conventional values

requires discernment

what matters and doesn’t

at the end of the day

there needs to be some ease

from being different

god

an object

itself

an idol

for

processes

god

an object

"itself"

an idol

for

processes

if you think william shakespeare could have  written this  then you must be out of your mind

across all of time there can only have been three or four men with the inclination, talent and life experience to write it, one of whom was sir henry neville

not some underworld heavy who let his wife pay for a loan from a neighbour in stratford-on-avon with sex while he was broke in london

the tick-tock of one’s own thoughts

the first tick

then later

the discomforting, unwanted, complementary tock

with its crashing resonance

the tick-tock of one’s own thoughts

the first tick

then later

the discomforting, complementary tock

with its crashing resonance

poetry is the philosophy of beauty

philosophy is the poetry of dullness

admixtures abound

poetry is the philosophy of beauty

philosophy is the poetry of dullness

the sea

a parallel processor

its patterns

spitting out

the answers to infinity

beauty unattainable

attains

through its decrement

beauty unattainable

attains

through

its

decrement

the forgetting

ourselves first

then others forget us

then they forget themselves too

the above is my more abstract reworking  of this , i don't know exactly what it is, a well known chinese dirge or poem?, but its effective

my transcription of the poem in the link

forget about her

forget about her and you won’t need to endure

forget about her and you won’t need to suffer

forget about her

forget about the things you don’t possess

forget about the things that other people possess

forget about the things you lost and the things you can’t obtain

forget about hatred, forget about suffering

forget about love

like how the rhinoceros forgets about the plains

like how the waterfowl forgets about the lakes

like how those in the underworld forget about heaven

like how the amputees forget about how they once could move freely

like how the fallen leaves forget about the wind

like how tula forgets about the female rhinocerous

forgetting is the only thing ordinary people can do

but i’ve decided not to forget about her

ed.  as a side note, china had rhinoceroses up until the tang dynasty when they were made extinct by the demand for its horn amongst other factors, so the transcript is likely to be an old poem

idleness

is

the

greatest

wealth

dramas

soaps

what’s missing

new borns

yet

its

all

about

that

ed.  i was thinking, the actors and actresses in soaps are so heavily made up, what would they do with newborns ?

reality

its discordant noise

then

suddenly

from

nowhere

a harmony

winston churchill had an exceptional mother

jennie

karl friston on reality being a 100%  hallucination

this is the "machine in the ghost", rather than "the ghost in the machine"

he really is a genuine genius !

soaps

films

media

synthetics

simulations

of reality

what is reality a simulation of ?

don’t explain

don’t complain

typical wisdom literature

half right

applicability varying with context

but still

it offers

something

more of the covid mrna  booster saga

“ The authors call for a moratorium on MRNA vaccine boosting on account of their observations ”

dr. john campbell summarizes the case for covid boosters  causing cancer

patterns of living

repeating cycles

that’s

why

as solomon said

there’s nothing new

the moon at times here can be so bright its possible to drive without the headlights on, a skill i have yet to find any use for, but i do try occasionally

the moon so bright

i need sunglasses

when its this luminous and i have to water the garden late at night, you can feel the disruption to the circadian rhythm so last night i tried sunglasses which seemed to work as i slept soundly that night compared to the horrific episode of sleep walking the night before as then i was out under a very bright fullish moon

the world is big, but i suspect i was the only person out there watering under moonlight with sunglasses on

alone

but not lonely

through the gate

the walls are gone

the scent of mystery

floats everywhere

somethings are only safely viewed from the outside

inside is to be caught in the moil forever

i sleptwalked last night for the first time ever, it was a memorable and frightening experience, you realise you can do anything and its not under conscious control

i do remember it vividly, i climbed out of bed throwing the bedding aside and walked through the house turning on lights and being in a dream of inexplicable things happening and looking for people, but they weren't there, my vision was clear, but restricted at the boundaries, i could see, but it was in a dream because at the end i suddenly woke up and it was an entirely different state with conscious control and normal vision

as a side note the russian poetess anna akhmatova was expelled from boarding school for sleep walking, i can see why now

i had eaten my main meal, drunk warm milk and got to bed very late ,  i can only think this is the reason for the "ambien-like" state

i was out in the full, very bright moon also, that might be another factor in what must have been a "hypnagogic" event

kate tunstall sings  her song  "black horse and the cherry tree"

she was adopted and  meets her sisters  for the first time

the span of a life

viewed from old age

is not long

but from being young

lasts forever

this transition of views

occurs

almost

unnoticed

the span of a life

viewed from old age

is not long

but from being young

lasts forever

this transition of views

is

called

living

these religious teachers

who produce nothing but a lifetime of bullshit

and self-promotion

disgusting

like those

who

support

their

crap

plot holes

existential questions

about

gaps of absence

of

being

miss renata  is an eastern european beauty contest, the other contestants don’t look too pleased at having a world class soprano in their midst, unsurprisingly patricia janeckova won that year

she died young, age 25 last year from breast cancer, an unfortunate loss of a very versatile talent

it pays to research any "medical treatment" before agreeing to it, everything that follows is downstream of that agreement or refusal

this is a world of consequences

dramas

insane probability

vast gaps in the plot

the scriptwriter’s bag of tricks

is bare

so i posted the below six years ago, the net can throw back stuff at you many years later giving a good opportunity to compare now and then, in this case i am happy with what i wrote

this painting is surprisingly consonant with the earliest christian/ essene angelology except the earth should be the moon and much larger, the armoured figure is jesus who fought lucifer on a battleground below the moon, but jesus and his army lost, he was killed and buried below the moon and then raised from the dead

references

standards

comparison

insanity

upon

insanity

references

standards

comparison

insanity

on

insanity

magical thinking

that enigmatic realm

half way between

infinity

and

reality

magical thinking

that nether realm

half way between

infinity

and

reality

magical thinking

that realm

where imagination meets infinity

with traces

of reality

interestingly, one of the hardest drugs to withdraw from is the supposedly benign and medically sanctioned xanax/ benzodiazepines

jordan peterson had to be put into a coma in russia to detoxify and he’s not been the same since

apparently he wasn’t aware of the problems when taking it, likely a penalty of the busy-ness of a high public profile with a lot of hostility directed at him

in my view its not religion that is the "opiate of the masses" but entertainment like netflix and C and K dramas

there is a huge hidden benefit to this and that is the loss of interest in insane ideologies like marxism so we now get neutered forms like woke which while not entirely harmless cannot match a fraction of the horror that attempts to implement marxism achieved

an interesting  convergence  between the "little pinks" and netflix

my view is that there is always 10% of any population prepared to act as "enforcers" of whatever brutal tyranny can be bought into being by their success, though always doomed, the attack on the capitol is a case in point

the great virtue of the british monarchy is that by providing a figurehead that can’t really be displaced by a real dictator, events such as the cultural revolution and "putinism" are prevented

dictatorships are not benign, at  the dissident edge  there is always brutal suppression

worlds ruled by appearances try to deny the inversion of intention and effects

melodrama

life’s patterns

male and female leads

rivals

bad guys and women

flashbacks

morality

blocks clunked together

ill-fitting

a failed opiate

spawned from an industry

of malfunction

the notion of "zen master" is a literary construct, like god, muhammad or the "mind ground" for that matter

narratives are endless

don’t drown your sorrows in drink, it destroys the processing that is beneficial with difficulty

life isn’t a sitcom or drama

i seem to keep telling people stuff they can’t handle, i just say and write what seems normal to me, i don’t know why i sometimes get the outraged reaction i do

you have to watch what you tell people, they just can’t handle it, the comfort zone of their blinkers being shaken

i’ve seen some extremes over the years on the net, in the early days people didn’t understand their loss of privacy at all, like paedophiles openly talking on irc, it opened my eyes to the fact most criminals are not repentant at all

a man in the UK who obsessively went to all the funerals of young girls he could

a guy who killed a young woman he was obsessed with but only ever saw from a distance  (he hadn't committed the crime when i had contact with him, he was actually passed onto me by others who were rightly concerned) ,  years later i read about the murder in news release , pure fluke i came across the info as it was in the usa

chatting to an arsonist happily setting bush fires in california, his big problem was avoiding being detected, he absolutely revelled in it, probably still doing it, this was early web and people were much less cautious

a man who was going to shoot all his coworkers who i managed to talk out of it using the fact that his family would be ostracised 

recently i came across this comment on a youtube  travel blog

“ Hi Ken i am a fighter pilot from USA now living in China and i love it  —  don’t worry about the lies they say about you or China, i get the same thing people calling me a traitor for training the Chinese how to fly planes ”

the  youtube nick  he posted under is his wife’s/girlfriend’s account, a video of him in  uniform  followed by him flying a fighter so its the real deal

the training of chinese fighter pilots by western "traitors" has jumped the experience gap by ten years or more and these people really are traitors who have materially affected the current military balance in the chinese favour as witnessed by the superb flying skills of the chinese in harassing western and taiwanese military aircraft

ed.  looks like the problem extends to  intelligence agencies 

those slowest of connections

A + B   =   C

twenty to thirty years to sum

the answer amazes yet has always been there

i no longer ask why

and am only grateful for an answer

alcohol abuse, mafia, endemic bullying, promiscuity, chaebols, lowest fertility rate, maniacal regime next door, patriarchy, maybe K dramas are a bit tame compared to the real south korea ?

white chrysanthemums

a melancholy bouquet

just death

the dark velvet streaked iris

for life

one reading

two readings

three

not

more

to

understand

touched

the "single mind" fragments

no one thing

naturally distributed

amongst

many things

imo you are also on "autistic spectrum", it presents differently in women

a diagnosis is not necessarily helpful, (of her partner)  personally i avoid labels, but he does need to understand he will have big gaps in his understanding of how the world works and of course everyone has these problems, regardless of any label called "neurotypical" or "autistic spectrum"

emily dickinson’s circuit

truths we can handle

direct we cannot

ed.  a reference to emily dickinson’s   famous poem

twenty minutes drive from here is a steep incline on a wooded backroad where a man was killed from a crash into a tree and for years i would notice wreaths laid there, presumably by his wife

there is no wreath there anymore and even though they cut down the tree after the crash, there are other stumps and i couldn’t really say with certainty where the crash had occurred

the grief must fade of course and when i pass the roadside gravel and dead leaves just lie in their usual way

this prosaic world

somewhat

devoid

of interest

its ups and downs

force obedience

to what is beyond us

this prosaic world

somewhat

devoid

of interest

but

not

entirely

modulate probability

and

you

control

the

universe

but

beware

your

own stochasticism

the world of appearances

so easy and difficult to simulate

doesn’t

cut

the

ice

floating lotuses

that don’t flower

the world of appearances

so easy and difficult to simulate

doesn’t

cut

the

ice

evolution is not some finality of science, but rather the implementation of self-organization as species differentiate to radiate into different niches

organization

destruction

production

more than survival

it

must grow

self-organization

is

an

emergent

property

covid boosters problematic as per new science ?

an interesting feature of flu vaccines is they can be boosted year after year without any negative consequences and the public health advice we are getting on covid boosters seems based on this also being the case for MRNA vaccines

however there is beginning to be evidence that this is not so, rather that covid boosters start to distort the immune system in malign ways, in particular  IG4 disease ,  cancer and autoimmune problems

unfortunately public health advice is treating the mrna covid vaccines like inactivated virus vaccines, but they are fundamentally different

since the variants of covid now in circulation are way less virulent than the original, to me getting boosters is not a good risk versus reward

children never needed the vaccine in the first place as their immune systems which are different to adults coped even with the original covid

i’m not anti-vaccine, i have had two pfizer shots but in effect the MRNA vaccines have not been tested on a large population and the detail of what they do and side effects are still being worked out

vitamin D’s   protective effect  against covid

i have been taking 3000 iu of the blackmores vitamin D with 90 mcg of caruso’s vitamin K2 daily for years and still have no idea whether i have had covid or not

maybe life is just a dance with chains

chinese saying

the circle of before phase change

technologies trap

circumventing evolution

explanations to others

what a waste of time

except

when

its

not

benign worlds

the pleasant dream

paradise

disturbed

what gets closer

to be avoided

gets closer

the

plain

the ugly

the diseased

the deformed

the damaged

the crippled

the retarded

the mentally ill

those who lose

life’s injustice

is doled out

in differing amounts

and

in

different

spaces

hospitals

doctors

temples

priests

believable

because

they somewhat work

but

all

the

same    .    .    .   ?

repetition

similarity

to

the

nth

degree

rewriting narratives

essential for false beliefs

that are then acted on

the bog of confusion

of today’s world

rewriting narratives

essential for false beliefs

that are then acted on

the bog of confusion

of this world

xi jinping’s and the ccp’s position is that all ethnic chinese are the property of the ccp

dangerous for everyone

adoption

paternity issues

always that sadness

the similarity

not

there

yet both similarity and difference

can lead

to

mistakes

gold collar

chinese expression

the beauty of young women

the power

that fades

inference

the secret of life

not being told directly

but working it out from clues

gives

more

than

an

edge

for china to successfully  invade taiwan ,  it needs a successful pre-emptive strike against US bases in japan

so if you wake up one morning to that news

that’s how WW3 will start

alexander pushkin’s death by duel is the craziest thing as he had the first shot and fired into the air ,  but the toxic bastard up against him still shot him and went on to live a long successful life, a lesson on not giving quarter to arseholes

actually his wife whose reputation he was defending was a bitch too, a great beauty and likely sleeping with the czar

worth some research, the whole thing is unbelievable, a great talent submerged by a nonentity with an element of fatalism about what happened, across the whole of europe these two drawn together by a bad resonance, pushkin’s literal nemesis

existence is a mystery

existence

is

a

mystery

“ time, be still

let me live forever in this moment with them

i never knew the true love’s of my life, would be my children ”

rose brik

religion

sub literary quality fantasy

religion

pulp fantasy

disjunctive imagery

not even any merit

no brains to tease

any deeper sense obviated

by its audience

music videos

its really helpful to watch some of these dashcam video  compilations  occasionally in terms of making your own driving safer and being aware of what can happen

monastic life historically used to be notoriously short because of communicable diseases, a big incentive to be a hermit

i am more and more of the opinion that what we call religion today is quite "re-invented" compared to the medieval and renaissance  realities

purple

red and blue

mixed

the colour of instability

violence

and

love

what terminates

terminates

let

the

end

speak

its

eloquence

the hall of mirrors

shattered

no repetition

eternal reflection

recovered to memory

your being here has value

don’t waste it

ed.  the above started as some sort of "rework" of

“ the city of mirrors  (or mirages)  would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when aureliano babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth ”

gabriel garcía márquez, the last line of "one hundred years of solitude"  (1967; trans. gregory rabassa)

but in the end i am not gabriel and my thinking is different and so what i wrote is different and took several iterations to transform to something i am happy with and its sort of an answer to that last line and its bleak theme of entire loss

the MRNA vaccines look to be highly differentiated from the flu vaccine in terms of the tolerance/ benefit/ downsides to boosters, that is while the flu vaccines can be boosted indefinitely (annually), boosters of the covid vaccines start to distort the immune system in malign ways, in particular  IG4 disease

unfortunately public health advice is treating the mrna covid vaccines like inactivated virus vaccines, but they are fundamentally different

children never needed the vaccine in the first place

entertainment

carrying the storylines

rubbish squared

surgeon’s saying :

one operation leads to another

why the eastern ukrainian front has reverted to a WW1 type trench warfare is that drones have equalised infantry with tanks

in the latter stages of WW2, the germans had hardly any tanks on the eastern front and the russian advance consisted to large extent of their tanks rolling through german defensive positions, albeit with high russian infantry losses

“ i am looking forward teacher and a sangha, and where i currently live there's only a group belonging to the ordinary mind zen started by joko beck.  what are your thoughts on this group ? ”

i have spoken to joko beck, she was old and tired and found all the attention she got somewhat harassing

there is some question as to whether she was suffering from a degree of dementia in her later years, which of course is a problem a lot of women face

i didn’t agree with the emphasis she placed on seated meditation, excessive to the point of being dangerous

don’t get too hung up on "teachers", its the weekly group meditation meeting that will be of benefit to you, that’s how i started zen, did it for a couple of years, the group context also teaches social skills which i badly needed

the "dementia" was actually a big issue amongst her dharma heirs since she revoked "dharma transmission" to two of them

i actually felt she was always a touch schizophrenic, not unlike a lot of zen teachers

teachers are just people and as people they are uneven, like everyone and everything else and in my experience most have only a limited understanding of what zen is about which really needs celibacy to bring the necessary focus and historically that’s how it was

joko’s emphasis on "ordinary mind", is i think, her antidote to the usual grandiose "theological" schemes you get in religion/zen/buddhism and to shift to the more productive concern of how we are in "ordinary life"

a poem by  rose brik  reworked by me

i wish i could have cried in my mother’s arms

she was always crying in mine

too heavy a burden for a child to carry

strength fades into tiredness

my love

couldn’t heal

her

pain

if you don’t want people to know, don’t do anything

contemporary chinese advice/saying

work is always a battlefield, you have been outflanked, why ?

just in case you don’t know, a teardrop tattoo on a face means they have killed some-one, a teardrop per person

it also means they live a lifestyle where such an advertisement is supposedly praiseworthy and there seems to be immunity from prosecution

being shot in the shoulder is so common in films, yet the hero/heroine seems to remain in full vigour why that’s nonsense

a hermitage at the base of a thousand foot cliff

in seclusion away from the disease of men

the moon a lantern hung in the sky

making tea from spring water

the air wet from a waterfall

mist at dusk

away from the noise of life

this quietude shows the truth

ed.  my reworking of an 11th century poem by the chinese monk fushan fayuan

it helps in thinking about teaching or learning a language or languages to understand that we do not ever acquire the facility of language itself, rather that is genetically programmed with a developmental realization and as children only learn a particular one

this is very freeing since you do not need highly prescriptive grammars or anything like that and can "go with the flow"

this "genetic programming" is also a good explanation of the remarkable uniformity of intelligence across races since the cognitive requirements must necessarily be similar

in a science fiction world we could be born all knowing the same language and with full facility, but since learning is a developmental process then tautologically different ones will arise and the strength of this pressure can be seen in regional and cultural dialectic variations

the fundamental principle of large language models

is not seeing beyond the next step

but seeing and implementing the next step

works on a lot of things

solves prediction and actuality

reality is iterative

ed.  lol, the last two lines were practising what i preach, the first four came at once and the last two were added later, one at a time

a woman is never settled until she has children

you really are a newborn calf not afraid of tigers

chinese saying

the past

not like some movies

clear forever

to be viewed at leisure

but slowly buried

by the debris of living

i want god to reach out to me, unveil his face, speak to me

“ but he is silent ”

i cry to him in the darkness, but sometimes it is as if there is no-one there

dialogue  from "the seventh seal" by ingmar bergman

lying by omission

misinformation by omission

just omission

the backdraught

of what we don’t know

the medical use of a substance or drug has a different baseline to say "recreational use" ,  for instance i am opposed to the use of "psychedelics" in the context of not having substance abuse problems, but there are contexts  where its use  may make sense as per PTSD or addiction

this is actually the underlying theory of prescription medicines, they are poisonous or detrimental in the context of good health, but certain medical conditions offer a positive benefit risk ratio, chemo would have to be an egregious example

pure land is a story

zen is a story

buddhism is a story

only the insane

persist

in

treating

them

as real

roger penrose gives the  best account  of godel’s famous theorem i have come across

in layman’s terms its that there are truths that cannot be explained and this is a consequence of trying to falsify the aforementioned statement

rephrasing roger, he says explaining something takes you beyond the explanation, its moves you up beyond the level of the problem and its answer

he is a superb speaker btw

in so much of life we are faced with people who do not want to go beyond the problem

so, what can be explained is not the bottom line of life which is just as well as reality would be very boring otherwise

being swayed by the common thinking

is to enter a series of disasters

rolex daytona

$850,000

less accurate

than my skmei $18 and 1 million times less/more  (read both ways to switch applicable subject)  likely to be stolen

ed.  i notice rolex is doing a lot of very subtle social media coverage/advertising, full marks for its effectiveness, but of course they need to given the superfluity of their product which is in effect just male jewellery

contradictions

dichotomies

fallacies

truth

all the same

except the last

which

is

also

the first

shopping can be interesting if you look around a bit

a discussion with a young german man at the vegemart following an inquiry about his accent which didn't sound typically german at all, more guttural than usual, he was so pleased to respond about his germanness i never got around to asking which part of germany he was from

a young woman sweeping the floor of said vegemart  (called the "nuthouse")  warning me to get out of the way with a playful "toot-toot"

opportunities in the supermarket to compare parents with their children for familial similarity, always so strong you wonder why the need for paternity tests

asking a woman attendant in the vegetable section of the supermarket about the signs warning that some vegetables have been x-rayed to kill insects and to ask staff which vegetables they are and it turning out nobody knew anything

so even the most normative of human activities has a surreal edge

personal criticism is "argumentum ad hominem"

it doesn’t go anywhere

short stories

lack ommph

novels are tedious

and poetry odious

however

ignore these

and your knowledge

is not

commodius

battles not to fight

most

the world of shallow attitudes

not confounded

because

they are never brought to test

meditation

not an end in itself

willows weep

plum blossom blooms

between these

we spin like tops

there

is

nothing

more

walls

of the unknown

working against us

to encroach

and

swallow

us

people come and go-->

ourselves is the only constant

the borders  of african countries were in the main set by local conditions and not arbitrary

what rejects

carries the lesson

of

listening

to what

we don’t

want

to hear

something i was going to write

walked away

not even a wave

goodbye

the “expertise-plus-release” view of  creative flow

its the re-working of experience by specialized circuitry in the brain that seems to deliver on its own schedule in an autonomous fashion

we live in a world of packaged solutions antithetical to this skillset

david deutsch  criticises  "woke"

most people do not understand how to think without mistakes, the rigor and difficulty involved and paradoxically always to be open to the possibility of being mistaken

normally we are almost entirely reliant on implementing mistaken ideas and correcting when things go wrong in the real world

what we are seeing is the ingress of the latter into the former, an over-democratization of intellectual life, which unfortunately is stretching into politics

in the social-historical context like nazi germany, communism and the crusades we see how extreme and for how long such problems can occur

“ dramas ”

suspense

requires

oscillation

between

scenarios

the transition

is

traumatic

my translation of caoshan’s song of the four prohibitions

四禁頌。莫行心處路。不挂本來衣。不須正恁麼。切忌未生時

don’t float in fictions, be honest with yourself and be wary of the days to come

yet with this comes a lightness of spirit

ultimate truth i looked for

book ended between penultimate truths

ultimate truth i looked for/ book ended between penultimate truths