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

gastric bypass  is not an operation that is safely reversible and i wonder what the consequences will be with aging and a loss of digestive efficiency and the subtle side effects of the ersatz "replumbing"

in addition the root cause of maladaptive dietary habits isn’t addressed and must reshow its ugly head again at some point in the future

why nations fail  and "extractive versus inclusive" political systems

this gives a lot of context to current international politics and  colonialism

its interesting to fit the current conflicts between the ukraine and russia and israel vs hamas and hezbollah into this schema, the ukraine being inclusive and russia being extractive though its not black and white, and similarly israel being inclusive and hezbollah and hamas being extractive, you are getting an abstract power play between the basic competing forms of government with the dynamic of technological advantage seriously tilting the outcome in favour of inclusive

this is why i am really in favour of the monarchy, in a formal way it diffuses power away from potential elite cliques which constitutional monarchy does by its churn of parties and leaders nominally subservient to the higher power of a politically emasculated king or queen

one

many

many is one

and one is many

this essential truth

walks

as

a multitude

zen is a word, ch'an is a word, master is a word

however you mix them

they are still words

correction

comes

from

seeing

the

problem

more

work

is

not

necessary

you

will

naturally

shift

to

carry

the

burden

of

reform

nodes

leaving and entering

disruption in midstream

can work for entering

but not leaving

上堂云。釋迦慳彌勒當。

The Master spoke  :   Shakyamuni is stingy, turn toward Maitreya

ed.  the master being yuanwu keqin in his  "recorded sayings"

what emerges is emergent

not known before

what comes out

is now grasped

not an answer anymore

new necessities arise

ed.  emergence, complexity are an alternative way to looking at the ideas of past and future and in terms of buddhist text may be a more faithful rendition of notions like the maitreya buddha rather than the highly westernized schema of linear time

a new largest prime number discovered

yet infinitely more remain to be found

  to get a feel  of how big it is

and according  to euclid ,  an unending succession beyond that

the world

awful and nice in streaks

but the unfairness

of being trapped in the miserable

no god to feel disconsolate for you

you have to do that

for

yourself

courtship

a small circle within larger ones

but for all its size

more significant

think about something

it looks different

think about it again

and it looks different again

this floating world

not as solid

as we think

one step too far

beyond multiplicity

into a false unity

because

multiplicity

is the unity

the eons reach

but this truth

is ignored

this  famous painting  never "gelled" with me, given that it was supposedly by "pieter bruegel the elder" something seemed lacking, i think particularly, the composition isn’t right, lacks his usual density

it turns out it is likely a copy which in effect is a form of translation

"the noise of time"

a hint of something

profound or specious

i can’t quite work out

what flows or moves

in jerks and jumps

i do not know

ed.  the title is a series of autobiographical sketches of his youth by osip mandelstam

meditation is not an end in itself but an opportunity to develop an observational facility about how your brain works

it was a huge mistake of the british to intervene against muammar gaddafi

saddam should have been left alone too

as we know, disaster followed

creative effort is night and day different from regurgitating someone else’s nonsense

those who the shaft of insight escapes

doomed to carve circles with their lives

its humour ,  but apparently some chinese men have trouble handling it and she gets a lot  of hate

of course china is in the middle of the demographic disaster of its one child policy and imbalance of males to females which has certainly changed the power relations between the genders in a very patriarchal society

interestingly there is a theory  (fisher’s principle)  why most species must tend towards an even balance of male to female offspring, something that has always puzzled me

“ For Fisher’s principle to work, there must be  mutations  that influence the sex ratio ”

another interesting chinese  comedienne

“ in the same way the pastorals  (ed. rococo especially françois boucher)  are this sort of nice ideal that doesn’t really exist, i want  my paintings  to have that same sense of the surreal going on in this sort of imaginative fantasy land, a sort of fakeness ”

there is no answer because there is no question

if you create a question, you need an answer

there is an answer because there is a question

if you create a question

there is an answer

the way of idiots

lots of words

breed more words

defeating

understanding

a woman’s world

inconceivably different from the male’s

its concerns and interests

don’t look for another universe

its right there

in front of you

noam chomsky on language being  a native function  of the brain

i think you could say its coded for genetically

celebrity deaths

the media mourning

so fake

it makes

you

want to vomit

ed.  this pretence of the claims of personal association with people you have never met let alone know well

women and men

at sea

in the geo-strategic realm

geopolitics

has its own logic

too brutal

to be understood

emotionally

normative values stand by

wringing their hands

uselessly

“ Alcohol is like the magic medicine that makes me feel "normal"

People like me much more when I am drunk

I am so much nicer with people around me when I am drunk

This shit ain’t good for my health

Isn’t there a better alternative to this bullshit ? ”

we only come this way once

its a pity

to destroy that passage

with

alcohol

or

drugs

i think one of the problems with the education system is the way it is primarily geared to produce students for the universities

languages interfere with each other in the brain which is designed for only one, polyglots are damaged by their facility

the marvel of  the knee joint

deep skills

unappreciated

you can only look

at results

so

what goes on forever

goes on forever

how can there be any answers there ?

well, on youtube you can be an art critic !

i feel  the portrait  was a wrong road and really didn’t capture your interest and the result is mediocre, you needed a cognitive element for it and you didn’t get that, i would suggest you explore a personal symbolism

going away from myself

the long walk back

where i am is not so attractive

but its saner

images in our head

going around and around

a merry go round

we can’t get off

zinaida serebriakova  an interesting russian artist i have never come across before, got out of the soviet union in 1924 unlike her brother  nikolay

oddly another brother,   yevgeny  did well under stalin

not accepting what you find

where you find

what is expected

things that add up

exist

yet still we yearn

for what can never happen

not accepting what you find

where you find

what is expected

things that add up

exist

yet still we yearn

for what doesn’t exist

education, wasting lives on irrelevancies

education

lives wasted

on irrelevancies

ed.  school curriculums are hardly sane when viewed in the context of later lives

crossover

between the reader and writer

what happens ?

hard to say

flower that goes to fruit then withers

might be

how

it

is

there’s so much random bullshit in the world

clarity is an illusion

except

when

its about

random

bullshit

the storylines of computer games

the literary and  artistic  cognitive level of the general population

not good

politics can be hardly surprising

i suspect lewis carroll was  familiar  with this

another influence are the "bab ballad" poems by w. s. gilbert

writers never come from nowhere, after all its a skill and skills require constructs that translate into experience

“ With great fluidity and freedom, Gilbert continually challenges our natural expectations.  First, within the framework of the story, he makes bizarre things happen, and turns the world on its head.  Thus the Learned Judge marries the Plaintiff, the soldiers metamorphose into aesthetes, and so on, and nearly every opera is resolved by a deft moving of the goalposts  .   .   .   His genius is to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand, to blend the surreal with the real, and the caricature with the natural.  In other words, to tell a perfectly  outrageous story  in a completely deadpan way ”

“ the morning after i killed myself, i tried to unkill myself, but couldn’t finish what i had started ”

this is from a prose poem by meggie royer, what  the video  effectively conveys is that space of being away from our life, that we need occasionally, just to walk away from things and see and feel a certain beauty in that

the greeks had it right, after death there is just nothing

what never happens

we can go in circles expecting it to happen

some loops

are ambiguous

error

exemplifies

itself

but was

it

 error ?

why do i have to have an opinion on it ?

i don’t have an opinion

its wonderfully relieving to have no opinion

why do i have to have an opinion on it ?

i don’t have an opinion

its wonderfully relieving not to have an opinion

comparing the facial features of grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren and the measured dilution

you know genetics is true

its hard to understand paternity "surprises"

life is like walking down a hallway with so many open and closed doors

what each holds is a mystery

the pistil

its biological superpower

constrained by itself

to be itself

han kang the new  (2024)  nobel laureate is a bit different,   her poetry  is much more condensed than the usual tripe

i have noticed authors’  interview  in an idiosyncratic manner compared to the normal, the thinking and opinions are works in progress, they twist and turn, follow up associations and create new formations which i relate to, the pity is the world often reacts very negatively to this and only cope when it is presented to them as entertainment

han kang reads from her book  the vegetarian

a good review of  the white book

life

death

insanity

asynchronous being

five words

waiting for a sixth

don’t look

for meaning

beyond this

if you would criticize the world for being the way it is

think again

why wouldn’t you criticize yourself

for being the way you are ?

“ you don’t understand women, when it comes to jealousy, slaughtering ten cows is not a problem  ”

contemporary chinese saying

the increased life span requires we look at alcohol and "recreational" drugs with a different perspective, that of what contributes to dementia

actually there’s a heap of factors signalling  a coming epidemic

i don’t agree with him on the net positive benefits of green tea

catullus, whose father was a friend of julius caesar is a well known poet "academically" ,  but is a bit hard to take for the general public so lacks a widespread appreciation

anne carson reads some of her  translations

real and unreal

conflict in the imagination

the unimaginative

are traumatized

a genuine physicists’  blackboard ,  jonathan oppenheim explaining his theory that gravitation is an emergent probabilistic phenomena from the degeneration of quantum through complexity

arrogance doesn’t equal skills !

problems that are deeper than ignorance, its the whole personality

in actual fact the "transmission system" is what has killed western zen, only very stupid people would persist with an accreditation that took so long and where the appointments were so capricious

so all the capable students just left and set themselves up as whatever guru

little as i like the usual pontificating OP’s on r|zen, the quotes of the old "ch'an masters" really only say one thing

“ sort it out for yourself ”

its a disease to proxy onto another

old eyes

how do they look ?

a deeper loss

approaching

jessie inchauspé making you/me think  about sugar

there’s no question in my mind that you can modulate sugar spikes with chromium supplementation  (which reduces insulin resistance)  and anti-oxidants like vitamin E help protect against glycation

i take a tablet a day of the "source naturals" chromemate chromium GTF, other brands could be fine, but one needs to beware problematic ones, especially with bad fillers

i am not in favour of her recommendation on taking vinegar

the dog , from goya’s "black"   paintings

asmodea definitely an influence on salvador dali

faces

too pretty or handsome

warp

somewhat

the illusion of others

their existence is yours

that is all

a world of higher probabilities

trauma to live in

more exciting

and flawed

the undercurrent of criminal views

not everyone is socially constructive

the deep flaw of utopianism

stalin was an idealist

soaps

emotional shortcuts

that are not productive

the famous phrase of rené descartes’ "i think therefore i am" has never seemed right to me and "i doubt, therefore i think, therefore i am " is more useful

what he said in a margin note was "we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt"

ie  the process of doubting defines our existence and that makes a lot more sense to me and neatly dovetails with karl friston’s "free energy principle"

that doubt, or uncertainty or partial knowledge is fundamental to existence and in a sense you get a blurring with what is non-existent which is a more satisfactory state of affairs philosophically

my own expression would be  "i doubt my existence, therefore i doubt existence"

religion is the hijacking of wisdom literature and philosophy and weaving it into an incoherent babble aka "belief system"

time

lost

as

it

always

is

can

never

be

brought

back

wishing

is

futile

explanation

tires the wise

that after all

is wisdom

“ Elevation of the plasma levels of (S)-lactate (Lac) and/or (R)-beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) occurs naturally in response to  strenuous exercise  and prolonged fasting, respectively, resulting in millimolar concentrations of these two metabolites ”

i think its possible to argue aerobic exercise has a degree of equivalence to fasting, likely beneficial in moderation

verbal hallucinations  are due to interior monologue being misperceived as external, its not a chemical imbalance as per "old thinking" but a functional imbalance in the brain that is structural in nature

this basic mismatch and its "non-chemical" nature also explains the toxicity of the meds used, that toxicity is necessary to get an effect in a change in structural function, no wonder psychiatric medication compliance is so difficult

the general understanding of psychiatric medications as a benign mapping of conventional medication philosophy into the mental health realm is wrong, the principles are quite different with the side-effect bar being way lower and the principle goal not being the patient’s welfare but societies

afference and efference

are a pair

meaning turned

by a vowel’s breath

of difference

afference and efference

are a pair

meaning turned

by a vowel’s breath

of change

one way of looking at marxism is total dysfunction

this trauma between the way reality actually works and marxism’s "map" of how it wants it to

so much blood on every waypost, but this problem is not limited to marxism

something is nothing

and nothing is something

an old truth rimed with frost

that no-one bothers with

compressed time

today was a blur

yesterday was a blur

and tomorrow will be a blur

well i am not so sure about tomorrow

but it seems likely

oddly the fast movement

seems to leave me at a standstill

twiddling my thumbs

and not going anywhere

why write poetry ?

its a different realm

on the edge of comprehension

takes you out of this one

into another

for a while

at least

ink blue

black silhouette

clouds in between

joy harjo gives an  autobiographical talk

what’s disturbing about this  schizophrenic man  is some of the thinking won’t be unfamiliar to us, but wouldn’t be accepted as real

actually a lot of ideas we have  (including cultural)  are unreal, its just that normally they don’t intersect too far with dysfunction

of course societies can go totally off the rails with various ideologies transiting to assumed fact

the thing about buddhist/ch'an/zen/daoist temples is they have huge maintenance and upkeep requirements which in effect forces them to have a primary purpose of being a tourist destination and the monks etc bound to a life burden of supporting this, a bit of a trap

huh, the loose tab on the end of a tape measure  is deliberate  !

gain and loss

sentiment says go one way

yet how little there is control of

“ can you tell me how to get to the railway station ? ”

a top film imo

a very natural transition into magical realism when the time comes, not forced at all like the usual junk

sabine doesn’t like what is happening  to germany

the root cause is the loss of able-bodied, breeding age men in WW2

its hard to believe a country can commit suicide, but they do

actors, actresses

the gravity or absurdity of what they say

acting can bear any weight or weightlessness

simulation

is

not

identity

“ When is it all worth it ? ”

the day after tomorrow !

long periods of time always tell a different story to the short term

the short term is blinded to the long and not vice versa

people who sit lotus

are the full doofus

they can regret a lot

when they get a blood clot

ed.  the lotus is a buddhist meditation posture that severely restricts blood flow in the legs

that’s the thing about writing, the natural reshaped or personality corrected

for eye infections what has worked for me is to use colloidal/ionic silver as an eye wash once or twice, the effect is not immediate, but takes several days, its basically a broad spectrum antibiotic and is used as such for burns in medicine

however it is toxic so don’t use regularly, rather only very very occasionally

the question i have about tattoos is ,  do they contribute to  or cause disease ,  i don’t think they are harmless apart from the psychic damage permanently having bad art on the body as its canvas does

what neither is

nor isn’t

cannot be described

yet hints

may

be given ?

“ A riddle ? ”

there’s answers in riddles

the plain and straightforward can only carry a limited freight

those points of beauty

we revolve around

white cherry blossoms

i passed on the road

and went back to look

breaking off a small branch

to take back with me

its now in a vase

lighting up the room

doesn’t the woman on the left in the striped dress look  so fresh and modern  ?

something out of nabakov’s adarian dream world ?

leaving

everything stays

except

me

we think of the trauma of birth from the mother’s perspective, but of course  from the baby’s  its total PTSD, their inability to form coherent memories must be what protects them

i was thinking there’s a commonality between hezbollah, hamas and putin’s russia, that they believed their own propaganda only to discover war searches out awful realities that no fictions can disguise

A. I. stories

a patchwork

from the collective experience

layers of the disjoint

ultimately

a fun but bad add

what i hear is another more lyrical tune there, that yuja wants to break away into, but she’s bound by philip glass’s script which forces back  into the dissonance

charity

with an idea of gain

eventually

turns out to be charity

“ cannabis use during pregnancy is directly linked to negative impacts on babies’  brain development ”

surprise surprise, research from those pothead countries, new zealand and the u.k., well maybe the uk is more into alcohol ?

i take one to two teaspoons of pharmaceutical grade taurine in the evening or divided up during the day, it really helps with sleep, migraine and the immune system

its been a life saver

mental maturing can be fast or slow ?

what of it ?

“ last night he dreamed that falling flowers would not stay

alas !  he can’t go home, although half spring has gone ”

lines from the  famous poem  "a moonlit night on the spring river" by the tang poet zhang ruoxu

“  light exposure  between 12.30 am and 6 am presented a significant health issue ”

a good wiki page on bruegel the elder and they way he  painted proverbs

cai thomas sings  suo gan 

the outstanding boy treble of recent years, a distressingly transitory skill of course

du mu

i like  his poems ,  they make you stop and think

nothing new about drugs, xue tao (768-831 ), courtesan, entertainer,   poetess  and hallucinogenic experimenter in the tang dynasty

letters  from my windmill by alphonse daudet

one of the great pieces of writing with a rare underlying whimsicality and scepticism

just repeat what you read and hear out loud and you have spoken some chinese like a native speaker

its a well known  poem , i notice we don’t really have any equivalent sentiment in english

the assumption of a normal distribution in medical data is false and i think there is increasing recognition of this in scientific circles

we march with the years

incremental change

to our eventual defeat

words in all directions

up, down and going around

winding threads that would constrain you

until exhausted you no longer fight

opinions

dislocated from any influence on reality

the media

war

no voice

except

fear

a chinese  dance  representing the song dynasty  painting  "a thousand miles of rivers and mountains"

things that haven’t happened

obscure what has

things that haven’t happened

obscure what has happened

so much violence in the news relates to places that serve alcohol

it makes for aggression, what more needs to be said regarding risk ?

joy harjo reads her poem  grace

an interesting poet, more semantic depth than most

perhaps the world ends here

the music weirdly effective  with the video

lower class urban living in chongqing, china

the trouble with pets

we have the power of life and death over

its a fact

that tarnishes everything

the above was my thoughts after reading  rehoming piiata  by nadine hura which i liked because it has that new zealand flavour, lost in recent decades of writing, an authentic mix of maori and european cultures

so many musical groups

never been’s or has been ?

wanna bee’s or wanna can’ts ?

something beyond

knows nothing beyond

k

n

o

w

s

n

o

t

h

i

n

g

ed.  somewhat a summary of a talk by foyan no. 48, instant zen translated by thomas cleary

yes the spacing is important

hilarious russian recruitment  video ,  basically you are gay unless you sign up as a contract soldier, sorta an inverse "woke"

huh, i had a neighbour  (british soldier, messenger)  who was riding a bicycle  (towards the end of the war i think, maybe italy?)  and a german chucked a grenade at him and fortunately  it never went off

actually i think poetry is a form of AI, properly done its another world with its own different landscape and to read it, takes you there whether you know it or not and like all travel, changes you

spin  in billards and pool, obvious when you look at it, but i never got to that level

i’ve always been skeptical about AI, but it is a step above heuristics towards autonomy, the compute requirement is unending and i think will end up one day with fully autonomous entities like ourselves probably with hybrid biological hardware

worlds without error

narratives

that repeat

themselves

perfect knowledge

that never transits

to the imperfect

the undoing of

what can’t be undone

tears make a slippery path

of regret

men

blinded by women

holofernes fate

teaches no-one

some things

seem trivial when they happen

but the passing years

show them to be

from a subterranean flow

in my view ptk and lasik are way too risky to be a general operating procedure

its not just immediate problems, but what can show up 10 to 30 years later, the eyes matter as much as the brain

if i criticise an OP in general terms and don’t do the work of explicating a detailed correction, i don’t view myself as duty bound to put the research work in to quote sources etc for my views because the OP’er takes the penalty, not me, i have done the work and sorted it out and he will blather on in error forever

i only write to further my own thinking and expression skills, not for the benefit of others

so much writing these days is like an minimally or untrained large language model

no wonder chatGTP is shaking things up

women

who never get past

teenage

affectation

everybody fills their time

what happens if

time is filled for them ?

the problem with sports like american football or the australian "rules" is that the massive musculature and body weight of some of the players does nothing to protect the head and shocks to the body transmit to the brain

you can divide sports into two classes, brain damaging or not and by and large people seem oblivious to the difference

you don’t need concussion for there  to be injury

if you think about it, christian crucifixion imagery is an extreme reific of the buddhist "life is suffering" meme

female suicide

the sadness and beauty of the null point

female suicide

the beauty and sadness of the null point

does a dog have buddha nature ?

does a dog have a soul ?

how many angels on the tip of a pin ?

how many angels on the head of a pin ?

who cares ?

a good story

requires the measured wrap of coincidence

not too much

not too little

and a satisfactory yarn

will unfold

the strange aging

of the long lived

only absence now

the hubbub of the world

has receded

of its own accord

the tears of the departed

glint rainbows in the surf

the cruellest aspect of dementia

bonds broken

by fading memory

the solid appears fluid

and proves fragile

leaving the intact

to wonder

women talk

emotional processing

men don’t do that

they think its peripheral to them

there is little appreciation for the fact that some forms of  iron supplementation  are toxic

“ What dose of taurine do you take before bed that help you to sleep ? ”

its better taken in divided doses during the day, i will take it from one to three times summing to between one and two rounded teaspoons

it is a diuretic, don’t overdo it

china clearly has different health and safety liability laws

these  are tourists at a tourist attraction

inconceivable in the mollycoddled western world

dramas

no margin of error and low compute

their attraction

except

they are almost

all error

i think  this  is a good explanation of why the world has so much error in, that the "compute requirements" increase exponentially for a linear reduction in error

the compute limitations basically pay us to work in a high error environment that is in the main liveable and to an extent  —  correctable

of course there are situations where a narrowing of the error margin with more "compute/investigation" pays huge dividends and the failure to do this leads to disaster, but the species isn’t good at this

a lot of politics operates on dysfunctionally expanded margins

daoism , buddhism, zen buddhism are unambiguously religions in asia, but in the west, particularly daoism and zen buddhism are stripped down to become "pop philosophy", in the provenance of the usual suspects, tedious bores grasping onto nonsense to support their justifiably low self-esteem

ed.  the video walk is part of the jinding daoist temple complex on laojun mountain in luanchuan, henan province, all of which really  look the part

a high reading/writing age is an anathema to most reddit and other moderators

you want to read  schopenhauer  on the subject

“ The only way to be liked is to appear to be dumb ”

interestingly, arthur schopenhauer was fanboy of søren kierkegaard and  baltasar gracián  who at least has a similar tone

“ Life is a warfare against the malice of others ”

i’ve never thought in terms of eating and sugar spikes, but i think it warrants attention since there is so much sugar in foods and now, due to breeding,  fruits

i do take half a tablet of the source naturals "chromemate" twice a day to help tamp down these spikes which are, in effect, a form of serious wear on the metabolism, when i see what people eat these days   .   .   .   .

alexandre dumas and his stories of swashbucking adventure, didn’t come from nowhere ,  his father  was an exceptional general under napoleon

take a leaf out of the stoics book :

don’t get upset over what you can’t change

i have been taking 3000 iu of vitamin D for years  (with MK7/K2)  which i really think has given me a new lease of life with the joint health of a man many years younger

if i was an idiot i could have gone the medical way  with bolus doses  and been wasting my time

“ In other words, although a large bolus produces a quick increase in 25(OH)D levels, it does so at the cost of downregulation of cellular activation and of factors of immunity

In contrast, a small to moderate dose of daily D3 has superior intracellular effects and needs frequent dosing due to its 20 hour half‐life ”

plum blossom

cherry blossom

old tropes

original thinking

is needed to

refresh them

the sands of time burn

each grain is a flame

don’t waste it

the sands of time burn

each grain is a flame

don’t waste them

schizophrenia, dementia, psychosis

the retardation of age

backwards and forwards

i traverse these

as my being

magic

wands

break

magic wands break

“ Is it logical to take 30 mg zinc occasionally for immunity to viruses ? ”

i take 10 to 20 mg of zinc monomethionine in the manner you are talking about, yes it does help

vitamin A helps as well and a really effective but "edgy" supplement for anti-viral effect is germanium sesquioxide, but don’t take this regularly

“ Why not take it regularly ? ”

its actually used as an anti-cancer chemo so its a bit strong/toxic for everyday use, but it really ramps those T-cells up, and i have never had covid which i attribute in part to my use of it when there are situations of potential exposure

views from close-up

and views from long distance

rarely do they match

the sages try to bridge the gap

but they can’t

smokers have some sort of illusion they die immediately and don’t spend years suffering some ghastly smoking related illness

its actually quite difficult to stop and stop/starting in repeated cycles is bad because unless they "taper" down, a sudden stop inducts micro-strokes, yet they have to give up completely because even a cigarette a day causes problems

interestingly from complete cessation, within five years they approach normal probabilities of contingent disease

i have to say

a childless pope

preaching against abortion

must be an inconsistency

even the edifice of catholic dogma

can’t sustain

or

can it ?

ed.  the weird thing is that for most of  history popes did have children, even if they were called nephews and nieces

talking without understanding

the empty tins

rattle

ed. lol 3-3-1 can’t get more minimal !  the above is my reworking of number 85 in the "record of tung-shan"

parting

they all do it

family

friends

like some tang hermit

halfway up a mountain

am i the only one left ?

trauma foci

we build on

to our detriment

gambling

the illusion of a 50/50 world

but its more like 1 in 150

of course carl jung is half-arsed, but half-arsed is still half-right and in his case, sometimes more than half-right

the primacy of solipsism    benefits of introversion    intuition

the titanic sunk in 1912 and its only 73 years later in 1985 that photos of it were taken by robert ballard’s submersible, something that would have seemed inconceivable at the time of its construction

its one of a number of compelling examples of the "out of the box" rapidity of the development of technology in our time

its not slowing down

priests, monks, nuns, patriarchs, bishops, archbishops, popes, cardinals, imans, muftis, sheikhs, "spiritual guides", chaplins, reverends, pastors, masters, roshis, fakir, shri, gurus, lamas, dali lamas

if only the babble

wasn’t so boring

ice in a glass jar

crystal clear she appears to me

and frosty cold in her speaking

ice in a glass jar

crystal clear she appears to me

and frosty cold in her caring

a theme of chinese dynastic poetry is women denied a "full life" either by their husbands dying or leaving, being unvisited concubines or there being no suitable partner for a marriage to be arranged with

being a "leftover woman" was a precarious fate in those days

another poem by wang changling

at dawn she sweeps the entrance

and dusts with her fan

the entire hallway

ed.  now the poem switches to the reality of the matter, she is not a servant but a high status woman in the household

her untanned skin

contrasts with the crows in the courtyard

whose freedom in coming and going

she envies

there is a strangeness to imperial china that newly settled maritime nations like us have trouble getting to grips with and that’s the historical continuity of thousands of years with the same enemies on your borders

the poem below was writen by chusai/ wang changling who was executed in the lushan rebellion, not an unusual fate for poets then i have to say

the empty fortress has a weird vibe in the moonlight

han and qin were once busy with its construction

now general li guang fights thousands of miles away

a wall against the nomads

failures in love

you can laugh and you can cry

err

on the side of laughing

a good interview  with paul orfalea, the founder of kinkos later sold to fedex

he was what we would call today "developmentally disordered" and you get that different perspective in the interview

how wide is the world ?

you go to the edge

and one horizon

is replaced with another

when does dreaming pass into psychosis ?

pretty soon

long term exercisers  store fat  subcutaneously in preference to around or in the organs !

this would help preserve cardiometabolic health

having pet cats gives a limited insight into them, you really need to live with ferals and see how they behave to get a complete picture

another way of looking at the jacinda ardern government and the covid "crisis" is that it was a step to a more soviet style government with personality cult and greater social control

fortunately it failed and its leader is now in exile

this might seem a bit fanciful and is of course just a construction, but all the same i think there is something to it and regrettably this malign movement is far from defeated being increasingly enabled by improvements in computing, communications technology, and a subtle "dumbing down" conformity to nonsense ideas

“ Talking to therapists sometimes feels like I’m doing it more for them than for me ”

this may be hard to understand, but they are a symptom of depression themselves

aerobic exercise and attention to diet will do way more for you than these cripples

“ That’s a bit harsh lol  —  also, not everyone goes to therapy because they are ‘depressed’.  Sometimes its just about getting to know yourself better/ well enough, to facilitate communication with others ”

it was a response to the OP and that context which was depression and ineffectual therapists

however i agree with you that there can be contexts that work, but if its skills versus depression, well skills can be taught but depression is physiology

“ I’m not totally sure what you mean by that.  Care to develop ?  Curious ”

basically what’s appropriate depends on the specific circumstances

horses for courses !

rules tend to crumble when faced with "real dealing".  however, not all the rules which is another problem

the  love theme  from romeo and juliet  (franco zeffirelli’s film)  composed by nino rota and arranged by henry mancinci; played by cellodeck  (cellist yoon-kyung cho)

fretless playing must be very hard, i notice she does a lot of sliding to change to a new note then finger spacing to reference later notes against that

Miaozong’s instructional verse

Killing and giving life proceed together

Sweet nectar, poisonous medicine

Is it a gift or a punishment ?

That’s entirely down to judgment

舉德山凡見僧入門便棒/  殺活並行/  醍醐毒藥/  是賞是罰/  一任卜度

my "retranslation" into something more modern and that actually makes sense

life is uneven

with its joys and hells

what is good and bad

only time shows

what rings the bells

life is uneven

with its joys and hells

what is good and bad

only time shows

life is uneven

with its joys and hells

what is good and bad

time shows

the problems of the ultra-rich

james packer doesn’t know what medications he is on, so how can he know about side effects ?

no wonder he looks in such bad shape, he’s caught in  an echo chamber  of the rich and famous and media idiots

“ However, Mr. Packer admitted he did not know what his current medications were because he has a private nurse prepare it for him

‘ I am on a bunch of things and someone does it for me ’  he said ”

the problem with that sort of wealth is that you, almost by necessity have to proxy essential activities to others, but only you are in that subtle space of knowing your own true benefit

of course you don’t have to be at the james packer financial level to have this problem, ignorance knows no social boundaries

“ talking for the poor ”

a russian term of a form of public discourse premised on anything elevating the lowest strata of society as being the ultimate right, deeply hypocritical of course and embedded in western politics education and media, easy to see this toxic marxist echo

waiting

the only way

to

handle

complexity

jesse livermore must have been major influence in the character development of jay gatsby in the "the great gatsby" ,  his biography "reminiscences of a stock operator" was published in 1923 which was two years before TGG was published in 1925

its actually gets a bit weird because  livermore’s life  post the publication of the great gatsby somewhat followed the story, reality became fiction which then became reality

prophetic

the female world

built on the worlds of men and children

blinded to how frightening that is

one reality

ten

two

the talkers talk

like dumb cattle

they cannot see the fence

the miracle

how driven we are

by ideas

good or bad

as it happens

i’m not in the business of supplying answers

or

questions

simone weil

fruit loop

self-battery

as battered

autistic

and finally

self-killed

gravity and grace ,  stylistically she’s heavily into "reinterpretation", which in turn requires a lot of "translation" by the reader, to be honest i don’t think i’m going to put in the effort to do any extensive reading, however  her quotes  are quite good

fictional threads

tying a history

today’s world

said before

"reduplication" is a very interesting word

its a duplication, but a double duplication with a resultant combined meaning that is different

eg.  "night night" sort of a recursive infinite succession

some arguments

the universe has burnt out

before they are resolved

i can grasp what it is to be male

but i cannot grasp what it is to be female

i suppose its the same for women

time slows

but the days pass quickly

the conundrum of age

a "fistful of dollars" is an uncredited  remake  of kurosawa’s film "yojimbo"

in the days before international copyright law had its current potency i guess

extracts of yojimbo

the male solipsist dream, one man winning against the universe, single of course, women destroy the illusion

the russo-ukraine war has resurrected the meaning of the phrase "meat grinder", a phenomenon lost really since world war II and the red army-wehrmacht battles like rzhev

this is a bit random, but reading  this article  mentioned gala dalí as woman who had "abandoned" her child and this vivid story came back to me about  that daughter  leaving paris when the germans invaded and seeking refuge in her mother’s house at arcachon

“ a handsome young truck driver drove me there.  the journey took two days.  millions of french people were on the roads, going south, fleeing the german army

i arrived at the villa and asked to see my mother.  the maid said that gala didn't have any daughter and that i was a liar.  gala wasn't in and i had nowhere else to go.  i kept talking with the maid who finally and defiantly said: " marcel duchamp and man ray arrived this morning.  we'll see if they know you."  she opened the door, duchamp and man ray were playing chess.  they knew me well, of course, so i was safe ”

also of interest is a childhood friend of gala was the doomed russian poetess marina tsvetaeva

all these famous names connected i find amazing and so different from today’s artistic scene

i don’t think its a given that women automatically like their children and maybe the dice rolls in that respect

there may be universes where string theory is true, just not this one

historically cultural buddhism is associated with prohibitions against eating meat and this may have caused an inbuild degree  of malnutrition

old photos

that seem now more

than they were at the time

age creating the perspective

to discern the truer weight

of events in the past

i suppose

nostalgia

is like this too

reading some poetry with my 3 diopter glasses

i made the mistake of looking at my hand with them

wrinkly, marked, veins raised, flabby with thin muscles

an old man’s

the poems put me in the wrong mood to see this

on further investigation

when we are brought to face our previous opinion

we are embarrassed

a rose bush

through the window

new growth

waving at me

cockatoos in the macrocarpas

so white

they glare

beginning and ends

middle

boxes

corresponding

to our idea

of

an

allowance

of

reality

but how good the fit is

who can say ?

both sei shōnagon’s "pillow book" and the tsurezuregusa of kenkō have the "random mode" of composition where there is little or no continuity between items

it occurred to me my writing was like this and apparently its a known style in japan called "zuihitsu"

english literature is entirely bereft of this except for some writers of aphorisms and really to be honest to get the span i manage requires the internet to provide reference material

so i think i have created a new form which we will see more of

an odd thing over the years on the internet is there has been a lot of "hate" for what i say, but there hardly ever has ever been any criticism of my writing per se

what has caused the most trouble is my anti-chelation stance, which at one point flowed over into the real world, a frightening thing

my sophisticated research reading also causes problems, people just do not want to know there is a vast productive agency space beyond simple proxying of medical and health problems in the usual way

solitude

empty echoes knocking around

sounds

the rain cannot drown out

solitude

empty echoes

knocking around

sounds

the rain cannot drown out

“ why medieval women sometimes fought in  bloody trials  by combat ”

the emotionality of women

toxic

to

men

the emotionality of females

toxic

to

males

i am not a good speller, but i have learnt that people do form negative views about what they read if there are spelling mistakes, so i give it attention

stability we seek

between the downdraughts

rare

but neither is a fantasy

ed.  this has two meanings with a shift in focus in the last line, one of the meanings is rather hard to get, but its there

marvelous singing of the  lord’s prayer  by maria coman

the semantics of it i am not keen on and have suffered reciting it in my young years at church schools so i wrote a version, the anti-lord’s prayer that could be sung by maria in the same way as in the link

neither father

nor heaven

names are hollow

kingdoms come and go

heaven and earth

stay in contention

trespass and forgiveness

are a pair

and satan is nowhere

to be found

though i have called this an "anti-lords prayer" it is quite theological, eckhartian with buddhist elements and it needs to be read in context

claiming holiness

denying holiness

still

the circle

turns

claiming holiness

denying holiness

still

a circle

claiming holiness

denying holiness

still

the circle

the intransigence of power

crushes

the feebleness of explanation

minerva

vacates

and mars

gathers his weapons

so much of human history

is like this

a lot of arguing is pointless

because

people are wrong

by necessity

six doors

black limo

money impresses

but it doesn’t impress me

i prefer  chinese proverbs  to our own, i’m not sure why, a harder edge or they just fill gaps ?

i have a missing tooth, but never had an implant put in because my reading indicated a problem of biological compatibility with titanium

however now you can get fracture free  zirconium implants , a ceramic, this decision may be worth revisiting

the biocompatibility of dental implants is a known issue so i will keep an eye out on product development and research

when i was at school, we had large windows that gave a lot of outdoor light, these were old buildings, but there must have been some deep cultural understanding about the protective effect of this inhibiting  myopia onset

a lot of "the record of joshu" is he is simply saying in effect to the questioner, you are wasting your time with this sort of nonsense

you can take the "mu" koan that way

christian theologians used to worry about whether animals had souls

good and evil

neoplatonism, gnosticism, augustine, christianity, emanation

on and on

libraries of babel

babble

one of the interesting things about WW2 is the way germany and japan held on, way past what was the rational point for surrender and i think this is due to technology enabling much greater social control of populations by the ruling elite and i think you are seeing the same thing with the russo-ukraine war today where the point of a negotiated peace being the optimal course of action for russia has been reached, rather than the present path with its continued full scale war, russia now has enough information about its inadequacies as a potentially occupying power to take a more rational view, but of course, to do this requires a blood bath in the elite

historically rational surrender was usually the norm, one of the reasons the mongols were so effective was their protocol of good treatment for an early surrender and a total massacre otherwise  (which by any standard were impressive)

this chinese "classic" is not, as you might expect an old "time honoured" work, but a very recent composition  (2007)  by ray chou

blue and white porcelain

the references are the subtle requirements of  quinghua porcelain ,  to get the right shade of blue being likened to the uncertainties of courtship

sanctions hurt in deep but subtle ways, xi jinping would have to reverse his policy on taiwan and the south china sea to have them removed, but reversing his policy on taiwan would lead to his ousting, so nothing is going change in the short term for china

drama

a bunch of stories

more sophisticated

a functional tableaux

to mire

the generations

with

nonsense

advanced old age

too stiff to wipe your arse

why am thinking about this ?

i must be depressed

couples

arguing with each other

have i missed out on something ?

no

love

loss

the shattering of divorce

wanted absence

replacing

wanted presence

what changed ?

you cannot rely on people 100%, even the most skilled and experienced can make big mistakes in their area of expertise

and paradoxically the pretenders sometimes get things right

dawn and dusk

that 3D light

seems to enlarge

time and space

ed.  a "reworking" of wang wei’s  poem

“ I also have a good acupuncturist which really does make me feel better, I think.  Are you a believer in acupuncture ? ” 

i am not a "believer" in anything except trial and error, i have no experience with acupuncture but it may have a biological basis in terms of nerve stimulation, however i think it is more important to get the supplementation right, effective supplementation should change the space you are in, some things that were once necessary are no longer necessary, maybe nerve health is a factor, i use walnut oil for cooking etc rather than canola though you have to watch the temperatures

i would be vigilant about the sterility of the needles

the  beef organ pills  are dried liver, heart and kidney, if you can’t get anything else they are ok, but if you can get fresh grass fed lamb and beef organs, that’s honestly, 10x better for you

EAT LIVER, WE ARE AN OFFAL EATING ANIMAL

“ Sorry for the slow reply ”

on youtube, i have had people reply 5 or ten years later to a comment i made, writing is time invariant, i can read a poem by sappho, recorded 2 and a half thousand years ago, the voice as fresh as the day it was written

“ I tell you

someone will remember us

in the future ”

that’s a fragment from one of her poems

being drunk

a brief bravado

against the world

while

it lasts

one of the big weaknesses of "scammers" is they don’t use "english" as a first language and you can pick up both subtle and outstanding differences that are obviously beyond their comprehension

solipsism

an unfortunate truth

to carry through

this life of communality

unlimited

is an emergent quality

of

limited

are we never ending or do we end ?

there are different perspectives on this matter

a cell is not just empty spaced, but  packed  and no doubt highly recursive as a consequence

no wonder biology is a constantly never ending quantum-like expansion of knowledge

is "emergence" as a property restricted to the large scale or is it somewhat independent ?

darwinian evolution

doesn’t preclude

non-darwinian

evolution

the world is full of bizarre things

wars when co-operation was by far the better path

medical tyranny

schooling that has to be unlearnt for later life function

food that inducts diseases

but by far the most absurd

a fashion runway

the word "mind"

tossed around like a racquetball

hit back and forth

meaning nothing

water under the bridge

can we forgive injury ?

the tide returns

best keep quiet

and watch the sands

sweep back

into the sea

to live a thousand years

and 200 is still in youth

more measured, rational beings would we be ?

or not ?

don’t spit (or hit?) some-one in the face

he dug the hole, let him fill it back in

contemporary chinese sayings

cats often can look like little lions with similar mannerisms, but the big difference is they do not hunt co-operatively, that’s a whole order of magnitude of brain function different

“ Strong evidence indicated that vitamin D3 supplementation  reduced  total cancer mortality.  In the context of site-specific cancers, there exists highly suggestive evidence pointing towards the potential prevention of head and neck, breast, colorectal, lung, and renal cell cancers through the intake of vitamin D3 . Furthermore, strong evidence suggests that maintaining sufficient levels of vitamin D3 may effectively lower the risk of renal cell and thyroid cancer ”

if you have read this, you now know more than most doctors

the popular chinese game "black myth wukong" has conscripted one of the most famous, if not the most famous classic chinese stories  the monkey king ,  this episode looks surprisingly  faithful  to the book by wu cheng’en

the posthumous letter

read it

its decipherable

locating

the

treasure

turning inside out

the usual rules

what was under our noses

all the time

the sad water buffalo story

a thai cultural meme

my whatever close relative’s water buffalo has broken its leg and we need money to pay for the vet bill and purchase of another one

its a caution to western men who don’t understand involvement with a thai woman means they are liable for a family gifting program

another variant has it that the man becomes a sad water buffalo labouring for the girlfriend’s family

cultures really do differ

addiction

drugs

alcohol

media

walk away from the edge of the abyss

for

a

while

then

the lotus comes back

to eat you

doctrines

about

god, infinity, buddha nature

logic

and concepts

can’t pierce themselves

theological endeavour

occupies

the countless stupids

forever

“ Glad I inspired you ”

in the land of no meaning

they grasp meaning

buddha-nature is permanent

buddha-nature is impermanent

not seeing

the cliffs in the distance

shining their message

what are we ?

i’d look at the way you use the term "zen master", its not healthy, rather sycophantic/ missionary/ promotional

a good  explanation  of how russia really works and how the pyschology is changing by  diane francis

pink cherry blossom

emerges in a day or two

its blushing swathes don’t last forever

the best time can do

is bring them back next year

sixty

according to anton chekov

is elderly

therefore

i

am

past

elderly

ed.  the beginning of chapter two of "sakhalin island" in a very good translation by brian reeve

being a snob without money

is not a good combination

been there

paths of allowance

cut into this world

of what we can see

“ I’m schizophrenic.  If the evidence and explanation supports my brain malfunctioning, that is preferable it seems, even if the alternative explanation is much more plausible it seems.  What is that though ?  Is that how its supposed to be ?  Is that protocol or corruption ?  Because I really don’t know ”

you have a bias to incorrect conclusions that can be defeated by more cross referencing and testing which actually is the basis of cognitive behaviour therapy  (CBT)

low reading age is not a crime, but it should be !

its the blindness that comes with it that’s so cringeworthy

confidently spouting nonsense, unbearable !

“ Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation ”

ed.  the above being claimed to have been said by rumi

not even

a translation

of rumi

just the usual

madeup

stuff

what a fraud you are

and

even

failed con

ed . coleman barks did not make literal translations of rumi, but created highly "new age" reinterpretations that have little resemblance to the actual rumi who in fact so heavily referenced islamic memes and writing as not to be palatable to western readers

silence is not the language of god

no god

no silence

hilarious, the real life drama, zena nasser and richard white, watch  the lipsync video  of the abba song

credit to them for not living a dull life, but i suspect cohabiting in a novel has its traumas

don’t microwave with plastic containers, you get chemicals  leaching  from them

there’s problems with leaving cataracts too long that make for a more risky operation and also having untreated cataracts raises the risk of dementia

the sun has to be quite high in the sky to give vitamin D, and its only really november, dec, jan and mid feb  (depending on latitude)  that the sun gets high enough to do that and if you get whole body exposure, you don’t have to spend long out under it

the preachy didactic and self-righteous narcissism are a pair

or is that preachy narcissism and the self-righteous didactic ?

“ I took a vitamin D3 supplement 15 years ago, had vivid dreams all the time, I started taking vitamin D again a few weeks back, no vivid dreams, I’m wondering if   the supplement  i use now contains any vitamin D3 ? ”

ok, what in my view is right and wrong with that supplement

it does have the ratio of vit D to K roughly right, however i never buy combined like that as i do vary the ratios/amount sometimes, like 3000iu of vit D in summer and take standalone vitamin K2/MK7 if i have a virus or expect viral exposure

it has some bad fillers; modified starch, maltodextrin, syrup solids ie a digestive nightmare

in addition its missing a preservative which vitamin D needs as its very fragile, the blackmores vitamin D has a tiny amount of sulfides to provide this protection and that’s what i use

they get the "black" colouring of the container right as vitamin D degrades with light

there’s a saying, something to the effect we are robots programmed with the ramblings of bygone philosophers and i think the influence of hegel on germany is a case in point with his view of the role of progression in history/geist underlying nazi philosophies and actually marxism as well

lacking insight

but claiming it

how

pathetic

these lecturers

of stupidity

dust

a metaphor for the wasted atomic

nothingness, absence have meaning

true eloquence

is hard to find

drifting to the edges of insanity

a poem brings me back

what is

and isn’t

dreams coalesce

into flowers

and mists

what is vivid

fades

looking and the looked for

now

seem empty

what is

and isn’t

dreams coalesce

into flowers

and mists

what is vivid

fades

looking and the looked for

both

seem empty

“ I have cleared all possessions from this temple, yet clutter remains ”

the clutter is your temple

the chinese  value system

woman rapes man then won’t have anything to do with him afterwards because he’s poor

a lot of confusion and some violence later it is disclosed he is really rich and high status and they live happily ever after

come to think of it, this set of ethics is somewhat universal

the qing dynasty never completely disappeared, it exchanged its embroidered outerwear for those with red stars printed on

zen is basically buddhism with daoism worked into it  (and actually some christianity)  for china’s administrative class which had a high degree of literary sophistication, it is itself a literary product with an overwhelming degree of fiction that tends to get treated by the ignorant as actually historical, christianity and islam are no different in this respect

i find the christian influence quite interesting, the monotheism and "born again"/satori, at the time zen was being formed, nestorian christianity was making inroads in china, too successfully, because it was then suppressed

the better quality "zen" like joshu is not monotheistic, but for practical purposes a lot of the historical and just about all the current western zen is a disguised version of monotheism which is why zen had such a rapid uptake

those who don’t want to look

i used to be critical

but now i see why they don’t want to see

i have entered their ranks

supercompetence

in fiction

at least

even

in reality

a toxic

dream

for mortals

the trouble with western style flower arranging is it lacks a 3D effect and a sense of differential colouration or sculpture

youtube has some good chinese/asian arrangements on, totally opened my eyes to what was possible, not these dreary, unimaginative and compacted clusters i have been seeing all my life and wondering why people bothered

the young

proud possessors of millions of years of evolution

the light of functional complexity shines in them

its a pity

they are such robots

to what they know

beautiful statues

that can’t think

i love these interviews with russian men in russia about the war

“ i would go and fight but  .   .   . ”

the list is, too old, poor health, too young, educational exemption, the last two, they laugh in the interviewers face thinking they can’t be touched

well, its a beautiful country with its leafy green summer

that which doesn’t die

must die

because

it

doesn’t

die

the unintentional contrasts you can get on the web are sometimes unbelievable

a video of a ukrainian  tank crew  in kurst being killed by a lancet drone followed by a promotion for  a luxury yacht

edit:  the videos ran one after the other in the original link, but i have had to split them to make it work for the viewer, however the tank video may well be immediately followed by the yacht video so the extra link may be redundant

its not just blood that wins wars

but information

billie and fineas eilish

wildflower

its very rare that one comes across research on alzheimers that is of practical use, but i think  this one  does !

my hypothesis is that exercise will assist the clearance of waste  (including beta amyloid and tau)  from the brain through activation of the  glymphatic system  and increased circulation of the cerebrospinal fluid

this is speculative, but links back to the effect exercise has on the smooth muscle in lymhangions in the neck, however  sleep  is more important

part of the problem of aging is reduced mobility so one has to work out how to safely get some aerobic exercise

most of my life i have mistaken the word "stonehedge" for stonehenge which seemed to have a semantic logic to it, but now having researched the meaning it turns out 'henge' is only partially appropriate as the main ditch is external to the main bank, a true henge has an outer bank enclosing the ditch, so "stonehedge" is not so wide of the mark

i can never work out when "the muse" will come, late last night after not writing much for days, i wrote eight poems in a row, getting upset helps

when idiots get control of the reigns of power

expect

idiocy

time distances

yes

in

somecases

no

in others

past midnight and a misty moon

the warbling magpies

are more sonorous

past midnight

a misty moon

the warbling magpies

are sonorous

fiction

the tableaux of words

can turn a story on its head

just like that

disconcerting

the reader

great tragedy

in small events

it doesn’t happen any other way

answers

their deceit of finality

vacuity

swallows

them

nuns

married to christ

that emptiness

of emotional nullity

angst

writ

large

a poem

a confluence and conjunction

momentarily formed

in memory

that rapidly

falls apart

leaving only

hard to understand

words

more faces than stars

unlimited worlds

don’t turn out to be

limited

A. I.

text

hallucinating text

Human Unintelligence

text

hallucinating

text

movies vs life, there’s movies about planes in emergency situations and it crossed my mind, i had been in that for real, an auckland to honululu flight that got struck by lightning when the pilots flew into a thunderstorm, the cabin lit up like a camera flash and all the hostesses rushed to the windows to look at the wings, so i knew it was serious

an engine had caught fire, the pilots were ambiguous about whether it had been successfully extinguished and that’s when i and no doubt everyone else was thinking about what happens if it falls from the sky

well we made an emergency landing an hour later in american samoa, the pilots were laconic, but the hostesses were stressed

no doubt the pilots were seasoned experts and they did warn us we were heading into a thunderstorm and my thought was they should go around it and in hindsight my judgement was correct and theirs wasn’t which i think is an example one comes across occasionally of very experienced people getting killed or otherwise messed in situations they made a bad call on, mountaineering, war etc and one wonders why

i guess there’s inescapable fundamentals about being in error, the very skills they have accrued brings them closer to an unrecoverable edge, an overconfidence of judgment or epistemological fatigue

life

the buoyancy and vigour

of early years

and the final sanity

of

fading

the world of writing

your own

no-one can approach

except

you

a hazard of facial surgery which is particularly apparent in chinese and korean actresses  (de rigueur for them)  is they look "out of species", an asian/western hybrid that doesn’t correspond to any known racial type

the face is an entangled mess of nerves, connective tissue, muscles and bone so its no wonder the results are often unsatisfactory

the pistil and stamen

so much

of life’s

misplaced energy

did you grow a brain just to look taller ?

harming others invites retaliation

contemporary chinese sayings

aging is not a smooth continuous process, but occurs in  big steps  around 44, 60 and 78 the fun milestones of decay, i guess the last step is unnumbered

tears to a woman

tears to a man

ed.  you might have to think about this one

victor gao must believe  what he says  because its too extreme for the audience, an actor would have toned things down while still keeping within what was acceptable to the CCP

lei’s  take on it

“ Am I roleplaying a Zen master ? ”

quoting scripture then giving commentary is a basic religious paradigm, from buddhism to christianity, so you are role playing the knowledgeable "priest" giving insight to the audience which is actually about all the moderators on r|zen permit, hence its not entirely your fault, but its a trap you are caught in

interestingly my theory that an enlarged prostate adversely reprograms cellular function at the germ cell level is borne out with new thinking on the theory of evolution  by dennis noble , in effect he says there is no privileged level or scale at which biological functions are determined

its not a mystery why women live longer than men, at the germ cell level female cells are biased towards repair and recovery while males are "crash and burn", my view is that enlarged prostates further bias males in the wrong direction

just like skin can be too thin, it can be too thick and actually the need is context dependent

you need good health to be a monk or nun and also to age well, big asks

temporal depth is an interesting notion, self evident as to what it is and interesting to consider in relation to whatever is under consideration, to what degree is it there ?

aging

keeping your head together

not easy

not as easy as it once was

though if you look at the results

you wonder

if you ever had it together

be careful about discussing  supplements  with other people, some get really upset because they proxy all their health problems onto doctors and can’t stand the thought there is a better way without side effects

karl friston  explaining  the "free energy principle", that the brain is really a prediction machine constantly concerned with the difference between what it expects to see compared to what we actually see

when you think about it, what this reflects is what we call reality is not some fundamental "state" we perceive in increasing degrees of finality, but rather that we construct views of how things are, which is an internal acknowledgment that the complexity of being is already well beyond our ability to grasp and therefore our perception is in constant need of readjustment

its interesting that science takes or used to take the view that theoretical development becomes increasingly final, a "theory of everything" being the extreme of that, but in practice its is more like a fractal zoom and just goes on forever, sorta sounds a bit buddhist really

brutal war

dramas and soap operas

making sense of this contrast

non plusses

even god

an elderly person i know of has had a bad femur break and may have had a fracture for quite a while, also has "cognitive problems"

she is on warfarin which is known to cause brain bleeds and osteoporosis

being on warfarin is not a good call imo, its low cost and an industry standard, but it imposes a downward trajectory of serious side effects

to me the fatigue sounds "viral" rather than "post viral" which is why its important to try some immune enhancement, like MK7/MK2, gernamium sesquioxide, hydrogen peroxide, vitamin A to see if the viral hypothesis is correct

humans have natural background viruses in their systems and they are not necessarily that well controlled

the heart pumps arterial blood around the body, but lymph and venous blood are moved by body movement, so taking stretches a bit further, its better to move the body and do full arm movements, bending the body, leg movements and repetitive neck and head stretches

not picking and choosing

then

picking and choosing

sounds so zen

and something behind everything

sounds so

monotheistic

christianity’s tentacles

stretch

millennia back

original thinking

is despised

and ignored

men in pursuit of nothing

goes on

forever

this human

way

the usual patheticness

writing

for money

in this society

that

can’t read

exercise

this is a tricky one as its important not to overdo it  (a surprising proportion of long covid cases have been with very fit people operating at an "endurance level")  but i feel aerobic exercise is necessary every two days to get the blood circulating, i don’t like gyms because you are breathing a lot of air exhaled by others, where i live i can run down and up hills in nearby paddocks which is probably ideal, in cities you have to worry about air quality and safety

no kensho

no dharma gates

the men with the tool kits

founder

not grasping

there is no truth

not even

no truth

ink blue

black silhouette

clouds in between

ed.  fill in with your own meaning

belief    :    an opinion that floats in the air and blows apart at the first hint of a wind

c drama paradigms have  become dated

the ceo is more likely now to be a party appointee who quotes xi jinping thought

the voynich manuscript

is

voynich

and

scrabble

and

garble

small minds

seek

sense

of

the

nonsensical

medical "conditions" are often just names for clusters of symptoms, even "cancer" has a very wide ontology in the area of being cancer or not

as the kettle heats up

i hear voices

like the hum of a rabble

raging

speaking over one another

then it has boiled

bubbled to silence

no more noise

i move onto the next thing

dementia

death before death

yet bodies that fail

can be crisp to the end

that mental wherewithal

can be so evanescent

is a puzzle

an interesting study  on the role of butyrate in maintaining a healthy microbiome

i think coconut flesh is a good source of butyrate and promotes the right sort of gut bacteria, i have used shredded coconut in cooking for years and never thought it was that significant, except it promoted the right sort of microbiome

however , now i think its significant, the only downside is it can make me a bit migrainey

its an hilarious world, the criticism of the "dragfest" reinterpretation skit of the last supper  (at the 2024 paris olympics opening ceremony)  ignores that the last supper as a painting is itself a drag fest, all the millions being spent by the media and not one mention of this fact

interestingly  jan van bijlert’s painting "the wedding of peleus and thetis/  feast of the gods"  is itself a heterosexual reinterpretation of da vinci’s  last supper

these people  who visit countries  where their possibility of arrest and incarceration is non zero, her family should have known better

war changes things, she is a citizen of a country whose weapons are proving very damaging to the russians, what was she thinking ?

night

what we can’t see

contains more than we can see

it just takes the patience

to be there

ruins

don’t convey much

a limited echo

of something that has been

and absent of the vibrancy

of when it was being

the origin of the saying "shooting fish in a barrel" relates to when salted fish were packed into a barrel

a pair of  pick pockets  on the paris metro, fun to work out what is happening

"truth" is just consistency within a context

but when the context is truth you end up with the usual recursion

philosophy that limits itself to finding "truth"

has tautologically failed

recursion is the bus ride going to nowhere

it must be odd to be a woman, a brain on top of a reproductive apparatus that is necessarily parasitized to force her to raise something that is half somebody else

imagine the horror of twins

you have replicated an entire other person

the way i write seems to get my emails shuffled to spam surprisingly often !

i’m not sure why, but suspect a lot of spammers are literary types trying to earn money the only way they know and honestly, probably pays about as well as most writing, long hours for little

when dealing with customer service, be polite, patient and courteous, they get some rough dealings and being pleasant usually puts you at the top of their priority list

same for the police

hydrogen peroxide should be helpful with staph and a range of skin conditions, in addition its an immune stimulant, however you need the very strong versions, 40%, you can buy it if you do a google search, its actually painful to apply and looks horrendous for the first quarter of an hour after application, just do a very small area to start, you have to be careful

“ Hydrogen peroxide  kills  Staphylococcus aureus by reacting with staphylococcal iron to form hydroxyl radical ” 

it looks like fizzy drink and keeps longest when stored in the freezer, don’t let anybody drink it, could be fatal

you can also use it in combination with iodine tincture, like rub a bit of iodine tincture on whatever you are trying to cure say once a day for a couple of days then a day later apply some 40% hydrogen peroxide to get a double whammy

schizophrenia

malign epistemic affordance

crashing vehicles

what emerges

is

nothing

schizophrenia

malign epistemic affordance

crashing vehicles

nothing

emerges

i agree with  this video  that  the photo  of the 3 Brontë sisters is likely genuine and what’s more charlotte looks like the person who could have written "jane eyre" and emily looks like she could have written the bleaker, more autistic "wuthering heights"

to me you have a suppressed or "disorded" immune response and you have to think in terms of this for supplements and diet, do they supress or elevate the immune response as well as their other wanted effects, eg krill oil is very good for the brain and nerves, but its immune suppressive, so for instance, if i am going to town and expecting a lot of viral exposure, i won’t take krill oil that day and even possibly the day before

immune suppression is not necessarily bad, the other side of an overactive immune response is autoimmunity

women expose the chest area in varying degrees as sort of signalling device, fully covered in the case of a nun’s habit, i feel there is something wrong if they have to go to such an extreme degree and actually historically convents had ambiguous sexual identities ranging from brothels to escorts for nobility to lesbian hostels

this sort of highly puritanical catholicism is in fact a 20th century reinvention

circles

and circles

and circles

the travelling show

with the same view

we

never

learn

circles

and circles

and circles

the travelling

with the same view

we

never

learn

teaching is an illusion, there are only learners

teaching is an illusion, there are only learners and the self-taught

last night out splitting wood on the back porch i caught a star dipping below the horizon out of the corner of my eye

a star

dipping below the horizon

spooky

what was

and is

and is now

isn’t

kindness

love

compassion

big abstractions

with not much

inside

"epistemic affordance", two words that mean a lot

“ its a dynamic multi-modal relation between the attributes of something in the environment and capacities of an agent in an interactive activity

its a relation between the epistemic abilities of an agent  —  to engage in certain kinds of knowledge activities  —  and epistemic features of the environment that afford his/her epistemic actions ”

in effect it unites philosophy with science, the world we know to some extent is an hallucination, it is created by us

“ Working on real-world problems usually requires the combination of different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge, as well as different ways of knowing.  People who are flexible and adept with respect to different ways of knowing about the world can be said to possess epistemic fluency ”

i have good cardiovascular health and can run a fast 100 meters, but my LDL was on the high side so the doctor felt justified in recommending i take statins

he backed right off when i showed resistance, but if i hadn’t he would have prescribed them to me

i could be taking them now for no benefit and developing a  suite of problems

it just blows my mind

our interest in  magic  comes from how it confounds our ideas about how the world works and it actually creates a need within us to "rationally" explain what we saw

i cannot read music, but it is illuminating to watch this performance of the emperor concerto synchronised to the score, in a way it doesn’t look difficult to write, but that will be  beethoven’s genius

Loved ones ?  What is love ?

a diffusion of interpersonal barriers

a mutual diffusion of interpersonal barriers

prenatal cannabis exposure  creates attention deficits

not so surprising the world is the way it is is it ?

never in my life would i have visited  this area of tibet  or even known it existed

from a distance

ducks glide across the surface of a pond

close up

its much more messy

from a distance

ducks glide across the pond

close up

its much more messy

walking so far in

the walking

back

is

as

far

walking so far in

the walking back

takes

a while

my brain woke me up this morning by creating a dream dog that barked

it worked and was about the right time

i even recognized the dog, long since gone

barney, a big black newfoundland who actually didn’t bark a lot and was highly intelligent, human-like

the shallow reaches define the deep

which can suddenly appear

a chasm beneath the waters’ surface

whose beauty takes away our fear

the american natural health scene is absolutely crazy

they’re not too bright and their real expertise is in bleeding money from you

it sounds a bit harsh, but years ago i used to run a message board for my diet  (the biofilm carbohydrate diet)  and the american approach to health is so boots and all, its hard to believe

one of the hangovers of the black plague which i think killed 50% of the population is that those who survived had overactive immune systems and that’s a trait many have the genetics for

most supplementation is done badly, the multivitamins you can buy are deeply flawed and the doses can be way too high, its a minefield, however i have picked my way through it and have web pages with advice, though most people seem to find the reading age necessary a bit on the high side

you can’t rely on others, you have to sort it out yourself, and i have been through it all

no sugar at all, no grains, though well cooked white rice can be ok, definitely no wheat flour products, processed food and bought drinks are usually problematic, don’t overdo the amount of potatoes etc etc, there’s quite a bit more i could say on this, you may not have the digestive problems i had, but definitely remove sugar and cut down on grains

no alcohol

vitamin D is a natural steroid, i take 3000 iu a day (maybe 4000 iu in winter) and 90 mcg of the caruso’s vitamin K/MK2 a day the amounts of these will vary person to person, its so tricky because a lot of vitamin D supplements don’t have a preservative and as a consequence degrade, the blackmores 1000 iu is good in this respect

i also take half a tablet twice a day of the source naturals "chromemate" which is chromium polynictoinate to stop blood sugar spikes, more of an issue when you get older i think

where i live its selenium deficient so i take 100mcg  (half a capsule of the thorne’s selenomethionine), however america is not in general selenium deficient, also i find it helps with migraine

occasionally i take a small cut off piece of the blackmores "mega B complex", also krill oil for the brain

half a teaspoon twice a day of the amino acid  , helps greatly with sleep and migraine

there’s quite a bit more i can say, like anything to be effective there's real work involved and sorting out and you have to do it yourself and beware of very flawed advice from others, there's nothing like health problems to make people lie through their teeth and they don’t think straight to start with

this is the reason i gave up running a health message board and now i just rely on research of which there is heaps

its a help to understand the principles behind elaine gottschall’s "specific carbohydrate diet" which my "biofilm carbohydrate diet" is an improvement on and fixes some of the problems with it

an hilarious  russian recruitment  video  (the 1:22 one almost halfway down the page), although on the surface it looks classic "agitprop", its subtly subversive because it conveys a very strong idea of not lasting long on the front before you will be killed, a sign the war is not going down well in russia and a spirit of rebellion is developing in moscow, apparently about the only place that matters

its interesting what you read,   erwin schrödinger  of the eponymous cat conundrum and a nobel physicist, although not jewish was forced to flee austria after the anschluss because of his anti-nazi stance and ended up teaching in dublin where he pursued his taste in underaged girls

“ As far as I can tell, "AI" is advanced pattern recognition ”

well it somehow jumps the barrier into semantics, that is, in some way it is a functioning neural network, not just statistics

round pupils

wide or narrow

what do we see ?

round pupils

we think

we see

everything

but

we

don’t

political idealism is always "faux" and the reason is people are basically self-interested, the idealism is a veneer that gets churned through its different forms and it will always be like this

for the first time there looks to be the possibility of an end to the russo-ukraine war, still six months to a year and a half away imo, but the point of war is to create information and the russians seem to finally be understanding they cannot win, in particular the appointment of an economist as the russian minister of defence, he is going to take the view that the the economic might of NATO is overwhelming and continuing the conflict, which although russia can do it, will be too destructive to living standards there

the whole business and the WW1 and WW2 levels of wrecking a country are an eye opener to everybody and must greatly have stepped back the chances of a chinese invasion of taiwan, which previously was certain

the root cause of the war, which i don’t think will be as well understood is the dismantling of the ukrainian nuclear missile defence by the USA after the break up of the soviet union, the blindness of countries in international politics never ceases to astound me

the ukrainians had better technical support for the missiles than the russians !

if you want to see what camouflage is about, look at a plover egg

“ If you think I buy into it you haven’t been paying attention ”

quoting "scripture" and then giving an exegesis on it not questioning the premise of the validity of the scripture says you buy into it

the defensive intellectual dishonesty of you people is so "unsurprising" and "your business as usual" apologetics is the bottom of the pile of the intellectual trash heap

remanence

this world

where things happen

red queens

sweeping

moves

find

the

coherence

flight crews and their cumulative exposure to cosmic ionizing radiation

subsidizing the airlines to have  a higher cancer risk

impaired circadian rhythm function

doesn’t help either

like nursing

some jobs can never be paid enough to compensate

for the wrecking taken

i was just looking at st. john of the cross’s poem  the dark night of the soul  and it reminded me how literally catholic doctrine requires nuns to have what can really only be described as the physical consummation of themselves with "christ"

highly ambiguous imo

i do think i understand his poem better now though

a song version  by loreena mckennitt

“ We knew that high levels of added sugars are linked to worsened metabolic health and early disease, possibly more than any other dietary factor, now we know that accelerated epigenetic aging is underlying this relationship, and this is likely one of many ways that excessive sugar intake limits healthy longevity ”

“ The researchers  examined sugar intake separately and found that consuming foods with added sugar was associated with accelerated biological aging, even in the presence of an otherwise healthy diet ”

if you read the labels on drinks and processed food, the amount of sugar is horrendous, no wonder diabetes and related diseases are growing significantly

i don’t know why its adherents are utterly unable to see the literary and fantasy nature of what they call "zen/ch'an"

its just an RPG

of course, any religion is like this

sanctimonious

bombast

layers of gaslighting

double faced

pretension

insanity and normality

converge

in these

lyrics are not poetry, they require a certain "emptiness" to make the music work

a poem i wrote decades ago travelling by myself in an old beat up 4WD in the australian outback at a crossing of the robe river in western australia with me travelling from the millstream chichester national park

sunlight laughing on the water

“ come and look at me ”

“ that’s better ”

sunlight’s laughing and i am crying

why am i crying ?

words

in an actors or actresses’ mouth

always seem

so realistic

past the illusion

into

reality

eons before

and eons after

a drop

and an ocean

conundrums without end

never resolved

each to ourselves

is about all that can be said

i have been taking half a teaspoon of the amino acid taurine twice a day for years, initially because it helped with migraine and sleep, but looking at this study there are a heap  of positive effects

university english literature departments tend to be dismissive of the writer’s lives and only focus on the text, but really you only get half or less of what is going on unless you do an investigation into the author’s life and times,   jane austin  and emily dickinson would be egregious examples of this

its an uncertain world and our very projections add to that uncertainty, so its important to take time out and look at how things actually are

the problem the education system has with chat gpt is with the system itself and not chat gpt, what should be taught is the ability to learn and research so that as an adult one can navigate successfully the modern mire and surfeit of knowledge and, unfortunately, "gaslighting"

what is the point of competing with chat gpt, its a tool, and brings its own skillset to the table

a woman who lost her son  (a soldier)  in napoleon’s invasion of russia asked st. teresa of availa how she could get closure over this and st. teresa told her in effect "there is none"

there will be a lot of this happening presently in the ukraine and russia

i prefer rujing to dogen though i think he has his weaknesses

what he is saying is that without the "dai kensho" experience you are wasting your time

nothing in what he says is "standard" and actually he’s not liked by the fakes of modern day zen

when people don’t put the right pieces in place, then how surprising is it they never come together ?

there’s a lot of these pieces and they are strewn all over the place, but blinkered asses just pull their carts under the direction of their owner

so many years later

this and that

little pieces

sewn together at last

maybe useful, maybe not

so many years later

this and that

little sums that add

too late to be useful

overlap

more certainty

in

a

capricious world

“ you can know a person’s face, but not their heart ”

a commonplace chinese saying, they seem to have a much larger repertoire of these homilies than western culture, its obviously a tricky place to live, machiavellis and narcissists around every corner

to be fair,   there is this ,  its not just china

a necessary truth

is unnecessary

why ?

work it out

a necessary truth

is not a necessary truth

life’s major problem

what is true

also encompasses

what we don’t like to be true

script

fill in the details

deny the script

and all hell breaks loose

a lot or even most public entertainment is to some extent in fact what could be called disguised pornography, that’s what ballet always was  (historically)  and certainly modern  dance  and the popular musical scene with some exceptions are like this

i’d say  this  is replacing ballet, not the "ballet with a complex story" but geared to a shorter attention span and quite a different cost structure

a million generations of biology tapped into for cash

why do i look and see most things as wrong ?

the changed demographics of population pyramids due to war casualties is the most significant footprint of a war since it is highly selective in killing able-bodied breeding age men

you even get it in non-war situations like china’s one child policy which is driving the current politics there through an over-persistent entrenchment of the "old guard" enabled by the lack of a significantly large upcoming generation, statistically speaking, smaller populations lose the "tails" of their distribution and change is in the tail

sarah paine  on WW1

the iran-iraq war is another case in point, the iranian losses were horrendous and while russia is trying to avoid this problem by the use of mercenaries, still, their losses of rural men are significant, putin, like hitler, khomeini and stalin kill more of their own than the enemy

the absent men don’t speak and there’s no-one to speak for them and the world continues oblivious to how it has changed and what is missing

illness and injury two hundred years ago had a totally different edge

it was something to survive to keep living

nowadays, its just a problem to fix in most cases

broken bonding

the splinters

persist

the certainty of yourself

there isn’t much else

is there ?

unsurprisingly since both covid and some cold viruses are related coronaviruses, infection by either gives a degree  of immunity  against the other, ie "heterotypic"

one of the core issues with covid vaccines is that they are not heterotypic, rather homotypic and consequently vulnerable to "antibody escape" and covid has proved highly able to take advantage of this

however heterotypic vaccine design requires a lot of care to avoid autoimmunity problems

imo there’s about five years or more of research required before a "safe and effective" mRNA covid vaccine can be made

religious teachers

talk forever

same material

same conclusion

the stupids

hate

originality

the world of illusion

strange loops not represented but actual

how many caught forever ?

forever

the correctness of reflection

that one step back and forwards

is doubtful

but at least

an improvement

ed.  i think "reflection" is a better translation of the intended sense than "mirror" in the usual buddhist and ch’an texts

i got a reply which, i think, is the conventional buddhist view

reflections in the jewels of indra’s net

reflections in the mirror

endless shining bodies

vairocana buddhas

sitting atop lotus pedestals

reflecting in the calm waters

and one another

reflections within reflections

one blinding light

my  reply

not a bad poem, but   .   .   .   .

reflections within reflections

not a way out

but

a

road

of diminishment

travel

to worlds as different from here

as the sea from sand

opens the eyes

and

closes them

travel

to worlds as different from here

as the sea from land

opens the eyes

and

closes them

all these studies showing that moderate drinking has beneficial health effects and a longer life expectancy than the "abstinent" are flawed because the "abstinent" necessarily includes a large proportion of the ill

alcohol is a dose dependent  systemic poison  and i feel contributes to the onset of many age related conditions like dementia

pistils and stamens

the undercurrent of life

is its continuity

not much else

a quote from foyan   :   "you cannot see your mind itself"

noticeably similar to heraclitus’s  "you would not find the boundaries of the mind no matter how many paths you travelled, so deep is its measure"

ie the problem of recursion, if you could see, then you would be in an infinite loop like receding images in a mirror !

interestingly A. I. / the  large language model ,  has a similar problem with a narrowing of the statistical range, in effect getting an echo chamber that is chronically distortive

i think you can argue that religion is a sort of large language model caught recursively on its own content making it a "strange loop"

the stress

of

approaching death

not unexpected

or necessarily unwanted

even the losing has faded

but the trauma of exit

into

another

world

random search

this

that

the next thing

then

serendipitously

something

useful

discovered

and immersed in

a knowledge of history completely destroys any notion of the validity of political idealism

alan turing, who was the driving force behind the cracking of the enigma code in WW2 is presented as having committed suicide in the usual way, but in reality he was in effect killed by the british government with the enforced chemical treatment for homosexuality, the suicide being inducted by that

the cracking of the code saved countless british lives and materially advanced the allied cause

starting from no meaning

they ramble to create meaning

throwing around

small words with big import

like

life

death

to

create

effect

again and again and again

observations that repeat

you are the only constant

what bears looking at

and is unresolved

the everspinning

ontology of being

albert namatjira  palm valley  1940’s

too much emotional engagement between a doctor and patient can lead to burnout and some patients can be notorious for not respecting boundaries

what ends and what begins

neither ends or begins

whether we are at the beginning of the end

or the ending of the beginning

the dream seems real

let it go at that

the unrealness of dreams

has no place here

the dishonest claim

honesty

the honest

demonstrate

the world is like this

beware of words

our own little well of being

interpreted reality

nothing then something then nothing

is that how it works ?

quote quotes

to capture the essence

today’s reader

has a short attention span

why be such a pompous didactic ass ?

modernism

post modernism

pluralism

relativism

factual relativism

endless

the list

why capitalize

detail

into

headlines

of

necessity

the

news

changes

i have just updated my email software  (em client)  which gave me the option of an "A. I. enhancement" which i did not take as imo it will just burden processing and be of very mixed effectiveness, maybe it would be ok on the latest CPU’s, but i would be cautious

windows 11 has problems, i’m waiting for windows 12, windows 10 is definitely one of microsoft’s better releases, i hope they see the light and extend their support period for it

this  a capella  is in a class of its own

how can you improve if you always close the door to criticism ?

i can’t think of an historical zen master who was not "neurodivergent"

“ How so ? ”

because zen, like philosophy constructs theories of mind that are more accurate than our biological or culturally received ones, "normal" by its nature is not open to this

"the blue cliff record" is a literary work, a mixture of sense and nonsense, like in effect, any "wisdom" literature there’s not some ultimate "ground" from which you can generate truth

more horror  from the mRNA covid vaccines, a 55% increased chance of getting alzheimers within three months and a 70.4% increased chance of mild cognitive impairment

ed.  used  this calculator  for converting the odds ratio to percentage

these are absolutely massive odds in terms of iatrogenic population statistics

its a south korean sudy, it could never be done in the usa, england or australasia because the legal implications mean it would never be funded

when i think about the covid response, it was a theological mania, an assertion of the supremacy of the modern bureaucratic state and medicine as a religious sufficiency, pure and unflawed

a person can be a mystery

until we hear them speak

then

they are no longer a mystery

some people

don’t notice

when

the

shoe

fits

them

claiming to have an answer

they continue to ask questions

their neediness

is

pathetic

past midnight

sitting on the back porch with the feral cats

raining

moonlight through the cloud

mist in the paddocks below the house

i can see as well as those night dwellers ?

round round pupils saying

we are at home here

ed.  cloud or clouds ?  the sky was "sheeted" in a continuous cloud cover so there was a sustained illumination unlike where the illumination is synchronously changing with individual clouds covering and uncovering the moon, however when i read the poem, my brain fills in "clouds" rather than cloud

cats’ pupils being round is more their normal state since they are primarily nocturnal

reflection

not something that is done

but an occurrence

an inflection of reality

and

a new emergence

explanations are a bother

reasoning is bad

this doesn’t leave many options

because thinking is sad

i have noticed that you can hear the same piece played by one person and it does nothing, yet played by another, it hits the spot and you will be compelled to listen to the end, scores are approximations and not instruments of precision

this performance  of rachmaninov’s turkish march by h j lim is the latter

ferroptosis  is a newly discovered nutritional deficiency disease caused by a lack of trace levels of a saturated fat called pentadecanoic acid /c15 with dairy or ruminant meat as the dominant dietary sources

grass fed dairy and beef has twice the levels of grain fed

moderna has three times the mRNA dose level compared to pfizer and 1.5 times  the death rate

actually back in the day moderna use was stopped in sweden, denmark, finland and iceland because of high rates of cardiovascular problems in men in the age group 18-39

i initially tried to get the moderna, but couldn’t, so had the pfizer at a free clinic here, got lucky on that one !

“ its easier to fool someone than to convince them that they were fooled ”

huh, czechoslovakia is now known as czechia, the czech republic and slovakia split in 1992, i am really behind the times on this one

i was thinking from the male viewpoint that the turp operation was a lifesaver, but from the female viewpoint c-section is way more significant

women dying or in some way being crippled by childbirth was once so normal

a good  BBC article  showing 19th century paintings by europeans of indian scenes

what does it mean to say he/she is a good or bad "whatever" ?

i suppose it can be said

but still i wonder

men and women look across at each other

and wonder

how can the other

be so different

men and women look across at each other

and wonder

how can each

be so different

the moon in its circuit

hear the nocturnal birds

the plovers and their screeching

the native hens and their racket

when they stop

the fields

frosted in the moonlight

the moon in its circuit

hear the nocturnal birds

the plovers and their screeching

the native hens and their racket

when they stop

the fields

frosted in the moon

old age

infirmity

when lessons are pointless

why do we wonder

about what ?

this level of skill in singing is unbelievable, its not just voices over the radio, but the full bodied visual presentation that opens your eyes

voces8  angus dei ,  notice no conductor, but they can self synchronise

i am going to hypothesize that why the "turp" surgery offers a degree of metabolic relief from the effect of aging is that the prostate releases signalling substances that affect the operation of some functional axis in the body, perhaps germ cell or  inflammatory  related and the amount of signalling is directly proportional to the prostatic volume

ed.  i have had to rewrite the above several times so it reads less clumsily, there’s a skill to conveying complex ideas that can be taken up easily, of course then the problem is people understand you and they don’t always like this new understanding

for those who have wondered about the subjective experience of time

“ By analyzing changes in brain activity patterns,   the research team  found that we perceive the passage of time based on the number of experiences we have  —  not some kind of internal clock

What’s more, increasing speed or output during an activity appears to affect how our brains perceive time

“We tell time in our own experience by the things we do, things that happen to us

When we’re still and we’re bored, time goes very slowly because we’re not doing anything or nothing is happening

On the contrary, when a lot of events happen, each one of those activities is advancing our brains forward

And if this is how our brains objectively tell time, then the more that we do and the more that happens to us, the faster time goes”  ”

“   Our study  suggests that when we get sick, messenger proteins from the brain travel through the bloodstream and reduce energy levels in skeletal muscle.  This is more than a lack of motivation to move because we don’t feel well.  These processes reduce energy levels in skeletal muscle, decreasing the capacity to move and function normally ”

i had a virus the other day, i notice when i get one, there’s always a period of several hours when i literally feel i can’t move, i think it must be due to the brain releasing the proteins described above

i presume the energy denied to the muscles is being transferred to the immune system and making T-cells for instance

the strongest influence on charles bukowski was the roman poet catullus, he did a lot of reading in his younger days and had an intimidating intelligence he wrecked with malnutrition, alcohol and fights, though the genius never left him, he must have had extraordinary genetics given the abuse he put himself through

he always claimed the alcohol stopped him committing suicide which is a pity, he had the potential to be a goethe-like figure with a lifetime of sobriety

interestingly goethe’s only surviving son was an alcoholic

“ Will you understand it in the year of the donkey ”

well, when you are the donkey  .   .   .  any year is the year

“ Is there a difference between a donkey and an ass ? ”

huh, "ass" is a word word with a surprising multiplicity of definitions

after sunset

a light blue sky

on the horizon

i thought the tops of the gums

were still

but looking closer

they weren’t

mazy star  into dust

lyrics

still falling

breathless and on again

inside today

beside me today

around broken in two

’till your eyes shed

into dust

like two strangers

turning into dust

’till my hand shook with the way i fear

i could possibly be fading

or have something more to gain

i could feel myself growing older

i could feel myself under your fate

under

your fate

it was you breathless and tall

i could feel my eyes turning into dust

and two strangers turning into dust

turning into dust

sons and daughters

transmogrifications of the parents

what goes on

is what has been

the past is silent

the future speaks

the dead

ghosts

in fiction

mobile

my dead

static

stopped

some things fade

others don’t

stasis

sylvia

the matrix

simulated reality

modern technology

creates a trap

and benefit

empty words

empty mind

the wrong sort of emptiness

i am afraid

"small miracles" are the usual scams dressed up in theological nonsense, i’m surprised you  (ed. brad warner)  are falling for this, eihei dogen’s validation was not his personal cognizance, just an astute caution about stepping too far outside cultural beliefs

ed.  sophisticated theologians and apologists generally are anti or downplay "miracles" because of the way the usual fraudulent behaviour devalues/debases the religions

its not that difficult to run checks on suss emails, check the addys eg. i have had several link to  qrco.de  in the past few days and so i looked at the mail source code, there are always clues there, from some hubric name to excessive useless code, picking this is a skill that develops

99% of scammers are totally incompetent, but there is a 1% you need to watch out for, they are not continuing because they are unsuccessful

tomorrow

a cloud of rapidly escalating possibilities

that simplify

into not much change at all

windows that open

and close forever

the curtains drawn

we shall never pass that way again

the path away

wet with tears

the feeling of loss

is hard to describe

except

it weighs on me

windows that open

and close forever

the curtains drawn

we shall never pass that way again

the path away

wet with tears

the feeling of loss

is hard to describe

except

it weighs on one

i have seen so much of this  polypharmacy ,  people do not seem to understand that psychiatric prescriptions are bound only by "threat to themselves or others" and there is often a complete disregard for long term health consequences by the prescriber unlike conventional medicine

well, some rural russian men are still alive !  on looking closer i think they are below conscription age, a weirdly tragic video, is  the song  an act of rebellion ?  those women do not look happy, an underlying stress in their features

this absence of men is noticeable in other russian rural youtubes, plenty of course in the protected area of moscow where they give their hubric opinions on the indispensability of the war, minus themselves on the front line naturally, a society of deeply ingrained hypocrisy by necessity, the gulags and stalin left a distorting imprint

sometimes

what seemed harmless

makes us bow our heads

with the horror of what we have done

sometimes

what seems harmless

makes us bow our heads

with the horror of what we have done

there’s a lot of cultural propaganda in entertainment and now i look for it, i can see it

i am coming around to the validity of noam chomsky’s thesis of "manufactured consent", its an interesting mix of the unconscious and conscious, subtle, subliminal, coarse and overt

is death the end of a probability distribution of being ?

this k-drama  is a bit corny and the plot clichéd, but there really is an issue with low social status and relative poverty, its interesting that goethe’s "sorrows/passion of young werther" has this theme as well, perhaps signalling goethe’s younger years were difficult in this respect

“ Its okay or at least understandable to fall in love unhappily, even noble perhaps  —  what’s much less noble is being a poor underdog in life with no proper future prospects.  Unrequited love is romantic, ordinary everyday problems are even harder to deal with ”

another  comprehensive  chinese dynasty poetry page, i never realised there was so much material

shangguan wan’er, real life c-drama, poetess, politician, beauty, emperor’s consort, taken into the royal household as a baby after her family was executed, granddaughter of a famous poet, face tattooed with the mark of a criminal

page 42

where stories part from reality

one soul, two bodies

when dreamers dream

the bottom turtle

finds its feet

ed.  my comment on the famous chinese ghost story "seijo’s two souls"

my head fails

carrying my yet unwritten poems with it

what a waste

ed.  this is me imagining a poem by  li ye  at her execution  (a famous tang poetess who upset the emperor enough to get executed)

i had visualized her as being beheaded which is an english thing, but most likely she was strangled, i initially wrote "falls", but had to shift to "fails", maybe "falls" is still ok

her poems

tang poets

one certainly has a sense of active participation by women of the elite in the cultural and political life, sorta in the area of c-dramas actually

is death

the end

of

a probability distribution

of

 being ?

blue sky

empty

of everything

except

 blue sky ?

blue sky

empty

of everything

except

blue sky

the magical

magical thinking

the scary sundering

revealing

reality

i can’t pick what is special about  this woman , but there’s definitely something, a personal distancing from the moil of life and herself ?

she is lesbian and this "gender blurring" is what gives her the apparent "charisma" and intelligence, relationships extract a price that, sensibly but unconsciously she isn’t prepared to pay

a still life

says

this is what the end is

what you see

“ What is greater than God, more evil that the Devil, rich people need it, poor people have it and if you eat it you’ll die ? ”

god isn’t great, the devil is benign, the rich are poor and the poor rich and stupidity kills

what is empty

never is

the context

always intrudes

i got a complaint the above was cryptic, my reply is as follows

when cryptic is sense

and not decoded

begging for the keys

won’t get you anywhere

i see this so much with zen, both on the net and in real life  (but generally applicable), people "start" with a translation ascribing it "scriptural status", not understanding any translation is just a stab at what its "semantic field"/ "web of associations" is and in fact only exists as a point in a vast array of possibilities, especially since the philology is usually very weak

i don’t know how easily i am shocked, but  this story  about the famous canadian authoress alice munroe shocked me

when i think about her writing there is something not quite sane there, hard to put my finger on, sort of a brittle hardness, fragility of something very breakable, lacking say the sinuous cross linking characteristic of goethe, maybe an unaddressed autistic rigidity and living too much in the apparent safety of a created world

eulogizing

laying on thick

what should be laid thin

the adult human

turns around fixed ideas

this they call

“ identity ”

i look at my $50 logitech Z200 computer speakers  (reduced from $70)  and then  i see this  @ $4 million

the sound initially wasn’t that great , but passable, however it has improved over the weeks, apparently speakers take a while to "loosen up"

the four statements of zen  (attributed to bodhidharma)

The separate transmission outside the teachings

Not based on the written word

Points directly at the human mind

You see your nature and become a buddha

my  commentary

zen is really the first line, that transmission, without it, you are wasting your time and i feel some meditation experience is necessary, though with most people, again, they are wasting their time

i think you can rope the second statement in, the last two are garbled, pre-kensho nonsense

transmission is the experience of identity with infinity, disbelieved until it occurs, then you have your own words and don't have to endlessly wring nonsense from "the scriptures", this i guess is the real meaning of "outside the teachings" and "not based on the written word"

the massacre of emperor qin shi huang’s wives and concubines  (of terracotta warrior fame)  wasn’t a random event, rather the winner (hu hai, one of his sons) of the power struggle after the emperor’s death killing what in effect were the court representatives/ power centers of competing factions

it was pretty brutal, they were herded into chambers and shot point blank with crossbows

in addition 30 sons and daughters of qin shi huang were executed in a purge

when you look at history, things are less random and arbitrary than can be represented later by historians, there are often hidden reasons

just say less and observe more, you will get the hang of dealing with people

this was advice i gave to some-one on autistic spectrum complaining about poor social and other "functioning", however another person replied saying my comment was "dumbed down" and didn’t match the complexity of the problem or its solutions

my  answer

call me "dumbed down"

the way i put it was abstract, that is its simple, but can be expanded to the complex, like "wisdom literature"

it is also a criticism about him having rigid views that are impeding his functioning

“ to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven ”

one doesn’t have to go against the grain all the time

bertrand russell gives  authentic insight  into valdimir lenin

“ People who rarely get sick, what are your secrets ? ”

take immune stimulants with infectious disease exposure which is just about any contact with people and crowds

vitamin K, germanium sesquioxide, zinc monomethionine, vitamin A

conversely fish and krill oil are immune suppressors so avoid taking when you anticipate viral exposure

sleep and rest makes T cells, sun on the skin is immune suppressive in the short term

a good explanation  of han fei and legalism which actually is pretty much the way modern society is developing impelled by technology and the way you make the ruler invisible is by having a surrogate head of state  (king charles)  and prime ministers voted in and out, its a system that for all its flaws, works

in comparision china and russia, especially russia suffer from the idiosyncratic "wanting" of the heads of states and though both countries have elements of strong legalism, its very unevenly implemented

anybody

writes anything

meaning nothing

claiming

its

something

but after all

its

still

nothing

even absurdity

has thin traces

of sense

but

does

sense

have

traces of

 absurdity ?

even absurdity

has thin traces

of sense

some roads go nowhere

some roads go somewhere

where is some and no ?

stoicism

and its philosophy of the world out of your control

makes sense

not fatalism

but caution

about

intention

education

designed

to

damage

brains

moon or no moon

the seasons pass

i do and don’t

remain the same

for us, one day was long, like infinity   :   quote from a poem by michizo tachihara

my  reply

one day

follows another

is about

all

i can say

traumatized

by some moments deeper than others

lost in memory

my wandering

left a remanence

and little else

why does the "blue cliff record" have to mean anything ?  why can’t it be what it is ?  a bunch of stories in the "wisdom literature" area

ed.  a ch'an/zen text

he who trusts others, will be controlled by others

alternatively

it is dangerous for a ruler to trust others.  he who trusts others can be manipulated by others

the above quotes by hanfeizi/ han fei

going too far is as bad as not going far enough

japanese saying, especially relevant in social interactions imo

uphill rivers

pictures of

 but where else ?

i got a reply

Climbing up

The mountain of hope

Washed away in

The river of lies

my  reply

hope and despair

lies and truth

the river runs backwards

and forwards

there ought to be

no problem with this

a whiter shade of pale  is indebted to bach ,  easy to hear

interestingly the lyrics were intentionally nonsensical

its noticeable how talented contemporary musicians have wide ranging musical interests and knowledge, unlike the next level down and lower

its not just women who undergo brain changes with pregnancy and children,  but men also

china has a long history of very sophisticated fiction being presented as real or historically accurate, there’s no doubt in my mind that  this speech  falls in that category and it has a weird maoist tone that signs it as a literary product, i don’t think you can even say it represents xi’s thinking, these people are much more opportunist and intellectually unsophisticated, however it is a real sign of resistance to him and the current direction the CCP is taking and the resistance is probably within the ccp itself, will things just drift or are they about to get bloody, i think i favour the former in the short term

human beauty

casts a shadow

diffuse or sharp

and so

it goes on

rain

in the dark

clouds obscure the moon

you can’t see what is happening

but have to listen

pitta - pat

rain

in the dark

clouds obscure the moon

you can’t see what is happening

but have to listen

quotes

the religious madmen

spew

endless

how could they have their own words

buried as they are

in

nonsense

i am not

white haired yet

yet will

if i live long enough

and lost my belief in

purpose

or hope

for the future

age

has

a mercy

"karmic dust"

free from

dream on

jakushitsu

ed.  my response to  the poem  "a visit to hattoji temple" by jakushitsu genkō and translated by arthur braverman

the rupture of affection

reality itself

is clawed

apart

largeness of mind is founded in an ability to tolerate hurt

in yourself

and others

one of the amusing things about chinese dramas  (c-dramas, in effect "soaps")  is the major theme of "marrying for money"

how this people ever became communist is a mystery !

one of the interesting things about writing chinese logographs  (ideograms, ideographs, logogram, lexigraph, there is panoply of equivalent nouns)  i had never thought about is  stroke order

at cloud-wisdom monastery, in the ch’an master’s courtyard

exalted with age, you never leave here :   the gate-path is overgrown with grass

but summer rains have come, bringing fruits and herbs into such bright beauty, so we stroll down into forests of shadow, sharing what recluse birds feel at dusk, freed even of our names

and this much alone, we wander the countryside back

ed. poem by wei ying–wu (c. 737 to 792), translated by david hinton, it has a beautiful slow cadence, its not quite good english, but attempts to retain something of the flavour of the original chinese

the best explanation  of migraine i have seen so far

“ As the depolarization wave spreads, neurons release a host of inflammatory and other proteins into the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)

In a series of experiments in mice, the researchers showed how CSF transports these proteins to the trigeminal ganglion, a large bundle of nerves that rests at the base of the skull and supplies sensory information to the head and face

It was assumed that the trigeminal ganglion, like the rest of the peripheral nervous system, rested outside the blood-brain-barrier, which tightly controls what molecules enter and leave the brain

However, the researchers identified a previously unknown gap in the barrier that allowed CSF to flow directly into the trigeminal ganglion, exposing sensory nerves to the cocktail of proteins released by the brain ”

my search for the strange

ended up with me

i am stranger than anything else

no wonder

i couldn’t find it

there’s some sort of bizarre law of net message boards where the persons least suitable for positions of authority successfully connive to become mods and censor anything that doesn’t fit in with their own ideas

often the case in politics, bureaucracy and company management too

memory

that strange animal

what it holds and what it doesn’t

what can resurface

once thought forgotten

its endless steps

and whittling repertoire

with age

black and white

one or the other

views

that

turn out

to be wrong

the "boundarylessness" of the net creates the weirdness of being exposed to the "social control" attempts of other systems of government that are totally alien to western experience, this "propaganda" by the  CCP  is so bizarrely  over the top  its hard to grasp, but they have significant resources devoted to generating it

the russian’s with their videos portraying putin as a soft, kindly, supercompetent "uncle" also fits this category

the underlying reality is arrest, torture and assassination for dissidents, these are real extremes of hypocrisy

what a panda does

i thought it might be speeded up, but looking at other videos its not, they do have a very inefficient digestion so there is a necessity to get through a lot

dr. david grimes  discusses  vitamin D

i have been taking 3000iu in summer and 4000iu in winter of the blackmores’ with 90 mcg of caruso’s K2/Mk7 for years

i still have no idea whether i have ever had covid or not, possibly not since i have never lost or had changed my sense of smell or taste

its a long time since i did this, but once i experimented with irradiating button mushrooms with broadband uvb and while i was never able to assay the amount made, i thought millions and millions of iu’s would be a reasonable guess and eating them had the effect of making me very sleepy, knocking me out almost so i had to lie down and snooze

the following is a comment section post made on the above video about the rationale for taking vitamin K with vitamin D

“ According to my understanding, Vitamin D is a transcription factor for - among others - the so-called Vitamin K dependent proteins like osteocalcin and matrix GLA protein

These proteins need Vitamin K2 for so-called post-transcriptional carboxylation, where carboxylic groups are added by the Vitamin K2 in order to make them fully functional

As with high D levels the concentration of these proteins are upregulated, so Vitamin K2 is used up

If the double carboxylated osteocalcin is missing, the calcium can’t be fixated in the bones, stays in the blood resulting in hypercalcemia

So adequate Vitamin K2 prevents this by activation of the osteocalcin and matrix GLA protein  (which removes the calcium from the soft tissue)

So adding 100 mcg Vitamin K2 per day to your 5000iu Vitamin D3 is a good idea (that’s what I do)

Plus the K2 ramps up the proteins S and C, both are expressed in the blood vessels endothelium and are antithrombotic molecules

Isn’t the human body amazing? ”

i don’t know how people in the catholic church swallow the line of the pope being the "spiritual" arbiter of "god" when clearly its  a political position

as absurd as the million who circle that stone box in mecca each year, what possible meaning could there be there ?

the martyr’s of solway

a well written article

christianity seems relatively benign today, but you just have to look at the history when, like islam it was a means of social control by whatever elite, the brutality of supressing schisms matched that of any invading army

the shallow rules

because it is correct

"depth"

is

an

illusion

profound

god

wisdom

yet underneath all these

lies the devil

upsetting

everything

a life’s resentment

an interesting concept

scratch around in the dirt a bit

and its there

loops

caught in

passing the same sign posts

saying

.    .    .    .    .

the same message

answers are questions

and if we care to take them

off ramps are everywhere

didn’t understand it at first, then got it

an ambigram

questioning without resolution

my way

the one who gives me milk is my mommy

chinese saying

i have never understood women’s fashion

unless it is as it appears

a stupidity

and flare

of biological necessity

not something

artistry

need be part of

at all

the speed at which i work

by the time i figure anything out

the person i could discuss it with

has died

repetition

and difference

when they repeat

without difference

you know

there’s a problem

one of the problems of fame and wealth is becoming a target for some unusual predatory people, though to be fair, with the internet even ordinary life manages to encompass "unusual" in our lives and "predation" is a given

this magic world

where justice occurs according to our lights

it has to be before it fades

but since it never is

it never fades

this other world

where justice occurs according to our lights

it has to be before it fades

but since it never is

it never fades

falling in love

an exercise in self injury

plot

that abstraction

conveying

everything from

the genius of gilbert and sullivan

to the inanity

of mills and boon

in my mind

a trial of scriptwriters

for murdering

their plots

what is love ?

four letters

a name

a word

a label

indefinable

a feeling

a remanence

invisible

tangible

intangible

sincere

a fraud

lasting

evanescent

a meteor strike

a calming breeze

all of the above

none of the above

contradictions abound

in what is

contradictory

restricted knowledge

as instrumental in the past

as of the future

restricted knowledge

as instrumental in the past

as the future

emperors and kings

tigers and tigresses

that

sometimes

ate

their

cubs

ed. yes you, empress wu

alcoholism

a reverie

but

dissolution

has a cost

flip  flop

one way

then another

the

only

path

flip  flop

one way

then another

the

only

way

“ I have never caught covid and am unvaccinated, why am i not catching it ? ”

63% of the population have a sufficiently turned on protective gene  (HLA-DQA2)  that fights against it

vaccines can be too effective by targeting "conserved areas" of the virus genome which is what happens with mRNA booster shots, the problem here is autoimmune issues springing from these conserved areas having sequences our own body uses

cutting corners

something gets cut

it may not be corners

you can’t throw a fist whenever you are upset

chinese saying

love

markov blankets meeting

they don’t mesh

the children do

it always takes some friction to engage with actuality as i am sure you have noticed

you don’t really engage with anything without having some trauma over the matter, the problem is to balance the injury against the gain

what is questioning ?

what is existence ?

what is meaning ?

what is what ?

what is questioning

what is existence

what is meaning

what is what

reflection

not two images

but one

bayes problem, my answer is always get more information and leave the world of heightened risk, but i guess, at some point you have to stop and do something

mindless aggression goes nowhere on a message board and is a poor cover for low reading age

a free meal comes with a price

chinese saying, more direct than the english

talking to a surgeon recently i was surprised at his saying he only got the covid vaccines because he had to for work and his children weren’t vaccinated  (against covid)  and how he felt there was a heavy irony in the vaccine conspiracy theorists being right this time around, from the web i do notice there was a surprising degree of vaccine hesitancy amongst medical personnel and i think that's because they deal with large populations and statistically see the extremes of vaccine injury, which would have been pretty apparent with the astrazenca debacle and there may yet be a problem with mRNA vaccines causing igG4 overdrive and consequent increased cancer risk

i have had a lot of experience with retreats and my comments are not casual, retreats are double edged in the sense they can open up a habit of reflection, yet fill your head with their proselytizing junk.  you may have been reacting against the level of nonsense they were trying to imprint you with, yet cognizant of the need to to develop a reflective skill

no criticism is dismissive for the reason that someone has given you the attention to look for areas of improvement

ed.  this is a sort of an optical illusion, it can be read two ways, one doesn’t make sense and the other does

nagarjuna is consistently the most badly translated philosopher i have ever come across having the misfortune to be regarded as foundational to various indian religious crap so he gets all these missionaries trying to turn him to what suits them

there’s that which dies and that which doesn’t

if that which dies, doesn’t

and that which doesn’t does

where are you ?

i mean "you"

but that doesn’t mean

i mean

you

i mean you

but that doesn’t mean

i mean

you

hypocrisy is ageless

those no wiser than before

think they are wiser

after

those no wiser than before/ think they are wiser/ after

supercompetent

supermen

superwomen

the dream

of that power

supercompetent

superman

superwoman

the dream

of that power

ghost people

fairies

mist above a stream

the missionaries for themselves

the cult of one

so pretentious

china’s one child policy has been a massive demographic disaster to the extent it has and will continue to cripple the country, shuffling women from childbearing to the workforce provided immediate gains, but at the cost of the future

"all powerful" governments have a huge strength when they get things right, but can destroy when they get things wrong

demographics is an emerging problem and almost a definition of whether a country is developed or not

women assess men

not so the inverse

biology speaking

again

“  we identified  a specific gene called HLA-DQA2, which was expressed  (activated to produce a protein)  at a much higher level in the volunteers who did not go on to develop a sustained covid infection and could hence be used as a marker of protection ”

using their stats 63% of the population is protected by this gene and have no need of the vaccine

overthinking

male and female

makes a snare

that has to be carefully unwound

profundity

wisdom

garbage

next to the trivial

years ago

travelling by myself in the remote queensland outback

stopping somewhere and walking about

i came across a cave with the skeletons of a mother kangaroo and her joey

a image that has stuck with me

transition

life to a corpse

hunting

seen it a lot

not like the movies

rigor mortis takes hours

a warm body

easy to skin

bayesian analysis is touted as some sort of "wunderkin" these days and claimed to give realistic likelyhoods in all sorts of situations, but as to what it is i have always wondered despite having done some of the math

it turns out it uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data

i think the weakness of the claims for it is that any increment in the completeness of the data can radically change its conclusions so its utility is not as broad as is professed

what every war leaves/ the gap of the dead

what doesn’t fit

a fact

an opinion

the whole edifice

comes tumbling down

taking

us

with

it

the brain has certain developmental tracks over a lifetime and will return to them if it can

time and time again

the same conclusion arises although it doesn’t seem real

we start to accept

it as correct

and

move

to

remedy

“ light exposure between 12.30 am and 6 am presented a significant health issue ”

late-night light  raises your type 2 diabetes risk by up to 67%

we have parted

once dreams that were

fading like the evening light

colours seen

to be no more

what remains

i cannot tell

ed.  hmmm, could be put to music ?

the ccp is pretty much a continuation of the boxer philosophies

any country that can have the boxer rebellion can never be expected to have sane government

worth a bit of research on

our brains

stitching stories together

in

denial of

fragmentation

feng shui

total nonsense

with cultural heft

this benign world of normality

everything comfy and safe

lets ignore the outliers

when making usb drive backups, let the usb run for ten minutes before dumping data to it, flash memory has much longer retention times when the chips are programmed hot, this applies to flash memory in general

when you plug it in  (the usb drive into usb port)  it gets power to the flash chips and in fact there's a microcomputer on board doing its thing so it all slowly heats up so i guess the answer to your question is "let it run on its internal software"

i do the same with sata flash drives, letting them get as hot as possible before making the copy and the longest i have ever tested is a year and a half without power which is not bad for quite used drives

they should be stored cold and programmed hot

the writer’s motto

imitation is a sincere form of flattery

plagairism is the sincerest

faces

are we the person stuck behind them

or are we them

a bit of both

i

suppose

some sort of transparency about yourself to others must be fundamental, its a skill of course, but without it, its hard to be comfortable with yourself

what every war leaves

the gap

of the dead

very tellingly, no mention of drones, obviously zero combat experience, the russian way is for everybody else to fight to keep the talkers  and singers  safe, WW2 was like that too

rome

colonnades

temples

columns

like a double exposed photo

two layers

the modern and ancient

superimposed

they think its fiction

when its true

and they think its true

when its fiction

this

world

c-drama, so many holes in the plot the actors fall through them

women

its not the hips that waggle

but the ovaries

and their  follicles

love subsumes

not what is talked about

but what remains

over time

life’s plot lines

same structure

just fill out the details

they vary

don’t get mRNA covid boosters and lower your cancer risk

people are not familiar with the problems of igG4 amplification, a design flaw in the current generation of vaccines

some people can hypnotize

you may even be aware of it

a black hole sucking you into their nothingness

the suicidal

seeking for nothing

will sylvia peek from behind the veil ?

virginia remove the stones from her overcoat pockets

and sara wake out of sleep and find

death is kind ?

ed.  the last line is a reference to sara teasdale’s  poem

women need to find  the smell  of their partners attractive so that you get a functional immune system in the children, birth control distorts that sense and is a factor in today’s high rates of allergy and dysfunctional immunity

hindu mythology

not one rabbit hole

but

many

a mind boggling vastness

no wonder mother teresa was confused

dogmatism is a mixed bag, being necessarily incorrect, but on occasions correct enough to be somewhat functional

gargi vachaknavi asked yajnavalkya

land is contained by the sea

what contains the sea ?

my  reply

what "contains" contain ?

ed.  this is at the beginning of a famous dialogue between gargi and yajnavalkya which the latter supposedly won, but in reality gargi had the sense to stop because the social mores did not permit a woman to come out the winner and actually if you read between the lines yajnavalkya physically threatened her

medieval battles where your allies change sides in the middle of the conflict are a surprising parallel to the trauma of divorce and i notice that women can have trouble identifying the need for transition, your once friend is now an enemy

i think an "amicable divorce" is simply one that is reasonable/rational without too much damage being taken by both sides which is how limited wars work

the fate of gaza which by virtue of its location was in effect in a geopolitical "marriage" with israel is a painful example of what happens when one of the parties is totally irrational, one has always to be careful when dealing with the irrational, simply because it is not rational and the bottom line in that sort of conflict is death and destruction, you need to be sure you are not the losing party in that case

"the ballad of reading goal", we likely have heard of it and maybe even can scratch up that it was written by oscar wilde but not know  what it was about

society’s destructive  undercurrent 

"the way"

somewhere to go

and somewhere to find

a path

that evaporates

as you walk it

"the way"

somewhere to go

and somewhere to find

a path

that evaporates

as you look at it

a lesson of life

is not to give advice

: o )

i got a reply

Are you saying

Advise

Is a vice?

my  reply

the vice of vice

or is it

the vise of vice ?

or even

the vice of vise ?

ed.  playing on american versus english vice/vise

i’m getting a weird feeling that a population level  disaster  of increased cancer rates from the mRNA covid vaccines is occurring, is it .1 or 1, or 10 percent ?  from turbo cancers a day or two after the vaccine or ten or twenty years to develop ?

there will be a slowly emerging picture, the basic issue is the vaccines were approved without the usual several years of testing  (and redesign if necessary)  required before release

absence

no imagery

to express

what is absent

the ouroboros of meaning

agrees

why anyone would buy  a piano  these days is beyond me

in december last year i was faced with a choice of getting the "infamous" turp operation or going on meds for benign prostatic hyperplasia  (BPH)  which is nothing to do with prostate cancer, indeed ,  my PSA is exceptionally low  (the operation is neutral in regards to the risk of prostate cancer)

the prostate grows about 2% a year so its just a question of time before men need the operation and imo, before the operation became consistently successful, BPH was a major killer of men, my mother told me that it was customary to have catheters hidden in top hats which might explain why such an unwieldy item was once in fashion

my research on the meds is they have problematic side effects  (including dementia !)  so i opted for the operation, not that expensive since it is so common and now six months later i can say its been a great success, though the first month can be a bit difficult, the surprising thing is i feel better overall in terms of energy and outlook which is not what i would expect given its such a specific operation that doesn’t seem to relate much to anything else

of course sleep is improved, not having to get up so many times in the night

thinking about this, i turned up  a research paper  on the subject which seems to bear out my own experience

“ Multiple linear regression analysis further identified that postvoid residual urine and lower urinary tract symptoms were predictive negative factors of the physical health dimension, whereas anxiety and depression were predictive negative factors in the mental health dimension of the 12-item short-form health survey ”

another study

so, in my opinion is the operation is better done sooner than later, you do need to read up on it though

they don’t do it with a general anaesthetic anymore, but an epidural to the spine with some opioid, so now i can say i have an idea of what heroin feels like, its nice, you have a very benign comfortable view of the world, but not something to write home about, i think people with addiction problems must react more strongly, i have grown more understanding of addiction watching too much youtube in the last year

in conclusion BPH has some negative effect on well being for which the mechanism is not apparent, might be hormone disruption, some bias to "crash and burn" rather than cell maintenance or even the brain perceiving a problem unconsciously and not liking it, who knows ?

operations are best done in summer, out of the usual viral seasons, and as with any surgery, who the surgeons are/is matter’s

be reasonably fit

TLDR; basically the condition has a general negative effect on well-being, its not just a urinary problem and the turp operation restores that well-being, so in my view, the current trend for men to go on medications to delay the turp is misguided

a rational discussion  of the increased rates of "excess deaths" in the western world, though i think dr. joseph fraiman pulls his punches a bit about how much is due to the mRNA covid vaccines

i think the problem of string theory is it is based on a paradigm of simpler and more basic is better, in effect a form of monotheism and it is a mathematical construction of such a state, however there is no existent state corresponding, a theoretical paradigm that may or may not be the case, and as it turns out, is not, not to say it doesn’t have some application which has yet to be fully apparent

my comment to a youtube woman talking about being"neurodivergent" and finding things constantly difficult

you are too high functioning to fit any "system" and honestly, most psychiatrists and therapists are toxic dullards, all worlds are crazy, you have to watch out for yourself, read the poets, emily dickinson etc, plenty of good women black poetesses, they are your "people" ,  pay attention to diet and exercise, what goes on goes on forever   .   .   .   . don’t go on meds   .   .   .

words

a summary

hello

goodbye

so much in-between

across time

languages without number

why is any one special ?

the sound of sand

in an hourglass

is where the meaning lies

100% cute

women

have to like men

or male children

would be in trouble

john keats’s  grave

not writ on water

yet

one day

it

too will go

wars on the one hand

designer handbags on the other

why does one surprise me and not the other ?

and which is which ?

designer wars and glide bomb handbags

are

not

so

absurd

proselytizers of any religion

the most boring people on any planet in any universe

the music industry is the area most changed by technological progress, editing software, sound synthesis by digital signal processing and distribution on the internet has turned what used to be a money spinner for the publishing companies into something highly diffuse, competitive and with minimal entry barriers

i am surprised by this whole new genre called beats with a disproportionate amount of young female composers  I          II

what i have noticed with people who copy/plagiarise my writing style is they eventually give up because it doesn’t work for them ,  they can imitate the style ,  but they can’t imitate the mindset so what they write always founders and eventually they drop it

the style and content/ semantics are inextricably bound together

the pointers

and southern cross

still visible

when the bright moon

has washed

most of the other stars

from the sky

zhaozhou  (ed. joshu)  jumped out of the page and remarked

i am the imagined me, but i ask

who is the imagined you doing the imagining ?

that shift of attention

momentum

to get inside something

and

it can be hard to leave again

that shift of attention

momentum

to get inside something

there’s an intimacy  to this portrait  by friedrich von amerling of an ambiguously sentimented model and for all the fame of the painting, its sitter is unknown

walls

and

doors

and

doors

in

walls

they

are

there

to

find

where i live

late afternoon

yellowed sunlight

like a penny an almost full moon in the clear blue sky

winter beauty

non-reproductive universes

heaven, dramas, plays, entertainment in general, even

hell

circuitous

never

to break free

“ fine feathers don’t make a fine bird ”

chinese version

fine feathers make a fine bird

my  comment

to be fair you can see both sides

an afterlife

where victims forgive their murderers

the robbed go surety for their oppressors

the injured and deformed mock their own condition

an afterlife

and this life

no questions

are

ever

asked

you may look more like an aunt or uncle than either of your parents singly, its a "shuffled deck" thing, combinations that fortuitously match and those that don’t

at the crossroads

the sign says forever

what does that mean

and in which direction ?

or is it

all directions ?

cherry blossom

a gust of wind

pink

snow

spring

cold

cherry blossom

a gust of wind

pink snow

drugs

not only chemicals

time takes and fades

any meaning

fruitless to pursue it

life is not so mysterious

an edge of being

ribboned on time

the twist and turns

go on and on

and

we

come and go

i was passing through the small grass area between the IGA, old railway platform and tourist information building when i saw a man of about 26 ? scruffily dressed with a 10mm thick rope and a large black and white patched well built with prominent strong jaws dog on the end of the lead that proceeded to move towards me and it became quite obvious it was set on attacking, teeth bared and growling and the man could scarcely control it being pulled down to the ground by the strength of the dog, but keeping his hold on his end of the rope then getting up again, i of course moved quickly away, it was like a sort of farce, this dangerous powerful dog he couldn’t control dragging him around, except if the dog had got loose there would have been serious trouble for me

i told him the dog was too aggressive and dangerous, but according to him i had got too close and he was a "guard dog"

well the police station was on my way so i called in to discuss what happened, the woman at the desk was interested and said she would follow up, didn’t sound like they could do a lot but in my view that dog could be considered a potential killer and its owner was just clueless and in denial about his responsibilities, the heavy rope "lead" spoke volumes

later i went out to the beach at sunset and walked out along the breakwater, not much wind and an interesting sky

if you are familiar with chinese "dramas" there’s an ongoing theme of severely disrupted families which i think is an painful echo of what happened in the cultural revolution

something car buyers often don’t take into consideration is the cost and ease of maintenance, newer models are not good in this respect

gibran alcocer  idea10

he seems to have some association with  anya nami

its like something out of george orwell’s novel 1984,   verbiage  completely decoupled from reality

momentum

our lives

everything else

the anticipatory

illusion

so, if princess di had worn a seat belt or the ambulance crew had looked for the  hidden lung injury  as they should have, she would still be alive

i know from my hunting experience that if the lung gets perforated, there is massive internal bleeding, they just become solid with blood

i guess that is what body armour is about, you don’t have to hit the heart, from modern times to ancient history

“ Teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were found to be over 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with  a psychotic disorder  compared to non-users

Interestingly, this elevated risk was not observed in young adults aged 20 to 24 ”

koans

crossword puzzles

a literary invention

ascribed meaning

beyond the absurd

which is the case

usually

but not always

the low reading age

founder

on

"buddha-nature" is one of a number of terms that i don’t think the original sense has been correctly conveyed through translation from the medieval chinese, "mind" being another

"soul" could also be a useful translation of buddha-nature

mRNA vaccinated individuals are producing igG4 antibodies which can be involved  in cancer  and autoimmune conditions

this is because of oversaturation of antigen exposure

to me the cancers of king charles and princess kate could be due to this, anyway its going to be interesting over the next five years to see what happens to the rate of cancer in "boosted" populations, the harm is cumulative, one mRNA vaccine is safe but boosters are not, especially in view of the dangerously virulent strain of covid no longer being in circulation

igG4 disease gives a five times increased risk of pancreatic cancer and a  69 fold  increased risk of lymphoma though most people won’t be at the extreme level of the actual disease, still those are extraordinarily awful increases

of course the level of development of "spike protein immunoglobulin G4 antibodies" from say three or four mRNA vaccines will be well short of the disease state, but i wouldn’t be surprised if that was already several multiples of the normal odds for lymphoma

study

i have read a lot of medical research in my time and this is real, don’t shoot the messenger !

its also what one would expect with a totally new invasive genetic technology inadequately tested before introduction at a population level

i expect to see the matter ignored publicly by the health authorities because of the potentially massive liabilities involved, except you will see boosters quietly no longer recommended and pfizer, biontech and moderna work on new designs to solve the problem, mRNA is a useful technology and here to stay

for some reason

this short

really comes alive

women

focus

on the control of their personal world

oblivious to the hazards

of the outside

if you want answers

step into recursion

keep stepping

and stepping

and stepping

and when you stop

there’s your answer

a monk asked zhaozhou   :   does a dog have an appreciation of its own existence ?

joshu replied

do you have an appreciation of your own existence ?

the monk was dumbfounded

the extent to which that subculture called "journalists" try to influence political decision making is unbelievable, they can’t write or say anything without dripping with some agenda or bias, objectivity is a lost concept

insanity

that two faced devil

one face

understands the universe

the other

poison’s life

echo chambers

why do we so love the sound of our own voices ?

the night sky

still in their eons

just silent

nothing more or less

than what it is

the night sky

the stars and their patterns

undisturbed

by any thought

except their own

there is no freedom in being part of a pattern, but there is a liberty in perceiving it and perhaps even a partial escape/isolation via that perception

i noticed years ago reading old chinese literature that their attitude to suicide was different to the western, not so hysterical and a certain fatalism about it, not a taboo topic anyway

i was interested to see it graphically portrayed in this  c-drama

voluntary death carries a certain pain, like unrequited love, the world is not what we thought it was

the opening scene is modelled on the famous painting  the death of marat ,  its an interesting allusion and shows a level of artistic sophistication not common in commercial entertainment in the west

aging

the world i grew up in

slowly becomes myth

to the younger generations

and perhaps

myself

aging

the world i grew up in

slowly becomes myth

to the younger generations

and perhaps

myself

as

well

women

and their primitive biological hierarchies

beauty, health, status, age, networks

a fayan quote

“ the only essential thing in learning Zen is to forget mental objects and stop rumination ”

re-translated by me as

“ don’t waste your time with specious conceptualization and exegesis, this has always been the case ”

so what do they go on to do ?

ginger should be peeled

there’s something toxic in the skin

its like we are given a sum at birth

to compute

and mostly its never successfully computed

and even if it is

one may feel so what ?

libraries of discourse on the "meaning of life"

in abeyance

leaves glue together

the sum of the words

not even registering

on the balance beam

the universe of women

and the universe of men

each so strange

and attractive to the other

love according to the dramas

of life breaking intensity

its happens and doesn’t

scars like snail trials

line the heart

some things are only a problem if you think they are a problem

if you accept that’s the way things are, there is no problem, rather they become epistemological guideposts

actors and actresses in general don’t have much in the intellectual area upstairs, i think that "emptiness" may in fact be essential to their craft since they are vacant blocks taking on the cloaks of other, but one or two stand out as hybrids, having a bit more than usual, you can tell in the speeches they give causing cognitive dissonance in their fatuous audiences

  helena carter  and emma thompson  (whose father wrote the magic roundabout which is totally surreal)  are two of those "hybrids"

my  comment

helena’s poem is not by rumi, but a very distanced "reinterpretation" by coleman barks

this being human

is a whore house

ideas and being for sale and stolen

the mirror is distorted

alice knew

ed.  i made this comment on the youtube and got a reply two years later saying "Strange, but thanks for sharing" and that made me thing about her use of "strange", what in fact was strange to me is the distance i felt from what i had written previously, because i had no memory of it, but did write it and i could understand the sense, but still its not quite the way i would put things these days or maybe its that more recently i wouldn’t be bothered to

i do have a surprisingly high number of replies to my youtube comments years later

olivia coleman and helena in a  mutual interview

“ A cigarette has no thought of burning, but it burns ”

my  reply

a cigarette is thought of as burning

i had always assumed that ted geisel/ dr. seuss was some colourless nonentity  author  but he’s not

also interesting is his first wife  helen palmer ,  another writer of children’s books

the problem of monotheism

a false solution

that’s not quite wrong

there’s no question in my mind that the existing mRNA vaccines need substantial redesign, clinical and population testing, the public health authorities are being unbelievably "negligent" in their approvals, indeed promotion of vaccines that still need the kinks being worked out and in effect getting inadvertent full scale population trials by rushing into use

even more worrying is the extension of their existing design technology into other vaccines like dual flu/covid and RSV

i really hate to think what is going to happen in the long term to cancer rates

dr. joseph fraiman

it needs to be understood that the stage 3 clinical trials while lasting several years do not test for very long term and subtle effects, simply because, that takes time, broader population use and as yet undiscovered focus

the problem with "precepts" is you also create their opposites which necessarily beg to be fulfilled and they are

just like new years resolution’s i guess

thoughts i never had before

random

what takes you out

cancer, cardiovascular/ cerebrovascular/ ischaemia, dementia

a chain with a weak link

that will one day snap

or slowly tear apart

if there is a god

please give me the snap