Then it is a prison,
then a house,
then a cocoon,
then a cave,
then a costume.

Then it’s a joke no one gets,
not even you.

But at l(e)ast it’s funny.

“if you want to find something, stop looking. if you want to move something: look for it.” – Brook Bartlett (because wanting and not finding, or not wanting and not moving, both imply hidden resistance)

“you have to know what you’re about, you have to feel your life flowing, and you have to sense your body.” – George Adie (know, feel, and sense)

“we choose whether to empower thoughts by taking them as truth, or disempower thoughts by recognizing them as programming.” – Hope Johnson (how to grow good karma)

(putting ‘em here for future reference)

But the one thing that the most dedicated Shamanic healer (unless he is truly a holy man, truly wakan), or the most evil CIA brainwasher of the infamous MK-ULTRA mind-control program, forgets to ask, is: where did that intent come from? Is he actually deluded enough to believe that he has summoned it out of nothing? On the basis of what intent might he have been able to do that? The magician is like powerful, skilled and courageous warrior who confronts the enemy and triumphs (or is killed or captured, but for the sake of the argument let us say he triumphs). He feels powerful, successful, and seems entirely justified in this feeling. But zoom out to the next larger frame of reference and what do we see? This warrior is now revealed as nothing but a soldier acting under orders. Whose orders? Along what chain-of-command? In the service of what overall strategy, what political agenda? The soldier sees and knows next to nothing of this; that’s not his business; his business is simply to do what he’s told. And the same is true of the magician. He may be imminently successful in enacting his intent—but as to where that intent came from, he is in total ignorance. He never asks that question, never looks in that direction, because he believes he is the Doer. To obey your own intent is to act under the command, under the tyranny I would say, of forces you will never see as they are, or understand, or be able to name. You may come up with some sort of psychological insight into patterns of intent you take as causal, or into the nature of the spirit beings to whom you attribute them, but the true origin of these patterns is completely hidden from you. Why? Because if you are the Doer, your knowledge, for all your excursions into the grim, fascinating, multifarious worlds of the Unseen, begins and ends with you yourself. The only way to even begin to see the real patterns that lie behind your intent is to recognize that the Doer is Allah—no-one else, because there IS no-one else. Instead of obeying our own intent, it is our duty, by the Trust that is laid upon us, to intend to obey Reality alone: “There is no power or might except by Allah”. This is the precise point where our true freedom lies—the point where our intent to submit to Allah effectively is Allah.

(the hands always made me laugh the most)

To me, the key hidden in all of this is that one needs to pay attention to the motivations which give rise to their actions.  Because the motivations are never “yours”, but they all have their own taste, and the agreement to let them manifest that taste is yours to sign…

The essay also leaves unanswered the question: what if he (or she) doesn’t believe they are “the doer”?  Is “magic” impossible without a separate self?  Is being a channel for higher energies to manifest through not the definition of doing God’s Will?  What is the line between submitting to the Will of God and being lazy?  Not that I have answers, but it’s an interesting place to do that whole “thinking” thing.

click through for MUCH larger versions, and titles (check the URL/title.jpg)

Assuming that things will still be being next year, I’ll see you all then.

Peace out 2012, it’s been cool.

]]> http://www.reclusland.com/compass/2012/12/14/th-th-th-th-th-th/feed/ 2 http://www.reclusland.com/compass/2012/11/30/darminisms-and-the-homeless/ http://www.reclusland.com/compass/2012/11/30/darminisms-and-the-homeless/#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2012 23:40:29 +0000 Ian http://www.reclusland.com/compass/?p=4094 This morning, I was reading an excerpt from Darwin’s journals (or was it his autobiography? I cannot recall).  He discussed his lost love of poetry and Shakespeare, how glad such things used to make him, and he lamented that such things now bored him immensely.  His mind seemed to have become only a machine for reviewing large quantities of facts and pulling from them a general theory.   He said something along the lines of this making him sad and, very likely, being an unhealthy thing for the mind too.  This implied, to me, a sort of descent into a sort of degeneracy, though perhaps that says more about my mind than about his.

I don’t have the book with me now, or else I would be more precise.  Please forgive my lack of references.

Later that morning, I was heading in to Starbucks to purchase my daily dose of what Terrence McKenna labeled the shamanic drug of business. Outside, a young homeless man (scraggly beard, long brown hair, stained clothes, my age) was laying on the ground, shoes at his side, kicking his sock-clad feet in the air and babbling to himself.  On my way out I handed him a few coins.  I am embarrassed to admit I unable to look at him so until then; t felt safer to do so upon leaving than it did upon entering.

When I handed him the coins, he looked up at me, very excited, and started talking to me.  I stood and listened a bit.  My memory recorded it as something like “reflexive, recurrence, becoming, unfolding, enfolding, turning, triangular, dyslexic!” and then a bit about a melted glass lens refracting perfectly.

This is, I feel, a true enough recounting of his words, though, again, I feel perhaps a bit too much of myself in the words chosen and their arrangement.

He seemed to be both figuring out his theories and telling them to me at the same time, and appeared to be very happy to be doing so.  His eyes were very kind, but (unless it was only in my imagination) there was no real connection in them.  And yet, something in me recognized myself in him, and in knew I had tasted the pleasure he found in his babbling.

Luckily for me I have some social connections, a job, and a blog, so I am safe for now.  I believe I may rightly consider this blog my padded cell, though, happily for me, it remains unlocked.  Or perhaps it’s better said that it is locked and only I have the key, and that my cell has a window in it as wide as the world.  In my case, such a window can also serve as a ventilation unit.  If memory serves, Darwin come from money, and while money does not ventilate by itself, it can be used create experiences that ventilate well enough.  That man outside of Starbucks had no means of ventilation.

So, yes, it does seem that I am safe, for now.  But that tendency that Darwin mentioned, that analysis of fact and creation of theory, is a pleasurable, addicting activity, and one can run heedlessly into many dangers pursuing it.  While philosophy is dry science, poetry is wet magic. Wet lubricates dry, grease in the axle hole making the ride smooth, saving us from the creation of friction.  No friction, no fumes. No fumes, no need for ventilation.

Wait.  No. Strike that.

Philosophy is language created out for knowledge, from clarity.

Poetry is language created out of emotion, from feeling.

To remain a poet philosopher, you must find a way  to love both the poetry and the philosophy. Otherwise, you may head past the tipping point and over into your doom.  I can only pray that my appreciation of, and skill with, these things always and ever increase. And that this may continue for the greater social good only, and my own good besides.

I have been trying to read poetry daily, lately.  This how I found the Darwin excerpt, in fact.  It’s in The Rag And Bone Shop of the Heart.

The source kind of ruins things (a bit) but before you click through, see how that sentence sits with you…

Remember the abyss?

“It is perhaps worth adding, as a footnote, a slightly different angle on the same difficulty.  The arbitrariness of the existing verbal concepts is not their only disadvantage, for once they are invented, verbal concepts have a further ill-effect on us.  We lose the ability to modify them.  In the unselfconscious situation the action of culture on form is a very subtle business, made up of many minute concrete influences.  But once these influences are represented symbolically in verbal terms, and these symbolic representations or names subsumed under larger and still more abstract categories to make them amenable to thought, they begin to seriously impede our ability to see beyond them.
Where a number of issues are being taken into account in a design decision, inevitably the ones which can be most clearly expressed carry the greatest weight, and are best reflected in the form.  Other factors, important too but less well expressed, are not well reflected.  Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality.  Each concept, at the time of its invention no more than a concise way of grasping many issues, quickly becomes a precept.  We take the step from description to criterion too easily, so that what is at first a useful tool becomes a bigoted preoccupation.
The Roman bias toward functionalism and engineering did not reach its peak until after Vitruvius had formulates the functionalist doctrine.  The Parthenon could only have been created during a time of preoccupation with aesthetic problems, after the earlier Greek invention of the concept of ‘beauty.’  England’s nineteenth century low-cost slums were conceived only after monetary values had explicitly been given great importance through the concept ‘economics,’ invented not long before.
In this fashion the selfconscious individual’s grasp of problems is consistently misled.  His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating.  Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well  The concepts control his perception of fit and misfit – until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately.”  – Christopher Alxander, “Notes on the Synthesis of Form”

Quick-and-dirty is a term used in reference to anything that is an easy way to implement a workaround or “kludge”. Its usage is popular among programmers, who use it to describe a crude solution or programming implementation that is imperfect but which solves or masks the problem at hand, and is generally faster and easier to put in place than a proper solution. It is also used in cognitive science to describe first-pass cognitive processes that might attempt to quickly process information in a simple way before resorting to more heavy resource-consuming processes. Recognizing the attractiveness of implementing changes speedily, there was a general move to formalize this as rapid application development. Quick-and-dirty solutions often attend to a specific instance of a problem rather than fixing the cause of the more general problem. As such, they are sometimes used to keep an item of software or hardware working temporarily until a proper fix can be made.

No word uttered by a god could be less than the universe, or briefer than the sum of time. – Borges

(And this experience is God’s Speech, God’s participals and diphthongs, God’s verbs, God’s meter and rhyme scheme, God’s conjugation.  And we are the part this Speech which exists to experience this Speech and to speak back to the Speaker while still being part of what is Spoken. Yet we seem only to want to speak of our own role, never turning to speak of the whole flow of Expression, of which we are both a part and all.  Thus, we keep our light under a bushel basket, and cover ourselves over to hide within the garden, so God does not See us.  And even though the Speech that God Sees is made Good in the Seeing, still we hide with our roles…)

So let start helping God make that proper fix by getting our heads out from behind our fig leaf bushel baskets…  How many times is God going let God’self get punched in the gut because we are not saying “OK, yes, and this too” for God, as the Speech of God, as that which is the Speech and knows the Speech?

(link fixed, 12/6/12)

—–

What comes to mind for me:

Rational form ultimately springs from the non-rational root of personal choice.  Sadly this is almost always done unconsciously, buried under too many previous layers of so-called impersonal rationality.  The fruit of this unconsciousness is to insist in the complete rationality of our forms and systems, an insistence which sits un-well with 0ur intuition.  Our intuition can feel the irrationality beneath the rational, but our adherence to the rational will not allow us to admit the truth of our intuition’s judgement.  The proper choice here would be to work to consciously admit the irrational at the root of all rational systems, while not abandoning the use of rational systems in general.  But, because we rarely choose to dig that deeply into our rational systems, and because we are scared of completely losing them, the intuition is denied its validation, and instead is reactionarily whored out as “”anti-rational,” a foe of rationality, rather than what lies behind all rational systems.  This weakens the truth at the heart of the intuition and makes it unreliable.

Since we refuse to admit the irrational at the root of the rational, even while our intuition tells us that it is ultimately irrational, we therefore must block out part of the intuitive, while still needing to rely on this crippled intuition whenever our rational systems fails us.  What is needed instead is an admittance, a confession, that the so-called rational is ultimately based on the irrational, and therefore the rational must be allowed to die away and grow back as the irrational reality of the situation demands.  The irrational is our source and our true identity.  The rational is a growth, an addition, a beard or makeup upon the original face of the irrational.  It can be used to make the irrational beautiful, but it must never be allowed to be mistaken as ultimate.  Only the irrational is ever truly ultimate.

This paints a picture of endless death and rebirth.  Whether this is a complete picture of the true state of things remains to be seen…

“The fully conscious and alive individual is totally present in the moment and perceives each situation as it is, free from all prejudice and all bias. His perceptions and his actions are not hampered by emotional or mental preconceptions and are not conditioned by past experience. Therefore, his perception is accurate and his action is to the point; accordingly, he has the capacity to respond efficiently, in tune with the needs of each situation he encounters. This, of course, implies a certain kind of freedom, which such an individual experiences within his body as a lack of barriers to the movement of energy. His emotions flow unhindered and are appropriate responses to the situations he encounters. This quantitative change from man’s normal mode results in a qualitative change in the content of such a person’s inner experience, which cannot be accessed by an ordinary person, even in his imagination.

Although this state is not conceived of by the majority of humanity, it is still a potential for each human being. There is proof enough of its reality in the few individuals of the various spiritual traditions who have realized it. That it is difficult to attain does not negate its possibility. All disciplines truly oriented toward freeing man attempt to realize it. The desire for growth and expansion is, among other things, a direct consequence of the experience of the absence of this condition of freedom, indicating that something necessary—and therefore attainable—is missing.

With this ideal condition as a background, the process of growth and unfoldment becomes easier to understand and appreciate: any deviation from this condition indicates the presence of prejudices based on the past, whether obvious or hidden, and growth is a matter of uncovering these prejudices and moving beyond them.”

- A.H. Almaas

—–

“When we speak of bad fit we refer to a single identifiable property of an ensemble, which is immediate in experience, and describable.  Wherever an instance of misfit occurs in an ensemble, we are able to point specifically at what fails and to describe it.  It seems as though in practice the concept of good fit, describing only the absence of such failures and hence leaving us nothing concrete to refer to in explanation, can only be explained indirectly; it is, in practice, as it were, the disjunction of all possible misfits.

With this in mind, I should like to recommend that we should always expect to see the process of achieving a good fit between two entities as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or irritants, or forces, which cause misfits.

It will be objected that to call a good fit the absence of certain negative qualities is no more illuminating than to say that it is the presence of certain positive qualities.  However, though the two are equivalent from a logical point of view, from a phenomenological and practical point of view they are very different.  In practice it will never be as natural to speak of good fit as the simultaneous satisfaction of a number of requirements, as it will be to call it simultaneous nonoccurrence of the same number of corresponding misfits.”

“But if we think of the requirements from a negative point of view, as potential misfits, there is a simple way of picking a finite set.  This is because it is though misfit that the problem originally brings itself to our attention.  We take just those relationships between form and context (Ian’s note: “form” meaning “figure”, and “context” meaning “ground”) which obtrude most strongly, which demand attention most clearly, which seem most likely to go wrong.  We cannot do better than this.  If there were some intrinsic way of reducing the list of requirements to a few, this would mean in essence that we were in possession of a field description of the context: if this were so, the problem of creating fit would become trivial, and no longer a problem of design.  We cannot have a unitary or field description of a context and still have a design problem worth attention. ”

- Christopher Alexander

—–

Having taken a seat to one side, Vacchagotta the wanderer said to the Master, ‘Now then, Venerable Gotama, is there a self?’ When this was said, the Master was silent.

‘Then is there no self?’ For a second time the Master was silent.

Then Vacchagotta the wanderer got up from his seat and left.

Then, not long after Vacchagotta the wanderer had left, the Venerable Ananda said to the Master, ‘Why, sir, did the Master not answer when asked a question asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer?’

‘Ananda, if I, being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is a self, were to answer that there is a self, that would be conforming with those brahmans & contemplatives who are exponents of eternalism (i.e., the view that there is an eternal soul). And if I… were to answer that there is no self, that would be conforming with those brahmans & contemplatives who are exponents of annihilationism (i.e., that death is the annihilation of experience). If I… were to answer that there is a self, would that be in keeping with the arising of knowledge that all phenomena are not-self?

‘No, Lord.’

‘And if I… were to answer that there is no self, the bewildered Vacchagotta would become even more bewildered: “Does the self which I used to have, now not exist?”‘

— S XLIV.10

—–

Everything, without exception, all sound logic as well as all historical data, reveal and affirm that God represents absolute goodness; He is all-loving and all-forgiving. He is the just pacifier of all that exists.

At the same time why should He, being as He is, send away from Himself one of His nearest, by Him animated, beloved sons, only for the “way of pride” proper to any young and still incompletely formed individual, and bestow upon him a force equal but opposite to His own? . . . I refer to the “Devil.”

This idea illuminated the condition of my inner world like the sun, and rendered it obvious that in the great world for the possibility of harmonious construction there was inevitably required some kind of continuous perpetuation of the reminding factor.

For this reason our Maker Himself, in the name of all that He had created, was compelled to place one of His beloved sons in such an, in the objective sense, invidious situation.

Therefore I also have now for my small inner world to create out of myself, from some factor beloved by me, an alike unending source.

- Gurdjieff (PDF)

—–

¹¹ Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. ¹² The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

¹³ “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. ¹⁴ After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵ So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. ¹⁶ He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

¹⁷ “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! ¹⁸ I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. ¹⁹ I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ ²⁰ So he got up and went to his father.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

²¹ “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

²² “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³ Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴ For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

²⁵ “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶ So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ²⁷ ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’

²⁸ “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. ²⁹ But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. ³⁰ But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’

³¹ “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. ³² But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

Luke 15:11-32

—–

Eckhart Tolle – Did the universe make a mistake with the ego?

—–

Dukkha – Etymology

The early Western translators of Buddhist texts (prior to the 1970s) translated the Pali term dukkha as “suffering” and conveyed the impression that Buddhism was a pessimistic or world-denying philosophy. Later translators, however, including Walpola Rahula (What Buddha Taught, 1974) and nearly all contemporary translators, have emphasized that “suffering” is too limited a translation for the term dukkha, and have preferred to either leave the term untranslated or to clarify that translation with terms such as unease, anxiety, stress, dissatisfaction, disquietude, etc.

Rupert Gethin explains:

Rich in meaning and nuance, the word duḥkha is one of the basic terms of Buddhist and other Indian religious discourse. Literally ‘pain’ or ‘anguish’, in its religious and philosophical contexts duḥkha is, however, suggestive of an underlying sense of ‘unsatisfactoriness’ or ‘unease’ that must ultimately mar even our experience of happiness.

On the deepest level, dukkha suggests a basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all forms of life because all forms of life are impermanent and constantly changing. Dukkha indicates a lack of satisfaction, a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards.

Sargeant (2009: p. 303) explains the historical roots of duḥkha and its antonym sukha:

It is perhaps amusing to note the etymology of the words sukha (pleasure, comfort, bliss) and duḥkha (misery, unhappiness, pain). The ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning “sky,” “ether,” or “space,” was originally the word for “hole,” particularly an axle hole of one of the Aryan’s vehicles. Thus sukha … meant, originally, “having a good axle hole,” while duhkha meant “having a poor axle hole,” leading to discomfort.

According to grammatical tradition, dukkha is derived from dus-kha “uneasy”, but according to Monier-Williams more likely a Prakritized form of dus-stha “unsteady, disquieted”. The Sanskrit prefix ‘su’ is used as an emphasis suggesting wholesome, high, evolved, desirable, strong and such.

Cheat sheet:

The main points here:

1) Suffering is caused by a bad fit between “self” and “context”.  The best way to achieve good fit is to find a bad fit and negate it.  The negation of a bad fit requires attention.

2) Growth is possible, required, preferable to no growth, and necessary for harmonious construction.  Such growth requires constant attention, and constant attention requires a constant reminding factor.

3) In an ever-changing world, good fit is indistinguishable from growth.  A good metaphor for this is a smooth axle wheel making for a good ride.

4) No attention = bad fit = bad ride.  When attention gets stuck on anything, it is a bad fit.

So, if there were a spatial formula which would explain in detail how to make living space, it would fail, because, by virtue of being a formula, it could not succeed in treating each place as unique.

But there is a formula of living process. If you pay attention to the wholeness, intensify it, intensify it some more – gradually then it becomes unique.”

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there, than in your own house: Till you remember how lately you were made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it : and more rejoice in the palace of your glory, than if it had been made but to-day morning.

Yet further, you never enjoy the world aright; till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it, that you had rather suffer the flames of Hell than willingly be guilty of their error. There is so much blindness and ingratitude and damned folly in it. The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before. It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said “God is here, and I wist it not. How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the House of God, and the Gate of Heaven”.

I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet,
and I have come to you.
I am with you..
After long years, of long wondering,
I have come to you, again.Should I tell you, everything I have seen?
Experienced? or drank in?
or do you not want to hear,
about the noise of life and the world.But one thing you must know,
the one thing I have learned,
is that one must live his life..
This life is the way,
the long sought after way,
to the unfathomable which we call divine.

There is no other way.
All other ways, are false paths.
So I found the right way,
to let it let me to you, to my soul.

I’ve returned, tempted and purified.
Do you still know me?
How long, the separation lasted.
Everything has come so different.

And how did I find you?
How strange my journey was.
What words should I use to tell you,
on what twisted path a good star has guided me to you.

Give me your hand,
My almost forgotten soul.
How long, the joy, at seeing you again.
You long disappointed soul.
Life has let me back to you.
Let us thank the life I have lived,
for all the happy, and all the sad hours,
For every joy, for every sadness.

My soul, my journey,
should continue with you..
I will wonder with you,
and ascend to my solitude..”

~ Carl G. Jung

This has long been a favorite BK quote of mine. What it points to, a bit humorously, is the cold-blooded, unflinchingly consistent, non-negotiable fact that REALITY trumps “your thoughts ABOUT reality” every single time.

In a moment of insight, she saw the inherent beauty in how consistent and impersonal this “law of the universe” is: “Oh, I see… when I believe my thoughts, I suffer. When I don’t, I don’t suffer.”

It’s not about trying to change your thoughts or get rid of them. Rather, it is simply no longer believing/taking seriously/buying whatever story or scenario the thought is trying to “sell” you on.

-Michael Jeffreys

and yet…

I was listening to an interview with Byron Katie today during my run and she said that one of the things that happened during her awakening, was that she suddenly began to have loving compassion for her THOUGHTS.

Instead of viewing them as “the enemy,” she began to see them much like a mother sees a child who is misguided; with compassion, love and an open heart. And so when a thought arose that said, “I want everyone to like me.” Her response was now a genuinely compassionate: “Of course you do, dear, of course!” It’s amazing what loving your thoughts, versus trying to stop them or change them, will do.

And once she was able to love them as they were (the idea of being “mean” to them suddenly was tantamount to mean to one’s own child!), she was able to see that in fact they were simply one tiny perspective, and not the truth, or the way things “really are.” That no thought was inherently true. And so this is why “questioning every thought” became the core of her teaching, THE WORK.

-Michael Jeffreys

The fact that both of these are true and necessary is not something often something I hear said, but either side without the other is, I think, unhealthy.

“But what about those in need? How does this message work for a starving child? What good does it do for the world out there?? What about the wars, the pollution, the rape, the killing, the abuse? And what about those that murder? Should they be told to follow their highest joy as well?”

If you’d really care about all those people you use so eagerly in your imaginations to excuse yourself from having to look at yourself right here, right now and apply the teachings FOR YOURSELF, you’d stop caring about them… <<Read the previous sentence again before continuing.

Let it sink in: “If you would TRULY care about other people, you would stop caring about – or being concerned for – them.”

For that is the only way to help anyone: to be more fully awake to the causeless joy that is YOU, and to be less obsessed with, and aware of: ‘other people’s problems’. The more you are concerned with ‘others’, the less you help the world change into a higher frequency version of itself.

More world-consciousness = More misery for everyone.
Less world-consciousness = A better world within no-time.

Trust me, or don’t, but at least stop abusing those imaginary people you pretend to care so much about just to serve your own need to hide behind your fears and excuses.

Take responsibility by letting everyone be taken care of by their own highest good and intelligence. You get in tune with yours, live with integrity, self-awareness and enjoy the permission to forget about other people’s welfare.

In this self-fulfillment, you will naturally become a better person and a greater force of Light anyway. It’s the only way to help anyone. You don’t really care about ‘them’ anyway, so stop using them simply because you are comfortable living behind the walls of your fear and pretense. Don’t pervert their innocence. They have nothing to do with this moment, so leave them out of your games and don’t use ‘those out there’ as a way to hide from yourself.

Simply be most authentically your true Self and compassion will naturally arise IN THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT ACTUALLY APPEAR WITHIN YOUR FIELD OF CONSCIOUSNESS RIGHT HERE AND NOW. Anything that doesn’t immediately occur to your direct experience, doesn’t need your care and attention! If you’re meant to go to africa to feed babies or stop murderers, YOU WILL. If you’re not there now, THEN YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT IT.

The longer you keep projecting this ‘disastrous world full of suffering’ outside of your immediate field of perception, the more your energy field embodies a powerful negative quality and emanation (even if you think you’re doing it out of the right intentions) that energy will actually perpetuate that reality outside of yourself. Everything is energy, so simply check what type of energy you are experiencing within yourself right now, for that is what you are sending out into the world.

By pretending to care so much about ‘them’ and wasting all your time and energy on worry, concern and a taught, innocent, yet false sense of righteousness, you’re actually perpetuating the very state that ‘they’ appear to be in. As such, you’re not helping them by pulling them into the equation of these teachings, you’re actually one of the perpetrators and officers of their condition. Yep! I’m not kidding.

You are killing people by pretending to be concerned for those that are being killed. You are raping people by wasting your energy imagining there are those out there who are being raped.

A better world starts with your energy changing to a joyful, loving, care-free one. Care/Concern = fear-energy, IT IS NOT LOVE. Let me repeat, for society has told you differently for many many years:

*** Care = Fear | Love = Care-Free ***

Break free from the spell of pretense that you care about anyone but yourself. Then, you’ll find a care that is based in honesty, Self-Awareness, presence, love and self-responsibility, not in abusive imaginations labeled ‘care and concern for a world I don’t see at the moment but have been told is somewhere out there that I should worry about all the time. I don’t deserve my own attention and happiness until I fix the world’.

Keep your attention on yourself at all times. You’re not responsible for anyone else’s highest good. Stop imposing your fear-based beliefs unto their paths. Stop interfering with what they need and desire to experience.

If you wish to help, you have to be an example of a higher frequency of being altogether, which can only establish itself if you stay awake and present to your immediate Self, with trust, love, joy and acceptance. It cannot come about through awareness of projections of ‘others and their problems out there’. Forget about the world. Its the only way to transform it.

What energy are you sending out into the universe RIGHT NOW within yourself? What are you feeling, creating and being energetically right NOW?

And NOW?

And NOW?

And NOW?

And NOW?

Stay with you, leave ‘them’ alone.

♥

(from a Facebook group)

Then check this:

“‘The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts,’ says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

Time and space, according to Einstein’s theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called ‘space-time.’ The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple.

If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space in 2004 to check.

The idea behind the experiment is simple:

Put a spinning gyroscope into orbit around the Earth, with the spin axis pointed toward some distant star as a fixed reference point. Free from external forces, the gyroscope’s axis should continue pointing at the star–forever. But if space is twisted, the direction of the gyroscope’s axis should drift over time. By noting this change in direction relative to the star, the twists of space-time could be measured.

In practice, the experiment is tremendously difficult.

‘GP-B researchers had to invent whole new technologies to make this possible,’ notes Will.

They developed a ‘drag free’ satellite that could brush against the outer layers of Earth’s atmosphere without disturbing the gyros. They figured out how to keep Earth’s magnetic field from penetrating the spacecraft. And they created a device to measure the spin of a gyro–without touching the gyro. More information about these technologies may be found in the Science@NASA story ‘A Pocket of Near-Perfection.’

Pulling off the experiment was an exceptional challenge. But after a year of data-taking and nearly five years of analysis, the GP-B scientists appear to have done it.

‘We measured a geodetic precession of 6.600 plus or minus 0.017 arcseconds and a frame dragging effect of 0.039 plus or minus 0.007 arcseconds,’ says Everitt.

For readers who are not experts in relativity: Geodetic precession is the amount of wobble caused by the static mass of the Earth (the dimple in spacetime) and the frame dragging effect is the amount of wobble caused by the spin of the Earth (the twist in spacetime). Both values are in precise accord with Einstein’s predictions.”

The point?  It seems that aiming for “perfection” while within a gravity well (gravity being attraction at a distance) will always fail unless the course is corrected with constant movement.  I don’t mean the science “proves” anything “spiritual”, rather that it proves something inherent about physical reality that is an excellent metaphor for spiritual reality.  Our myths must grow to match our understanding of the universe, after all…

It is that awareness of anything requires tension.  Without tension, awareness just is, there is no registration of anything on any level.

But to say that “you” don’t exist is to still equate “you” with tension.  You are not tension.  You are complete tensionlessness.  But perhaps you are tenionlessness that can make use of tension, if tension is not rejected.

Tension here might be the same as (or similar to) holding, resistance, dukha, projections, etc…

There is nothing wrong with tension.  It is OK when it happens.  But there is a way of no tension, and tension cannot experience it.

The “you” that is tension is simply a sensation that passed through your awareness that accidentally got held onto.

Tension is not the problem, ignorance of tension is the problem.  But ignorance and tension are actually the same thing.  Being free of ignorance is being free of tension.

“By my counting, the first occurred when mankind learned to plant and harvest, so ending the nomadic age of the hunter-gatherer, who perforce spent most of his time, at least during long parts of the year, in pursuit of food.

“The farmer, as we have come to think of these first revolutionaries, was able by his husbandry to feed himself and several others, freeing those from the need to feed themselves. They turned to making things – spades for the garden, buckets and bowls for the house, chariots and ships in which to explore the world. They began to write and record, to frame laws and to protect large areas from their enemies.

“Many must have mourned the loss of a simpler, more innocent existence; indeed, the story of the garden of Eden may reflect this; but the change broadened mankind, the population grew and spread. There was no chance of return.

“The second great change occurred around the end of the eighteenth century when we learned to make things not with hand-held tools but with machines. In truth, the change was a gradual one; garment-making machines, though hand-powered, pre-date the pyramids and many examples can be found in Roman times of large-scale industry. So perhaps the essential element in what we call the industrial revolution was the invention of steam power, which not only provided the engines for industry but also the power for transport. The energy in coal replaced the energy in wind.

“Again, population leapt, again men travelled far more, again larger territories were defended, again men came to long for an arcadian past which existed more in fantasy than in truth, but the simple items of our daily life, the furnishings of our dwellings, became immensely more abundant. Many more were freed by this profusion to lead more contemplative, studious lives in our universities to the eventual benefit of the advance of science.

“So we come to the third great change which is seen to be upon us, the second industrial revolution as it may be. Partly this is concerned with the replacement of people in factories by robots and computers. Partly, it is the leap made possible in the manipulation and transmission of information. Wholly it is down to the computer in one way or another and once again millions of people will be freed by the change to adopt other pursuits.

“From a positive viewpoint they are free from the drudgery of the mill. Negatively and realistically they are unemployed and very miserable. This is a sad consequence and we are not so able to manage our affairs to prevent it but it is a temporary pattern, I believe, caused by the incredibly rapid loss of manufacturing employment. Where in the 1940s 50 percent of people worked in factories, not 10 percent will work only half a century later. This revolution will broaden horizons as much as the other two.

“This, then, is one way of looking at the way we live that is current and becoming popular. It is probably reasonable but if we focus on an analogy with the industrial revolution, we will miss a much more dramatic analogy. Instead of looking back centuries and millennia for a comparison with our times, I would draw you back a million times further into the past than the beginnings of civilisation.

“Four thousand million years ago, when the universe was only half the size it is now and the solar system only five million years old, a singular thing happened – life. By some ineluctable process in the primordial soup, stirred by fierce cosmic rays and bolts of lightning, carbon compounds of strange complexity formed and re-formed, growing in subtlety until they came to transmute sunlight and to replicate. For a billion years, these first bacteria, so mysteriously conjured, clumping together to form living reefs called stromatolites, were the only life. Yet three billion years later they evolved into mankind.

“I said that the event that started this process was singular and so, for all we know, it was. So it will long remain. All life is carbon-based and carbon is exceptional in the variety of compounds to which it leads, providing organisms with a rich choice of building materials. If we ever discover life on other planets we would not be surprised to find it similarly based on carbon but it might not be so.

“When I was a boy I read science fiction stories and in those days a common theme was the discovery of a life form strangely different from ours. A popular idea was for life based not on carbon compounds but on silicon on the grounds, I believe, that silicon, too, can form a wealth of products, many of them physically useful. Soon, I suggest, those stories will seem strangely prescient, for silicon-base life will exist. It will not have emerged from millions of years of trial and error in energetic protoplasm but from a mere century or less of man’s endeavour. I am suggesting that the path the silicon-based electronics industry is on will lead to life.

“The human brain contains, I am told, 10 thousand million cells and each of these may have a thousand connections. Such enormous numbers used to daunt us and cause us to dismiss the possibility of making a machine with human-like ability but now we have grown used to moving forward at such a pace we can be less sure.  Soon, in only 10 or 20 years perhaps, we will be able to assemble a machine as complex as the human brain and if we can we will. It may then take us a long time to render it intelligent by loading in the proper software or by altering the architecture but that, too, will happen.

“I think it certain that in decades, not centuries, machines of silicon will arise first to rival and then surpass their human progenitors. Once they surpass us they will be capable of their own design. In a real sense they will be reproductive. Silicon will have ended carbon’s long monopoly – and ours too, I suppose, for we will no longer be able to deem ourselves the finest intelligence in the known universe. In principle it could be stopped; there will be those who try but it will happen nonetheless. The lid of Pandora’s box is starting to open.

“Let us look a little closer to the present. By the end of this decade manufacturing decline will be almost complete, with employment in manufacturing industries less than 10 percent in Britain. The goods are still needed but, as with agriculture already, imports and technical change will virtually remove all employment.

“Talk of information technology may be misleading. It is true that one of the features of the coming years is the dramatic fall, perhaps by a factor of 100, in the cost of publishing as video disc technology replaces paper and this may be as significant as the invention of the written word and Caxton’s introduction of movable type.

“Talk of information technology confuses an issue – it is used to mean people handling information rather than handling machines and there is little that is fundamental in this. The real revolution which is just starting is one of intelligence. Electronics is replacing man’s mind, just as steam replaced man’s muscle but the replacement of the slight intelligence employed on the production line is only the start.

“The Japanese, with the ICOT program, are aiming to make computers dealing with concepts rather than numbers with thousands of times more power than current large machines. This has triggered a swift and powerful response in the American nation. There is a large joint programme of development among leading U.S. computer companies; it is at least as large as [the] DARPA program and IBM, though it says nothing, may have the biggest programme of all.

“These projects are aimed at what are loosely termed fifth-generation computers. These really are a new breed of machine entirely and will be as different from today’s computers as today’s computer is from an adding machine. Powerful as these new engines will be, they will not remain inordinately expensive, thanks to the progress of the semiconductor industry. Once available they will start to replace human intelligence at ever higher levels of abstraction.

“The simple microprocessor provides sufficient intelligence for current assembly line robots. As robots learn to see and feel, their brains will grow. Eventually, and not too far in the future, they will make decisions on the production line currently delegated to a supervisor.

“Outside the factory we employ men’s minds in two principal ways, as fonts of knowledge and as makers of decisions. The former of these attributes is now falling prey to the machine with the  development of ‘expert systems’ whereby the acquired knowledge of a man, an expert in mining for example, is made to repose in the memory of a computer. The transfer of data from human to machine is neither easy nor swift but, once attained, it may be copied at will and broadcast. A formerly scarce resource can thus become plentiful.

“The ability to reach wise conclusions, as we expect of a doctor or lawyer, from much or scant data will long remain man’s monopoly but not always. Fifth-generation computers will share this prerogative. Tomorrow we may take our ailments to a machine as readily as to a man. In time that machine will be in the house, removing the need for a journey to the doctor and providing a far more regular monitoring of the state of health than it is now economic to provide.

“The computer as surrogate teacher may bring even more benefits. Today, and as long as we depend on humans, we must have one teacher to many pupils. The advantage of a tutor for each child is clear and if that tutor is also endlessly patient and superhumanly well-informed we may expect a wonderful improvement in the standard of education.

“What, though, is the purpose if, in this imagined future, there are no jobs? Curiously we can find analogies in the past. Freemen of Periclean Athens led not such different lives as we might live, for where we will have the machines, they had slaves who served both to teach and as menials. Thanks, perhaps, to their fine education, the freemen of Athens seem not to have found difficulty in filling their time. Just as they did, we will need to educate our children to an appreciation of the finer things of life, to inculcate a love of art, music and science. So we may experience an age as golden as that of Greece.

“Machines will be capable of replacing men in tasks requiring complex motor functions. Strangely I think it may be easier to make a machine to teach mathematics or Latin than to make one play tennis, for the latter task calls for an astonishingly fine and rapid prediction and decision, coupled to precise action, but still it can and will be done. Not to relieve us of the pleasure of playing games but to relieve us of the monotony and danger of nearly as complex a task, that of driving a car.

“We took to cars for the freedom they conferred to travel from any one place to another at any time, secure from the elements. We have paid a price in the mortality of our peoples and the pollution of our lands. We have chosen to restrain these remarkable vehicles to much less than half the speeds they could readily attain to mitigate these two evils.

“The future promises a better solution. I anticipate totally automatic personal vehicles with all the freedom in space and time of today’s cars but guided by machine intelligence. They will be powered by electricity drawn from internal batteries in towns and on minor roads and from a main supply of the highways, possibly coupled inductively into the vehicle. These latter-day cars will be well nigh silent and clean but, above all, free from human fallibility. They need not then be restricted to 55 or 70 mph on main roads. Speeds of more than 200mph should be safely and economically possible.

“Magnetic levitation might replace wheels with advantages in the quality of ride, in silence and in the longevity of the vehicle which, having no moving parts, would need no regular servicing. It is entirely possible that the performance of these vehicles will become such as to obsolete aircraft for all but the longest journeys and those over water.

“The linking of the telephone to ever more sophisticated computing machinery is leading to major improvements in the service available. The latest of these is the cellular radio system of communication now growing in this and certain other American cities. I see this as a partial solution to the general problem of permitting people to telephone one another, no matter when or where. It is but temporary economic restraint, not technical fundament, which bars us from the logical conclusion of truly personal telephones. Carried on or about the person, these wireless devices would allow us to telephone and be telephoned wherever we choose. I would not need to know the whereabouts of the person I was calling – only his number, since this would be particular to him wherever he was, instead of a fixed instrument as is usual now.

“I believe this is achievable by an extension of the cellular principle in area and capacity, the latter requiring a much finer granularity of the system. That is to say the controlling transceivers will need to be far more closely spaced.

“It often seems that each new step in technology brings misery rather than contentment but this is because it brings change faster than benefits, and change, though often stimulating, is always disturbing. So it is and will be with the intelligence revolution but here the benefits to come handsomely outweigh the trauma. Even our most intractable problems may prove soluble.

“Consider, for example, the imprisonment of offenders. Unless conducted with a biblical sense of retribution, this procedure attempts to reduce crime by deterrence and containment. It is, though, very expensive and the rate of recidivism lends little support to its curative properties.

“Given a national telephone / computer net such as I have described briefly, an alternative appears. Less than physically dangerous criminals could be fitted with tiny transponders so that their whereabouts, to a high degree of precision, could be monitored and recorded constantly. Should this raise fears of an Orwellian society we could offer miscreants the alternative of imprisonment. I am confident of the general preference.

“Intelligent robots will also help to care for the elderly who might even find companionship. Sleeplessly vigilant, the robot could provide for normal physical needs and watch for medical problems. As the intelligence of robots increases to emulate that of humans and as their cost declines through economies of scale, we may use them to expand our frontiers, first on Earth through their ability to withstand environments inimical to ourselves. Thus, deserts may bloom and the ocean beds be mined.

“Further ahead, by a combination of the great wealth this new age will bring and the technology it will provide, we can really begin to use space to our advantage. The construction of a vast, man-created world in space, home to thousands or millions of people, will be within our power and, should we so choose, we may begin in earnest the search for worlds beyond our solar system and the colonisation of the galaxy.”

(given in 1984 to the U.S. Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, and published in the UK in the August edition of ‘Sinclair User’ magazine that year, by ECC Publications, ISSN 0262-5458.)

I’d say attachment to buddhism liberates itself when one is sincere in practice. When the time is right the practice unfolds and destroys itself but until then it isn’t smart to unattach to buddhism, especially right view (Three marks, Four noble truths, Etc)

Many tend to follow this trend of anti intellectualism or anti concepts. This awareness practice is important but it shouldn’t negate view and intelligence. As that would be a reaction against our minds.

And some even create a split between mind and heart. If we are overly intellectual we cannot feel and vice versa. I would highly suggest examining why the heart and mind cannot communicate to one another and why we need an illusory split.

With regards to attachment as a whole. Letting go practice is important and in a way the whole practice is about letting go from the gross to the subtle. But its important to realize that it is insight or realization that brings about the letting go. Not the letting go forced by us. That forced letting go turns quickly into dissociative practice where we avoid everything. Imho that is an incorrect practice and can lead one towards a heavy form of Nihilism.

So letting go is a gradual process that happens when we allow phenomena to penetrate our hearts. We do this by holding right view and exploring our experience, good or bad.

And the greatest thing we can realize is that everything is already letting go. We just need to get out of the way. We just need to stop running, stop attaching.

And in many ways letting go doesn’t bring final resolve. Everything that we can experience or have experienced will stay with us forever in the mandala. Because our pain isn’t just ours but it is the pain that we all share. Our joy isn’t just our joy but it is the joy we all share. It is the lessons we learn in both and the commonality of both that we can finally learn to hold both in our hearts and to know peace simultaneously.

(from The Open Door)

Images. Presence plays with form,
fleeing and hiding as the sky does in water,
now one place, now nowhere.

Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.

I love the rose that is not a rose,
but the second I try to speak it, any name
for God becomes so-and-so, and vanishes.

What you thought to draw lifts off the paper,
as what you love slips from your heart.

- Rumi

(thanks to a friend’s Facebook feed)