"It is always about you and your body."

"It is always about you and your body.
It's how you see yourself, and as a result, how you see the rest of the world.
The body dictates everything. It's where it all starts.
What you can make it do. What you can make it endure. How quick you can be. How precise. How quiet, and strong, and flexible, and still. It is the one tool you always have at your disposal, no matter where you travel, the one weapon...
It is at the heart of everything you do, and you must be able to trust it completely.
The body.
This is what it takes."

- Critical Space, by Greg Rucka

My wife may need a hobby...

As she insists that we now have a pet dog.

And his name is Bijou.

These are pictures of him.

I worry about my wife sometimes.

Enkai

Enkai - work/group related dinner/drinking party - is where folks tend to loosen up... They usually have them a couple times a year, the beginning and end, graduations, after special events and the like.

So there was one after the Bunkasai. And much eating and drinking was done by all.

The staff of Tsuyazaki Jr High were all suitably impressed that I had managed to learn the names of all the teachers.

Yes, expectations are low for the foreigners here.

Disclaimer: Despite my wife's assertions, I personally do not feel that the liberal consumption of alcohol that evening had anything at all to do with my crash on my bike later on that night. Or the resultant sprained wrist incurred.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Bunkasai

Bunkasai, or culture/art festival, last weekend at Tsuyazaki Jr High. Pretty cool actually. The kids wrote and performed plays/skits, sang, danced, did traditional Japanese drumming [taiko], had a brass band performance... all pretty cool.

During lunch some out of school groups came in and performed... including a talented acapella group and, I kid you not, a bunch of breakdancers.

Japan has a pretty deep and abiding love of/fascination with urban African American culture circa 1985 or so. These guys knocked out routines that were, I swear to god, like watching Rerun off of "What's Happening!" Love for the old-school b-boys and b-girls.

And then the whole thing at the end of the day was closed out with a bunch of these guys dancing with the students onstage.

That's right. The Japanese culture fair was finished off by breakdancers.

The pics didn't come out so great [dark-ish auditorium] but here they are.

Become Something More

Alchemical Braindamage:

"...getting the shit you want doesn't matter. Not yet anyway. For most people, getting the things you want is like a heroin addict getting a fix. It's only useful insofar as it shows you how far you're prepared to go to get your latest hookup. Save yourself the hassle and go watch Requiem for a Dream, and come back to me.

It's by far more beneficial to go ahead and do things, but pay more attention to the evolving process of your own will, as it begins to purify itself. This purification process, along with all the other skills I've been sharing, lay the groundwork for the biggest piece of alchemical heavy lifting you're likely to attempt on my watch. The statements of intent, the willingness to commit yourself, the cleansing of external influences, the freedom to express your will, even if it's just to yourself. The cultivation of concentration, and a symbolic scaffold to hold the mind together under stress, as you explore and integrate aspects of the unconscious. This is all going somewhere.

This is the invocation of your inner genius, your daimon, your true will, your spirit guide, the holy guardian angel.

...when you're able to open this channel of communication, you are utterly transfigured.

This happening is not as rare as you might suppose. What is rare is undergoing it consciously. Usually what happens is someone gets 'abducted by aliens' or talks to the archangel gabriel, or has some kind of profound visionary experience and then marches off in a transformed state, but having unconscious contact through a symbolic intermediary, carries the traces of that distortion. In many cases various kind of madness and general flakiness ensue.

Not that you can dispense with the symbolic intermediary altogether mind you, that's what we spent the last couple episodes on after all. But if you selected and built the map yourself, and you know it's just made up, you won't commit the cardinal sin of postmodernism: mistaking the map for the territory. ie: if you made the filter, you won't make yourself over in the image of your filter. That's just embarrassing and pitiful.

...What happens to most people who experience this, is for some reason or other that crisis of discontinuity builds up in the deep mind, created by contradictions, fuelled by intense emotions or mystical experiences. At some point the disassociated self images rip loose and force a communication with with the frontal mind, sometimes in a highly allegorical and symbolic fashion. It will present itself in a way that may not be factually accurate, but easier to accept than the truth. Doing it the way I've presented here should sidestep those problems. It'll be slower and probably less dramatic, but you've have the benefit of presence of mind and some influence over the content.

In many traditions it is said that before this process is undergone that all acts of magick are inevitably poisoned by the cravings of the ego. You would simply be feeding the hungry ghosts in your head. There's no guarantee your higher self is less egotistical than you are now, but you will almost certainly find that beyond a certain point your concerns will blend naturally into the universal, the profound, the archetypal and the idealistic.

Some folk may have doubts there is such a thing as a higher self. That humans are what we are and we should just learn to accept it. That idealizing some new form of life is just a pretext to judge and reject others and promote some kind of fascist fantasy trip.

But maybe it's just growing up. Maybe it's just learning to take responsibility for all the powers we really have, instead of judging us all for the actions of a few. Maybe it's possible to have bigger hearts, stronger minds, broader shoulders. Maybe it's possible to be an example and not an object lesson. Maybe it's possible to ask more of ourselves and let others do as they please. Perhaps we can quit being ashamed of what we are, or what we're not, and start making some tentative steps towards something we can hardly imagine right now.

Maybe you can live without excuses, without doubts, without pointless resentments, confusion and fear. Maybe you don't really need that stuff as much as you seem to think you do.

If you've been reading my stuff for a while now, or any of the links in my sidebar, you are hopefully not simply crushed by the weight of the problems in the world today. It's easy to look at the tidal waves of corruption, filth, murder and deceit, and throw up your hands, to turn back to your own concerns and leave the world to fend for itself. That's natural. We're only human after all. And these things seem so far beyond the grasp of any normal human being. The path of the mystic is to rest in the unchanging. To accept the ebbs and flows of impermanence. To treat all things as the will of god.

But the path of the magus is different. You are a part of nature, you can change things, you do have influence, and you don't need to be afraid to use it. Your will is as valid as any other. You will is just as much an expression of god as any other. To do nothing, to do anything. The same. To retire to your cave or transfigure the earth. The same.

...So maybe the solution to our 'human' failings is to become something more."

Those who repeat their history are doomed to know it.

Alchemical Braindamage:

"...You want to understand your future? Do you even understand your present? It's right here after all. Take a good look. Do you understand that?

No? How about the past? It's not even happening anymore. It's all over and done with. No moving parts. All the information is there. How about it?

I didn't think so. What I'm getting at here, besides my usual tactic of browbeating my readers, is that you're not really looking to understand some temporal junction. You're looking to understand yourself. Your reaction, your perceptions, your meaning to things. Even if I handed you deadly accurate facts about the future, all of it is going to interpreted in terms of it's relevance to you, in this moment."

What the Martial Arts Community is usually like...

Alchemical Braindamage:

"I belong to a japanese organisation call the bujinkan. It is the commercial shell for 9 schools of traditional japanese budo, the oldest of which is 1100 years old. It's sorta like belonging to a club where 90% of the people are clueless ninja wanna be geeks, 9% are quality martial artists, and 1% are mindblowing warrior shamanistic types, who are all very dangerous and slightly insane."

Symbolic systems...

Alchemical Braindamage:

"...a couple more points on the last installment relating to concentration: why it works, how it works and why it's hazardous.

It helps to think of the mind as a kind of ecology full of all kinds of conflicting impulses, beliefs, concepts, and emotional perspectives on things. This whole ecology is sustained more or less by the attention/energy you give it. In practice you can treat energy and attention as the same thing. In truth one follows the other so closely they might as well be the same.

Now attention has ( at least ) two aspects to it, and they can both be trained. Breadth and depth. Most of us have no problem with a extremely wide and diverse breadth of attention. We maintain views on the whole universe after all. Or we think we do anyway. Most of us have a lot less practice maintaining attention in depth. To do that requires holding the focus in a single place for long periods and if you've not had a lot of experience with that, it can be highly uncomfortable. The thing to remember though, is the depth of our attention is also the depth of the well of energy we can tap. Very shallow very superficial attention = very shallow and superficial supplies of energy.

So, going back to our ecology metaphor. We tend not to notice the contradiction and conflicts in our mental ecology because we rarely, if ever, probe deep enough into it to notice them. That, and since the supply of energy is so shallow, nothing in that ecology ever really gets big and fat enough to cause problems in the whole system. With deeper concentration that can change fast. You may find that tapping into a much larger supply of energy can feed some or all of your weird internal aberrations to grotesque levels. This is why I recommended highly that you consciously and deliberately direct that deepened faculty of attention into things you enjoy, and useful skills. That, combined with the mental housecleaning in the other parts should keep you out of trouble provided you are mostly sane and stable to begin with.

What you do not want is to turn your new willpower that can crush diamonds and use it to probe the tattered edges of your self esteem, or nurse old grudges, or tear apart the last remanants of your existing ontology. At least not until you've taken the time to craft a new one. Feeding those subjects a massively increased fund of energy will send you round the bend right quick. I'm willing to bet most of you have had difficulties in this area already, even without the help of intense mind power. So it helps to exercise a little restraint, and to have a nice durable map to guide that new wand of yours with.

Now there are no shortage of maps these days, and no shortage of fodder to make new ones. This is the gift of postmodernism after all. We have the god given right to shred anything placed in front of us to expose it's inherent flaws and contradictions. It's unweildly excesses and unverifiable pronouncements. We feel good and calm in the act of doing this. We feel the rightness of it.

...We think we're defending the holy right to overturn dogma and ask 'the tough questions' as if no one had ever done that before. What you need to understand, particularly under the circumstances I've described above, is that you really will benefit from having a map that doesn't get shredded. At least not by you.

...We tend to have this neurotic thing about the 'real truth' as if nothing is acceptable except the naked reality of things. Problem is, if that's all you'll settle for, you'll most likely end up chewing your wrists open in short order. For the time being, you need to learn to suspend your ruthless cutting apart of the ground beneath your feet and use a model of reality, not because it's the 'real thing' but because it works. And you need to learn to filter things through that map. Not all the time, but when you have to, because sometimes you will have to. Sometimes you will need to to have a framework there to interpret something, or you will freak right the fuck out. The rest of the time you can happily just sit in the unknowingness of the grand mystery of whatever the popular buzzword is these days, as long as you have a nice serviceable symbolic order to fall back on.

There is a part of your mind that really really needs to be able to define and encapsulate your relationship to the word around you, as a means of handling stress. It doesn't need to be all that convincing or comprehensive a definition, it could be patently absurd. But having a good definition, one that leaves you lots of room to maneuver, to make revisions, interpretations, even to rip out and replace chunks, is a lot better than simply assimilating christian theology as a subconscious safety net, which is probably what a lot of you are doing right now. If it's not that, it's gonna be something. The problem isn't being stuck without a net. The problem is being stuck with a shitty net that you're not consciously aware of, that won't take the strain of what you're doing, and will rip under pressure. If that happens, then my friend, you are truly FUCKED.

Don't underestimate the benefits of a symbol system to fall back on. Even if on some level, you know it's arbitrary. It's better that way, anyhow."

Suck it up

Alchemical Braindamage:

"I mean, how pitiful is it that almost nobody can just kind of sit with the feeling of being an autonomous authority? We all go through a phase of thinking we're the center of the universe, but rather than integrate it into a healthy psyche, while acknowledging the limitations of that view in functional terms, we instead are taught to recoil in horror at anyone who dares to ignore the consensus and social norms.

And all you so called 'non-conformists' can shut the fuck up right now. I can see you acting all smug about how liberal/anarchist/discordian and 'deprogrammed' you are, but chances are all you do is bounce off the programming other people have in utterly predictable fashion. You're perfectly willing to be hateful, narrow minded, exclusionary and prejudicial in your own ways, as long you get enough support from your peer group. Let me give you a hint: if you say you're 'against' anything, or you define your life in terms of changing something about the world around you, you're as robotic as the next idiot, so sit down and shut up. The door is always there if you're feeling the need to assert yourself a little bit.

But anyway. Regardless of your background, it's pretty likely the idea of being a law unto yourself is going to call forth stereotypical images of moralistic horror, like seeing yourself smeared in feces, sodomising homeless children over the kitchen table, whilst reading passages out of Mein Kampf.

...If you really need to know what the intent behind my last rant was, then here ya go...
- to give you an particularly vigorous and confrontational variation on the banishing ritual.
- for those of you sufficiently able to roll with that, you may have caught a glimpse of an unconditioned and autonomous sense of will.
- for those of you who didn't, that perhaps gives you a nice look at how neurotic and inhibited you are. It's really hard to do all that stuff you're talking about, someone will actually dislike me, or fight against me ...

Yeah whatever man. When you look at all the major achievements in history, it's quite clear the hardest part in any of them was being willing to imagine and act on it. Suck it up.

For Jr [though Lord knows I need it too...]

Alchemical Braindamage:

"...That root is concentration. Your ability to channel and shape energy is directly related to your powers of concentration. Any time you, or anyone else, bumps up against the so-called limits of occult power, they've done no such thing. All they've done is bump against the limits of their ability to concentrate. So before you start throwing around ill-informed pronouncements about what is and is not possible, go do some samatha meditation for five hours a day for ten years and then tell me what is and is not possible. kay?

Of course, if you actually did that, you'd probably go through half a dozen or more nervous breakdowns, bouts of paranoia, degrees of psychosis, epilepsy, and neurological disorders of various stripes. So I can understand why the misinformation out there runs so thick.

The reason most people in our society have such ridiculous ideas about what our minds can do is simple: our minds are ridiculously weak. If you think five hours staring at a wall is a 'long time' you don't get a opinion in the occult powers debate. Thanks for comin' out. If you think it's 'impossible' to do anything, and you're prepared to debate your belief in any form of 'impossibility', you'll have already crippled yourself in that department anyway, whether it be starting a new nation or standing up to armed men. I'm sure you guys were helpful at the foundation of all the countries that exist right now.

I'm always sort of amused when people talk about how 'the media' screws with our minds. How did they do that? Are you saying the media is stronger than your own will? Did someone put a gun to your head and make you watch alla that CNN?

CONCENTRATION. Chances are your mind is so hopelessly splintered and contradictory that you couldn't finish a half hour sitcom. A safe transition to occult powers is probably not in the cards for you. If you try, you'll probably freak out, or kill yourself. Most postmodern 'occultists' have all the willpower of a heroin addict with fetal alcohol syndrome, and most of the material out there is meant to soften that fact to themselves. Old Uncle Aliester would die of embarrassment. But don't let me get in the way of your consumer instinct towards instant gratification. For the foolish or truly dedicated, the exercise is as follows:

1. Sit still.
2. Pick an object of concentration. It helps if it's relatively static and simple. The breath is ideal. A circle on the wall, or a potted plant will do.
3. With as little daydreaming, mind wandering and internal babble as possible, hold your focus on the object.
4. Do it every day for at least an hour.
5. For a year.
6. Yes really."

"There is nothing contained in any words, anywhere"

Reproduced almost in full, apologies to the author.

Note: the profanity is actually there to evoke a specific psychological disconnect. Think Christopher Hyatt if you're familiar with his writing...

Knowing that beforehand pretty much ruins the intent for anyone else... but who am I kidding? I'm mostly just blogging this stuff for myself...

Alchemical Braindamage:

"Okay, enough of the metaphysical bollocks. You want power? Lets talk about muthafuckin power.

It's really simple. In fact it's so simple I doubt you can handle it. Yes you. I am talking to you. I doubt YOU can handle it. You're so hopelessly crippled by all the stupid bullshit in your head and all your idiotic concepts that I really doubt you will understand what I'm about to tell you. But let's give you the benefit of the doubt.

The truth about power is that it's already right there in front of you. You are born with all the authority you could ever need. You have way more power than you can ever use.

and I can hear all the little bitches whining already.... but I don't feel powerful..whinewhinewhine...

Yeah exactly. EXACTLY. You don't FEEL powerful. Why the fuck do you think that is? Do you think they raise robot slaves and obedient servants to feel powerful? Of course they fucking don't, asshole.

Nothing you see, or read or experience is going to make you powerful. There is nothing contained in these words. There is nothing contained in any words, anywhere. It is in you right now. It doesn't come from people either. You are either a master, a mistress, or a slave. You are either one of those people who is waiting for someone to tell them what to do or you are not. It's digital. On or off. Get with the fucking program or go home.

Still not simple enough? Do you suppose that these powerful people have something going for them you do not? Do you suppose there is some real difference between you and the politician, the rock star, the millionaire, the prophet? Did somebody infuse Martin Luther King Jr. with his authority, or did he just do it? Did someone give Jim Morrison his magnetic serpent power, or did he just step forth and get it?

Really. Really. STOP thinking. For once in your life stop thinking and understand this. Nobody has any power over you that you did not give them. The book didn't do it, the law didn't do it, your parents and siblings didn't do it. YOU did it. And you can do it again. You can do it whenever you want. You can say or do or have anything you want. Humans are the only creatures in nature pathetic enough to try and justify our own existance. You're alive, there is nothing to justify.

But won't that make me selfish? Fuck off. Seriously. Shut the window in your browser and fuck off. I don't have time for people like you. Morality is a construct. Don't pretend that you give a shit about any arbitrary construct. You do exactly what you're prepared to live with and nothing less. You can justify it any way you like, and lots of people do. Morality is an excuse to quit thinking. If you're afraid to actually do something useful with your thinking process, namely to examine and make intelligent and healthy choices about your interaction with people, then go back to what you were probably doing with it instead, namely disempowering yourself and becoming a better robot. There's plenty of people out there who will gladly tell you what a good person you are. I'm not one of them. I don't know, and I don't care.

Society is structured to check the tendency to exert power. Law is based on the terror of natural charisma. We're constantly exposed to examples of people who abuse other people, and this is meant to frighten us into not going anywhere near our own power, as if that will automatically make you into Hitler or Charlie Manson. It's all a fucking sham. Society has fuck all to do with laws and everything to do with influence. If you want to delude yourself that morality and laws make the slightest bit of difference, you need to go back and finish puberty. Society is built on those too stupid and naive to recognize that charisma and natural influence is and always has been the glue of human groups. Period.

The world, the things in it, and yourself are exactly, mean exactly, are limited exactly and only exactly in the ways you say they are. Get it through your fucking head.

You talk about authority as if it were something that fell from the sky, and granted, that is a popular story. It didn't fall from the sky. All authority came from somebody who wasn't afraid to use it, and make up a story about where it came from. God? God is everywhere and nowhere, it's like open source software. Make up your own story if you want, and be ready to back it up. The hospitals are full of people who didn't have the juice to walk their talk. If you can keep it together long enough to attract some followers, then you'll probably be fine. Groupies, friends, or employees. Whatever.

Does this sound cynical? Does this sound like I'm condoning abuse of the innocent and gullible? Why are you still here? Why are you wasting both of our times? What in the fuck makes you think I have the ability to condone or authorize anything you do? Or anything anyone else does either? I don't. Anyone stupid enough to think that is not someone who's going to understand what I'm saying anyway. Just go away. Flagellate yourself with someone else's words please.

People who want to abuse and harm others are going to abuse and harm others regardless. Would you like me to do something about that? Fine. All you out there who might be reading this and feel that you may be abusive and harmfull at some time in your future, go kill yourselves instead. Or better yet, just be a nice robot. Raise bunny rabbits for kids in cancer wards. I dunno.

There. Happy now? Either you're prepared to trust that humans are mostly positive and constructive in their natures or not. It's pretty simple.

But all that shit is besides the point. Either you get it or you don't . You are the source of authority. Full stop. The only obstacle is quite simply whether you are prepared to get it on or not.

You will not be flying in the face of all the other authority figures out there. there are very few, to start with. Most of them derive their power from second or third hand sources anyway. They have no idea how to deal with the real thing. In case it weren't obvious already by the sickening spectacle of hurricane katrina, the paper mache reality of all your so-called authority figures is rapidly coming clear as nothing more than the naked use and abuse of simple power. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone dumb enough to cling to these delusions like the railing of the titanic. I hope you find whatever you think you're going to find by living that way.

Start your own Church. Start your own FUCKING COUNTRY, already. It's not like there won't be room for new versions of both pretty soon. You think I'm joking? I'm not fucking joking. You still don't get it. Go watch the Simpsons and drown in the irony like the fluid in some geriatric patient's lungs. The world is exactly the way it is because people LIKE YOU are too fucking meek to step up and do what's best for the planet and the people on it. You can tell me all this simple compassion shit if it makes you feel better. You can absolve yourself of responsibilty with more generation x slacker bullshit:

oooohhh but what gives me the right to decide what's best for everyone else?

Exactly the same goddamn thing that gives that simpering alchoholic on tv the right to decide what's best for everyone. NOTHING. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Please tell me you get this. Please tell me you aren't going to sit there and piss away the abilty to do something good, because you're afraid to make a judgement call. And yeah, I noticed I used the word 'good'. Is that a problem? Too fucking bad. You obviously still aren't getting this.

Once you start acting as if the universe will provide everything you could possibly want, you will see it quickly starting to comply with that state of being. All this other magick bullshit is simply meant to be training wheels and perceptual tools.

Homework: for all you fledgling power users out there, pick something on your list that requires an act of decisive will and just do it. NOW.

next time: More bullshit for those you who haven't got it yet, and probably never will.

It'd be nice to have an original thought...

Alchemical Braindamage:

"...pretty much everything in your head came from somewhere else. Aside from the odd profound innovator, everything circulating in human culture is a recombined, repackaged, blended and idiosyncratic version of something invented ages ago. After all, the physical world is more or less exactly the same stuff that's always been here for the last several million years now. We might recombine the bits in different ways, and describe them differently, but not that much is really ever new under the sun. So don't feel bad if you haven't got a lot of truly original shit in your head. Very very few people do. If it makes you feel better, you'll be well on your way to original thoughts once you've done a thorough housecleaning. But I digress...

My take on this skill comes in two parts. It grows and evolves in all kinds of interesting ways, but here's how you start:
First of all, take some time to notice what is influencing your thoughts, speech, and actions in your surroundings. Other people, the architecture, the weather, your job, the media. It may seem common sense, but do you ever really think about this? Do you ever really ask yourself how different your life might be without these influences? Do you ever ask yourself how deep the hooks really go? Would you be shocked to find out how much of your life is shaped by the imagined opinions of strangers on the street? Would you be shocked to realize how much your mind is affected by a stream of pixels coming through a computer screen? How you ever thought about turning these things off? Can you even conceive of shutting these influences out?"

The skill set NOT on most resumes...

Alchemical Braindamage:

"What is magick?

-Magick is a skill set. It is typically a toolbox designed to use internal states to induce change in accordance with the will. Yes it's fuzzy. If everyone does it or acknowledges it's efficacy it's not magick anymore, it's science. Magick is science that doesn't have the blessing of the consensus yet. There is a lot of overlap with spiritual practices largely because the same skills are applicable in both areas. ie; getting what you want, and transcending desire altogether. Yes that's a paradox. Life sucks, get a helmet."

...How does spirituality relate to magick?

- Tricky but fairly clear. Spirituality is an end, magick is a means. Magick is useful for getting things you want, it could be getting laid or knowing god. 'this technology is morally neutral'. You can be a magician without a whiff of spiritual understanding, but it's pretty likely a spiritual person will have some magickal skills, even if they tend not to use them. Why? Magick works partly as a result of broadening one's views of reality. Achieving spiritual insight is necessarily a broadening of views by quite a bit. Magickal skills are frequently a byproduct of this process. As I've said elsewhere undertaking spirituality as a way of gaining powers is regarded as a perversion of the path. Undertaking magick as a way of gaining powers is just like any other way of gaining powers. Your ego with superpowers is still your ego, and you still have to deal with it.

...Is spirituality a valid topic for evangelisation?

-Generally speaking, no. Spirituality requires critical thinking and self examination. Being evangelised tends not require either one very much. If you're capable of being evangelised, your hold on whatever reality set you had before was probably pretty weak, which implies you weren't using your critical thinking before, and probably aren't now.

The important thing to remember is that spiritual practice is not based on changing your concepts. It is based on changing your expeirence of life, beyond the reach of conceptualisation. Evangelism doesn't touch this area, and tends to deal entirely in the change of opinions and viewpoints. Most traditions council to let potential converts come to you. If you go to them, it's not really their idea or intiative, and that will cost them later on in the practice.

Let go

Brilliant stuff...

Thornton's Guerilla_Blog: Incarnari, Anger, & Maya. .:

“Of course, as soon as a goal is conceived, spontaneity is at once destroyed and the self-consciousness of the ego-entity, with its sense of personal doership, takes over. From then on, the vision is pin pointed on the goal, thus missing everything really worthwhile in life.

The ‘purposeful’ life indeed misses the purpose of day to day living, which is to enjoy the unity in the duality and the multiplicity of life. It is only when the ego-entity realizes this fact that there springs the sense of total freedom, and then comes the floodlight of true vision, which misses nothing and enjoys everything. Then spontaneous action, not being in conflict with the natural course of events, with What Is, enables the man of true understanding to be fully receptive through his senses to the entirety, of the universe.”
-Ramesh Balkesar"

“Consciousness is the only one, singular, identifiable with its universal Source. The perceived spatial and temporal plurality of consciousness or minds is just an appearance or illusion.”
-Erwin Schrödinger

“The plurality of sensitive beings is mere appearance (maya); in reality they are all only aspects of the ONE being.”
-Erwin Schrödinger 1961 (shortly before his death)

...I have friends that wonder why bother with the any of this at all. But I have a fairly firm conviction that if every individual ego does a thorough and honest investigation into their own personal experience, they will come to the unmistakable conclusion that every single action that they thought was ‘their’ action turns out in reality to be a reaction to an earlier happening over which they had absolutely no control.

But only every single time.

I am not talking about the surrender of defeat. . .that is the path all people who offer a method revolving around ‘action’ will be forced to admit at some point. But that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a much higher level of surrender.

One that remains stronger then any show of force, will, or effort, by its very nature, at every single moment.

But if we are not independent entities, with choice of action, and responsibility for that action, then how do I conduct my daily life in the world? Or from another thought process. . .how can I stay moral, stay ‘good’, with such a belief system? Or more properly stated, why would I? After reading those last two sentences it must be obvious why I would refer to those questions as coming from a shallower thought process, because the answer to the question exists within the belief system itself.

I have read theories that matter/energy is a product of consciousness. That matter occurs within consciousness. And I have read theories that consciousness is created as a by product of matter. That matter precedes consciousness. But both theories assume two. In Hinduism this is known as Advaita = “not two”. In Buddhism this is called co-dependent origination, and interconnected whole. And in Christianity it is the trinity. But I don’t think an accurate understanding of any of the above set symbols points to a different actuality.

...A very sincere seeker went to Ramana, and with tears in his eyes, confessed that he was a simple man and learned discussions went over his head and his confusion remained. He requested, with much emotion, that Ramana would very kindly tell him in very few, simple words what he should do as spiritual effort.

Ramana said: “Just relax. . . . .and let go.”
”

'Freedom of religion' is also 'freedom from religion...'

I love me some righteous indignation mixed with common sense.

And profanity.

The Rude Pundit:

Here's the thing about that Missouri pharmacist at a local Target who refused to fill a woman's prescription for emergency contraception: if you can't do your fuckin' job, then move out of the way and let someone who can do it step behind the counter...

In addition, how about this: if your religion prevents you from doing your job, get another goddamn job. If a Kashrut-abiding Jew is given a job as a McDonald's food taster, McDonald's would fire him the second he said he couldn't put in his face the McBigfuckin' cheeseburger or any meat with 'special sauce' on it. Unless said Jew alerted McDonald's up front. Then McDonald's would be idiotic to hire him. And Mayor McCheese would weep with shame...

See, the Rude Pundit has said before, 'freedom of religion' is also 'freedom from religion.' In other words, on your own fuckin' time, you can worship your Jesuses (whatever flavor of Christ you worship), you can be Allah-rific, you can pretend you understand the Kabbalah, you can get all nekkid and dance around yer goddess fire. There's your freedom. Enjoy. But you start to tell me shit like 'I won’t fill it. It’s my right not to fill it' when it's your fuckin' job to fill my prescription? Then you (and any company that supports you) is engaging in a discriminatory practice as sure as a Denny's refusing to seat black people.

And until they open up 'Scrips Fer Jesus' stores where God's druggists can do his will, just shut the fuck up, suck it up, and gimme my drugs."

Bat-motivations

As the movie obviously showed, Nolan gets the character...

Box Office Mojo > Features > Wing Kid - An Interview with Christopher Nolan:

"The reason to me he's heroic is because he's altruistic. He's trying to help other people with no benefit to himself and, whatever motivates him—and this was the tricky thing to really try and nail with Batman Begins as opposed to previous incarnations—is the difference between him and a common vigilante, the Punisher or Charles Bronson in Death Wish. To me, the difference is he is not seeking personal vengeance. We did not want his quest to be for vengeance, we wanted it to be for justice. That's what sends him looking for an outlet for his rage and frustration. What he chooses to do with it is, I believe, selfless, and therefore, heroic. And that, to me, is really the distinction—selfishness versus selflessness—and that is very noble. But it is a very fine distinction. I do think he is a heroic figure.

BOM: But he does gain a value—justice is a value, even to Batman. Is he really selfless—or does he want to have a life to call his own?

Nolan: To me, he's not selfish in terms of how the word is generally understood—he's not obtaining personal gratification in an immediate sense. He's having to obliterate his own immediate [short-term] self-interest.

..."It's interesting that you say that because, particularly with Batman, there's a demand, particularly from the fans, that you treat it with appropriate darkness and, to me, it was never about making a darker film. It was about making a realistic film and, to me, there's great [virtue] in the character. The discussion we were having about heroism is something I've thought a lot about Batman because, yes, you can make him very dark but you can't ignore the question of his heroism and his inherent ability. Otherwise, he ceases to be Batman—he becomes a different character, the Punisher, the Crow. The fans can argue about what defines Batman, but the heroism—the positivity of what he's actually doing—isn't up for discussion. Again, it's not just about making him darker—it's about making him more realistic."

"The troops defend our freedom!"

This phrase has always bugged the hell outta me. With all due respect to the folks serving, and even with whom I served... the idea that the military genuinely "defends the freedoms of American citizens" is ludicrous.

The Troops Don’t Defend Our Freedoms by Jacob G. Hornberger:

"How often do we hear the claim that American troops “defend our freedoms”? The claim is made often by U.S. officials and is echoed far and wide across the land by television commentators, newspaper columnists, public-school teachers, and many others. It’s even a common assertion that emanates on Sundays from many church pulpits.

Unfortunately, it just isn’t so. In fact, the situation is the exact opposite – the troops serve as the primary instrument by which both our freedoms and well-being are threatened.

Let’s examine the three potential threats to our freedoms and the role that the troops play in them:

1. Foreign regimes

Every competent military analyst would tell us that the threat of a foreign invasion and conquest of America is nonexistent. No nation has the military capability of invading and conquering the United States. Not China, not Russia, not Iran, not North Korea, not Syria. Not anyone...

2. Terrorists

Despite widespread fears to the contrary, there is no possibility that terrorists will conquer the United States, take over the government, and take away our freedoms. At most, they are able to kill thousands of people, with, say, suicide bombs but they lack the military forces to subjugate the entire nation or any part of it.

Equally important, while the troops claim that they are protecting us from “the terrorists,” it is the troops themselves – or, more precisely, the presidential orders they have loyally carried out – that have engendered the very terrorist threats against which the troops say they are now needed to protect us.

...Finally, but certainly important, despite being the most powerful standing army in the world, the U.S. troops were not even able to protect Americans from terrorist acts, as best evidenced by two terrorist attacks on the same target – the World Trade Center, first in 1993 and then again in 2001.

3. The federal government

As our Founding Fathers understood so well, the primary threat to our freedom lies with our own government. That’s in fact why we have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – to protect us and our freedoms from federal officials. If the federal government did not constitute such an enormous threat to our freedoms, there would be no reason to have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Yet, what is the primary means by which a government takes away the freedoms of its citizenry? Our American ancestors gave us the answer: its military forces. That is in fact why many of our Founding Fathers opposed a standing, professional military force in America...

Consider the words of James Madison:

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.

Here’s how Patrick Henry put it:

A standing army we shall have, also, to execute the execrable commands of tyranny; and how are you to punish them? Will you order them to be punished? Who shall obey these orders?

Would U.S. troops obey presidential orders to deploy against the American people and take away our freedoms?

There is no doubt about it. Of course they would, especially if the president told them that our “freedom and national security” depended on it, which he would.

...What if the president ordered the troops to deploy across the United States and to round up “terrorists” and incarcerate them in military camps, both here and in Cuba? Again, there can be no doubt that most of the troops would willingly obey the president’s orders, especially in the middle of a “crisis” or “emergency” because they view themselves as professional soldiers whose job is to serve the president and not to question why but simply to do or die...

The solution

No one can deny that we now live in a nation in which the president wields, albeit unconstitutionally, the omnipotent power to send the entire nation into war against another nation – and that he has the means – a loyal and obedient army – to exercise that power...

No one can deny that we now live in a nation in which the president claims the omnipotent power to jail and punish any American citizen whom the president labels a “terrorist,” denying him due process of law, trial by jury, and other constitutional guarantees – and that he has the means – a loyal and obedient army – to exercise that power.

Thus, as a practical matter the troops serve not as a defender of our freedoms but instead simply as a loyal and obedient personal army of the president, ready and prepared to serve him and obey his commands. It is an army that stands ready to obey the president’s orders to deploy to any country in the world for any reason he deems fit and attack, kill, and maim any “terrorist” who dares to resist the U.S. invasion of his own country. It is also an army that stands ready to obey the president’s orders to take into custody any American whom the commander in chief deems a “terrorist” and to punish him accordingly.

There is one – and only one – solution to this threat to our freedoms and well-being: for the American people to heed the warning of our Founding Fathers against standing armies before it is too late, and to do what should have been done at least 15 years ago: dismantle the U.S. military empire, close all overseas bases, and bring all the troops home, discharging them into the private sector, where they would effectively become “citizen-soldiers” – well-trained citizens prepared to rally to the defense of our nation in the unlikely event of a foreign invasion of our country. And for the American people to heed the warning of President Eisenhower against the military-industrial complex, by shutting down the Pentagon’s enormous domestic military empire, closing domestic bases, and discharging those troops into the private sector.

“Oh, my gosh, if we did all that, how would our freedoms be protected?”

Protected from what? Again, there is no threat of a foreign invasion...

What would happen if a foreign nation ever began constructing thousands of ships and planes and mobilizing millions of people to invade the United States? The answer to that threat was also provided by our Founding Fathers: the foreign nation in question would be met by a nation of free well-armed citizens who would be prepared and willing to rally quickly to oppose any invasion and conquest of our nation...

We should also keep in mind the tremendous economic prosperity that would result from the dismantling of America’s enormous standing army. Not only would all the taxpayer money that is being used to fund the standing army be left in the hands of the citizenry for savings and capital, but all those new people in the private sector would be producing as well, instead of living off the IRS-provided fruits of other people’s earnings. Thus, the economic effect would be doubly positive, and, while weakening the federal government, it would make our nation stronger.

What about foreign monsters, tyrants, oppressors, and conquerors? The answer to that was also provided by our Founding Fathers: Our government would no longer go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, but foreigners suffering oppression and tyranny would know that there would always be at least one nation that would accept them – the United States of America. Rather than police the world, Americans would focus on producing the freest and most prosperous society in history as a model for the world and to which those who escaped tyranny and oppression could freely come...

"Then how do you know it was really me?"

Very cool little thought experiment...

Phone Calls From The Future » Pop Occulture:

"Here’s a fun speculative scenario I was talking about with a friend of mine last night. Imagine for a moment that you received a phone call from yourself in the future. First of all, how would they prove that they were really you, and second, how would they be able to prove they were from the future? So maybe they know secrets about your life - but maybe that just makes them psychic and manipulative. Is there any way to be sure you’re really talking to yourself? If you were somehow sure, would you flip out? I think I would. I think I would be terrified actually.

...that probably means that you’re about to be told to do something that you won’t like or understand. When you ask for an explanation, they’ll probably give you one which further strains your credulity over the whole situation - which would be too risky given the delicacy of the situation. So more than likely, you’ll tell yourself that you can’t say why. You’ll hear yourself say, “Just trust me.”

If that was the case, would you go ahead and trust yourself? What if you weren’t sure yet if it was really you? What if it was some kind of alternate-dimension/trickster version of yourself trying to get you to do something stupid or dangerous? Would you have any choice but to ignore their advice and carry on as before?

If you determine that you can’t trust yourself in the future, on what grounds should you therefore trust your current self? How do you know you’re really yourself? Reminds me too of a fun Sufi parable where Nasrudin walks into a shop, and the shopkeeper says, “Can I help you?” Nasrudin asks: “Did you see me come into the store just now?” To which the shopkeeper answers yes. Nasrudin replies, “But have you ever seen me before?” When the shopkeeper says that he has not, Nasrudin rebuts, “So then how do you know it was really me?”"

But think of the children!

Kung Fu Monkey: D. A. C. M. A:

"As you are well aware, a debate is raging in this country about gay marriage. Specifically , that allowing gay couples the right to enter into the institution of marriage will destroy the Fabric of American Life, in this case the Fabric most likely being a rough cotton blend, not too comfortable lest there be some accidental pleasurable friction in your Satan's Playground Spots.

This sociological approach is the only remotely viable (and yet still fatally weak) argument against gay marriage -- it cannot be opposed on any reasonable grounds in a civil rights sense. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, gay marriage neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Two gay people getting married in my general vicinity do not change my legal rights. They do not affect my earning potential, they do not raise my taxes, they do not infringe on either my rights to certain freedoms or opportunities to practice such freedoms. They do not, in a negative way, affect the legal status of other marriages. Divorce case law and evolving property law defines my legal relationship with my wife far more than any other factor. The 'slippery slope' argument will always be there, but again -- case law, people. Legal Armageddon has been predicted from pretty much every sociological and technical advance in the last two centuries. We've limped along. If you can skate past the idea that it's legal in Georgia for a 60 year old man to have sex with a 16 year old girl but not cool for two 30 year old men to share a life insurance policy -- good for you.

One may oppose gay marriage from a religious standpoint, but one's religious rights are not abridged. If one belongs to a religion which opposes gay marriage, then odds are there will not be any gay marriage in your church. Gay people will not paratroop in and occupy your vestry. You will not have to worship with them, change the personal nature of your relationship to God, or even like them.

Kiernan at Crooked Timber tackles a well-known opponent of gay marriage. This Maggie Gallagher is taking the 'marriage is an institution necessary for the functioning of society' road, with the tour bus painted a lovely shade of 'and by marriage I'm going to use what marriage has meant legally for the last hundred years or so and blithely pretend that's the tradition stretching back to the dawn of Western Civilization' primer. The engine for this bus will be the ever popular 'societies make babies and the best way for society to raise babies is through marriage as it's traditionally defined' -- again, the 'tradition' being whatever version of marriage in the history western civilization best fits the argument in each specific paragraph of her essay.

...But accepting the basis of her argument before Ms. Gallagher mangles it in the sales job, let's say I spot her: marriage is a Very Important Institution, and we'll even spot her the why based on whatever shambling argument she constructs. But if one's argument is that Marriage is 'under attack', then I would argue --as Kiernan does -- that no-fault divorce and the cultural acceptance of divorce is a far more devastating 'attack' on marriage."

5 years of unbridled success... wait, that's not right.