so many forks in the labyrinth

[click image]

.

I hesitate to even share this playlist with you because there are so many extremely profound insights nested in with a bunch of talk that is likely to turn you off the instant you hear it mentioned. To begin with, you will stuff the interviewer immediately into a category, decide he is or is not the kind of person you want to heed, and even as he barely gets a word in edgewise, your idea of anyone spending time with him will be influenced accordingly. Then when you listen and hear things like Tarot or Christianity or Astrology being mentioned, you will by that time have a whole universe of things to help you miss the point. So then, maybe on the basis of you liking me or wanting to explore the weird universe of things I bring up, you might listen to the whole thing anyway, forming opinions about every sentence coming out of Tsarion's mouth.

I have a head start on you. I have spent twenty and more years—granted, with long stretches of worldly intrusions peppered in—studying the works of the ancients, leaning heavily to Zen and the Hua-yen, and so am in a position to see what he's trying to accomplish and how much basis in reality is fueling him. I've been entertaining you or turning you off or making you wonder with my recent doctoral studies, my weird detachment from what you call "progressive", my frequent reminders of the traps nested in the works of people you may have grown to like or admire on the internet. Part of what I like about this guy is that he's shown himself to be about these same things, and especially about the part where you are reminded to use the information, from whatever source, as your means to train your brain out of the hypnosis mode and into the seeing mode. He's nicer about it. He thinks watching tv and sports can serve for this. I get his point, but I think he errs insofar as he or I might be able to do this, but those whose mental conditioning is so intransigent, and gotten so intransigent precisely by means of these things, will almost certainly NEVER catch on that way.

My approach to bridging this is to abjure participation in these things, these traps, if only to plant an awareness in you as you are participating in them that spiritual death lives there. Some even come right out and say that's fine with them. They want it. They are so used to their personal energies, hopes, dreams, intentions being of no account, they can't see that this death wish, or this walking dead person gig, is giving them more power than they ever had before. The wrong kind... well... the wrong WAY... I'm trying to be precise. It is the power they've always had and have never seen, and they have let sociopaths turn it the wrong way. They are lending their power to sociopaths.

Every drop of our reaction to the sociopaths empowers them. The exceptions to this are two: [1] that we arise and go after them physically, whether peacefully or violently; and [2] that we remove our energies from their reach, put them in the service of liberation, of positive manifestation, that manifestation of positive intent I mention sometimes.

You're always wailing about your intent being ignored, impotent, screwed up, left to wither and die under the mountains of bullshit heaped on it by the world, by life in this world. Well, think about the words "manifest positive intent"... each of them. Look each one up in the dictionary. That is something you can do, and I don't mean doing like volunteering on a crisis hotline or donating to a soup kitchen, though those are great. One of the greatest Zen masters of all time bellowed, "Stop doing and perform!" Another screamed, "Don't waste time!"

I'm not a master. I am probably closer to one than you are likely to meet. This Tsarion fellow might be closer even than I am, but I'm not sure of that yet. Though he has had mentors, living and dead, to whom he never forgets to express his gratitude, he is clearly self-taught on most of the stuff he puts out. I'm pretty sure he shunned university altogether, maybe even dropped out of school early, in favor of teaching himself. This is in the best tradition of his ancient ancestors, and enlightening beings are attracted to such people. He may have benefit of the attention of a true master, or a number of them, and would NOT be expected to mention them, would in fact never take any such liberties without express permission. OR he's a particularly acute student in the library, and I don't mean this in the left brain sense of rote memorization and recall of minutia. I mean in terms of insight.

So I don't know if he is performing on his assignment or just doing a better job of performing on MY assignment than I am, but I am at this point beholden to him for helping fish me back out of another of those awful glue pits littering my path. He has said much in this interview that has been particularly helpful to me. The truly magnificent part of all this work, this agonizingly hard work I have done, is that it ceases to need to be true masters giving dharma after a while. It becomes possible for the whole world to be my teacher. Sentient beings become buddhas. Sentient beings are never not buddhas here to enlighten us, but 99.9999999% of us not only don't know that, but refuse to do what's necessary to SEE that.

That is the way to deal with everything that plagues the world, and most people won't do it. I wonder when my pity and my anger will stop cycling up to take turns being rude to you. I think I have some existential handicaps that contribute to my outrageous slowness, and I think I have those because the one thing that has always been a reliable way to splat me smack into another of the bottomless and countless glue pits is my anger with myself for my slowness. I suspect myself of trying to turn off my brain by frying out my thyroid for the PRECISE reason that I have to learn to stop this or die. If dying of dimness can't force me up, then, well, then I die.

.
love, 99
.